Shine is proud to announce that senior consultant Ben Teese will be speaking at the YOW! Connected conference being held in Melbourne on the 17th and 18th of September.Ben's topic will be React Native, an innovative new framework that applies the principles of the React web...
Shine Senior Consultant Ben Teese has had a piece published in the latest DZone Guide to Database and Persistence Management.In the article, Ben does an overview and comparison of the Firebase, Meteor, and Amazon Cognito platforms. These platforms all aim to solve the use-case of...
UX Australia 2014 Redux was a one day Melbourne based recap of UX Australia's 2014 Sydney conference. It was a chance for those who had missed out to see the most popular presentations. The following is a brief overview of the presentations.Shine Senior Developer Ben Teese will be speaking at YOW! Connected next week.Held in Melbourne, Australia on September 8 and 9, YOW! Connected covers both Mobile Development and The Internet of Things.Ben's talk topic is 'The State of the Mobile Web' and is scheduled for 3:30pm on...
After the most recent WWDC, most iOS developers aren't talking about cool new iOS 8 features or APIs. Instead, they're talking about a whole new language: Swift. Yes, you heard right - a whole new programming language. How exciting it is!
Apple has been working on Swift secretly for a few years. It is a modern programming language that takes the strengths of other popular languages (for example, Python) and avoids the bad things about Objective-C (for example, poor manual memory-management and awful block syntax). As Apple declared, it’s Objective-C without the C. Not only this, Swift is also able to access the Apple Cocoa Touch framework and share the same LLVM compiler as Objective-C, so they can be seamlessly mixed in a same project.
Now you might be just like me, wondering why Apple would introduce a new language for iOS and Mac OS programming. Let’s walk through some most exciting parts of Swift to see if we can find a reason.
Mobile web apps have come a long way from their clunky, cut-down ancestors of the pre-smartphone era. Responsive design and mobile-specific interactions such as touch and swipe events have begun to bridge the gap between mobile web-apps and native smartphone applications. So unsurprisingly, when working with a mobile web app we are often tasked with aiming not only for feature-parity with a corresponding native app, but for UI-parity as well.While plenty of arguments can be made against this approach to begin with, on a recent mobile web-app project we were curious to see how far we could go when tasked with pursuing the native ideal.Parity across the layout of the pages is simple enough, but the native UI experience is about so much more than just layout. All of the seemingly-insignificant things in the periphery - page transitions, modal dialogs, the now ubiquitous left-hand slide-in navigation bar - are crucial. However, there was one element that we didn’t expect to cause any problems, particularly given how widely used it is - the humble accordion.
Problem solving is a major aspect of software development, there are often many different solutions to a problem and a good developer will strive for the most simple without compromising maintainability. However, there are certain times when there’s simply no elegant way to solve a problem so you end up writing what’s commonly referred to in the industry as a hack. You probably won’t be proud of it and you might even have committed the code under a pseudonym so no one can git blame you, but however ugly, the hack still solves a problem and the next thing you know, you’re being asked to write a blog detailing its every hideous crevice.
