Author: Nic Raboy

Extending The Gradle Build File In Apache Cordova 5.0+

June 10, 2015

Apache Cordova 5.0 brought many changes, all of which are for the best, but many of which are a major inconvenience in terms of development or deployment. For example, previously I wrote about whitelisting external resources in Ionic Framework because by default everything is now blacklisted.

This time we’re going to explore the new default build system, Gradle. This build system is nothing new as I’ve written about it in the past, however, it is new when it comes to Apache Cordova and hybrid mobile application development.

You may run into library conflicts or need to do little customizations to your build process. We’re going to see how to do these things. Gradle is for Android only, so if you’re developing for iOS, feel free to move along.

June 2, 2015

Nic Raboy

Working with images in Android is great, but what happens when you need to store them somewhere other than the file system? Let’s say for example you want to store them in a SQLite or NoSQL type database. How would you store such a piece of data?

One common way to store image data would be to first convert the image into a base64 string. We all know strings are very easy to store in some data structure.

Base64 via Wikipedia:

A group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation.

Another way would be to store the binary data in a CLOB or BLOB type SQL column, but to keep it generic, in this particular example, we will be exploring the idea of converting images into base64 strings.

May 28, 2015

Nic Raboy

Previously I had written an article regarding how to make a gallery-like image grid using Ionic Framework, but what if we wanted to accomplish the same using the native Android SDK?

In this tutorial we’ll see how to make use of the Android GridView with an image adapter to display remote images from the internet.

May 24, 2015

Nic Raboy

It was recently brought to my attention that big things came with the latest Apache Cordova Android and iOS update. One of the major updates being the requirement of whitelisting in order to use external resources.

What exactly does this mean?

Take the example of some random API like Facebook or TinyURL. If you try to perform a request on either of these APIs it will fail because by default everything external is blacklisted. By adding to the whitelist, things change.

May 21, 2015

Nic Raboy

Have you ever wanted to highlight text in a string on a web page using AngularJS? If your answer was no, don’t disregard, because you may one day need to. The good thing is this is not very hard to accomplish.

There are many ways to do this using JavaScript, but we’re only going to examine one of those methods.

Using AngularJS and a few regular expressions (RegEx) with JavaScript, you can find text in a string and then apply your own customizations.

May 18, 2015

Nic Raboy

Have you ever wanted to fetch remote HTML data in a similar fashion to cURL or Wget using some backend web service and parse it? If you said no, don’t worry, I said the exact thing until I was challenged to do so. For the challenge, I chose to use Express as my framework and a few libraries to assist in the process of fetching and parsing.

I chose to use the HTTP and HTTPS libraries for fetching the data and the htmlparser2 for parsing the HTML data. These are of course only a few of many alternatives to choose from for such a task.

May 15, 2015

Nic Raboy

There are many ways to create mobile Android games. For example you can use a framework like Unity3D or Unreal Engine, or you can use native APIs like the SurfaceView canvas or OpenGL. All the different methods have their pros and cons.

In this particular example we’re going to see how to render graphics to the Android screen by extending the SurfaceView class and a canvas.

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