How to create an awesome hybrid mobile app - Part IV

 Here comes the final part of the hybrid mobile series in the hot summer. At the time of writing this from Bangalore (was called as Green City not any more I think) it's quite hot like 40° C. Time to take care of our nature! Anyway, we've come through a long way... let's finish this final part. Our hybrid mobile app "Safe" has grown into a pretty good shape now. So far, the work we've done allows an user to select a photo and persist in a secured way by AES 256 encryption. We also completed the work to edit an already persisted photo or wipe it out permanently.

Fig 1. Safe Login Pages

Encrypting and persisting the photos is not enough to keep them safe! We've to protect the access to the app through a login mechanism and that's what we are gonna build in this part. We'll also see how to build the settings and info pages and last but not least I'll introduce you to Jasmine and show how she'll help us to write some good unit tests. So folks, ARE YOU READY?

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How to create an awesome hybrid mobile app using Cordova

It's been little over an year I've published anything in my blog. Every time I inspect my Google analytics page I sense the traffic is getting down. I've been patience for all this time working now and then with sheer confidence that I could complete this taunting work. People who have been following my recent blog posts know that it's no longer a typical blog where enthusiastic developers write about creating todo app in some got-popular-lately technology or comparing two frameworks and describing their pros and cons in a table. I encourage learning by building something for real. I'm driving my website in that path. It's a place where I can share the experience about something that I built lately. It's easy said but it takes a lot of time and effort to build something useful and share with others. In all those months passed I was working in this hybrid mobile app so called "Safe" that helps to store photos safely. The app runs successfully in both iOS and Android platforms. I would like to share the experience I had in creating this app through this series of blog posts. I strongly believe that it'll help a lot of people to build their own *dream* app.

The idea of building a mobile app came to me three years back when I was facing difficulty in keeping sensitive information like passwords, credit-cards and photos. I own an iPhone 3GS device and was thinking that developing an app would help me to keep my secrets safely and easily accessible from anywhere. There are already a lot of apps out there that solves this problem but I want to build one myself so I can learn something new. I ended up finally developing an app that could store only the photos but not the textual information. The good news is the app runs fine in both iOS and Android devices.

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How to create an awesome blog template using Bootstrap 3 - Part II

Hi folks, hope it didn't take too long to publish this second part. I was quite busy with a mobile app that came on the way (still working on it) that delayed things little. Thanks for everyone who showed interest in this tutorial. Do you know, your comments are the food for my "How to" tutorials.

In the previous part, we saw how to create a decent blog template quickly using Bootstrap 3. If you haven't read it, I would encourage reading, though, it's not a necessity for reading this part. To follow this article, all you need is some basic knowledge in HTML and CSS. It would be great if you've some little knowledge on the CSS pre-processor language LESS.

If you've read part 1, I believe you should've already gained the knowledge to craft templates for any website using Bootstrap. But the fact is, all the created Bootstrap templates bear the same look and feel provided by the framework as default. The default theme provided by Bootstrap is good for wikis but not for a website that sell top-notch electronic products. Look does matters! It's very important that you should customize the theme to reflect your brand.

After reading this part, I'm sure you'll gain enough knowledge to decorate any Bootstrap template and walk her pride on web. You should also get a glimpse of the CSS pre-processor LESS and the immense benefits it brings to the stage. I would be happier if you learn the trade to create and sell dozens of website templates in a short time with less work and little creativity.

Alright, let's beautify our template!

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Twitterr Bootstrap 3 Blog Template

"Are you one who doesn't have great design skills but looking for stuff to create nice templates in a short time? Are you one who recently heard about this nice framework called Twitter Bootstrap and don't have much knowledge or experience to customize and create some website that represents your brand? Well folks, this tutorial is for you."

Actually, this is not just a tutorial but workshop. At the end of this workshop, you'll gain two things: First, you'll have a beautiful blog template that you could use right away for your website. Second, which is the most important thing, you'll know how to create stunning templates by yourself which jaw drops others. Here after, you won't be googling to search for any free template, because you know how to create one with the help of Bootstrap. At the time of writing this, the latest version of Twitter Bootstrap is 3, we'll be using the same in this workshop.

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."

Due to time constraint and content size, I've divided this workshop into two parts. In the first part, which is going to be very simple, we are going to create a complete blog template using Bootstrap. At the end of this first part, you'll have a nice blog template with home, single-post, contact and about-me pages.

In the second part, which is going to be more interesting one, where we'll see, how we can download the Bootstrap source code and customize it to create our own theme that matches our imagination.

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How to create a simple blog in ASP.NET MVC - Part I

Introduction

There are different ways we can learn a technology, by reading books, by attending conferences, by doing samples and more. I think one of the best way is by creating something useful out of it. One of the useful thing that could be easily created is a blog. In this multi-part series, we are going to learn ASP.NET MVCstep by step by creating a blog from scratch.

To keep things simple we are not going to build the commenting system instead we are going to useDisqus. I encourage you to build the commenting system by yourself and that would be a good exercise for you.

We are going to use ASP.NET MVC 4 to develop the application. I'm not good at Entity Framework, I usedFluent NHibernate/NHibernate combo to build the data-access system. You could use Entity Framework if you like. Finally, we are going to use Ninject for dependency injection because of it's simplicity.

In the first part of the series we are going to build the basic infrastructure of the blog. We are going to create the necessary model classes, data access components, controllers and views. At the end of this part we have a working blog where we could see the latest posts, read a complete post, browse posts based upon a category or tag and even search for interested posts.

In the second part, we are going to build an admin console to manage our posts, tags and categories.

In the final part we are going to integrate Disqus commenting system with our blog. We also see about integrating AddThis, FeedBurner for sharing and subscriptions. Last but not least, we also take necessary measurements for SEO.

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