Colin Eberhardt

Tech

Generative AI is moving at an incredible pace, bringing with it a whole new raft of terminology. With articles packed full of terms like prompt injection, embeddings and funky acronyms like LoRA, it can be a little hard to keep pace. For a while now I've been keeping a notebook where I record brief definitions of these new terms as I encounter them. I find it such a useful reference, I thought I'd share it in this blog post.

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Jun · 6 min read

Re-implementing LangChain in 100 lines of code

LangChain has become a tremendously popular toolkit for building a wide range of LLM-powered applications, including chat, Q&A and document search. In this blogpost I re-implement some of the novel LangChain functionality as a learning exercise, looking at the low-level prompts it uses to create these higher level capabilities.

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th May · 13 min read

Beyond the Hype: Is generative AI coming for programming jobs?

In this episode, I'm joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Chris Price and James Heward for a lively debate on whether the latest advances in generative AI are going to threaten our jobs – are we going to be made redundant by our own creation?

Colin Eberhardt · 2^nd May · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype: Y2Q – The end of encryption as we know it?

In this episode – the second of a two-parter – we talk to Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt, about the growing threat that Quantum Computers will ultimately render our current cryptographic techniques useless – an event dubbed ‘Y2Q’, in a nod to the Y2K issue we faced over twenty years ago.

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Apr · 1 min read

AI is morphing from tool to platform (and the next technology epoch begins)

The buzz and excitement around generative AI is continuing to grow as their capabilities rapidly expand. However, their ability to generate content is just the starting point. From my perspective, the emergent reasoning capability, coupled with their intelligent use of tools, is what will make this technology truly transformational, and will mark the start of a new technology epoch.

Colin Eberhardt · 31^st Mar · 5 min read

Beyond the Hype: Quantum Computing – hype and not hype simultaneously?

In this episode, we talk about Quantum Computing with Denis Mandich, CTO of Qrypt. As well as discussing quantum physics, we cover the practical aspects of cloud-based Quantum Computers and what can be achieved today through circuit design. Finally, we look to the future to discuss the impact this breakthrough technology is likely to have.

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Mar · 1 min read

· Video

Could the Public Sector Solve the OSS Sustainability Challenges?

The rapid rise in the consumption or usage of open source hasn’t been met with an equal rise in contribution – to put it simply, there are far more takers than givers, and the challenges created by this imbalance are starting to emerge.

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Feb

Beyond the Hype: ChatGPT and why it has set the internet alight

In this episode, I'm joined by my colleague, Oliver Cronk, and Chris Booth from NatWest for a lively discussion about the much-hyped ChatGPT – covering its origins and recent advances, the new discipline of prompt engineering, and some practical applications and limitations of this technology.

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Feb · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype: Blockchain is dead, long live blockchain

In this episode, I’m joined by colleagues Oliver Cronk, Peter Chamberlin and Chris Price for a lively discussion about blockchain, including the mechanics of bitcoin, the proof of work consensus, and technologies which are blockchain-like, but prefer not to use that term. Finally, we ask ourselves the question, is blockchain just hype?

Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk, Chris Price · 15^th Dec 2022 · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype: Is the Metaverse built on foundations of hype?

In this episode Colin, Ollie, Johanna and Lily hold a lively conversation that dives into Web3 and the Metaverse. We ask the question “what is Web3.0”, and explore what it means to be a decentralised technology. We discuss the Metaverse, Roblox and other virtual environments, and very briefly touch on NFTs. But for the most part, we talk about exploration and innovation.

Colin Eberhardt, Oliver Cronk · 7^th Nov 2022 · 1 min read

· Video

The State of Open Source in Finance - Keynote Panel

FINOS, in partnership with Linux Foundation Research, GitHub, Red Hat, Scott Logic, and with the support of many other FINOS members, conducted the second annual study to assess the opportunities and potential challenges of consuming, contributing to, and governing open source in financial services. This panel dives into the research's key findings, as well as provides insight into how things have progressed year-over-year.

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Nov 2022

Can Web3 beat public cloud?

There are a growing number of voices heralding Web3 as the future of the internet, and this technology (concept?) is receiving considerable coverage at conferences, in the technology press, and internet forums. I decided it was time to put Web3 to the test and see how it fares against the contemporary approach to building apps - the public cloud. Unfortunately I found Web3 to be very lacking.

Colin Eberhardt · 31^st Oct 2022 · 16 min read

· Video

Evaluating Workflow Technology

A panel discussion from FinJS London 2022, exploring the latest developments in desktop workflows

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Oct 2022

Beyond the Hype: Most-loved language – does Rust justify the hype?

In this episode, Simon Martin, Chris Price and Rob Pilling share their interest and insights into Rust. This relatively new programming language has caught the attention of the development community, being voted the ‘most-loved’ language seven years in a row in the StackOverflow survey.

Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price, Simon Martin, Rob Pilling · 1^st Aug 2022 · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype - Investing in Innovation and avoiding the Hype in Digital Government

In this month’s episode, we tackle a wide range of topics relating to the role of technology innovation, and the perils of hyped technology, within Digital Government.

Colin Eberhardt, Jessica McEvoy, Alex Segrove · 8^th Jul 2022 · 1 min read

The State of WebAssembly 2022

WebAssembly has gone through quite a transformation this last year, while the wasm language landscape is slowly shifting, the more notable change is in what people are using WebAssembly for. The use of wasm for serverless, containerisation and as a plug-in technology has leapt considerably, with WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) becoming ever more important.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Jun 2022 · 4 min read

Beyond the Hype - Behaviour Driven Development, Hype? Or just misunderstood?

In this month’s episode we talk about Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), a testing practice where system behaviours are captured in a human readable Domain Specific Language (DSL), which are automated and executed.

Colin Eberhardt, Daniel McNamee, Xin Chen, Jack Arnstein · 15^th Jun 2022 · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype - Is multi-cloud a myth?

In this month’s episode, we talk multi-cloud. This is a challenging topic, even the first step—nailing down what the term actually means—isn’t easy. How does it differ from hybrid-cloud or poly-cloud? Does the term refer to the deployment approach for a single application or an entire organisation?

Colin Eberhardt, James Heward, Robert Griffiths · 3^rd May 2022 · 1 min read

Building a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform

WebAssembly is really starting to shine is as a standalone runtime environment. In this blog post I explore the Wasmtime WebAssembly runtime, and build a WebAssembly-powered serverless platform in just 70 lines of code.

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th Apr 2022 · 11 min read

Beyond the Hype - Do you actually need a microfrontend?

A relatively new architectural style for building web-based applications, micro-frontends are an extension of the popular microservices pattern where the vertical slice of functionality that a microservice provides is extended all the way to the front-end. With micro-frontends, you can more easily scale your development teams by composing applications from loosely coupled frontend components. In this podcast we ask the question 'Do you actually need a micro-frontend?'

Colin Eberhardt, Sam Hogarth, Dean Kerr · 5^th Apr 2022 · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype - Microservices: are they the only architecture you need?

Microservices have become the standard architectural pattern for everything. It’s a great and versatile pattern, but what people rarely talk about is the cost. You didn’t think you got all that good stuff (polyglot, scalable, decoupled...) for free, did you? In this episode, we talk about the real-world impact of choosing this pattern and when it might not be the right choice.

Colin Eberhardt, Ian Sugar, Harry Bellamy · 8^th Mar 2022 · 1 min read

Beyond the Hype - Coming soon from Scott Logic

Beyond the Hype is a brand new monthly podcast from the Scott Logic team, where we cast a practical eye over what is new and exciting in technology – everything from Kafka to Kubernetes, AI to APIs, microservices to micro-frontends. We look beyond the promises, the buzz and excitement to guide you towards the genuine value.

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Feb 2022 · 1 min read

Article recommendations and increasing engagement with OpenAI GPT-3 Embeddings

It is quite common for blogs, or news / content distribution websites, to organise their content around categories of tags. However, this approach is time-consuming, and from measuring behaviours, it doesn't seem to do much to encourage browsing. In this blog post I use the new OpenAI embedding API to create highly targeted article recommendations, resulting in a four-fold (x4) increase in engagement.

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Feb 2022 · 5 min read

Open Source Sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility

The recent Log4j vulnerability has once again sparked a lot of debate around our reliance on open source projects and their sustainability challenges. I argue that money cannot fix this issue, nor can hiding behind security scans, audits and other defenses. The solution is to genuinely understand the open source community, acknowledge the shared responsibility we have in our commons and through the well-understood tool of Corporate Social Responsibility, look to fill the ethical and philanthropic gaps.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Dec 2021 · 6 min read

Creating personalised data stories with GPT-3

You can tell powerful stories with data, but so often we are faced with raw data (albeit beautifully presented), and are left to create our own narratives. My previous attempts at turning data into stories have been time consuming and underwhelming. In this post I demonstrate how GPT-3, a new and advanced language model, can construct engaging and unique stories from user-specific data, with relative ease.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Dec 2021 · 10 min read

Open source in financial services, bridging the contribution gap

We recently worked on a research project, exploring open source issues and challenges within financial services organisations. We found that consumption is “acceptable” rather than “encouraged”, with security concerns representing the biggest obstacle. On the flip-side, open source maintainers don’t wish to invest further in security. Financial services organisations, whose contribution policies lag behind, need to bridge this gap in order to fully capitalise on the value open source presents.

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Oct 2021 · 4 min read

· Video

Open Source Sustainability through Corporate Social Responsibility

Modern software is increasingly complex, made up of hundreds or thousands of open source components, hidden away in deeply nested dependency trees. Just how much do we know about these components that are an integral part of our products? What are the risks associated with their usage, and our exposure?

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Oct 2021

Exploring 120 years of timezones

Timezones, and daylight saving - the practice of moving clocks forward by one hour once a year - are a pain. They make it hard to schedule international meetings, plan travel, or may simply cause you to be an hour late for work once a year. For a developer, they are even worse! This blog post takes a visual journey through the last 120 years of timezones, daylight saving and the ever changing world time.

Colin Eberhardt · 14^th Sep 2021 · 4 min read

· Video

Copilot - Life with an AI-powered programming pair

Last month GitHub released Copilot, an AI powered tool that provides surprising accurate suggestions ranging from a few lines of code to entire functions. Copilot uses a vast and powerful AI model that is trained on billions of lines of open source code from GitHub. This, combined with the context provided by your code and comments, allows it to provide amazingly accurate suggestions. This is no simple autocomplete, this is pair programming with a robot!

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Aug 2021

GitHub Copilot Experiences - a glimpse of an AI-assisted future

I've been lucky enough to be granted access to the preview of Copilot, GitHub's new 'AI pair programmer' that is causing quite a stir. This blog post shares my initial thoughts and experiences with this tool. In brief, I'm stunned by its capabilities. It has genuinely made me say 'wow' out loud a few times in the past few hours, not something you expect from your developer tooling.

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Jul 2021 · 6 min read

The State of WebAssembly 2021

This blog post shares the results of the first State of WebAssembly Survey, with results from 250 respondents surveyed in June 2021. We find that Rust is the most frequently used and most desired WebAssembly language and many other interesting results

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Jun 2021 · 5 min read

You probably don’t need a micro-frontend

Micro-frontends is a relatively new architectural style for building web-based applications, which as the name suggests, is an extension of the popular microservices pattern. In this blog post I argue that this is a pattern you might not need!

Colin Eberhardt · 17^th Feb 2021 · 6 min read

What the financial crash can teach us about open source

A talk I gave at the virtual Open Source Strategy Forum conference in 2020, where I compared some of the challenges facing open source (complexity, fragility, sustainability) to those which triggered the financial crisis of 2008.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Dec 2020 · 12 min read

· Video

What the financial crash can teach us about open source?

A talk, from the Open Source Strategy Forums, where I compared some of the challenges facing open source (complexity, fragility, sustainability) to those which triggered the financial crisis of 2008.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Dec 2020

In-browser transcoding of video files with FFmpeg and WebAssembly

The WebAssembly build of FFmpeg allows you to run this powerful video processing tool directly within the browser. In this blog post I explore FFmpeg.wasm and create a simple client-side transcoder that streams data into a video element, with a bit of RxJS thrown in for good measure.

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Nov 2020 · 8 min read

Code generating a WebAssembly 6502 emulator from specifications

Writing emulators that bring old computer hardware back to life is a popular hobby, and one that I have been enjoying recently through my own goal of writing an Atari 2600 emulator. However, writing a CPU emulator can get a little repetitive and tedious, so I thought I'd explore a different approach - generating the CPU emulation code from a specification rather than manually translating it. This blog post shares the fruitful results.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Aug 2020 · 9 min read

White Paper: Building an integrated desktop application ecosystem

This white paper identifies the core building blocks that are required to build an integrated desktop application ecosystem using a combination of web and legacy technologies, looks at the associated challenges, and reviews the various open source and commercial products that form the foundations of this ecosystem of the future.

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Aug 2020 · 1 min read

· Video

The new normal for your desktop

This webinar explores the potential and realities of an emerging vision for a more integrated desktop application ecosystem, as facilitated by various open-source and vendor products.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Jun 2020

· Video

A gentle introduction to WebAssembly

WebAssembly is a brand new W3C standard for a secure and load-time optimised, stack-based virtual machine that is a compilation target for a broad range of languages. That's clear isn't it?! This talk will provide a very gentle introduction to WebAssembly, with practical examples. By the end of the talk you'll have a much better understanding of this exciting new technology.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Jun 2020

Rendering One Million Datapoints with D3 and WebGL

This blog post introduces the WebGL components which we recently added to D3FC, this suite of components make it easy to render charts with very large numbers of datapoints using D3. Throughout this post I'll describe the creation of the following visualisation, which displays 1 million books from the Hathi Trust library

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st May 2020 · 15 min read

A WebAssembly Powered Augmented Reality Sudoku Solver

An Augmented Reality Sudoku solver using the WebAssembly build of OpenCV (a C++ computer vision library), Tensorflow (a machine learning library) and solver written in Rust. It neatly demonstrates how WebAssembly allows you to write performance-critical web-based applications in a wide range of languages.

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Jan 2020 · 13 min read

WebAssembly 2019 Year In Review

I've been authoring the WebAssembly Weekly newsletter for just over two years now. As we near the end of 2019 I want to take the opportunity to share some of my favourite articles from the year.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Dec 2019 · 4 min read

WebAssembly on the Blockchain and JavaScript Smart Contracts

WebAssembly, despite the name, is a universal runtime that is finding traction on a number of platforms beyond the web. In this blog post I explore just one example, the use of WebAssembly as a smart contract engine on the blockchain. This post looks at the creation of a simple meetup-style event with ticket allocation governed by a smart contract written in JavaScript.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Nov 2019 · 11 min read

Faster Fractals with Multi-Threaded WebAssembly

When WebAssembly was released a couple of years ago it was an MVP (Minimal Viable Product), one significant feature that was missing from the MVP was threads. The WebAssembly threads proposal is now quite mature and available in both the tooling and Chrome. This blog post explores the internals of this feature, the new instruction set, and how it supports multi-threaded applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Jul 2019 · 13 min read

Build your own WebAssembly Compiler

Have you ever wanted to write your own compiler? ... yes? ... of course you have! I've always wanted to have a go at writing a compiler, and with the recent release of WebAssembly, I had the perfect excuse to have a go.

Colin Eberhardt · 17^th May 2019 · 20 min read

Building a better D3 axis

Recently we've been looking at enhancing the D3 axis component to implement a number of common features including more flexible label placement (e.g. positioning labels between ticks) and rotation / offset of labels to avoid collisions. This blog post demonstrates some of these features and how they were implemented.

Andy Lee, Colin Eberhardt · 9^th May 2019 · 6 min read

· Video

Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler - London Node User Group - April 2019

This talk, from London Node User Group, looked at some of the internals of WebAssembly, exploring how it works ‘under the hood’ with a demonstration of how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Apr 2019

White Paper: Thinking differently - the cloud as a value driver

The Financial Services industry is having to change and adapt in the face of regulations, competition, changes in buying habits and client expectations. This white paper encourages the industry to look at public cloud not as a tool for driving down costs, but as a vehicle for technical and business agility.

Colin Eberhardt · 18^th Apr 2019 · 1 min read

Maintaining global state in AWS Lambda functions with Async Hooks

This post looks at how the experimental Async Hooks API can be used to support global state within AWS Lambda functions. Considering that this is an experimental API it's worth treating with caution, but it does provide an interesting potential solution to a common problem.

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th Mar 2019 · 9 min read

· Video

Tools, Bots and Automation for better Open Source Projects

With open source projects, we often work with strangers, people we may never speak to, let alone meet. Creating a quality product, with such a disparate team can be quite a challenge. This talk takes a look at how tools and automation are a critical component when creating a successful open source project.

Colin Eberhardt · 14^th Dec 2018

OpenFin Layouts added to StockFlux

We've updated StockFlux, our OpenFin demo app, to make use of the recently-released OpenFin Layouts APIs. This blog post takes a quick look at the features we've added, and the APIs used.

Colin Eberhardt, Marzio Superina · 3^rd Dec 2018 · 2 min read

Realtime crypto charting with JPM Perspective and d3fc

Perspective is a streaming pivot visualization engine which uses WebAssembly. This blog post explores its capabilities and creates a custom cryptocurrency visualisation using d3fc.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Nov 2018 · 6 min read

7 Reasons I ❤️ Open Source

Here's why I spend so much of my time—including evenings and weekends—on GitHub, as an active member of the open source community.

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Nov 2018 · 1 min read

Serverless Rust with AWS Lambda and WebAssembly

In this post, I look at how WebAssembly can be used to create serverless functions and demonstrate an AWS Lambda function written entirely in Rust.

Colin Eberhardt · 18^th Oct 2018 · 5 min read

Building a Complex Financial Chart with D3 and d3fc

When it comes to creating complex bespoke charts, of all the JavaScript visualisation / charting frameworks, D3 is the clear winner. This blog post takes a step-by-step look at the process of of building an ‘advanced’ financial charting using D3, with additional components from d3fc.

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Sep 2018 · 16 min read

The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals

WebAssembly is a performance optimised virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP. This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Jul 2018 · 10 min read

Sleeping Lambdas and AWS Step Functions

With AWS Lambda you pay for execution duration, which means that sleeping or waiting during execution has a direct impact on your bill! This blog post takes a look at how to make AWS Lambda functions sleep, without incurring costs, via AWS Step Functions.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Jun 2018 · 9 min read

Transpiling WebAssembly to support Multi Return Values

The WebAssembly specification is evolving, with many new features on the way. This blog post makes one of these future features available today, multi value returns, using the Babel approach of transpiling.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th May 2018 · 10 min read

Writing WebAssembly By Hand

WebAssembly is a new language for the web, although unlike JavaScript it's not a language you are expected to use directly. However, it is actually possible to write WebAssembly directly by hand and it turns out this is an educational and enjoyable process, which I will explore in this blog post.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Apr 2018 · 13 min read

White Paper: The Web Assembles

WebAssembly is a new runtime for the web; a fast and efficient compilation target for a wide range of languages that could have a far-reaching impact on the web as we know it. This paper looks at at the performance limits of JavaScript and how WebAssembly was designed to tackle them.

Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price · 24^th Apr 2018 · 1 min read

· Video

WebAssembly - and the Death of JavaScript?

This talk, from JSMonthly, looked at what's wrong with the way we are using JavaScript today and why we need WebAssembly.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Feb 2018

Writing a CHIP-8 emulator with Rust and WebAssembly

Over the past couple of months I’ve been exploring the potential of WebAssembly. I wanted to try my hand at creating a more complex WebAssembly application, which is why I’ve been spending my evenings working on a CHIP-8 emulator ... and learning Rust!

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Dec 2017 · 12 min read

Developing Bristol Pound - An Open Source React Native App

A few weeks ago the new Bristol Pound mobile app was launched, allowing users of this local currency to find vendors, view transactions and make payments on both iOS and Android. This post describes our experience of writing this application using React Native.

Colin Eberhardt, Georgiana Ginghina, Chris Meehan · 22^nd Nov 2017 · 9 min read

Migrating D3 Force Layout to WebAssembly

In this blog post I'll take a look at a real-world application of WebAssembly (WASM), the re-implementation of D3 force layout. The end result is a drop-in replacement for the D3 APIs, compiled to WASM using AssemblyScript (TypeScript).

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th Oct 2017 · 12 min read

· Video

Serverless JavaScript

JavaScript is the dominant force on the web and increasingly the desktop too, but what about on the server? This talk looks at server-side JavaScript within the context of serverless architectures, a cloud-computing pattern with zero configuration, automatic scaling and a pay-per execution model.

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Oct 2017

Exploring different approaches to building WebAssembly modules

In this blog post I'll explore the various different ways you can create WebAssembly modules, using Emscripten, LLVM and AssemblyScript, comparing the tooling and performance.

Colin Eberhardt · 17^th Oct 2017 · 10 min read

Asynchronous Recursion with Callbacks, Promises and Async.

Creating asynchronous functions that are recursive can be a bit of a challenge. This blog post takes a look at various different approaches, including callbacks and promises, and ultimately demonstrates how async functions result in a much simpler and cleaner solution.

Colin Eberhardt · 14^th Sep 2017 · 11 min read

Creating a Market Profile Chart with D3

Market profile charts are relatively complicated and specialised charts used by financial traders. This blog post looks at how to render a market profile chart using D3.

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Aug 2017 · 8 min read

cla-bot a GitHub bot for automating Contributor Licence Agreements

A few months ago we contributed a project, ContainerJS, to the Symphony Software Foundation, an organization that fosters open source and collaboration within financial services.

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th Jul 2017 · 2 min read

Mapping UK place name endings (With command line cartography tools)

Place names in UK and Ireland are very much influenced by their surroundings, with endings such as -hill, -ford, and -wood quite clearly referencing local geography. This blog post uses the new NDJSON command line tools for processing, transforming and joining datasets to create an optimised visualisation.

Colin Eberhardt · 25^th Jun 2017 · 8 min read

gifbot - Building a GitHub App

This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd May 2017 · 8 min read

Developing a GitHub Bot with AWS Lambda

This blog post describes the process of creating a GitHub bot, hosted as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda function, that performs various checks on pull requests.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th May 2017 · 15 min read

Interactive and Responsive Small Multiples with D3

Small multiples repeat the same basic chart, typically with the same axes, to display different slices of a dataset. They are an excellent way of showing rich multi-dimensional data, without becoming a dense mess of lines. This post looks at how to implement small multiples with D3 and d3fc.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Apr 2017 · 11 min read

Visualising London Marathon Training Data From Strava

I downloaded an analysed the training data for 1,000 athlete who ran the London Marathon in 2016. From this data I've learnt that people put in ~30% less mileage than popular plans suggest, Sunday mornings are a firm favourite for long runs, and that Saturday morning parkruns are very popular!

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Feb 2017 · 4 min read

Visualising London Marathon Strava Data

I recently downloaded run data for the 7,190 athletes who recorded their London Marathon on Strava, a popular platform for runners and cyclists. This blog post visualises and analyses the data in various interesting ways.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Jan 2017 · 4 min read

Our most popular Tech Blog posts of 2016

OK, I’m a bit late; I intended this for the start of January, but this time last year I wrote a post on our most popular 2015 technical blogs. Here I am again!

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Jan 2017 · 1 min read

Semantic Versioning is not enough

A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary consumers of your libraries and frameworks this can’t be right? Perhaps a hybrid approach that combines both semantic and romantic versioning would keep both the computers and the humans happy?

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Dec 2016 · 5 min read

A Journey Through Sound Synthesis with AudioKit

For the past four years I've been an author on Ray Wenderlich's website which provides tutorials for iOS developers. I don't do much native iOS development these days, However, I do like to keep my skills up to date. As part of this team I sometimes find myself being assigned topics that I wouldn't otherwise look into. And so it was, a couple of months ago, that I received an assignment to write a tutorial on the open source AudioKit project.

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th Nov 2016 · 1 min read

White Paper: Unstoppable HTML5

A white paper which takes a looks at the continued growth of HTML5 and how it is now a viable solution for desktop application development.

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Oct 2016 · 1 min read

· Video

Time Travel and The Future of HTML5 Productivity

In this talk I'll review how the functional programming style of frameworks such as React, ImmutableJS and Redux have paved the way for novel techniques that once again support rapid development cycles

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Jul 2016

Recursive Pattern Matching and Transformation of JavaScript AST

I've recently been playing around with the JavaScript Abstract Syntax Trees (AST), with the aim of transforming some JavaScript code into various other languages (Java, C#, Objective-C). As part of my research, I looked at how Babel performs AST transforms. If you're not familiar with Babel, and the plugins which perform the transformations, I'd recommend this blog post by Shuhei Kagawa that describes the development of a simple plugin for Angular 2 code generation.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Jun 2016 · 10 min read

Six tips for cleaner javascript promises

This blog post shares a few quick tips and patterns that I've been using to structure JavaScript promises; keeping them clean, simple and readable.

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Jun 2016 · 12 min read

Applying redux reducers to arrays

The redux pattern provides a simple (and strict) pattern for managing state; a single store holds the state while a reducer applies actions, evolving the application state.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th May 2016 · 9 min read

Automating Expenses With the Mondo API

Mondo Bank has recently moved into public Beta, sending out 1,000 cards to trial customers each week. I received my Beta card a few days ago, and have been using it ever since. This blog post takes a quick look at the Mondo API and how I used it to automate expense claims!

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Mar 2016 · 7 min read

Binding with Bond

Swift Bond is a binding framework that removes the mundane task of wiring up your UI. In this tutorial, which was originally published on Ray Wenderlich's website, I introduce the concepts of Bond and demonstrate how to use it to rapidly build an iOS app.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Feb 2016 · 1 min read

Angular 2 Time Travel with Redux

This post looks at integrating Angular 2 with Immutable.js and Redux, a popular Flux store implementation. It also demonstrates that the functional approach, encouraged by these technologies, allow for powerful concepts such as time travel, where you can replay actions and application state.

Colin Eberhardt · 25^th Jan 2016 · 11 min read

Angular 2 with Immutable.JS

Angular 2.0 introduces a component-based approach to building applications, where the rendering can be optimised by selecting a suitable change detection strategy for each component. This post looks at how the OnPush change detection strategy works quite elegantly with the concept of immutable objects as enforced by Immutable.js.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Jan 2016 · 8 min read

Most popular tech blog posts of 2015

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th Jan 2016 · 1 min read

Creating an Angular 2 build with Gulp, TSLint and DefinitelyTyped

From my perspective Angular 2 is a great improvement over Angular 1. The framework is simpler, and as a result your code is more concise, making use of modern JavaScript concepts. However, this does come at a cost; with Angular 2 the required tooling is really quite complicated.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Dec 2015 · 15 min read

Building a todo list application with Angular 2.0

This blog post takes a step-by-step approach to building a simple todo-list application with Angular 2.0. Along the way we'll look at web components, dependency injection, TypeScript, bindings and the Angular 2.0 change detection strategy which combine to make a much more elegant framework to its predecessor.

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Dec 2015 · 16 min read

Rendering ASCII Charts with D3

A few days ago Bloomberg published their list of 50 companies to watch in 2016, and for some reason they decided to publish the entire report in ASCII! I thought it would be a bit of fun to see if I could use D3 to create my own ASCI charts

Colin Eberhardt · 18^th Nov 2015 · 8 min read

· Video

Geeking out about React Native

ReactJS, Virtual DOM, JSX, a hackable editor, ES6 modules, classes, arrow functions, node, iOS, native-UI, flexbox, idempotent functions… In this talk I’ll be geeking out about all the seriously cool tech that makes ReactNative possible.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Oct 2015

White Paper: HTML5 Migration – Get started with a Little Bang

This white paper explores and addresses the importance of migrating complex business applications from Flex and Silverlight to HTML5. It highlights the risks involved in delaying your migration and provides a solution that tackles cost concerns at the same time as delivering an early return on investment.

Colin Eberhardt · 11^th Oct 2015 · 1 min read

Improving Grunt Performance

JavaScript builds are getting more complex and time consuming. This blog post shares a few steps I took to improve the performance of one of our project's grunt build, hopefully some of the tools I used will be of use to others.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Oct 2015 · 6 min read

MVVM With ReactiveCocoa 3.0

This is my final article on ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RAC3), where I demonstrate some more complex RAC3 usages within the context of an application built using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th May 2015 · 8 min read

White Paper: Making Technology Disappear

Creating omni-channel experiences in enterprise is more often than not a challenge in terms of strategy and mindset rather than technology. This white paper outlines a twinned design and technical approach that ensures focus is squarely on users and the contexts within they use a system.

Graham Odds, Colin Eberhardt · 8^th May 2015 · 1 min read

ReactiveCocoa 3.0 - Signal Producers and API clarity

My previous blog post took a first look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RC3), where I described the new Signal interface, and the pipe forward operator. In this blog post I continue my exploration of the RC3 APIs and turn my attention to signal producers. I also discuss a few points around the overall clarity of the new ReactiveCocoa APIs.

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Apr 2015 · 7 min read

A First Look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0

This blog post takes a look at the new ReactiveCocoa 3.0 swift interface, which introduces generics, a pipe-forward operator and an interesting use of curried functions.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Apr 2015 · 7 min read

Retrospective on Developing an application with React Native

I've been building a React Native app for the past few months, which was published as a tutorial yesterday. A number of people have asked about my thoughts and opinions about React Native - which I am sharing in this blog post.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Mar 2015 · 7 min read

Introducing React Native

A few months ago Facebook announced React Native, a framework that lets you build native iOS applications with JavaScript. I've been spending the past couple of months building am app with this framework, which I have finally been able to share!

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Mar 2015 · 1 min read

Implementing React.js in Swift

This blog post explores the novel approach taken by the React.js team, where the UI is expressed as a function of the current application state, and re-implements it with Swift.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Mar 2015 · 12 min read

Exploring KVO alternatives with Swift

Swift has access to all of the Objective-C APIs, which means that anything you could do with Objective-C you can now do with Swift. However, there are times when it is worth exploring a better, pure-Swift, alternative. This post explores the pros and cons of KVO versus a couple of Swift alternatives.

Colin Eberhardt · 11^th Feb 2015 · 8 min read

Implementing Events in Swift

Swift does not have a built in eventing mechanism. This post explores a few different ways events can be implemented in Swift and how to avoid problems of retain cycles and closure reference equality.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Feb 2015 · 6 min read

SVG layout with Flexbox for simpler D3 charts

This blog looks at how CSS flexbox layout can be applied to SVG in order to simplify the task of constructing charts with D3. This approach has been made possible by the JavaScript flexbox implementation that Facebook recently open sourced to support ReactJS Native.

Colin Eberhardt · 2^nd Feb 2015 · 9 min read

Exception Handling in Swift

Swift doesn't support throwing exceptions, nor does it support catching them. This wouldn't be a problem if you could develop iOS apps in pure Swift, but unfortunately at the moment you cannot.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Jan 2015 · 7 min read

Tearing Down Swift's Optional Pyramid of Doom

This blog post looks at a few techniques that can be used to remove the deeply nested if-let statements that are a common sight in Swift code.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Dec 2014 · 7 min read

Swift Initialization and the Pain of Optionals

Swift's strict initialisation process results in a number of practical issues, leaving developers scratching their heads. This post explores a few solutions including two-phase initialisation, the use of optionals and lazy properties.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Nov 2014 · 5 min read

Binding mutable arrays with ReactiveCocoa

This post describes a binding helper that allows you to bind arrays directly to table views with ReactiveCocoa. In this update to my previous post, the helper is extended to support mutable arrays.

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th Nov 2014 · 2 min read

Mandelbrot Generation With Concurrent Functional Swift

This post show how the simple task of computing a Mandelbrot set can be split up across multiple threads (and processors) using functional techniques.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Oct 2014 · 10 min read

Jekyll Pagination and Infinite Scroll

Recently I updated the Scott Logic blog to implement infinite scrolling using a combination of Jekyll pagination and jScroll. Both of these components are quite fussy about their respective configuration, meaning that integrating them took longer than expected. I thought I'd share my solution in this blog post, hopefully saving others from the hours I spent digging into jScroll code or cursing Jekyll!

Colin Eberhardt · 14^th Oct 2014 · 4 min read

Swift and the curious case of AnyObject

Swift, as I am sure you are aware, is quite a strict, safe and strongly-typed language. However, because the language needs to maintain Objective-C compatibility it has some rather curious features, and the behaviour of `AnyObject` is one of them!

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Sep 2014 · 2 min read

Functional Swift and Memoization

This post is a continuation of my previous which looked at implementing Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques. Here I look at how memoization can be used to cache the return value of a function in order to improve performance.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Sep 2014 · 11 min read

Swift By Tutorials is Published

Apple released the first public beta of the Swift programming language just over three months ago. Within days of the release myself and Matt Galloway started working on our book Swift by Tutorials, which as of yesterday is finally finished and shipping!

Colin Eberhardt · 18^th Sep 2014 · 1 min read

The Game of Life with Functional Swift

This blog post shows an implementation of Conway's Game of Life using functional techniques in Swift.

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Sep 2014 · 12 min read

Swift Adoption Statistics

It was just two months ago that Apple took us by surprise in releasing the Swift programming language. This blog post reflects on the first few months of Swift adoption.

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Aug 2014 · 2 min read

MVVM, Swift and ReactiveCocoa - It's all good!

This blog post looks out how Swift makes the combination of ReactiveCocoa and MVVM even better ...

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Jul 2014 · 5 min read

A Statistical Comparison of the iOS and Android Stores

A few months ago I published a blog post which showed the results of analysing the meta-data of 75,000 apps from the iTunes App Store. This blog post continues the analysis by adding 60,000 Android apps into the mix.

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Jul 2014 · 1 min read

MVVM with ReactiveCocoa

I've recently had a two-part tutorial published on Ray Wenderlich's website that details how ReactiveCocoa can be used to implement the MVVM pattern within iOS applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Jul 2014 · 1 min read

Swift Sequences and Lazy Evaluation

In this blog post I want to take a quick look at the Swift Sequence protocol, which forms the basis for the for-in loop, and see how this allows you to write code that performs sequence operations that are only evaluated on-demand.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Jun 2014 · 7 min read

White Paper - HTML5 At Enterprise Scale

Moving from desktop or plugin technologies (Flex, Silverlight, Java Applets) to HTML5 is a challenge for developers of large-scale enterprise applications. This White Paper discusses the challenges and offers potential solutions.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th May 2014 · 1 min read

Binding to a UITableView from a ReactiveCocoa ViewModel

This blog post presents a simple utility class for binding ReactiveCocoa ViewModels to UITableViews without the need for the usual datasource / delegate boiler-plate.

Colin Eberhardt · 11^th May 2014 · 9 min read

A Colour Analysis of the Apple App Store

This blog post presents the result of analysing 250,000 screenshots from the Apple App Store, looking at hue, lightness and saturation histograms for each category.

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Apr 2014 · 8 min read

A Statistical Analysis of the Apple App Store

The App Store continues its rapid growth, with approximately 300,000 apps added each year. I decided it would be fun to download as much app metadata as possible in order to see what patterns and trends I could find. This blog post describes the results.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Mar 2014 · 9 min read

Simulating Accelerometer and Location data for iOS

This blog post looks at how to simulate accelerometer and location data so that you can test iOS apps without the need for a physical device. The simulated data is provided by an interactive UI which allows you to rotate the phone and mark paths on a map which can then be replayed.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Mar 2014 · 7 min read

ReactiveCocoa - The Definitive Guide

It feels like everyone in the iOS community is talking about ReactiveCocoa at the moment. In this blog post I talk briefly about what ReactiveCocoa is and the 'Definitive Guide' which I wrote for raywenderlich.com

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Mar 2014 · 2 min read

PropertyCross 1.3 Released

PropertyCross has just announced a v1.3 release, which includes two new frameworks, a number of updates and an improved build system.

Colin Eberhardt · 31^st Jan 2014 · 2 min read

iOS 7 By Tutorials In Print

The book, iOS 7 By Tutorials, which I contributed four chapters to, is now in print.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Jan 2014 · 1 min read

Understanding JavaScript Object Creation Patterns

This article explores the various ways you can create objects with the JavaScript language, and through this exploration finds that there is much to learn about the language!

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Nov 2013 · 1 min read

An Interactive Tab Bar Controller Transition

This blog post looks at creating an interactive tab bar controller transition, where you can swipe left and right to navigate between the tabs. The transition itself is a 'paperfold' effect - very pretty!

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Sep 2013 · 9 min read

Creating a custom flip view controller transition

With iOS 7 Apple introduced a new set of APIs for creating custom View Controller transitions. In this blog post I look at how to create a custom 'flip' transition, giving the impression of a turning page.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Sep 2013 · 8 min read

iOS 7 by Tutorials - the first iOS 7 book - is published

For the past four months I have been hard at work writing four chapters for a book, iOS 7 by tutorials. Just yesterday, as the iOS 7 NDA was lifted, the book went on sale.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Sep 2013 · 1 min read

Windows Phone App Studio - Shows Potential ...

A couple of days ago Microsoft announced Windows Phone App Studio, a web based tool for the rapid creation of Windows Phone applications. In this blog post I take this new technology for a spin to see what it's capable of, and the interesting potential it has for creating 'personal' apps.

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Aug 2013 · 5 min read

New iOS Article - How To Make a Custom Control

My latest iOS development article has been published on Ray Wenderlich's site, this time I look into how to develop custom iOS controls.

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Jun 2013 · 1 min read

ReversiEight - A Windows 8 Reversi Game

For the last six months or so I have been deeply immersed in a combination of iOS and HTML5 development. Now I don't want my C#/XAML skills to get too rusty, so over the weekend I decided to write a simple Windows 8 Store App.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd May 2013 · 1 min read

HTML5 - It Just Got Real - Slides

A couple of days ago we hosted a one-day conference, HTML5 - It Just Got Real, at the Royal Society buildings in London. As promised, we have made all of our presentations available online.

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th May 2013 · 1 min read

Enhanced Windows Phone 8 Map Gestures

This blog post describes the addition of a two-finger rotation and three-finger pitch gesture to the Windows Phone 8 Map control.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Apr 2013 · 6 min read

Comparing KendoUI and Knockout (with a bit of jQueryMobile on the side)

This blog post compares the same twitter search application written with both Knockout and Kendo in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each framework.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Apr 2013 · 9 min read

HTML5 - It Just Got Real - A One-day Conference in London 14th May

Announcing a one-day conference at the Royal Society, London UK, on the 14th of May.

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Mar 2013 · 1 min read

Windows Phone 8 Running App Article wins CodeProject competition

I've just received an email from those nice folks at CodeProject letting me know that my article 'A Windows Phone 8 Run Tracking App in 100 Lines of Code' has just won the Best Mobile article of January 2013 award.

Colin Eberhardt · 25^th Feb 2013 · 1 min read

Linq to Objective-C

In the past few months I have been immersing myself into the world of iOS development.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Feb 2013 · 10 min read

CodeProject MVP 2013

Earlier today I received an email informing me that I have been awarded a CodeProject MVP for the year 2013.

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Jan 2013 · 1 min read

CodeProject Article on Xamarin Cross Platform Development

This article looks at how you can write a cross-platform mobile application with a shared C# code base using Xamarin MonoTouch.

Colin Eberhardt · 4^th Jan 2013 · 1 min read

Introducing PropertyCross - Helping you select a cross-platform mobile framework

Introduces a new open source project that helps developers choose a suitable cross-platform framework

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Dec 2012 · 7 min read

A Multicast Delegate Pattern for iOS Controls

This blog post introduces a simple pattern for adding multicasting capabilities to existing iOS controls. Adding multicasting allows for improved clarity and code re-use.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Nov 2012 · 4 min read

Ray Wenderlich and My Adventures in iOS

The technologies that we use to write applications for our end users are changing at a frightening pace!

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Nov 2012 · 1 min read

Integrating Knockout and jQueryMobile

This blog post looks at the issues regarding integration of KnockoutJS and jQueryMobile, and provides a simple worked example - a Twitter Search application - where the two technologies play nicely together!

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Oct 2012 · 7 min read

Clearer - A Gesture-Driven Windows 8 To-Do Application

A couple of days ago a published a new article on CodeProject, this latest article tackles the migration of a gesture-drive application from Windows Phone to Windows 8.

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Oct 2012 · 1 min read

Gesture-Driven To Do List Article Wins CodeProject Monthly Competition

I have just found out that my article "A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List" won first place in the July 2012 best mobile article category.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Aug 2012 · 1 min read

Property Finder - A Cross-platform HTML5 Mobile App

A while back, when PhoneGap for Windows Phone was still in beta, I created Property Finder, an application for searching UK property listings.

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Aug 2012 · 1 min read

Book Review: iOS Programming for .NET Developers

A couple of weeks ago Josh Smith published his latest book, "iOS Programming for .NET Developers", which seeks to ease the transition from .NET to iOS developers.

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th Jul 2012 · 5 min read

A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List - Complete Example

Over the past few weeks I have been working on a Windows Phone to-do list application, inspired by the iPhone Clear app.

Colin Eberhardt · 26^th Jul 2012 · 1 min read

An Introduction and Thoughts on Developing iOS Applications with MonoTouch

This blog post describes the creation of a simple twitter search application for iOS, based on a similar application I wrote for Windows Phone a few months back.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Jul 2012 · 13 min read

The Higgs Boson, Comic Sans and my 15 minutes of Twitter fame

It's been a busy Twitter day for me. A reasonably inane tweet that I posted this morning pointing out that the announcement of the (potential) Higgs Boson discovery was written using the much derided Comic Sans font has been retweeted thousands of times.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Jul 2012 · 4 min read

A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application Part Two - drag re-ordering

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a todo list application which uses gestures to achieve its basic functions.

Colin Eberhardt · 27^th Jun 2012 · 9 min read

A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 - An Update

My blog post from yesterday "A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8" sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Jun 2012 · 1 min read

A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8

This blog post takes a look at what Windows Phone 8 (WP8) means for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers and the Microsoft development platform in general.

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Jun 2012 · 3 min read

Microsoft Surface vs. Apple iPad - a Visual Comparison

In this post I present a graphical comparison of the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad tablets

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Jun 2012 · 2 min read

A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application

This blog post describes the implementation of a gesture-based todo-list application. The simple interface is controlled entirely by drag, flick and swipe.

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Jun 2012 · 13 min read

Introducing the jQuery Mobile Metro Theme

This blog post introduces the new jQuery Mobile Metro theme and demonstrates how to create a web UI that detects the device it is being viewed on, to render a Metro UI on WP7 and iOS on other devices

Colin Eberhardt · 30^th Apr 2012 · 10 min read

WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues)

This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Apr 2012 · 4 min read

Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part Two)

This is the second post in my series about databinding in Silverlight and WPF.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Apr 2012 · 8 min read

KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight - a new CodeProject article

I have just published a new article over on CodeProject called "KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight".

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Apr 2012 · 1 min read

Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part One)

OK, so the title is a little ambitious, but there is nothing wrong with setting yourself lofty aims! Because of the depth of this topic I have decided to split this tutorial up into a series of blog posts, each of which explore a different aspect of the binding framework.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Apr 2012 · 10 min read

Developing a GWT TodoMVC application

This blog post describes my experiences of developing a simple Todo application with Google Web Toolkit (GWT), that I have contributed to the JavaScript TodoMVC project, which compares the implementation of the same application with various JavaScript frameworks.

Colin Eberhardt · 12^th Mar 2012 · 8 min read

Plotting Circular Relationships Graphs with Silverlight

I have just published a new article on codeproject, which describes the creation of a Silverlight custom control for plotting the relationships between a network of nodes.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Mar 2012 · 1 min read

Slides and code from my WPUG talk on PhoneGap

Yesterday I presented a talk at the London-based Windows Phone User Group on the development of cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight

Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow.

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Feb 2012 · 2 min read

The Gradual Decline in Silverlight Adoption

Around one year ago I made the prediction that Silverlight would have an overall adoption of 81% by the end of 2011.

Colin Eberhardt · 13^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

WPUG Talk: Developing cross-platform mobile applications with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7

In a couple of weeks I will be giving a talk on using PhoneGap for cross platform mobile application development at the WPUG #NotAtMWC12 event on Tuesday, February 28, in London. This post gives a brief overview of my talk and a video.

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Feb 2012 · 1 min read

A Simple Pattern for Creating Re-useable UserControls in WPF / Silverlight

This blog post provides step-by-step instructions for creating a user control, which exposes bindable properties, in WPF and Silverlight. The post covers dependency properties, and how to manage DataContext inheritance.

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Feb 2012 · 8 min read

WP7 PhoneGap Backbutton Support Re-visited

About a month ago I published an article which demonstrated how to create a WP7 application using static HTML pages and PhoneGap.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Jan 2012 · 2 min read

Windows Phone 7 - Browsing your Photos via Bing Maps

The Windows Phone 7 camera gives you the option to record the location where a picture was taken (under Settings => applications => pictures+camera).

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th Jan 2012 · 6 min read

Proud to be a CodeProject MVP 2012

I have just received an email from Chris Maunder, co-founder of CodeProject, informing me that I have been awarded CodeProject MVP status for 2012.

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Jan 2012 · 1 min read

FastClick for WP7 - Improving Browser Responsiveness for PhoneGap Apps

I recently released an update of the HTML5 / PhoneGap application I wrote a few months ago to the marketplace.

Colin Eberhardt · 5^th Jan 2012 · 4 min read

A Festive and Fun Windows Phone 7 Maze Game

Last night, with my Christmas presents all wrapped and a lack of any decent programmes (festive or otherwise) on television, I had a few hours to kill, so decided to create a festive-themed WP7 game ...

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Dec 2011 · 8 min read

A Metro Themed PowerPoint Template

Over the weekend I mentioned on Twitter that I had created a Metro-style PowerPoint template. There were a few requests to share, so hence this blog post. Scroll to the bottom to download the PowerPoint file.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Dec 2011 · 1 min read

A Simple Multi-Page Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap Example

This blog post shows how you can use PhoneGap to create Windows Phone 7 applications that are comprised of multiple, simple HTML pages, whilst meeting the Marketplace certification requirements.

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Dec 2011 · 6 min read

A Windows Phone 7 Slide View with Page Pips

A popular user-interface in the iOS world is the UIPageControl which renders a small set of dots to indicate the number of pages.

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Dec 2011 · 3 min read

Handling the back-stack in Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap applications

Recently I have been researching the use of PhoneGap for creating HTML5 Windows Phone 7 applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 28^th Nov 2011 · 5 min read

Pushpin Clustering with the Windows Phone 7 Bing Map control

This blog post provides a simple utility class that will cluster pushpins on a Bing Map control. This utility provides a way to achieve great performance with 1000s of pushpins.

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Nov 2011 · 5 min read

Suppressing Zoom and Scroll interactions in the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser Control

This blog post describes a simple helper class that can be used to supress scrolling and pinch zoom of the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser control.

Colin Eberhardt · 17^th Nov 2011 · 3 min read

The Untimely Demise of the Plugin (and how LOB developments will suffer)

It has been another interesting week for HTML5 and front-end technologies. We have seen Adobe abandon work on mobile versions of the Flash plugin, news of Silverlight 5 being the last version of the Microsoft plugin and more recently an announcement that Adobe will no longer develop Flex.

Colin Eberhardt · 14^th Nov 2011 · 3 min read

An Introduction to Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 Metro

With the new Metro UI, Windows 8 has firmly embraced the tablet form-factor, with the interface tailored for touch and multi-touch interactions.

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Nov 2011 · 5 min read

Property Finder - the first HTML5-based Windows Phone 7 Application

Last week I submitted Property Finder, a simple application that searches for properties based in the UK, to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I was happy to receive confirmation that this application had been certified and published just two days later.

Colin Eberhardt · 7^th Nov 2011 · 4 min read

Tombstoning with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7 (and KnockoutJS)

A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about how the recent announcement of PhoneGap support for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) which makes it possible to develop HTML5-based applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 24^th Oct 2011 · 9 min read

Codeproject September Competition - Scored a Double!

I have just received an email from Codeproject - my article on XAMLFinance, a cross platform Silverlight, WPF and WP7 application, has won Best C# and Best Overall article competitions for September.

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Oct 2011 · 1 min read

Adding Error Bars to Visiblox Silverlight Charts

Having spent a number of years studying Physics at university, I have had the importance of error bars well and truly drummed into me!

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Oct 2011 · 6 min read

Paging Data from the Server with Silverlight

This blog post provides an implementation of IPagedCollectionView which allows paging of data from the server. An IPagedDataSource is introduced that allows any paged data source to be plugged in, with the standard controls such as DataPager making it easy to create paging applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Oct 2011 · 7 min read

WinRT Transitions - Creating Fast and Fluid Metro UIs

This blog post looks at the new concept of 'transitions' that WinRT, within Windows 8, introduces. This concept makes it very easy for you to create a fluid and interactive UI without going anywhere near storyboards!

Colin Eberhardt · 10^th Oct 2011 · 4 min read

Using ObservableCollection with WinRT (via a little shim!)

WInRT introduces a new interface for collection change notification, IObservableVector, which means ObservableCollection no longer works with this framework. In this blog post I will show how you can use ObservableCollection, via a simple adapter, within you WInRT applications.

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Oct 2011 · 4 min read

A Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) MVVM Tombstoning Example

In this blog post I look at the new application lifecycle model that Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) introduces, and show how to handle the various lifecycle events in a simple MVVM application.

Colin Eberhardt · 3^rd Oct 2011 · 6 min read

Developing Windows Phone 7 HTML5 apps with PhoneGap

This article show the step-by-step development of a Windows Phone 7 HTML5 application using PhoneGap. It also looks at how viable this approach is for cross-platform mobile development.

Colin Eberhardt · 29^th Sep 2011 · 14 min read

Building Windows Phone Apps - a free WP7 eBook

I've just had an email land in my inbox from Microsoft's Mike Ormond, announcing that the Windows Phone 7 book that I contributed a couple of chapters to (Introduction and Tools), has finally been published!

Colin Eberhardt · 22^nd Sep 2011 · 1 min read

XAML Finance - a cross-platform WPF, Silverlight, WP7 application

I have just published a new article on codeproject which describes the development of XAMLFinance, a cross-platform application for the desktop (WPF), web (Silverlight) and phone (WP7).

Colin Eberhardt · 19^th Sep 2011 · 1 min read

TweetSearch - A Cross platform Metro UI WinRT and Silverlight Application

With the Windows 8 preview release earlier this week, developers are now faced with a whole new and exciting Microsoft stack.

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th Sep 2011 · 9 min read

Windows 8 - An OS of two halves.