Tag Archives: development

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February 19, 2015

Drinking The Koolixir – Part 1

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In case you haven’t yet heard of it yet, Elixir is a functional programming language (technically, a collection of macros) written in Erlang. I have been persuaded to add it to my (and, consequently, Grio’s) technical repertoire due to a good amount of recent buzz in the blogosphere (as well as some points I’ll get to later). To make sure I have a strong foundation for my Elixir learning experience, I am starting my adventure with a foray into the underlying syntax of Erlang.

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December 2, 2014

Continuous Integration: An Overview

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Continuous Integration at Grio

In the same way that testing code is more and more becoming table stakes for modern software projects, continuous integration is increasingly becoming standard on projects of any non-trivial degree of complexity. Here at Grio, we leverage continuous integration whenever possible, in order to eliminate time spent performing routine deployments and tracking down integration issues.

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February 12, 2014

Hiding Android’s System Bar

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For years developers (and consequently consumers), have had to accept the fact that the Tablets (and some phones) would always have the System/Navigation Bar visible on their screens. A 10.1 inch advertised screens, offered in fact a 9.8 inch usable screen.

Finally Google’s latest Android OS, KitKat, introduces a decent user-friendly tool that gives us ownership of that last bit of screen.

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October 22, 2013

Android Studio: Not Ready For Prime Time

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As one would expect with a fine product, it would work best right out of the box. In the case of Android Studio, some assembly is required. The issue I found was that a newly created project with default settings wouldn’t compile. I thought that this bug might have been specific to my setup, but after reproducing it on 3 different computers and finding several outstanding questions as well as a few open bugs with Google concerning the issue, I decided that a fix would be a fine thing to write up, hoping it enables other people to develop as painlessly as possible.

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October 4, 2013

Upgrading Your iPhone App to iOS 7: The New Status Bar

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With the release of iOS 7, there are several changes in how you lay out and customize the appearance of your UI. In particular, the status bar is now transparent, and your views will show through it. Now this is a great opportunity to redesign your app and take advantage of this new look and feel, but what if you aren’t ready and you want to the old iOS 6 status bar back? Well, I’m excited to tell you that there is a way to do this!

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March 21, 2013

Facebook Photo Picker for Android

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Select Album Screen

On a recent project, we needed a widget that would allow users to select a photo from their Facebook albums. “Surely the new Facebook Android SDK must support this.” I thought. Alas, my hopes were unfulfilled. “Well, I bet there is a third-party solution for this!”, I surmised, but again, my search was for naught. At this point I decided to roll up my sleeves and do it myself.

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October 31, 2012

Basic AppEngine Asynchronous Tasks

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Google’s AppEngine is a very useful platform in the way it allows developers to have an application server up and running within 10 minutes.
It leverages the Google infrastructure, too, offering high speed, high capacity, etc.

Wow (Awesome!)

However (Hmm), AE does not allow for the usual multi-threading mechanisms…

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April 24, 2012

Jumping Back (Into) Flash

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On my previous project, I was busy delving into the relatively new world of Unity game scripting as my go-to solution for dynamic content.  Now I’m working on a game that has me going back into the world of Flash, so I thought I would write a brief commentary on the differences I perceive between the two frameworks as it pertains to 2D game-crafting.

Before I go too far into this, I should point out that these two design paradigms are really not expected to be compared like this side-by-side most of the time.  Flash has existed for more than 15 years, and has undergone significant improvements in that time.  Unity is a relatively new framework with a more specific vision: 3D games that can be easily exported to other frameworks, like the iPhone or a web-based player.  In fact, the next version of Unity will even allow publishing to Flash itself.

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