tips and tricks

Taking AWS SDK Go 2.0 For A Spin

The Amazon Web Services SDK for Go 2.0 contains a number of enhancements compared to Go v1. Golang is a great programming language for modern cloud native applications. The language provides great facilities for better concurrency, internet content parsing (JSON, XML, etc…), support for HTTP(S), ease of cross-platform compilation, and static binary executable generation, just … Read More

UITableView Swipe Actions in iOS 11

Overview One of the new but little discussed APIs in iOS 11 allows the addition of swipe actions on UITableView rows via the new UISwipeActionsConfiguration class and associated UITableViewDelegate methods. Adding swipe left or swipe right actions is now pretty simple, so lets just dive right in. To try out these new APIs, a very … Read More

Updating text on a Loading spinner with Ionic 3

Ionic has a handy Loading component, typically used to display a spinner and message while some network operation completes or some other work goes on in the background. It works well for simple operations, but falls down for dynamic or multi-step operations. For instance, when you call the LoadingController to set things up, you can … Read More

Changing your iOS App Icon programatically

When iOS 10.3 was released, Apple opened up an API to allow developers to change the app icon for their app programatically. Of course this doesn’t mean you can change it every second like the Clock app, or even every day like the Calendar app. What you can do is change the app icon when … Read More

Alexa adds Device Identity

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 … Read More