Out of the box mobile platforms, and even React Native for that matter, don’t ship with a very large selection of icons. If we’ve chosen to use React Native as our development framework then we’re lucky that there is a great component that can be added to give us thousands of icons for use in our ap...

When creating a mobile application, chances are at some point in time you’re going to want to have more than one application view or screen. In many programming languages this is referred to as application routes. With React Native, the navigator is used to switch between screens. The post Using Nav...

In many mobile applications it is essential to be able to use the device camera. Maybe you’re creating the next Instagram or other photo sharing application. Previously I wrote how to use the device camera in Ionic Framework, but how might we do the same with React Native? Lucky for us, with React N...

I recently picked up some Estimote iBeacons to play around with and figured I’d try to get them working in an Ionic Framework Android and iOS application. If you’re unfamiliar with iBeacons, they are small bluetooth proximity devices. There are many different manufacturers, but Estimote appears to h...

In case I’m in your part of the world, I’ll be giving a talk at the Phoenix Mobile Festival in Phoenix, Arizona on September 19th, 2015. I encourage you to attend or at least swing by and say hello. The title of my talk is Building Offline First Mobile Applications and the abstract is as follows: Wh...

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, you’ll know I did an article for doing HTTP requests with Ionic Framework. Since I’ve been playing around with React Native a lot lately, I figured it is probably a good idea to figure out how to do RESTful HTTP requests sooner than later since everything has ...

So you’ve been fiddling with React Native for a bit now like I have. If you’re like me then you’re at a point where you’re ready to look at saving and loading data in your mobile application. Now I’ve previously demonstrated saving data with Ionic Framework, so the goals I’m about to share are going...

The internet can be an awful place sometimes. Let’s say you created a website or blog with WordPress that recently became popular and are now getting a ton of traffic. If it hasn’t happened already, you’re going to get a lot of bad traffic mixed in. By bad traffic I mean bots and crawlers that proba...

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog and tutorials, you’ll know that I’ve done quite a few posts on Ionic Framework. I’ve been hearing a lot about React Native lately so I figured it is time to give it a shot. There are 6,500 languages and roughly seven billion people in the world. Chances are you...

When developing mobile Android and iOS applications, the user experience is often more important than what your application actually offers. A quick and very easy enhancement you can implement in your application is in the realm of form validation. Best practice says that you should always validate ...

I’m always trying to add more flair to the mobile applications that I develop whether it be through slick user interfaces or graphics. For a while now I’ve wanted to mess around with charts in my mobile applications, but it kept getting pushed to my development back-burner. I decided to push myself ...

I recently picked up an iPad Air 2 to replace my ancient Android tablet. My first serious iOS device since my iPod Touch. A feature that I’m really growing to love on my iPad Air 2 is the touch id functionality for signing into the device and various applications. How do we incorporate this touch id...

I’ve been blogging and making programming tutorials for about a year now and have gathered quite a following. You can see the statistics of my first year blogging in a post I recently published. With this following came a lot of topic suggestions and requests. Some of these came through Twitter, som...

One of my Twitter followers recently asked me how to properly use a pin dialog in their Ionic Framework mobile application. Although I’ve already created a similar article regarding creating a pin unlock screen in an Ionic Framework application, I figured it might be a good idea to show how to do th...

Previously I did a post on Simon Reimler’s blog regarding local notifications with Ionic Framework. However, there is a different kind of notification you can use in your application. In iOS and many different flavors of Android (not all), you have the opportunity to use badge indicators on your lau...

So you’re making a mobile app using Ionic Framework and you care about the experience your users receive? Maybe you want to control the functionality of certain features based on how much battery the users device has left. An example of this is, maybe you have your application pulling remote data wh...

One year ago from today, I started this code blog. I set off to help people with niche topics that I myself banged my head when trying to solve. Through the months, I’ve gotten more traffic, followers, comments, and even job offers. Here are the stats to reflect my journey as a blogger. The post My ...

AngularJS is one of the hottest things around right now. Maybe you’re finding yourself getting pretty deep in its greatness and you’re ready to customize how exceptions are handled by default. Lucky for us there is a way to override the default functionality and do whatever we want when an error hap...

RegEx is a powerful beast. Previously I wrote how to test password strength using JavaScript and regular expressions. This time we’ll take a look at how to check credit card providers based on the credit card number entered. No, this won’t test if a credit card number is legitimate, but it will test...

Apache Cordova 5.0 brought many changes, all of which are for the best, but many of which are a major inconvenience in terms of development or deployment. For example, previously I wrote about whitelisting external resources in Ionic Framework because by default everything is now blacklisted. This t...

Working with images in Android is great, but what happens when you need to store them somewhere other than the file system? Let’s say for example you want to store them in a SQLite or NoSQL type database. How would you store such a piece of data? One common way to store image data would be to first ...

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...

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 Tin...

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 th...

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 assis...

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 gra...

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 supporte...

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...

I’ve been a Java programmer for a while now, however, recently someone asked me a question regarding one of Java modifier keywords and I had no clue what it was. This made it obvious to me that I needed to brush up on some Java that goes beyond actual coding and algorithms. After a few Google search...

Previously you saw an implementation of Quicksort, one of the better sorting algorithms. This time we’re going to look at a much inferior sorting algorithm which generally makes its appearance in introduction to computer science type courses. I’m talking about the Bubble Sort algorithm. Bubble Sort ...