our blog
Looking Forward to ARKit and AR Apps in iOS 11
At WWDC earlier this month Apple previewed ARKit – it’s initial foray into Augmented Reality or AR. Alongside the intro session at WWDC they published Understanding Augmented Reality which provides a nice overview of how ARKit works, best practices, and its limitations.
Following WWDC the development community has put together a number of great demos that highlight the possibilities and potential of ARKit and the Made with ARKit (@madewithARKit) site has been chronicling some of the best of these.
Here are a few of my favorites…
Persistence
Boston March 1911 Icy wind blew the pages of the young man's book from beneath his near-frozen fingers. His tattered gloves helped little. He huddled in an alley finding what warmth he could behind a bakery. The scent of baking bread made his mouth water but he dared...
Our Takeaways from NAB Show 2017
A couple of us were among the 100,000+ attendees at the recent NAB Show in April. If you’ve never been to the show, it would be kind of tricky to describe it fully since it’s rather broad and all-encompassing when it comes to media and digital content. The National...
12 Things I Learned About Starting a Business (by Starting a Business)
The first thing I learned by starting a business is that it's best just to do something. If you have an idea for a business, and you love the idea, and you believe it to be a good idea, then just run with it. If it doesn't turn out great, or even if it fails, learn...
JSON Parsing, Conversion, and Caching in the Apollo iOS GraphQL Client
In my last post I took a closer look at how the Apollo iOS GraphQL client executes queries and what the resulting JSON looks like. In this post I’m going to focus on how the JSON is parsed and converted to the native Swift types generated by the apollo-codegen tool and also look at how the Apollo iOS client caches results.
GraphQL Requests – Behind the Scenes with the Apollo iOS Client
In my last post I took a look at using the Apollo iOS GraphQL client framework to access a GraphQL backend running on the Graphcool GraphQL mBaaS. Shortly afterwards Brandur Leach, an API engineer at Stripe posted "Is GraphQL the Next Frontier for Web...
How To Manually Change ASP.NET MembershipProvider Passwords
Don’t ask me why you find yourself working in ASP.NET. I know there are more effective ways to build a site.
Don’t ask me what reason could possibly explain needing to change some passwords. Why isn’t this functionality built in to the app? I know, I know…
But you’re there. Your app is using the MembershipProvider system, which saves the passwords in the database in some kind of encrypted form. And now you have to change some passwords quickly, probably for multiple embarrassing reasons, yet the app doesn’t offer you the functionality to do so, and you don’t have the time to add that functionality and re-build and re-deploy the app.
If only it were possible to go into SSMS and change the passwords using only T-SQL.
Now you can.
Rebuilding SXSW
Now, just hold on a minute. I’m not trying to say that SXSW is broken or somehow inefficient. Stop yelling at me. Look: SXSW has been around for about 30 years at this point. And it’s grown exponentially in that time. I started going to peripheral music events around...
Exploring GraphQL on iOS
GraphQL is a “query language for your API” developed by Facebook back in 2012 for use in its mobile apps, which in 2015 became a published open source specification and framework. Its development was driven by frustration with the state of REST-like endpoints and development of mobile and web apps to consume them.
I hadn’t worked with GraphQL before, but it looked interesting and wanted to see if we could put it to use in the mobile or web apps we build.
What We Saw at SXSW 2017
We attended the SXSW Interactive Conference last week and it was just as busy, exciting, and informative as one would expect. We went to sessions covering everything from art and technology to medical software, hearables, wearables, IoT, audio software, software...
Cython Extension PBJ
Python is a powerful programming language with extensive library support. But what does one do when needing to integrate with a platform-specific C or C++ component that has no native Python support? There are two options: completely rewrite the functionality in Python, or create a Python extension. Either option can be painful and prone to errors. Enter Cython. It’s like the peanut butter and the jelly to the extension sandwich.
Like a PBJ sandwich, Cython code is easy to construct, satisfying to use, does not require exotic ingredients, and can be prepared by almost anyone.
Mentoring Future Engineers
The mission: create a robot in six weeks. The challenge: complete on time, under budget, and with a team who may not know one another. Sound familiar?