As mentioned, I created and submitted my first Windows 8 application to the Windows Store this past weekend. Overall, the whole process was very enjoyable. Some points about the process and the app itself:
First of all, you’ll need Windows 8 installed. If you’re reading this before October 26, 2012, then there are two prerelease versions of Win8 you can install. There’s the Consumer Preview, which you DON’T want, and the Enterprise Evaluation, which you DO want. The Enterprise Eval version is the only one that will allow you to install the Visual Studio tools you’ll need to make an app. You can find that version here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/jj554510.aspx. Again, if you’re reading this after October 26, you’ll probably just have to install the release version.
Read more...You know what I hate? Subscribing to a blog and that blog doesn’t get updated for months and the blogger shows up and says, “Sorry I haven’t been blogging, been really busy, blah, blah, blah. But I’m really going to start blogging now!” and then they don’t blog for another few months and come back and say, “Whew! Still so busy! But I’m really going to get back into this blogging thing now! I promise!” and there’s no actual content in those posts, just promises of impending awesome content. That’s what I hate. That, and silverfish. Those things freak me out.
Read more...Note: I changed the name of the plugin from “SublimeProjectMaker” to “STProjectMaker”. The github address is also different now because of that change.
I love Sublime Text 2. But one thing I’ve always felt was missing was the ability to easily create a new project. I understand the difficulties involved. Sublime handles many different languages and projects of all different types. Each type of project in each language could have a completely different setup. There is no one single project type that could possibly work for everything.
Read more...As I was writing the previous post on my Kindle Authoring Setup, it occurred to me that markdown might be a solution to having to mark everything up with HTML tags. So I wrote a comment in there exactly as it hit my brain. After publishing that post, I went ahead and checked it out and it has worked beyond what I imagined.
First, I located the command line tool, pandoc (again, cross-platform, yay!) and installed that. Then I did some tests and was amazed how much it did. Read up on markdown syntax and was even further amazed. I’d say this writing/publishing flow is now as close to perfect as it can get.
Read more...As mentioned previously, I have started working on self-publishing my Playing With Chaos book on the Amazon Kindle self publishing service. I quickly got the outline, first chapter, part of the second, some code and images done. Then last weekend I decided I better check into the whole publishing process in a bit more detail. I went through all the material on Amazon’s site, as well as several other tutorials. I even downloaded a free ebook on Kindle publishing and paid for another 99 cent book on the subject. I learned a lot, but none of it made me very happy to begin with. Here’s why:
Read more...Well, the title gives it away, so I just need to elaborate. I had so much fun and did so much research and wrote so much code for my Playing With Chaos presentation, and it went over so well and was very popular. But in the 45 minutes I had last week, or even in a full hour of talking, you can barely scratch the surface of the simplest bits of math or code and only show a few quick images or demos of each example. And there were lots of other examples that I didn’t even have time to touch on. I would love to be able to cover all the topics I had in mind, and go over each one fully enough, with well explained code. Thus, I’ve been thinking of writing a book based on the presentation.
Read more...I just got back last night from Beyond Tellerand – Play! This is a conference put on by my good friend Marc Thiele. Formerly known as FFK, it’s a conference that I’ve wanted to go to for a while, and which Marc and I have talked about for several years. We finally got it together this year and I made it out. The conference is held in Cologne (or Köln), Germany. There are two days of sessions in two tracks, plus a day of workshops before and another afterwards.
Read more...Almost two years ago I got my first Android device, a Nexus One. I was not at all impressed right off the bat. Coming from the iPhone world, things just didn’t seem … “right” about it. On the other hand, I was intrigued by it and kept wanting to check it out. Eventually, I forced myself to use it for a couple of weeks straight. My eyes were opened, and iOS never again seemed the least bit compelling to me.
Read more...I wrote yet another article on object creation in JavaScript. This time, for Adobe! I’m really glad to see that they are reaching out to publish articles like this. I hope to see a lot more on similar subjects. And I hope that means that they may have additional tooling and products in the works that will support high end web development.
Here’s the article link:
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/javascript-object-creation.html
It touches on many of the same principles of my last couple of JS object posts here, but supplies some non-trivial, real world code to demonstrate the principles.
Read more...When you get into a bit higher end JavaScript patterns, one thing you’ll read very early on is this concept: that although JavaScript does not have private members or access modifiers, it is possible to achieve this behavior with closures. This is often done through an IIFE and is the simplest implementation of the module pattern. Like so:
[php lang=“JavaScript”]var mod = (function() {
var privateVar = “foo”;
return {
getPrivateVar: function() {
return privateVar;
},
setPrivateVar: function(value) {
privateVar = value;
}
};
}());