Thursday, October 21, 2010

New Job at Blake Education

Hello everyone,

as some of you may know I have changed job a few weeks back. The process has been rather long since I had to change sponsorship for my Working Visa. The new visa was approved one day before the previous one was to expire. So I started exactly four weeks after I left Front Foot, on August 31st.

I really enjoyed working for Front Foot for the past two years, I learnt a lot from everyone there. I had the chance to work on really interesting projects with them:

I would like to thank the Front Foot team for the two years working with them. I loved working on mobile technologies, and I really learnt a lot.

So what am I up to now?

I work at Blake Education as a Software Engineer, still working with Ruby on Rails, and other technologies around Ruby. Blake is a publishing company that specialises in education. We run the very successful website readingeggs.com, and we have more projects of course!

Working here is very different from my previous work, the main reason is that most projects I did in the past were just developed for a customer, then shipped. On the contrary readingeggs needs to evolve a lot according to the new needs of the customers.

Being able to re-factor bits of the application, constantly making sure performance is not altered by the addition of features and by the increasing number of customers, and also working on new projects that should re-use as much code as possible...

I really love software engineering, and software architecture, and I really want to be good at it. Of course I already have a decent level, but I feel like I'm going to learn so much at Blake. And it's already started!

I have two more blog posts I want to write about what's been going on lately, so stay tuned!

Friday, March 19, 2010

sudo gem install nokogiri-happymapper

This is it, you can install my fork of happymapper using the above command! It's now available on Rubygems.org.

It's a replacement to happymapper, so you want to use it using:
require 'happymapper'

Thank you to Matt/GoodGets for using the fork and pushing me to publish it as a gem! Enjoy! :)

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Change keyboard appearance of UISearchBar

It's not built-in the API, so this piece of code will do. It makes your search bar display in black, and with transparency... enjoy! :)

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Mapping UIWebview links to controller/delegate actions

In an iPhone application I'm developing, there are some views that are quite complex to code... and I find them much easier to code in HTML/CSS. Since the Webkit engine available on the iPhone is quite powerful, I find it a much easier way to create complex views...

Now if you want this view to interact with your application it is a bit tricky... but not THAT much. Here is a piece of code I have in my controller... well in my UIWebViewDelegate.

Basically we catch the click on a link, and if the link is of the form file://...#action we then look for the selector action in the controller and trigger it if it exists.

It's THAT simple. :)