Conferences

Quick list of conferences to keep an eye open for:

http://ng-conf.org/	Angular / Google	March	YouTube
http://ngeurope.org/	Angular / Google	October	YouTube
http://jsconf.com/	JavaScript	Monthly	YouTube
http://www.dotjs.eu/	JavaScript	November	YouTube
http://jqueryuk.com/2015/	jQuery	March	Vimeo
javascript-summit	JS / jQuery	November
http://conf.reactjs.com/	React / Facebook	January
http://www.buildwindows.com/	Microsoft	April	Channel9
https://anglebrackets.org/	Microsoft	May
http://reactconf.com/	Reactive Systems	April and Nov
https://www.google.com/events/io	Google	June	YouTube
https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/	Apple	June	Apple
https://fbf8.com/	Facebook	April	Facebook Live

Floating label

Material Design from Google has come up with floating labels for form entry.

The label starts off as the placeholder or watermark for the control, when the user enters the control the label floats above the text in an animation.

material-design from Steven Hollidge on Vimeo.

You can hear more about Material Design in this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qiyhkQVyxE

The floating label appear at 12 mins 05 seconds.

Material Design: Google’s new design language

 

 

For more info check out:  http://google.com/design

You can check out some examples on the Polymer website, here’s one to get you started:  http://www.polymer-project.org/apps/topeka/

Polymer: The future of HTML5

It seems in many ways HTML is moving closer and closer to XAML. 

Through the use of Web Components, Google have come up with a project that allows developers to write HTML web pages that make use of data binding through Node.bind(), custom controls using HTML Imports and modularity with the Shadow DOM - very very cool stuff! 

http://www.polymer-project.org/

https://github.com/polymer/polymer

Webcast introducing Polymer (from May 2013): 

Polymer webcast from Google

Architectual diagram:

platform.js is a poyfill to bring all modern browsers up to a base line allowing devs to be able to use polymer.js.

It is believed that over time the size of platform.js will reduce as browsers catch up.  That said it’s still only 32KB when gzipped.

The team have created a set of controls/elements for app development, built on top of the framework such as:

Everything is an element.  The composability of business applications will lead to much faster development time, enabling programmers to focus on solving business problems and not battling away with boilerplate code.

The future looks incredibly fun for developers.

Publishing an Android app to Google Play

Using PhoneGap to build my Android package from GitHub here are the steps to publish to Google Play.

1. Store your app source code in github (mine is open source so github and phonegap build services are free).

2. Install the latest jdk on your computer:  http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html

3. Create a key using the keytool, by opening a command prompt:
cd "C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_15\bin"
keytool -genkey -v -keystore itineraryhuntermobile-key.keystore -alias itineraryhuntermobile -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

(replacing itineraryhuntermobile with the name of your application)

3. Add your key to phonegap build cloud services:

5. Use http://build.phonegap.com to rebuild and download the APK file

Once you’ve assigned your key to the Android section, entered your password which phonegap store for one hour, you can rebuild a release version of your apk file.

6. Register with Google Play, pay the $25 developer fee and fill out the application details including application screenshots:

https://play.google.com/apps/publish

7. Wake up the next morning and your app will be in the Google Play store:

 

You can find it in Google Play here:  https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=itinerary.hunter.mobile

Google Chart Tools

They are beautiful, easy to use and free - get involved!

Getting started:  http://code.google.com/apis/chart

Chart Gallery:  http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery.html

Playground:  http://code.google.com/apis/ajax/playground

Google PageSpeed & SpeedTracer

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimise their web pages by applying web performance best practices and is integrated into the Developer Tools within Google Chrome.

As an example, here is one of my Azure hosted websites running SQL Azure backend viewed in Chrome with Page Speed turned on:

Speed Tracer

Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux).

Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more.

Here’s an example of Speed Tracer:

Conclusions

Everyone likes quick wins, by using these tools against your business apps bottlenecks are made visible within your team.  This is a very powerful and necessary part of development, be sure to include performance tests as part of your normal development and release cycle to measure code impact over time.