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  • Javascript, the Back Button, and Windows Phone 8 Development

    I recently had the opportunity to begin exploring and toying around with Windows Phone 8 development.

    Why you ask?  Why not really, but mostly because I was giving a free phone and it’s an untapped market when it comes to apps.  At this stage it’s not over diluted like the Android and iPhone stores are.  That and of course there is an option to create apps using HTML, Javascript, and CSS – technologies I’ve used and mastered for years!

    I actually submitted my first app last weekend – and sadly – it got rejected 🙁  I was given two reasons; firstly I did set a default application icon, whoops my bad.  Secondly, I didn’t properly handle the back button since there are “multiple pages” in my application.

    It took me several hours to finally found the answer so I thought I would share it.  Please note, this feels like a bit of a hack, but I wasn’t able to get the “suggested” solutions working…

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  • MSConfig – What Would I Do Without You!

    Being a web developer typically means you’ve probably been around computers your whole life.  This means that you’ve troubleshooted them, broke them, fixed them, fixed them for others, etc…  As time has gone by and I’ve dedicated myself to the art and craft of development, I’ve slowly drifted away from supporting computers.

    However, I recently upgraded my work laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 8 – what a frustrating experience this was!  But not the purpose of this article, just part of the train tracks of a good story!

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  • Simplifying the buzz word “Responsive Design”

    Every so often there is a new buzz word in the web development/design industry.  A few years ago it was HTML5 and CSS3.  Now it seems to be “responsive design”.  And of course this makes a lot of sense.  With more and more Internet users accessing the content on their laptop or desktop PC, tablets, and mobile phones, websites need to be able to be ready to serve up the content in an appropriate fashion.

    In this article, I want to take a step back and help simplify this process because by stopping and thinking just a little bit, it doesn’t need to be complicated.  In fact it’s quite simple.

    At the time of writing this article, my blog is only about 50% responsive, I am planning a new design soon that will take it to the next level.

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  • Changes to Model:find(‘first’) in CakePHP 2.3

    A new stable release of CakePHP has just been released a few days ago, version 2.3.  With this many great new changes have come out of it.  You can read the full change log here:
    http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/lorenzo/2013/01/28/cakephp_2_3_0_is_out

    One of the things that immediately caught my mind was this great big bolded sentence:

    IMPORTANT: Model::find('first') will now return an empty JavaScript array when no records are found. Make sure you update your tests!

    Immediately after reading this I thought major code changes were going to be required; however, luckily my fear was unfounded.  Let me provide an example…

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  • Recent Guest Posts on PHPMaster.com

    I’ve had the pleasure of being a guest writer at a fantastic site called phpmaster.com.  This site is a subsidiary site to one of the most popular technology blogging sites sitepoint.com.

    The first article I wrote is an excellent extension of the various CakePHP articles I’ve written about in the past.  It discusses a variety of ways to improve the speed of CakePHP applications.  The latest article (that was just released a few days ago) discusses creating your very own OAuth server.  Since OAuth2 is still in a draft state, the article is for creating an OAuth1 server.

    In case you are not a regular of this site, here is a quick preview of the articles. (more…)