Tech: Blog

A modern and flexible alternative to databases

I was on holiday last week, so of course have been busy. People staying,

There's no denying that whilst Bitcoin's future may be hazy right now, the underlying technology it relies upon -- the Blockchain -- has revolutionized many industries and projects, with more to come.

I'm excited about Swift for reasons I will expand upon later, but it's mostly the enthusiasm it has attracted. In less than six months, here are the project's GitHub stats.

Attend any tech-related event or read any tech-related article over the past 18 months, and you will likely have heard of Docker and have an inkling of what it is and does.

Images enhance any interface and can help engagement and interaction with your users. In this video we will look at how to load and display images from a remote location via an API and the Volley library. We will look at two methods for loading images and how to layout and format images in an interface.

I go to a lot of events. Firstly because I get bored easily, but mainly because I like hearing what people are working on and their ideas. I have noticed an increasing amount of companies and events that label themselves as 'tech', and I challenge if they actually are. To me it feels like some older phrases that are slowly dying and losing their meaning.

Not since the shuttering of Google Reader has there been quite so many outcries of surprise and annoyance amongst tech fans. Facebook's announcement that their popular developer service platform, Parse, will shut in a years time caused ripples of panic amongst developers who rely on it. It's always been a bad idea to be too reliant on a centralized, commercial service as it may not always last for ever. Parse wont be the first or the last to close and it's a good lesson to us all to be flexible.

I make no pretense that I am a generalist and get bored quickly. I have written before about how this sometimes makes you feel left out, or worse, an idiot who has wasted their life. I want to explore this topic in more detail, and that of 'tech tribes', that I feel it relates to.

Your app is ready, the next steps are to get it into the Google Play Store for people to download and use. In this video we look at preparing your application for release and creating a listings page for your creation.

I apologise for the delay in this installment of the Weekly Squeak, I let various things get the better of me in the past weeks and am annoyed that I did. First the madness of a series of events, conferences and travel and then I got hit by a crippling cold-flu thing that has made me struggle to get even the work I needed to get done complete, let alone the things I wanted to do. I had a topic I wanted to cover in this post, but I think I will save it for the future and instead talk about some of the questions and issues that have arisen as a consequence of these past weeks.

In this video you'll be building upon previously learned techniques by taking data imported via API and displaying it to the interface. We'll learn how to get into the API data, get it into a usable format, and then once it is properly formatted, attach that data to the interface to make a usable implementation of the API data that, in this example, you are fetching from the Marvel API.

Meet Mathias Fußenegger, aka 'Jordi', one of Crate's core engineers and a massive Linux fan.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.