Month: March 2016

Picking a new theme for site

I’m in the process of picking a new theme for this site. Instead of having a free theme I’m looking for a paid one that matches the type of business CGCSoftware aims to be over the next 12 months.

So I’m looking for one that reflects that CGCSoftware is a mobile web development consultancy who can help other software companies with their mobile development needs, a hard thing for the theme to sum up.

What my theme does need to do is, be responsive (can’t be all about the mobile web and not work on phones), not be to design agency that’s not what I am and look clean and professional.

When entering the world of WordPress themes its amazing how many there are, the theme industry is massive. It may take a while to find the one I want.

30 days of blogging 

I’ve recently signed up for Marc Jenkins’ 30 Days Writing Challenge to improve my blogging output. I do like reading blog posts from developers who writing about their day to day working lives as well as technicial posts.

I’ve not really written many technicial posts, just because I don’t want to write something that is incorrect, but I do remember what Remy Sharp once said that he wrote a blog to remind him of something. So he could look back and be reminded of something he learnt. Great idea.

So Marc’s course starts soon I’m looking forward to the course and see what is involved.

My thoughts on the mobile web 

Currently the mobile web is growing and growing, every week there is a new ways of using web technologies to create mobile apps.My weapon of choice is Ionic, mainly because the Ionic team have created a framework that allows a web developer to create apps that work well and look fantastic. 
It really shows the power of the web, it’s everywhere, you can build anything with just HTML, CSS and JavaScript. For a company who want their product to reach as many platforms as possible, the mobile web is the ideal solution. A single web developer can built apps for mobile, tablet, desktop and now TV.

The web has always been an exciting place to be, but now with the options for the mobile web, being a web developer is a great place to be.

Unfortunately with more and more technologies coming out, different approaches to using web technology to develop cross platform apps. This ‘my technology is better than yours’ arguments start. Usually these are fuelled by the companies who’s technology it is. I mean they have to sell their product. But what is better, native, hybrid, or these ones that use web technologies to compile down to native. They are all great, but for me as a web developer I want to be able to create great apps for as many platforms as I can. For the people who use these apps, they don’t care what technology the apps was developed in. All they care is it works as they wanted to, it’s fast and looks good. For me as a web developer I want to use something that I can use my current skills for and Ionic is my platform of choice for these reasons.

So web developers enjoy this current growth we have in the mobile web it’s a very exciting time.

SyncHerts mobile development event

I went to my first SyncHerts event in a while. It was about mobile development, a favourite subject of mine, so I was keen to see what others in the local area are doing.

This was the second part of a 2 part event. In the first event people broke into teams and wrote user stories and made UI designs. In this the second part they needed developers to actually make these apps.

so again we split into teams and as the developer in the team I started making the app with Ionic. We only had 20-30 minutes before we had to demo to the other groups, which isn’t long enough to create a fully featured apps. But with the power of Ionic I was able to build an app that loads in a JSON file with a list of pizzas (it’s a pizza ordering app) then when you select on a pizza you get to see the full details of the pizza. Finally we added a Order button, so people could chose which one they wanted ordered for the next meet up.

We weren’t the only team using Ionic, another team had created a Ionic app that used a carousel to go from one pizza type to the next. Another team used Xamarin, and another team used Bootstrap with ASP MVC.

It was interesting to see how quickly people could get something together in such a small space of time. It was also interesting to see what technologies people would use.

I was impressed with how quickly you could build something that looked OK and worked using mobile web technologies like Ionic.  I was also able to load the app on my phone to demo using Ionic View.

I might add to the app and get it on GitHub