Packt Publishing was kind enough to send me a code that you can use to get a 30% discount when you pre-order my new book, Mastering PhoneGap Mobile Application Development! When pre-ordering the book at http://bit.ly/1K7Bjfn, use the following code: NORA50y The book’s final stages are complete, and so the final release date should be sometime this month (February 2016). So, you might not want to wait too long! »
I purchased an iPad Pro just before the end of 2015. As a mobile app developer, I needed to ensure that my apps would work on the larger screen, and although one can test this to some degree in the simulators, there really is no substitute for having a physical device in hand. Keeping in mind, then, that I’ve only had the device for a couple weeks, I thought I’d give some thoughts on what I think of the device. »
Not too long ago I purchased an iPad Pro so that I could use it for development, and also verify that my existing applications worked correctly. Because it is a larger device, it is important to also verify that my apps can appropriately scale to the new screen size. This isn’t difficult, and you can test this in a simulator, but my mantra has and always will be: “there is no substitute for testing on a real device”. »
Recently I encountered an odd problem while working on an app for the current book I’m writing. The app worked as-is, but I wanted to improve the startup performance by using a SQLite database rather than using an XHR to load a large JSON file.
»I just wanted to share a few tips regarding the Content Security Policy meta tag that we need to use in PhoneGap/Cordova apps. I’m not going to cover all the gory details — for that, there are plenty of great sites.
»This is part 1 of a series regarding technical writing.
As you may or may not know, I’ve now written two pretty large technical books (one was the second edition of the first). This post is more about the process of writing technical books, and later posts will go into more detail about my experiences with Packt Publishing (the publisher).
»I’m so proud to announce that my new book, PhoneGap 3.x Mobile Application Development Hotshot is now available for purchase. It’s an update to my earlier book, and it has been modernized and updated for Cordova 3.x. Although the title includes “PhoneGap” in the name, it generally uses the Cordova Command Line Interface (“PhoneGap” is more recognizable in the market).
»So, it’s pretty much a given that working with the HTML5 API is a painful experience due to all those levels of callbacks. Even a simple operation turns into something unnecessarily complex, and so I present FileManager – a simple wrapper around frequently used portions of the File API that uses Promises (or Q.js, specifically).
»In an app for a client, I was having an odd problem: the SELECT box wasn’t tappable on Android 2.x. It worked great on iOS. It worked great on Android 4.x. But on 2.x, it just wouldn’t respond to input.
»Yeah, yeah, so using SOAP is generally not the preferred solution when working from Javascript. It’s so much easier to handle data in JSON rather than in XML. But sometimes you can’t avoid it.
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