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:

• Planet Three Portal for iPhones and Android phones. It won the AIMIA award for the best mobile product of 2010.
• Lotto Results iPhone application (supported by a Rails backend). It was my first iPhone application, and also Front Foot's first.
• Macquarie Dictionary for mobile phones, with interesting XML processing techniques which led me to develop further the nokogiri-happymapper gem.
• Atrium: scalable, multi-channel notification platform. One of the most technically advanced project I've worked on.

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!

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! :)

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! :)

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. :)

New portfolio iPhone App released!

I've finally released my first iPhone app under the name Melion Design. This is a photographs portfolio for Andrew Hill. What I want with this app is to demonstrate the engine I've developed to manage your portfolio in your own iPhone application.

The application is free, it's called "The Frog Photos" and you can find it in the app store. Andrew can manage the photos available in the application through a web interface I've developed. It makes it easy to upload, and manage photos. The following features are available:

• Amazon S3 photos storage:  fast download of photos.
• Offline mode: user can still browse your photos when offline.
• Customize the description of each photo.
• Customize the perma-link of each photo.
• Provide a link to your own website.

Don't hesitate to contact me if you're interested in having your own portfolio available in the appstore for everyone to see! :)

Lotto Results for iPhone, version 1.2 released!

Yes, there it is! Version 1.2 has the following additional features:

• Systems - record up to 18 of your favorite winning numbers assisting System Players
• How to win - check what you require to win a division prize for each and every game
• Odds - check the odds of winning each division for each and every game

I'm now working on even more exciting content, but I can't tell you yet what it is!

I just enjoy a lot working on this project. :)

You can find Lotto Result in the app store.

Presentation of my Happy Mapper fork at the last RORO Sydney

Last November I did a presentation of the Happy Mapper fork I developed. The video is available on Vimeo. Unlike the description says, it is a fork using Nokogiri to replace XML Object, but watching it will clear everything out! It's a lightning talk, so I'm sure I won't waste too much of your time :)

You can also find all the videos from RORO on Vimeo. Enjoy!