Building on existing infrastructure, not dreams

Most companies sooner or later start to experience the issue of inter-division chaos.

A company usually starts small – let’s say 2 founders, 2 more employees. They invent a great online product and grow steadily – expanding and dividing itself into smaller divisions and subdivisions, employing more people, putting new ones in charge of smaller and smaller pieces of the same company.

Then, most companies start to internally fluctuate on those small differences. Let’s say – 2 databases used to store same user data in different format, 4 applications where each one partially uses one of those 2 databases. Next comes exceptions for international users and a new database created for that sole purpose etc.

And soon – we have a hard to solve puzzle that’s steadily growing with the company expansion itself.

jQuery Mobile – refreshing page, preventing navigation

Sometimes the easy thing is actually quite hard to accomplish.
Sometimes, straightforward methods do not exist for simple tasks.
This is a story for 2 such tasks – refreshing a jQuery Mobile AJAXed page and preventing navigation to another such page.

Cordova 2.0 – broken vs. resolved

It’s been a while since Cordova (PhoneGap) version 2.0 has been released. And it’s just a few days since Android version 4 was also released to the public. The latter was a reason for me to upgrade my project to Cordova 2.0, as my 1.8.1 version no longer worked on Android 4 devices.

Let’s have a look at what’s been changed, fixed and broken since PhoneGap 1.8.1…

Yahoo! Pipes – merging multiple Feeds from a CSV file

Merging multiple RSS Feeds using Yahoo! Pipes is a super easy. Really! Nothing can be easier – everything is nice and visual. You simply drag and drop whatever modules you need onto the dashboard, sort, filter and truncate posts however you like… It’s like a dream come true.

So why did I spend 3 days trying to figure out something as simple as adding a new key into an array generated by a Loop module? The reason is simple – everything I tried, including a few outdated manuals on the web says – it’s a near-impossible task to accomplish!

Soft keyboards in Android / iPhone PhoneGap applications when we call focus()

Android and iPhone – despite being rival products – both have one very annoying security / performance thing in common. None of them will show you a soft keyboard when you programmatically focus on a text field or a text area. This still remains an unsolvable puzzle for web developers, however for native applications (like PhoneGap ones), here comes the rescue 🙂

jQuery and JavaScript code optimization

I have spent last 4 months developing a mobile application using PhoneGap (now Cordova), jQuery Mobile and lots of trial and error situations. I already had some knowledge of speed optimization in JavaScript and jQuery beforehand, but nothing could have taught me more about this better than a Samsung Galaxy Ace mobile phone with Android operating system. And this experience, I now would like to share with you all 🙂