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Meet Christian Haudum, aka 'Haudi', one of Crate's integration engineers and a fan of vinyl and dub step.

After making many changes, some of which I will get around to blogging about soon, play testing for Chip Shop is open again!

Classy is an intriguing project hoping to bridge some gaps between designers more used to web or front end projects and app developers. Classy allows for the use of 'CSS-esque' stylesheets to style native iOS app interface components.

I don't have an particular themes from the week I can remember in enough detail to discuss this week, so thought it time I dragged out one of my long term 'topics to discuss'.

As a coder of many years, I am a keen believer in writing everything once and being able to use it in multiple places. In the coding world, thanks to open data formats and widely supported APIs we can generally have one central set of content and use it for different applications and use cases, all nicely in sync.

It's been quite a week (month, year) for celebrity death and I'm certainly not going to be the first or last to talk about the subject this week. I am going to mostly talk about Bowie, because I was a bigger fan of his work than say, Alan Rickman, but also for other reasons I will come to. Whilst we're here I should also briefly mention the death of John Bradbury, drummer with The Specials. He actually died on December 28th of 2015 and wasn't part of the new 69 club, but was 62\.

GitHub, and the Git version control system it's based on, are fantastic tools for managing and collaborating on projects – code-based or otherwise.

Late last summer someone handed me a curious USB device that I popped in my bag and then sat on my shelf until today when I thought it was about time I plugged it into my computer to see what it did.

Volley, next generation network communications for Android

I spent some time this week finishing off a lot of the changes from my last round of playtesting, most of these have resulted in changing Chip Shop from a somewhat random card game with a board (for no particular reason) into a more rounded actual board game.

It seems fitting that as I start piecing together the fragments of interviews and notes gathered over the past months that it has been just over a year since Estonia’s innovative e-Residency program began, which is where my fascination with Estonia began and this story starts.

Using layout managers to craft awesome Android interfaces

I will keep re-iterating (for the next 6 months at least) that whilst Swift is not the first language from a commercial company to be open-sourced, the enthusiasm and outcomes so far have been astounding.

What better way to start my new blog post and podcast of semi-random uttering and opinions than with a round of the year and thoughts that have led me to starting it in the first place.

I have loved Kapeli's offline documentation browser, Dash for a while now and have been intending to start contributing to it for the best part of 2015.

As part of creating Chip Shop (and future game ideas) I read recommendations on reading about (and playing) various types of games, not just board games.

First, let's get the disclaimers out of the way. I helped Kickstart this book, but that wouldn't necessarily make my review biased...

Across the mobile channel in 2015 we had over 3 million views and published just over 160 posts.

There are quite a lot of specific images and text descriptions required to create a listing page for your app, we detail them here and provide some useful tools to help create them. In this final section we submit our application to the store. You're almost there!

A Chrome extensions prime function is to interact and enhance a users' web pages and in this video we look at how to do this, building our first extension with a combination of HTML and JavaScript. This extension will replace all images in a SitePoint article with images of Super Heroes, bringing even more super powers to your browsing experience.

Whilst not a new language, Go has gained a lot of interest over the past two years and the number of bigger name projects utilizing the language is growing rapidly. I wrote an introductory article on the language for SitePoint and came across mentions of mobile support, so thought I’d take a look at the possibilities.

A few more changes from my first play testing session.

Our databases contain valuable and business critical information and whilst there have always been manual ways to create restorable backups of Crate databases, as of version 0.53, we are pleased to announce the 'Snapshots' feature.

After my first constructive play test session, here is the first wave of changes to the game.

Any Android app that requires even a basic interface will need the basic building blocks of activities and intents to manage interface screens and the flow between them. In this video we look at the different activity types available and how we connect them with intents.

GoLang (generally shortened to Go) is the latest language-that-everyone-wants-to-learn-and-use. In this article, I'll provide an introduction to the language, its features, its potential, and whether you should care about Go or not.

A Chrome Extension Manifest file contains important metadata about your extension. From simple aspects like giving it a name and an author, to setting keyboard shortcuts and overriding browser settings. The Manifest file gives life to your code.

I just had my first play testing session for Chip Shop and returned with lots of feedback. The three players helped me identify a lot of small problems with the game as well as a couple of larger issues that need some refining to make the game work better. None of them so big to break the game, but some important ideas to ponder. Depending on the decisions I make, they may change move the game in a slightly different direction.

No application exists in isolation, in most cases it will frequently need to access external data and services to bring it to life. In this video we look at the principles of connecting to these services. We will cover the basics of APIs, REST and JSON in an Android app and play with some Marvel Super Heroes on the journey.

Pushing forward to play testing (which has now begun, more on that later) I have been busy cleaning, tidying and streamlining game components after Essen. Here are some updates...