Captain Danko’s JavaScript Lab — Code Smarter with Tutorials, Frameworks & Dev Insights

When I was working on building some native iOS UI , UITableView  was one of the things that I was working with and at some point during my work, I wanted to refresh the table and I was expecting a built-in method like UITableView.refresh. Naturally, one of the first things that I tried was to type in the variable name in Xcode , key in "." and type "r" expecting the Autocomplete to show the refresh method. However to my surprise there was no refresh method? and I thought what? A basic feature like this should surely be there. Turns out that there is a way to refresh the table, it's just not immediately obvious to someone who's new to iOS. So in this post, I will talk about my solution to refresh table. Problem Refresh UITableView: the tableView in question only has only one section and it should be refreshed with an animation by clicking a button or otherwise.  Provide a general, reusable method to refresh UITableView. Solution The solution use...

At some point the thought of adding a Widget to my iOS app came to mind which was followed by starting work on adding a widget for my app, My Day Todos . Obviously the first step was to learn how to add a Widget to an iOS app and in that learning process I discovered many things about widgets in iOS first of which was a widget in iOS is a an app extension i.e a  Today Extension . While I am still haven't finished working on the widget for my iOS app, I thought I would take some time out and share what I have learned. In this post, I will share a few important tips and provide an example of how to add a Widget to an iOS app and have the widget UI powered by Html5 via  Ionic framework . I added some code to my Github repo, Html5StarterAppWithSwift in order to show how this can be achieved. There are already too many tutorials out on the Web on how to add a Today extension to an iOS app so I won't be including that here. Instead I will focus on sharing some of the useful tip...

In this post, I aim to show how to build a Java RESTful web service or a Java Restful backend that can be used(consumed) by a mobile app or a web site. Unlike my pervious posts where I explain a technical solution, I am going to structure this one differently. In this one I am going to try and tell a developer's story through it. Background Our story picks up from the time Cpt.Danko (Danko) returns to work after being away for 3 months on medical leave. At this point all we know about Danko is that before going on leave he was just a developer, all he did was write code the way he was asked to and he had very little responsibility. On returning to work, he didn't realise that he was no longer just a developer but he was actually "promoted" to a full-stack developer and had heaps(lots) more responsibility with the same old (low) wage. This "promotion" caught him by surprise as after being away for 3 months he expected to have the same level of responsi...

Part of the reason I have not written a new blog post in over a month is because I was on a holiday and that too in a place where I did not have the best internet connection. The other part is that I am trying to make my next technical blog post more captivating than my previous posts. What prompted the initiative to write more engaging posts? During my holiday I met someone new and during the introductory phase I asked her "so what do you do?" to which she replied, "I am a content writer" and I thought, WOAH! Prior to meeting her, I had never met anyone who did that, I mean the concept of "content writer" was new to me. So as usual when presented with a new concept, I try to analyse it and think more about it. I though hmm, if there is a job dedicated to it, then content creation is something that shouldn't be ignored.  I was thinking about all this in the context of my blog and the posts I write i.e. the content I create on my blog. The conc...

2015 was a good year for me and while there was no major conquest overall, I managed to take a number of "small steps" towards building a better tomorrow. In this blog post, I will elaborate on the aforementioned "small steps", which include releasing my first iOS app , the steps I took to ensure my open-source repo reaches a wider audience and a workplace initiative that I am very proud of. Let's start with the release of my app, p.s. there were several things that went wrong in 2015 for me, one such example would be that extremely unprofessional colleague who ended a project that we had spent a year working on via email. However I will keep this post short and only focus on a few things that went right. I released my first iOS app: My Day Todos This was an awesome, as I mentioned in this post , closer to releasing the app, I was getting quite impatient and I was at the point of just wanting to release something and doing so felt very rewarding. I hav...

I started making iOS apps soon after Xcode 6 beta was released, one of the main attractions for me was the new programming language, Swift . I really enjoyed coding in Swift but making an iOS app is more than just about coding in Swift, there's a whole bunch of additional stuff that you need to know. In this blog post, I am just going to share a list of online resources that helped me learn how to make iOS apps and eventually get to creating my first iOS app My Day Todo s. Ok, I will try to get through the resources that I found in Chronological order, In the beginning... Swift was new and Xcode 6 was still in beta, so there weren't a whole lot of useful resources out there, some of my SO questions were down-voted and closed. In fact for one of my questions someone on SO who possibly down-voted my question commented that, "this is not a real question, it is so simple to do this in Objective-C"... I am pretty sure my question was very clear about me working with ...

To start with part 3, I think it's best we have a recap of all the events leading up to this. So here we go, Previously in parts 1 and 2... I had a great life, a loving girlfriend, a job I liked etc etc and little did I know that it was the calm before the storm. One evening I had a really bad accident while I was out on my usual run, what happened was while crossing the road, I was hit by a car and left for dead on the street.  I suffered a few injuries as a result of the accident, one of which was a Traumatic Brain injury and I lost a lot of what was very dear to me. I lost my girlfriend(breakup), my ability to walk(at the time), my memory wasn't as good anymore and a number of other things. A few months after my accident, I started building my first mobile(iOS) app which would serve as a tool to help me in my daily life. That was a quick recap of the events, if you want to know more, you can have a read of part 1  and part 2 . Hmm, where do we begin? The app that I ...