The Polyglot Developer

Updating Apache Cordova Platform To Latest Version

October 31, 2014

If you’re like me, you’ve been developing applications with Apache Cordova or Ionic Framework for a while now. Long enough to have received an email from Google Play stating that they are going to remove your application if you don’t update your published application to a more secure version of Apache Cordova.

Apache Cordova announcement:

Security issues were discovered in the Android platform of Cordova. We are releasing version 3.5.1 of Cordova Android to address these security issues. We recommend that all Android applications built using Cordova be upgraded to use version 3.5.1 of Cordova Android. Other Cordova platforms such as iOS are unaffected, and do not have an update.

So how does one go about fixing something like this? A security flaw like this isn’t the first and it probably won’t be the last.

October 28, 2014

Nic Raboy

Recently I met with the guys at Drifty, the creators of Ionic Framework, and they hooked me up with a beta invite to Ionic Creator.

In short, Ionic Creator is a what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) editor for Ionic Framework cross platform Android and iOS mobile applications. It is like the Dreamweaver of mobile application development.

October 25, 2014

Nic Raboy

So you’ve made a great app, but need some help marketing it. Adding social media features to your application is a great way help spread the word, without actually doing anything. Social media can bring good traffic for you, the developer, and provide useful features to your user at the same time.

Take for example, you made a mobile app that finds funny pictures on the internet. You might want to add a share button that shares a particular funny picture on your users social media account while including reference to your app so all their friends can use it too.

The following will show you how to make use of social media sharing in your Android and iOS mobile application using Ionic Framework.

October 22, 2014

Nic Raboy

It is no secret, that many Android devices handle web pages poorly. Unless you have Android 4.4, your device is using whatever proprietary browser your manufacturer has decided to give you. The lucky ones who are running Android 4.4 tend to have higher end Nexus or Motorola devices.

This isn’t the end of the road for your hybrid development journeys. Using Crosswalk in your application replaces the default web runtime with the runtime 4.4 users are already enjoying. The best part is that this will work with Apache Cordova, Phonegap, and Ionic Framework. For the sake of this article I’m going to aim it towards Cordova and Ionic Framework, but Phonegap should be pretty similar.

October 19, 2014

Nic Raboy

I recently started playing around with the Dropbox Datastore JavaScript API and decided that I wanted an extra layer of security in the data I store on the Dropbox server. I figured the best way to accomplish this would be to encrypt all data in my application before syncing.

It took me a while to find an encryption library that I liked, but in the end, I chose the JavaScript library Forge. This library has plenty of cryptography tools that extend beyond just AES encryption, thus making it very worthy to check out.

October 16, 2014

Nic Raboy

One of my Twitter followers recently asked me if I could write an article regarding Google Maps and Ionic Framework. I am always up to learning and sharing things, so I’ve taken on this challenge.

The following will get you a fresh Ionic project with geolocation and a fancy Google Map.

October 15, 2014

Nic Raboy

I recently released an iOS and Android application called OTP Safe to iTunes and Google Play. OTP Safe makes use of the time-based one-time password (TOTP) algorithm commonly used with two-factor authentication (2FA). How exactly, does this algorithm work, and how can we make it work with JavaScript?

Using the following resources as our framework, we can make use of the TOTP algorithm quickly and easily:

http://blog.tinisles.com/2011/10/google-authenticator-one-time-password-algorithm-in-javascript/
https://code.google.com/p/google-authenticator/source/browse/libpam/totp.html?r=a852f172b62bf58d436e942e59f6439224b1477d

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