This is totally last minute, but I’ll be MCing the backend development track at Kings of Code. There are a bunch of great speakers from around the world talking about all sorts fo fun stuff like real-time apps, Git, Go, and more. Hope to see you there!
Come join me and Frank, an iOS developer, at our office on the second floor of the Volkskrantgebouw and just down the hall from startups like Bottlenose, Ideedock, and Spaaza. The rent is €110.35 a month per desk, including BTW.
… eleven years ago. Brilliant.
Recently I’ve been working with Arjan on a Cordova (PhoneGap) app for AT5, the local TV station in Amsterdam. While HTML5 video tags work just fine in the app, playing a video kicks you out of the app and into Mobile Safari. Since that’s not the nicest user experience, we wanted to add a native video player plugin to play the videos within the app.
phonegap-videoplayer-plugin is commonly used to do just this, but it doesn’t work in recent versions of Cordova nor is installation totally obvious. So, I took only the most essential files from it and created my own native plugin, CDVVideo. You can find CDVVideo on GitHub.
Last Wednesday I gave a guest lecture in the course “ICT Design: Valorization and mobile applications,” part of the ICT Management and Design Masters program at TU Delft. I talked for almost two hours on my perspective on the business of app development as a freelancer and independent developer. The students asked insightful questions, and I really enjoyed my time there. For those interested, I have uploaded the presentation.
I’ve really loving running apps on Heroku, but unfortunately their routing mesh means that they only support custom domains on a subdomain (http://www.mydomain.com), not on the raw domain (http://mydomain.com). Luckily today I discovered an option buried in the Google Apps settings to do this:
Just specify the subdomain for which you have a CNAME pointing to your Heroku app.
Then it’s just a matter of setting your DNS A records to Google’s servers. Here’s it in TransIP (the IPv6 addresses haven’t be updated):
Because I’m nothing if not consistent, I’ve made Yet Another Option Library, this time in Ruby: option.rb
Because I couldn’t for the life of me find the information in the simple_record documentation, here’s how:
SimpleRecord.establish_connection(sdb_access_key, sdb_secret_key, :server => sdb_region_domain_name) |
You can find the SimpleDB region URLs on Amazon’s Regions and Endpoints page.
Continuing my thoughts on the continued strengths of email, I throw at the following on Twitter and got a a decent amount of interest:
Here’s a (not so) crazy idea: just use email (SMTP + IMAP) as your internal message queue. Need push? IMAP-IDLE. Need fanout? Add more To’s.
— Peter Robinett (@pr1001) July 24, 2012
I think there really might be actually something to this. Email as system is very well-understood and the clients and servers are quite optimized. I have to say, I’m tempted to whip up a proof-of-concept!
Now you can easily find out with my latest site: isitraining.nl
