I put together an app to play Wordle and to use to research various aspects of the game, including best starting words. I put this little non-technical video together as an experiment: It’s a learning experience making these videos. The…
Category: software development
The dine safely app for our pandemic times
I built a little app to check and grade the COVID-19 Safety Measures of our favorite dining establishments. You can check it out at: https://dinesafely.org The front-end is pretty much a bare-bones material ui react app interface initially forked from:…
A Fresh Look at PHP
I never have been an active PHP developer. I’ve worked with it on the occasions I’ve had to, like hacking WordPress, or for smaller quick and dirty projects, but had never seriously considered the language for anything beyond that. I…
Refreshing an old app for a pandemic
We developed the Phew app in 2015, when iOS 8 was the new hot item. After 2016, the app received minor updates for bug fixes and iOS compatibility, but by the time iOS 13 came out last last year, the…
What I learned in 2017 as CTO for a VR startup
For me, I’ve found that I have to get my hands dirty to really understand and appreciate something. There can be a big difference between learning something in the abstract and applying it in real life, particularly in production environments.…
Secret decoded
The Secret app is a new iPhone app for sharing photos and text anonymously. The sharing model of Secret is unusual and intriguing to me. According to their FAQ: Your secrets are delivered anonymously to the people in your Contacts…
Another perspective on “Why mobile web apps are slow”
The recent post from Drew Crawford “Why mobile web apps are slow” has received a lot of attention and provides a rather powerful argument for the topic. I’m not here to dispute anything in that post; it’s good information, go read it if…
Android vs. iPhone development experience
There are a steady stream of posts about which platform makes more sense to develop for, in terms of market size, chances for success etc. This post isn’t about that. This post is about the development experience itself, what it’s…
KiraDb lightweight open-source noSQL-style database Java API
My good friend Mark Petrovic and I are releasing KiraDB on gitub as an open-source project. KiraDB is a Java API implementing a persistent datastore for stand-alone applications. The design goal of KiraDB is to be lightweight and easy to use,…
Forbes: Android is shipping more phones but Apple is still the logical choice for mobile development
The title to this May 9 story, suggests another Apple bashing: “Is Apple’s dominance of Mobile Development on the Wane?” It appears to be an old editorial trick, the classic alarmist headline, because the article itself goes on to answer in…
