At WWDC Apple announced that iOS 11 will now support Drag and Drop. This works not only within an app, but also from one app to another. Dragging between apps is only supported on iPads. This tutorial will walk through how to implement receiving data from Drag and Drop.
Handoff is a neat feature that was introduced in iOS 8 and macOS (then OS X) v10.10. This capability allows an app to pass data across macOS and iOS devices so that a task started on one device can be completed on another device. In this tutorial we will implement Handoff on both iOS and macOS platforms.
We have an Alexa project where we’re using Alexa to control physical devices in the room. In a deployment, there are multiple devices in multiple rooms. But these devices aren’t lights or thermostats, so they aren’t yet candidates for the Alexa Smart Home API. A few months ago, it looked like we would have to create dozens of cloned Amazon accounts, one for each room, in order to be able to distinguish one Alexa device from another. Happily, Alexa has…
A short tutorial on how to enable React JSX syntax checking in Visual Studio Code using ESLint.
Learn how you might organize your package structure in Angular applications for simple ES2015 imports using barrels, and the difference between JIT and AOT compilation in terms of size and speed.
It’s a known limitation that a custom Alexa skill cannot perform notifications. That is, Alexa can only speak when first spoken to, and cannot spontaneously alert you that you have an appointment coming up or whatever. There’s a simple way to fake it, though, if you’re using an Echo device and you have a spare computer. The computer can use the Echo as a Bluetooth speaker. Then if you generate an MP3 of Alexa saying something, the computer can play…
When I first looked at Firebase, I thought it was garbage. (Sorry, I ran out of sugarcoating this morning.) But things changed when we came across an app that was a much better fit for it. That app was an Amazon Alexa skill, which needed to control content in a browser showing full-screen on a TV. We could have wired up WebSockets or something, but then it would have been on us to define a protocol and handle timeouts or…
Learn how to use observables to connect a web audio API to source content from sources like MIDI using RxJS and Angular. Part one of a two-part series.
Part 2 of Rich Freedman’s tutorial on getting an Angular (nee Angular 2) application to communicate with a secured Spring Boot backend including code samples and approaches.
First Contact We were building a small proof of concept for a mobile app, when one of the stakeholders requested that we evaluate Firebase for it. It was my first exposure to Firebase, which looks like it was a cloud database that grew to include authentication, notifications, and other features. On the face of it, it looks interesting — mobile devices could load and store data using the Firebase API, no back-end server or hosting needed. Different devices could get…
