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…
It’s been a while since I’ve written about Angular (2 – drop that label, now it’s just Angular) as I’ve been consumed with teaching and developing courseware on a variety of subjects. But now I am coming up for air, just in time for ng-conf 2017. Three of us from Chariot will be there – me, Rich Freedman, who just posted this gem about Spring Security and Angular (2) (part 2 coming soon), and Dan Kyle, who will be manning…
Chariot Solutions is showing off IoT and mobile solutions at our booth at South by Southwest 2017. Here is a short video of Ken Rimple giving a quick guided tour. Some of the solutions we’re showing include: TorqueByte – a methanol/water injection device that we’ve helped update with a bluetooth wireless system and iPod monitoring system. Canary Compliance – a just-launched company that provides fuel pump compliance monitoring. We worked with the company to ingest data from their wireless cellular…
I, like most developers, tend to rush into playing around with new technology. What I mean is you get excited when hearing or reading about something new then jump into the deep-end of the pool and while in mid-air throwing your towel to your chair. That’s what happened to me with VectorDrawable. I heard about vector graphics by watching a Google video and immediately went to my project in Android Studio. I located to the res/ folder, right clicked and…
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.
This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending the Scala by the Schuylkill conference at Comcast headquarters in downtown Philadelphia. Initially begun as an internal Scala conference, the organizers opened the conference this year to external folks interested in Scala. I learned a lot from this event, gaining perspective on trends in the Scala community and sparking curiosity in several interesting applications of the Scala language.
