Author: Nic Raboy

Use Font Awesome Glyph Icons With NativeScript

January 4, 2016 Nic Raboy

If you’re like me, you’re terrible when it comes to design and that includes graphic design. Creating icons throughout an app can be a rough process, not just from a creativity perspective, but also from the perspective of displaying these icons on various screen sizes and resolutions. Web developers have it easy with the incredibly useful Font Awesome glyph icon package. The thing is, it isn’t just web developers that can make use of Font Awesome.

It is very easy to include Font Awesome in your Telerik NativeScript mobile application. I already demonstrated using these glyph icons in an Ionic Framework, React Native, and even a native Android application. Now it’s time to do it with NativeScript.

TPDP Episode #1: The Requirements for Developing Mobile Applications

January 3, 2016 Nic Raboy

This is officially the first episode in The Polyglot Developer Podcast! I’ve spent a long time thinking about creating a podcast, but now I can officially say that I’ve followed through with it. Episode #1: The Requirements for Developing Mobile Applications is an episode that I’ve broken into several parts because I feel there are different kinds of requirements.

1. What do you need in a mobile application?
2. What do you need to build a mobile application?
3. What do you need to do to drive success in a mobile application?

Those three topics should be considered by everyone looking to develop their first mobile application.

Using An Oauth 2.0 Service Within An Ionic Mobile App

January 2, 2016 Nic Raboy

Previously I demonstrated how to use Oauth in an Ionic Framework 1 Android and iOS mobile application, but with Ionic 2 becoming all the rage, I figured my old guide needed a refresher.

Modern applications are always making use of APIs and data from third party services. The problem is, these remote services require a special kind of authentication to happen in order to work with the data they manage. The most common form of authentication for web services is Oauth.

In my Ionic Framework 1 tutorial I demonstrated Google Oauth, but this time we’re going to see how to use Facebook Oauth in an Ionic 2 application.

The Polyglot Developer Podcast

January 1, 2016 Nic Raboy

To help kick off the new year, I wanted to announce that I am creating a podcast titled The Polyglot Developer Podcast that will be released to iTunes as well as Pocket Casts.

You might have some questions regarding this, such as:

• What is a podcast?
• What will this podcast hope to accomplish?
• How will this podcast differ from all my videos and written blog articles?

Let’s break it down and get everything cleared up on why you should care about the free podcast that I’m publishing!

Migrate Your WordPress From Bluehost To Digital Ocean

December 28, 2015 Nic Raboy

Bluehost is a great service that is incredibly cheap, but depending on the amount of traffic that you receive, a Bluehost server may not be able to accommodate in performance. For example my WordPress blog, the one you’re on now, receives too much traffic, which is why I had to host it on a VPS service. In particular I’m hosting this WordPress blog on Digital Ocean. Now, not everyone needs more than Bluehost so don’t think it is a bad service from the start.

Here we’re going to look at migrating a WordPress blog from Bluehost to a Digital Ocean virtual private server (VPS).

Use SQLite In Ionic Instead Of Local Storage

December 27, 2015 Nic Raboy

Ionic 2 is becoming all the rage right now because of it using Angular. With the introduction of Angular, comes many differences in the language and framework itself. One of the most critical parts of any mobile application is its ability to save data and have it persisted when the application is launched at a later date. I demonstrated in Ionic Framework 1 how to use SQLite as a storage solution, so I figured it would be a good idea to demonstrate the same using Ionic Framework 2.

Let’s see why it might be a good idea to use SQLite in an Ionic 2 application rather than HTML5 local storage.

Create A Toast Notification In Android With NativeScript

December 25, 2015 Nic Raboy

Toast notifications are a common thing in Android applications. They are convenient because you can display a message to a user and have it disappear shortly after without blocking any of the UI that might exist within the application. I already demonstrated how to display these notifications in an Ionic Framework application, but this time I’m changing gears to explain how it is done using Telerik NativeScript.

I wanted to start off by saying that I was inspired to write this article after reading Brad Martin’s post regarding the Snackbar notification in NativeScript. Both are common and useful ways to display notifications in mobile apps.