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Showing posts from November, 2015

Visualising data in a native iOS app using a Html5 charting library

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This is something that I had been meaning to add to  Html5StarterAppWithSwift for a long time and I was finally able to achieve that a couple of weeks ago. Background One of my past jobs involved me working on a web app that did all sorts of data visualisation i.e. drawing charts using Javascript charting libraries. Consequently, I have also applied my data visualisation knowledge to one of my personal projects i.e.  PTAapp  which should give an indication of how data visualisation fits into my background. Now let's talk about some of the tech that I used to build charts. In my past job we used Google Charts  to draw charts, which at the time at least required an internet connection to work. As I talk about in my previous post  I used morris.js  to avoid the issue of internet connectivity. Now that I am involved in making iOS apps and given my background it seemed natural for me to apply my charting knowledge to making iOS apps...and that is ...

Ionic app with a Django backend: Part 2 - The Ionic app

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In this post, I will continue from where we left in Part 1 of this series.  In part 2, I will talk more about the front-end side of things. Ahh, I have a background in web development, hence I call this front-end, but that's not the most accurate thing to say in these modern times. So the right way to say this is, I will talk about the Ionic app in this Github repository(IonicAppWithRestBackend) in more details in this post. So what did we do in part 1? In part 1, we got to the point of running our backend on the web server that ships with Django . To refresh your memory, this is how we got the backend server running, Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/cptdanko/IonicAppWithRestBackend Navigate to the backend project directory cd IonicAppWithRestBackend/backend/python_django/restBackend/ Note: if you are using Windows, you may want to change "/" to "\" in the above command. Once there you can run the backend server with the follow...

Ionic app with a Django backend: Part 1 - The backend

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In this post, I will be talking about my latest Github repository(repo);  IonicAppWithRestBackend  and delve into details about what it is and the problem it aims to solve. Introduction The idea of this repo is to provide code samples for both the backend and front-end for an Ionic app that communicates with a REST ful backend. The aim is to bring many disparate aspects of building a solution like this(hybrid app that talks to a REST backend) and to be able to see most of them as one complete solution. Also, a solution such as this ensures you can test your Ionic app locally during development. Still not clear? read on to find out what I mean. Note: Once I started writing this post, I realised that it would be a really long blog post, so I decided to split it into individual parts in hopes that it's an easier read. In part 1, I will be talking about what the backend solution is and how to get it running. Motivation In 2014, I started working on a project with someon...