In the last couple of months I’ve done a fair bit of programming on iOS/Android/HTML & JS. I’ve also been experimenting a bit with PhoneGap/Cordova (I’ll call it Cordova from here on out). While playing with a Cordova application of my own I ran into the need for a native interaction that wasn’t possible with just PhoneGap. I wanted to display what is called an “Intent Chooser” on Android. This is a dialog that displays a list of applications that can be used to handle a specific user request. In my case I wanted to send a tweet using …

Appcelerator Titanium is a product that bills itself as the easy way to create cross-platform, native, mobile applications. It’s a lofty goal. After several months of development on a decent sized application, I can say that currently the platform falls short of meeting that goal, way short.

A promising start..

I was drawn to Appcelerator because of the idea of being able to write straightforward JS and get native widgets. This would allow me to focus on the logic of my application, and not making sure I hadn’t forgot to track the retain/release counts on my objects correctly. Initially …

Once upon a time there was a website, a website that catered to the lowest of lowbrow humor. It was aptly named, lowbrow. Then, for no real reason, it vanished. Those of us who were fond of it made varying attempts to resurrect the bits of it that were available to us, and ultimately we all failed. But just as suddenly as it vanished all of those years ago, it reappeared on a new domain. But this time with something new, almost unfathomable for lowbrow, an API. Let the gears begin turning…

After playing a bit with the …

Background

I got a PDA (A Sharp Zaurus, running Linux to be exact) in 2001. By 2003, I was on my third PDA, my cell-phone could act as a bluetooth modem, and it had a camera. Skip forward a few years, and there’s Palm’s, Blackberry’s, and Android devices. In 10 years I’ve gone through a dozen PDAs and cell-phones, each with more features and capabilities than the last. But in 2011, I’m moving backwards, I traded my Android phone in for a $20 nearly-disposable flip phone.

This wasn’t a spur of the moment decision, I’ve been plotting, and …

When I setup this blog, I set it up as a GitHub repository so that I could write my posts in vim, track them in git, and publish my changes in a way that’s extremely similar to how I deploy all of my other apps. This was, and still is, an extremely appealing process. But sometime in the last couple of months post-receive hook script has busted. It doesn’t error, it runs fine when I trigger it manually, but doesn’t seem to work when called via git. I spent an hour or so trying to figure out what was …