Development

Using Facebook Login, S3, and DynamoDb in browser app One of the challenges of building small mobile web apps without a traditional back-end server is storing global state in a secure way. In my exploration of ways to store state I decided to build a very simple multi-player social app that allows players to participate in a simple photo challenge game. The game author specifies a photo caption and then invites friends to add photo responses that most creatively match the caption. [Read More]

I promised a few examples of spreadsheet driven apps. You may remember the Hipster List was the first example. These are simple web apps that are initialized using data from a Google Spreadsheet once the user loads them in a browser. Using spreadsheets to keep app information current is easy for anyone. There is even a way for users to point the app at their own Google Spreadsheet if the app developer wants to turn feature that on.

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In my continued experiments with Polymer, I created a web component that wraps NVD3 - a reusable chart library for d3.js. As part of the activity I ported all of the NVD3 example charts to a web component I am calling <goddip-charts>. The component is contained in a pogg on poggr, as this is where I do my experimenting and it allows me to code and serve the project documents in the one place. [Read More]

Using Google spreadsheets is a great way for a team to collaborate on a data set but it leaves a bit to be desired on presentation of the data. To that end I will be creating a series of fun examples showing how to build small interactive apps that utilize Google Docs and Polymer web components to quickly bring data to life. In this series I will be using a Google spreadsheet as the data source, but other data sources are possible, and I will get to those as well in future posts.'

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It is sometimes handy to turn on CoreData.SQLDebug in the simulator when debugging a Core Data issue. I have found the output to be very useful in finding the hard to find little bugs that pop-up between restkit and core data. It can also help find performance issues with the database. Unfortunately there isn't any documentation for how to do this in RubyMotion. I found one solution that works to a degree. [Read More]

Just a quick note, I was getting an undefined constant error for RKLogConfigureByName, the standard way of setting up logging in RestKit. It seems that the #define statements in the /vendor/Pods/RestKit/Code/Support/RKLog.h/ file are not getting picked up. I am using the pod and loading with RubyMotion pod support, so I am not sure what the issue is. I will need to investigate further but this quick workaround works, just call the lower-level method mapped via the #define. [Read More]

Just a quick note, I was getting an undefined constant error for RKLogConfigureByName, the standard way of setting up logging in RestKit. It seems that the #define statements in the /vendor/Pods/RestKit/Code/Support/RKLog.h file are not getting picked up. I am using the pod and loading with RubyMotion pod support, so I am not sure what the issue is. I will need to investigate further but this quick workaround works, just call the lower-level method mapped via the #define. [Read More]

Recently I have been using RubyMotion for iOS development; I really appreciate developing in Ruby, and prefer Emacs to Xcode. Compared to using interface builder, styling apps can be a challenge. It is possible to use RubyMotion with XIB files created in Xcode's Interface Builder, but I have been trying to avoid this. I am striving for a more web-app like design and development workflow. I have been using teacup, which takes a declarative approach to styling and uses a CSS-like DSL. [Read More]

In an earlier post Simple state machine example, I provided an example of using the Ruby state_machine gem to create a state machine for handling a simple list of tasks. In this post I will provide a similar but not exactly compatible description of building a parser to read lists from a text file. In this example I use the markdown syntax for lists, where items can be placed hierarchically, thus removing the need for a separate " [Read More]