Blog - Dayspring Web Design and Development » Technology

Android on the move, gets Facebook respect

John G. — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:59:05 +0000

Facebook announced its new SDK for Android developers today. One of our developers was at Google I/O last week where Facebook was showing a developer preview.

Up until now the ways to integrate Facebook into Android applications were hacks that weren’t officially supported by Facebook. But in a nod to the fast-growing popularity of [...]

Open APIs Are All The Rage

John G. — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:27:13 +0000

Everybody is calling everyone else, apparently, in a monster repackaging of data, re-presenting info on my website (please stay here, don’t go to the source) and especially via mobile apps. REST is killing SOAP. Some info on the numbers, republished from a ReadWriteWeb post:

Perhaps most illustrative is his “API Billionaire’s Club.”

Members of the club include [...]

Javascript on the server with Akshell

Matthew D. — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:57:07 +0000

I’ve been intrigued by a few different “Javascript on the server” frameworks as they have passed by. Here is one that runs Javascript in a cloud and have an online IDE for creating the sites. The article at the bottom is an interview with the creator.

Akshell is a Cloud Service that helps developers [...]

Martin Fowler will be speaking in San Francisco

Matthew D. — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 16:33:33 +0000

I have appreciated a lot of what Martin Fowler has to say about development over the years.

He will be in San Francisco on May 11-12 for a couple of free forms. The 11th is Tuesday in Santa Clara and the 12th in in San Francisco. Both are free.

Unfortunately the 12th is a Community builders night [...]

Some cool Schools/Universities design examples

Young-Ki K. — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 17:04:00 +0000

I came across a couple of university web sites and was interested how they were programmed.

The first is Bucknell’s Virtual Tour site: http://community.bucknell.edu/. It is made up of a lot of full screen photos but seems to load extremely fast. Browse around and you can see what I am talking about. Probably AJAX pulling in [...]

DrupalCon SF 2010: Modules/Tools of interest

Bruce Y. — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:35:47 +0000

Just wanted to try to keep track of some interesting modules mentioned at DrupalCon:

Organic Groups – create groups that users can join. groups can have own home page and context

PURL – use for embedding context info into URL. Use this instead of setting session variables

Context Spaces – more granular variable level overrides than using Context [...]

DrupalCon SF 2010: Drupal Distributions

Bruce Y. — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 21:10:23 +0000

Jason and I attended a DrupalCon session on a Open Atrium, a drupal distribution for intranets and project management. It’s basically Drupal-based app that competes with 37Signals’ Basecamp/Campfire/Backpack suite. It’s an impressive product which made me think to look up some other Drupal distros that could be of interest. Here’s some of what I’ve found [...]

Mobile Data Aggregation, South Africa style

Jeff W. — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:14:39 +0000

The New York Times has an article about Ushahidi, a platform for aggregating data and plotting it on a map. Ushahidi was created by a Kenyan lawyer after the violence that followed the 2007 Kenya election.

The site collected user-generated cellphone reports of riots, stranded refugees, rapes and deaths and plotted them on [...]

Android users: 73% male

Bruce Y. — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 00:06:46 +0000

It looks like Android users are overwhelmingly guys (73%!):

Got an Android phone? You’re probably a man

Are most early adopters men or is it something inherent to the platform?

Here are some more mobile stats: AdMob Mobile Stats January 2010

Javascript parseInt quirkiness

Bruce Y. — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 23:35:56 +0000

I found a funny quirk to the javascript parseInt function today. I tried this:

hour = parseInt(“08″);

expected a value of hour == 8. What was the result? hour == 0. huh?

Well, here’s the function syntax:

parseInt(string, radix) If the radix parameter is omitted, JavaScript assumes the following: If the string begins with “0x”, the radix is 16 (hexadecimal) If [...]