I'm a user focused mobile developer, here is where I publish advice and thoughts on building great mobile apps
This forms part of my “From PHP hobbyist to pro Ruby developer” course which I’m trialling at the moment with Remi. The purpose of this unit is to learn Ruby, and a little about professional code construction. The two books you will need are: The Well Grounded Rubyist, David A Black Clean Code, A handbook…
This is the first part of a longer course I’m developing for an Intern I’ve hired who we are guiding through the process of becoming a ‘pro developer’. In time these notes will form part of a larger post. Ensure you are on a Mac or Linux machine None of this is going to work…
Three platforms stand out for cloud based hosting – Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and EngineYard. Here I present my experiences with the three, and thoughts on which might be best to use under various factors. To cut to the chase – Elastic Beanstalk wins, but as usual it depends on your situation. Common features All the…
A comparison of the pros and cons of the three main secure ways of authenticating an API, in plain business terms. We cover: HTTP Basic Access Authentication over SSL HTTP Digest The answer, as usual, is it depends, but if you can force the server to use SSL, or are creating a private API, then…
A guide to creating a REST API, which will enable you to build API’s in a cost and resource effective way that follows clear standards. I take you through the core principles you need to know to build a REST API.
Multivariate testing isn’t always a good thing. It comes with many pitfalls and risks I’ve laid out here.
Update – Nov 2012 – Thankfully due to a recent update this plugin is no longer needed. FlexSlider2 is a jQuery plugin that allows you to easily insert rotating banners, image galleries and app examples. They also automatically become responsive. The problem with FlexSlider2 Out of the box however it doesn’t allow you to use…
I wrote a article a few years back on setting up virtual hosts on OS X so you can have lots of urls pointing to different folders on your mac, for testing websites. A good practice I have found is to run this folder out of Dropbox, so even if you haven’t committed changes to…
I had some issues installing OCMock on Xcode 4, and found the method to be documented differently in a number of places. Fortunately I’ve worked out how to do it and it can be applied to any static framework, so I’m sharing it here, using OCMock as an example. Download the framework and locate the…
I’ve been talking to people about native vs web for years, and don’t fall down on one single answer. I thought it was time to get these thoughts down on paper. I’ve framed the discussion around a series of questions you might ask about an app you are developing. Are you designing an app which…
