Have you ever wanted to build your own password manager? Maybe you don’t trust the password management tools that already exist, or maybe you just want the experience. I personally use the tool 1Password, but many of my friends don’t trust the applications that exist on the market. It is a valid con...

I am pleased to announce that my first ever skill for Amazon Alexa powered devices has gone live in the Amazon Skill Marketplace. My skill, BART Control, accesses live information about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in northern California. If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Alexa, it can be descri...

Most modern applications have separation between the backend and the frontend layers. The backend is typically a RESTful API and is critical part of full stack development. These APIs are generally further broken down into a collection of routes, often referred to as endpoints. Building applications...

Rich site summary (RSS) feeds are very common on blogs or sites that have a publication type feed. These feeds are in XML format and have information such as the publication title, a summary, or other bits of information that is rather useful. There are plenty of mobile applications on Google Play a...

A little more than a year ago I wrote a tutorial regarding using local notifications in an Ionic Framework Android and iOS application, but Ionic Framework and AngularJS is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Lately, anything Angular is all the rage and that includes frameworks that use it like Io...

In my previous NativeScript tutorials I demonstrated how to access native platform APIs and features using JavaScript, but I never explained how to develop plugins that could accomplish this in a very maintainable fashion. By moving this native functionality to plugins, the application code remains ...

I’ve been developing and writing about NativeScript for a while now. One of the things that everyone seems to bring up is that the UI NativeScript offers is unattractive in comparison to frameworks like Ionic. Sure, it may be unattractive, but it is a native UI and had you been developing with Java ...

When developing an Ionic 2 application there are often scenarios where it probably isn’t a good idea to include repetitive source code in multiple application pages. A common example of this would be when it comes to database interaction in an Ionic 2 application. Sure you could establish a connecti...

If you’re a long time follower of my blog you’ll remember I wrote an article about creating an RSS reader using Ionic Framework. That tutorial not only used the first version of Ionic Framework, but it now also uses a deprecated Google service, once known as the Google Feed API. Because of the depre...

Recently I found myself needing to add a JavaScript library to an Ionic 2 TypeScript project. Now you’ll probably recall that I’ve written two different articles regarding using JavaScript libraries in TypeScript project. I wrote about including a JavaScript library in an Ionic 2 app in a guest post...

As some of you may know, I have a hoarding problem. I am hoarding Raspberry Pi microcomputers. In my personal collection I have one from each generation, making four standard units. Well, I recently picked up another unit, but this time a Raspberry Pi Zero. These things are about the size of a nine ...

There are many password managers on the market right now for Android and iOS. I personally use a mobile application called 1Password, but what if you’re the type of person who doesn’t trust these companies with your sensitive passwords? The solution to this would be to build your own password manage...

I’ve been developing Android applications for quite some time, but with all the various cross platform or hybrid web frameworks available, I’ve slowly been drawn into developing iOS applications as well. I’ve touched iOS here and there, whether it be with Ionic Framework or Telerik NativeScript, but...

Back in 2014 I started blogging on The Polyglot Developer which was previously known as Nic Raboy’s Code Blog. Since then I’ve published more than 250 blog articles, more than 100 video tutorials, and even three premium courses. The Polyglot Developer is evolving again, this time with premium member...

As a web and mobile application developer, you may come to a point where you need to worry about data and how to synchronize it between devices in platforms. PouchDB is one of a few good solutions that makes this task significantly easier. In this episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, guest spe...

So you’ve released this great application that you developed using NativeScript by Progress. The problem you might be facing now is that no one is rating or reviewing your mobile application. This may be related to the fact that it takes a bit of time to find an app in the app store and then leave a...

I’ve created a few tutorials around Ionic 2 while it was in its early alpha stage up until now. These tutorials explain how to use the bits and pieces that the framework or Angular offers, but I never demonstrated how to make a functional application. Seeing how to put the pieces together makes a hu...

Not too long ago I created a Couchbase NoSQL plugin with Mehfuz Hossain from Telerik for the NativeScript framework. Since developing the plugin it has received a lot of positive feedback and great developer adoption. Shortly after its release I published a blog post on how to use the Couchbase plug...

As many of you know, I had been using Apache Cordova based frameworks such as Ionic Framework for a long time. They are convenient and easy to use when it comes to rapidly developing cross platform applications. The problem with using Apache Cordova frameworks such as PhoneGap, Ionic Framework and O...

I recently found myself needing to switch micro SD cards in my Raspberry Pi 3, not necessarily because it needed a storage upgrade, but more because I had a different device that needed the exact memory card that the Raspberry Pi was using. The problem was that I had already done a lot of work on th...

I’ve been building NativeScript applications for a while now using vanilla JavaScript and TypeScript. Even though NativeScript has been working with Angular for a while now, I’ve been holding off until it was more stable. Not stable from an Angular perspective, but more stable from a NativeScript an...

As some of you may know, I travel a lot. I am always on a plane without internet and not much to do. Up until now I’ve been using my iPad for watching the few movies I purchased from Google Play because Google Play lets you watch offline. The problem with this is my iPad doesn’t have a lot of storag...

There are a lot of different ways to develop mobile applications. On my first two podcast episodes I discussed some of these app development solutions, but this time I’m doing a followup on one in particular. In this episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast, guest speaker TJ VanToll and I are going...

Not too long ago I wrote an article that explained how to include external JavaScript libraries in an Angular TypeScript project. To summarize that post, my goal was to show how to use any of the millions of JavaScript libraries that exist online within a TypeScript application. I received a lot of ...

Not too long ago I wrote about sending emails in an Ionic Framework app using the Mailgun API. To get you up to speed, I often get a lot of questions regarding how to send emails without opening the default mail application from within an Ionic Framework application. There are a few things that coul...

You may or may not know it, but I am very active on various social media outlets as well as this developer blog. Since I don’t give out my email address, social media is a great way to communicate with me if the comments section of this blog isn’t relevant. I want this to be an opportunity for all m...

I’ve been using Telerik NativeScript for a few months now and figured it would now be appropriate to share my experience and opinions of the framework. I’ve already compared NativeScript against Ionic Framework, but this article is going to be a little different. I have no plans to make comparisons ...

A few years ago a wrote a tutorial for sending emails in an Ionic Framework Android and iOS application. The tutorial works great, but it requires that a mail application be used to finalize the send. In other words, you can set default values for email fields, but you still need to select Gmail or ...

As I continue to port my Ionic Framework tutorials to Ionic 2, I figured it was time to discuss how to make use of the device camera within an application. There are often needs to obtain pictures within an application. Maybe you’re creating an application like Imgur, or maybe you just want to be ab...

Recently I wrote an article regarding how to use SQLite in a NativeScript Android and iOS mobile application. In my previous tutorial the assumption was that the database would be created fresh. However, what if you want to ship a pre-filled SQLite database with your application? Maybe you have 10,0...