Category: Development

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Adventure Development

Drupaldelphia 2013

Drupahdelphia 2013Decided to attend my second Drupaldelphia, I also went to the 2011 one as well. I do enjoy being around some like minded folk everyone now and again, and usually I walk away re-energized and eager to try developing new things as well.

This year’s was held in the Philadelphia Convention Center. I decided to take the PATCO train to 8th and Market from Lindenwold. I fully navigated the entire trip without getting lost a single time! This is pretty amazing for me!

The train tide was pretty simple. The whole experience made it seem like more of an exotic trip for me. Plus it was only $6 round trip, which seemed pretty cheap to me to get there and back.

I took in 4 sessions, most of which were pretty interesting. My favorite was the Intro to Migration session.

At this very moment I’ve been working on migrating much old data into Drupal, so the timing of this session couldn’t of been better. The speaker did a great job covering the various approaches and the pros and cons to each. I think it will be a very useful session moving forward.

Another treat of my Philadelphia adventure was meeting up with Honey Badger Hall of Famer Lauren for lunch. She works a few blocks from there and was kind enough to meet me for lunch and gave me a tour of the Reading Terminal Market.

It was pretty insane in there, with tons of dining options. We were a bit overwhelmed and couldn’t make a decision on what to get. Eventually I got a chicken parm sandwich and it was messy but good.

The ride home was a bit wet walking to the train, but besides that pretty easy. Just got on, got to my car then drove home. Again I didn’t get lost at all! So impressive!

I’m always impressed with the Drupal community, and this was no exception. Very well done, and very affordable! $25 and I got a t-shirt too! A great experience and I’m glad I went!

Categories
Development

PhoneGap with jQuery Mobile iOS 7 iPad Broken Display

I made a little iOS app using PhoneGap (Cordova 3.0) and jQueryMobile 1.3.1. All was working well in my xCode simulators as well as when testing out on my iPhone with iOS 6.x. But when xCode 5 and iOS 7 arrived I sadly noticed that my app was now not displaying correctly on the iPad simulators when running iOS 7.

Broken Avalon AppThis one had me stumped for quite some time. I hadn’t changed anything, so clearly something had changed with the iOS 7 update. After much research and quite frankly guessing it appears that the iPad under iOS 7 is measuring the device width and height a bit differently than it had in iOS 6, thus throwing off the CSS that was laying out this app.

Luckily a fairly simple change to the meta viewport tag was all that was needed to set things bad in order.

Removing  ‘width=device-width, height=device-height’ from the viewport meta seemed to set things back in order for me.

I’m not sure if this causes any conflicts elsewhere, but so far I haven’t found any (it’s quiet, almost too quiet).

 

 

Categories
Adventure Design Development

Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps

I really wanted to take a course on Coursera this summer to learn something new. Learning stuff for the sake of learning is great. So after checking out what was being offered this summer, Creative Programming for Digital Media & Mobile Apps from the University of London International Programmes caught my eye. It sounded like some fun stuff.

The course was pretty nice. No additional materials were required besides downloading some open source software (Processing, Audacity, etc.). With video lectures posted every week and discussion forums to ask and answer questions.

The first week of the course started a bit rough. Setting up a working environment can always be tough, and it seemed that many were having similar issues in the forums. There were some coding errors in a few of the early examples that were giving me issues. Most notably the javascript examples. This was a pain to deal with, especially early on. But luckily, I’m a skilled enough coder already to of figured out and fixed it for myself. If I wasn’t already comfortable coding, I probably would have left the course though.

The remaining weeks the coding issues disappeared and it was much easier to follow along with the lectures. The video lectures were great and of very good quality. The instructors were easy to follow and a bit funny as well.

The quizzes and assignments were great too. Though I really aimed a bit too low with my first assignment, doing the peer reviews really had me step up what I’d do for my final assignment.

With the suggestion of a friend I decided to re-create Donkey.bas (the original DOS game) using Processing. I found a video of it being played on YouTube and just went from there.

It does have some gaming flaws as speed picks up still, and has been formatted to a mobile devices screen size. But overall I thought it turned out ok, and kept the cheesiness of an early 80’s DOS game.

All in all I was very satisfied with my experience with taking this class. If you’re into learning something new and don’t really care about a degree or grades to prove it (so overrated to me), then I can’t imagine there’s ever been a better time to gain new knowledge. It’s really an amazing time to be around with all the information so readily available.

Categories
Development

Opening Links in System Browser with Cordova 2.4.0 (PhoneGap)

Found myself a little stumped on this one. I’m making a simple directory mobile app using PhoneGap for iOS and Android. The listings have a website associated with them that we want to link to from the mobile app.

However, when I tested it on my iPhone I discovered that all the links were opening up within the app iteslf. Meaning that user was now trapped in that site with no way back to the Mobile App. Not a very usable experience (though the business clicked on in this case may’ve liked that).

So I tried many things, target=”_blank” seemed to be recommended. Apparently that worked on older versions of Cordova. But, not in my case.

After some more research I did find some documentation on how to handle the InAppBrowser. Finally, exactly what I was looking for!

Apparently you have to use the window.open() function and set the target to _system.

window.open('http://a-website.com', '_system');

So, I updated my links and all seems to be well now!
Categories
Development

Google Maps v3 Weird Controls Rendering

I just upgraded a few of my Google Maps to v3. But, I noticed that my Controls and InfoWindows weren’t rendering correctly. They were looking pretty weird.

So I began much investigation. Turns out that it was a CSS conflict with styles on my site.

For Responsive goodness I was using:

img { max-width: 100%; }

and this was the source of the conflict.

Fixing turned out to be really easy once I narrowed down the problem.

I just set the max-width of the images within the map container to none.

#map-container { max-width: none; }

Now my maps look pretty and my Responsive goodness is still working like a charm!

Categories
Development

jQuery Mobile Hi-Res Images

I’ve been developing a little mobile app using jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap and ran into a little difficulty with supporting both Retina and earlier iPhone displays. Turns out it’s not too difficult using some CSS3 media queries.

However my hi-res images were showing up way too big still.

Simply adding the background-size attribute to what a “standard size” image should be did the job. It did make a lot of sense too, even though I hadn’t thought of it at first.

For instance, my 640px x 1136px image needed a background-size attribute of 320px x 480px to display properly on the Retina display since they pack a much higher pixel density.

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@media only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:2) {
    .ui-body-a, .ui-overlay-a {
        background: url('img/home_bg_2x.jpg') center bottom no-repeat;
        background-size: 320px 480px;
    }
}