Make A Gallery-Like Image Grid Using Native Android

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.

Whitelist External Resources For Use In Ionic Framework

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.

Highlight Text In A String Using JavaScript And AngularJS

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.

Get Remote HTML Data And Parse It In Express For Node.js

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.

Draw A Graphic To A SurfaceView Using Native Android

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.

Ending My Adventure At UC Merced And Starting Fresh

May 13, 2015 Nic Raboy

Back in 2010 I was hired by the University of California, Merced (UC Merced) after having first worked as a student employee for two years prior.

I was hired as part of the Student Information Systems (SIS) team of IT. Although my responsibilities spanned across all departments, I primarily supported the needs of the Undergraduate Admissions department.

I designed, developed, and supported many of the applications to address the growing needs of the department. These applications stretched from simple information management systems to complex automatic review processing systems using a variety of programming languages such as Java, ColdFusion, PLSQL, and Shell.

Use RegEx To Test Password Strength In JavaScript

May 12, 2015 Nic Raboy

Recently one of my Twitter followers asked me how they might validate password strength using regular expressions (RegEx) in their code.

Regular expressions via Wikipedia:

A sequence of characters that forms a search pattern, mainly for use in pattern matching with strings, or string matching.

RegEx is nice because you can accomplish a whole lot with very little. In this case we are going to check various aspects of a string and see if it meets our requirements, being a strong or medium strength password.