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Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android Lolipop

February 16, 2015 / / 2 Comments

I have posted about theming Cordova / PhoneGap to look like native Android before but at the time Android Lolipop and the Material design were not out.

Since then the world of Android has changed a lot. Google has created a new UI design which developers are using to design their applications. It’s nice looking, elegant, and simple.

But I’m not a great mobile developer. I can make Android do pretty much whatever I want, but it takes me substantially longer to write an Android application than it does for me to write a web application. Because of that I like to rapidly prototype my applications in Cordova first and sometimes keep them in Cordova because of the ability to have one codebase that covers multiple platforms.

But web applications always tend to look like web applications and not native.

That is what Materialize is trying to change, and doing a damn good job at.

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How to Survive a Month with 3 Jobs

February 1, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Money is obviously a factor but the lack of sleep quickly outweighs that.

Several friends and people online asked why I haven’t posted any articles in over two months, when I was going to be, and why I haven’t returned their calls or Facebook invites to dinner.

The reason: in December I had three jobs.

And not just three part time, burger flipping jobs, three full time, complex, and time consuming programming jobs.

I was teaching client side and server side JavaScript at Full Sail University, working as a lead architect on a multimillion dollar medical records project for the government, and consulting with a very fun and successful startup called NeoReach.

Here is what I learned.

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Why Carl Sagan is the Best Scientist

November 10, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m going to divert from my normal discussions of programming to talk about something I think is very important and still somewhat related to programming.

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HTML5 Is Recommended!!!

October 28, 2014 / / 0 Comments

It’s time to break out the Champagne and celebrate because today the WC3 has released the fifth major version of the HTML specification and with this specification comes the recommendation from the WC3 to start using HTML5.

While HTML5 has been a specification for years it wasn’t until today that the WC3 has officially told developers to start using it.

By this point most developers and browsers are already supporting HTML5 with minor exceptions when it comes to video and audio support.

I’m honestly very happy that HTML5 is official. Now I just need to wait a bit longer until ECMAScript 6 gets released and all my front end problems will be solved.

Node.js Best Practices

October 8, 2014 / / 13 Comments

I’ve recently been working on a lot of Node.js projects, for myself, with my students, and for national organizations. Because I’m a University instructor I’ve been getting a lot of questions about what the best practices for Node.js are from every project I’m involved with. I’ve worked with Node.js for years and know all the best practices myself, but I had never seen a list that explained the best practices to my satisfaction. So, I have put one together taking all the best practices agreed on by the community and explaining why each practice is the best way to write Node.js code.

If you want to improve these best practices in any way please don’t hesitate to create a pull request to the GitHub repo.

Here we go.

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Socket.IO Driven, Mongoose like Models with Marilyn

September 5, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Recently, I have been working a lot with WebSockets, specifically with Socket.IO. As a former ActionScript developer I love being able to return to using events to send and receive data as well as having my application get real time updates from the server. It feels so natural and fits really well into the types of applications I like to build. However, I wanted some more organization. I wanted a library that was designed around CRUD and WebSockets. Something like Mongoose, but on the frontend. I looked all around GitHub and found some libraries that were close, but nothing that was perfect, so I decided to make one myself.

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Theme PhoneGap and Cordova for Android

August 25, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Cordova is a great platform for building native feeling mobile applications on Android and iOS with web technology like HTML, CSS,
and JavaScript. But what about the getting the native look out of these applications?

Obviously you have to use or write a CSS library which include all the UI components from the Android system and styles the appropriately.

Luckily developers have already created these types of frameworks and today I’m going to explore two of them for making web and Cordova applications look like native Android applications.

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Microsoft has Actually Made a Great Product, TypeScript

August 15, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I’m fairly vocal about my opinion of Microsoft products. They have never made a single that is better than the competition, except maybe C#, but only maybe.

IE vs Safari vs Opera vs Chrome vs Firefox: Chrome or Firefox win

Office vs iWork vs LibreOffice = iWork wins

Windows vs OS X vs Linux = Linux wins with OS X a close second

However, they have finally made a product that is I would use over the competition, and most developers I talk to agree.

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The dark web is a dangerous place. Its crowded with hackers, drug dealers, and nefarious people trying to steal your identity or cause you harm. But it doesnt have to be that way! In this blog post, well outline how you can build something from scratch on the dark web without getting caught up in all the chaos of these shady parts of the internet dark.pe. A lot of people are interested in the dark web, but dont know how to access it. This article will provide an introduction and step-by-step instructions on how to find what youre looking for. It covers topics like Tor browser, Bitcoin, VPNs, and more!