So recently I was presented with a challenge. Make a Minesweeper game using native Android with no additional frameworks such as Unity3D or similar. Minesweeper via Wikipedia: A single-player puzzle video game. The objective of the game is to clear a rectangular board containing hidden “mines” witho...

By now, if you’ve been keeping up with my tutorials, you can probably put two-and-two together and determine that I’m really trying to get into the NoSQL world. Up until now I’ve brushed upon Google Firebase, Facebook Parse, and Apache CouchDB, most of which I’ve done some kind of todo list type app...

Circling back to data structures and algorithms, we’re now going to take a look at the efficient sorting algorithm known as Quicksort. Quicksort via Wikipedia: Sometimes called partition-exchange sort, is an efficient sorting algorithm, serving as a systematic method for placing the elements of an a...

I’ve been developing mobile Android applications since 2011 and up until now I’ve been using nothing but Apache Ant for building them. Now you’re probably like, it is 2015, why aren’t you using Gradle like the rest of the world? Well, I like Apache Ant, and I had no real reason to switch. However, I...

I started working on an app and decided it was time to step up my design game. Usually my apps suffer from looking plain or dated even though they have some insanely awesome functionality (ex: OTP Safe). However, after looking at many other apps, I came to the conclusion that an app can look more at...

It is time I talk about another cloud data storage option for Ionic Framework. Previously I had shown how to use the Dropbox Datastore API, Firebase, and PouchDB to store information remotely. This time I am going to discuss how to store data using Parse, a Facebook company, and retrieve data from t...

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, I’ve made a topic regarding Binary Search Trees, but another very important topic in computer science and software engineering is in regards to Graphs. Graphs via Wikipedia: A graph data structure consists of a finite (and possibly mutable) set of nodes or ver...

Continuing on the topic of interview questions for programming and software engineering type positions, I thought I’d brush up on a popular one. Although I have never personally been asked about this, other people have told me that they’ve been asked to determine if a number is prime or to print out...

If you’ve been keeping up, I previously wrote two tutorials on the topic of evaluating mathematical expressions. The first tutorial was on the topic of converting an Infix expression into a Postfix expression also known as Reverse Polish Notation using the Shunting Yard algorithm. The second tutoria...

Previously we’ve explored how to parse XML data using Node.js as well as PHP. Continuing on the trend of parsing data using various programming languages, this time we’re going to take a look at parsing XML data using the dom4j library with Java. Now dom4j, is not the only way to parse XML data in J...

Previously, I demonstrated how to convert an Infix Notation expression into Reverse Polish Notation using JavaScript, but I never explained how to evaluate the expression. Reverse Polish Notation via Wikipedia: A mathematical notation in which every operator follows all of its operands, in contrast ...

Imgur is a great image service for sharing and viewing images across the internet. Since there is a lot of buzz around AngularJS lately and there isn’t already an AngularJS extension for the Imgur REST API, I decided to take it upon myself and start creating one. The post Make An AngularJS Library F...

I have a few popular Oauth related posts on my blog. I have one pertaining to Oauth 1.0a, and I have one on the topic of Oauth 2.0 for use in mobile application development. However, I get a lot of requests to show how to accomplish an Oauth 2.0 connection in a web browser using only JavaScript and ...

Have you ever built an app that has heavy content that might need to one day be printed to a PDF or to paper? Maybe you’re building the next great email or news app, both of which have an expectation that you should be able to print what you’re reading. Both iOS and Android have printing functionali...

To continue on my trend of Firebase and Ionic Framework based tutorials, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool to sign into your Firebase application using a social media account such as Facebook? Out of the box Firebase and AngularFire offer some nifty methods for authentication, however they don’t work q...

Anyone who knows how to program can probably solve a mathematical equation such as 5 + 3 * 6 - ( 5 / 3 ) + 7, but how might you get a computer to understand the appropriate order of operations? The equation I listed is in a format known as Infix Notation. Infix Notation via Wikipedia: Infix notation...

I recently started making an application with Ionic Framework that made heavy use of images both remotely and locally. During this time, my goal was to present the images in a grid that looks good for all device sizes and orientations. One might think this would be an easy task because Ionic offers ...

Have you ever needed to come up with a random string of characters say for a password? Maybe you’re looking for a random string of characters for an oauth 1.0 nonce. Maybe you’re in a job interview and you’re asked to generate a random alpha numeric string. Whatever the case, we’re going to look at ...

Recently I was tasked with reading a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) file using Java. In my project, the JSON file contained properties information to be used inside the application. There are many libraries available for reading or parsing JSON data in Java, but in particular we are going to be u...

The Node Package Manager (NPM), is becoming a major go-to resource for all development software and libraries. It is easy to use and covers a lot of ground. If you’re anything like me you’re going to have more than twenty global packages installed on your machine through NPM, but how do you go about...

Since writing my two tutorials regarding using SQLite in Ionic Framework and shipping an app with a pre-populated database, I’ve received many requests for a tutorial for making a full blown app. I listen to my readers, so I figured what better way to show such an example, than to create a todo-list...

It was brought to my attention that the File plugin for Apache Cordova has no documented methods for finding the available disk space on a device. This does not mean that you cannot figure out how much space is available on your users device because you can make use of Apache Cordova’s nifty cordova...

Back on the topic of possible programming interview questions, you may at some time in your career be asked to reverse words in a string. This is a much simpler problem and may be more likely to appear on a technical phone screening. In it’s simplest form, you would assume all space separated string...

When developing web applications a common way to store data is to use local storage. This NoSQL approach is great, but what if you’re coming from an RDBMS? With HTML5, you have access to the WebSQL API which allows us to use SQL queries for handling client side storage. This guide will show you how ...

A while back one of my subscribers asked me how to integrate the native device calendar into their Ionic Framework mobile application. I didn’t know at first, but after some research I found a great Apache Cordova plugin by Eddy Verbruggen called PhoneGap Calendar Plugin. Don’t let the plugin name f...

I started developing mobile Android applications in late 2011. It wasn’t until 2012 that I released my first application to the Android Marketplace, now known as the Google Play Store. Up until early 2014, I only made native Android applications using the official Android SDK. As of now, I have only...

If you’re pursuing a degree in computer science, you’ll probably experience Binary Trees in one of your first semesters of school. After seeing them in one of those first semesters, you probably won’t see them again until you’re interviewing for a job. While interviewing for software engineering or ...

Recently I’ve been contributing a lot of code to open source projects on GitHub. In particular, I’ve been contributing to the AngularJS extension set, ngCordova, for Ionic Framework. When I first started contributing it was a scary process, mostly because I had only ever used Git for solo projects. ...

Not too long ago I contributed to the ng-cordova project on GitHub. I added Oauth functionality to many popular API providers such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter. I made a guide on how to use this added Oauth functionality on the official Ionic Framework blog, but since then I’ve received a good d...

To continue on the topic of popular interview questions for software engineering positions, I figured it might be appropriate to go over solving a maze that was created using a two-dimensional array. A maze created from a 2D array can be solved using recursion similar to like we did for the previous...