Colin Eberhardt

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Resources

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech · 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

Resources

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

Cloud

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Cloud

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Cloud

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Resources

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. The Foundation has various legal requirements that must be adhered to, including that all contributors (i.e. committers) sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Unfortunately as...

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

Tech

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

Cloud

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

Cloud

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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...

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

Tech

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...

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

Resources

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

Tech · 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

Tech

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...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. As your app becomes more complex, you can split up your reducer into separate functions, however, what if you have multiple instances of...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

Most popular tech blog posts of 2015

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech · 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

Resources

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. The paper covers:...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Resources

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. When developing an app most of the APIs you’ll be working with are Objective-C APIs that have been...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

The Game of Life with Functional Swift

This blog post shows an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques in Swift. This results in code which is a clear and concise representation of the game’s logic. I also take a closer look at ranges, intervals, the pattern match operator, ~= and how local functions help...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Resources

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. The article describes the creation of a 'range' slider control, and covers topics such as API design and using Core Graphics for rendering. Interestingly, iOS developers have...

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

Tech

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. You can see the results...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. You can see these gesture in action below: The WP8 release replaced the image-tile based Bing maps with a fully vector-rendered map from Nokia. Being vector-based, this map can...

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

Tech

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. Introduction I've always been a big fan of Knockout, most likely because it reminds me of Silverlight (rest in peace). For my thoughts on...

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

Tech

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. Just a few years back I wrote a white paper titled "Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide ..." with the help of a couple of my colleagues, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the...

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

Tech

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

Tech

Linq to Objective-C

In the past few months I have been immersing myself into the world of iOS development. Whilst the Objective-C language takes a little getting used to, with its odd syntax and memory management rules, it is certainly a fun platform to develop for. I do miss a few C# language...

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

Tech

CodeProject MVP 2013

Earlier today I received an email informing me that I have been awarded a CodeProject MVP for the year 2013. I am very grateful to CodeProject for this award - it is a very popular website for developers, with around 10 million members, and thousands of authors. It is an...

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

Tech

CodeProject Article on Xamarin Cross Platform Development

Yesterday I published a new article on CodePrioject: Property Finder - a Cross-Platform Xamarin MonoTouch Mobile App This article looks at how you can write a cross-platform mobile application with a shared C# code base using Xamarin MonoTouch. The application that is described in the article, a property finder, is...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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 is CIO at ShinobiControls, suppliers of highly interactive and fun charts, grid and UI controls for iOS developers. Most iOS controls have a concept...

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

Tech

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! Over the past few years the title of my blog has changed from "Adventures in WPF" to "Adventures in .NET", and more recently to the very generic "Adventures in Technology". The latest...

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

Tech

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! The code for this blog post can be found on github. You can also try it out on...

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

Tech

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: "I had fun porting my gesture-driven to-do list application to Windows 8, and had an interesting journey along the way. There are...

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

Tech

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. Thanks CodeProject, looking forward to receiving my collection of goodies - especially the new mouse mat! (Why not check out my latest article, a HTML5-based...

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

Tech

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. This application successfully made its way into the Windows Phone Marketplace, making it the first WP7 PhoneGap app. I recently developed the Property Finder application further in...

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

Tech

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. As someone who has many years of .NET experience, and more recently a desire to develop for 'the other side', I thought this...

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

Tech

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. I have just published the final application over on codeproject. You can see it in action below: Pop over to CodeProject for the full sourcecode and implementation details....

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

Tech

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. In this blog post I'll used the MonoTouch platform, which allows you to write iOS applications using C#. This blog posts describes...

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

Tech

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, and has been the top tweet for...

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

Tech

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, a left swipe deletes an item, while a right-swipe marks it as complete. In this blog post I am adding re-ordering which is initiated via a tap-and-hold gesture and performed...

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

Tech

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. I think it is fair to say that I was not the only one who was quite concerned about the impact of aligning the developer experience of Windows Phone 8...

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

Tech

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. This has been a big week for Microsoft; Monday saw them unveil the new Surface tablet that runs Windows 8. This was followed up...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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: So far the application supports deletion and completion of tasks, but not the addition of new ones. I'll get to this in a later blog post! Introduction -...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Tech

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

Introduction This is the second post in my series about databinding in Silverlight and WPF. In the first post I looked at how you wire-up UI controls to a model in the absence of a databinding framework. I showed how databindings can be created in code-behind, removing the need for...

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

Tech

KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight - a new CodeProject article

I have just published a new article over on CodeProject called "KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight". It demonstrates the implementation of the same application using both frameworks, and seeks to answer the question "Which is better, Silverlight or Knockout?" It's a bit of an epic (6,500 words). I hope people find it...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. This blog discusses why I chose GWT, the compromises and benefits of...

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

Tech

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. Head over to codeproject and take a look! Visualisation of Eurozone Debt You can see the control in action below, where it is...

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

Tech

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. Here are my slides from the presentation: And here is the twitter search application I demoed: PhoneGapTwitterSearch.zip You can also try out Property Finder on your phone. Thanks to...

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

Tech

Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight

UPDATE: I have posted the sourcecode for this control on codeproject. Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow. A few weeks back I found a tag trending tool, which can be used to measure...

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

Tech

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. The adoption statistics are now available and indicate that my predictions were wrong by more than 10%, with Silverlight adoption reaching just 67% at the start of this...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. When building user interfaces you will often find yourself repeating the same UI patterns across your application. After all, users...

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

Tech

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. Whilst PhoneGap makes the packaging of HTML / JavaScript / CSS and images into a breeze, one thing it doesn't do is provide correct back-button support. Correct back-button...

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

Tech

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). With this feature turned on, each application has their latitude, longitude and altitude stored as part of the standard EXIF data. I thought it would be...

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

Tech

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

Tech

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. This update fixed the location detection issue, where the marketplace certification process failed to detect that the application was using geolocation data via the browser (this issue has been fixed...

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

Tech

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 ... Ever since I first started writing code for Windows Phone 7 I have wanted...

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

Tech

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. So why create a Metro-style PowerPoint presentation? A couple of reasons, firstly, the templates...

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

Tech

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 is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts....

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

Tech

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, with the current page highlighted in some way. This is often used in conjunction with a UIScrollView to navigate between pages in a multi-page layout. Windows Phone...

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

Tech

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. I have written an introductory post on the subject and also managed to have a HTML5-based application accepted into the marketplace. The Windows Phone 7 execution model has a few unique features (when compared...

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

Tech

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. The Bing Map control for Windows Phone 7 is a versatile control, allowing you to provide your users with an...

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

Tech

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 is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Developers of Windows Phone...

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

Tech

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, its enterprise...

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

Tech

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. Many of the Metro concepts familiar to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers are also present in Windows 8. Watching the vieos from the //build/ conference you can see...

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

Tech

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. You can download the application from the marketplace now....

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

Tech

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. In my previous blog post I showed the development of a simple HTML5 / JavaScript application which PhoneGap wraps up...

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

Tech

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. Having narrowly missed out in the monthly competitions a few times, I am pleased to have scored a...

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

Tech

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! Within physics, or any experimental science, there are always going to be errors in the measurements you make. The more repeat measurements you make, the more...

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

Tech

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. With web-based applications, bandwidth constraints often...

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

Tech

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! I have to admit it, I am a big fan of the Metro Design...

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

Tech

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. <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Path=MyCollection, Converter={StaticResource ObservableCollectionAdapter}}"/> Developers are slowly starting to get...

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

Tech

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. In a previous blog post I described the development of a simple Windows Phone 7 application using the...

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

Tech

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 is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Introduction...

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

Tech

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! This is a collaborative book with contributions from Pete Vickers, Andy Gore, Mike Hole, Gergely...

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

Tech

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). Head over to codeproject to read about the development of this application and download the sourcecode. Regards, Colin E.

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

Tech

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. The Windows 8 architecture has something of a split-personality, incorporating a completely new runtime, WinRT together with the older Win32 and .NET framework. However, these sit on different sides...

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

Tech

Windows 8 - An OS of two halves.

In this blog post I take a look at Windows 8 on the outside, from a user perspective; and on the inside, from a developer perspective to see how it will change the way we develop with Windows on tablets, smartphones and the desktop when it is released next year....

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Sep 2011 · 7 min read

Tech

Dart - will Google make HTML5 applications viable?

Just a few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost "Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?", where I described some of the issues with JavaScript and how these could be solved by Microsoft if they wrote a C# to JavaScript compiler. Just a couple of days ago it...

Colin Eberhardt · 11^th Sep 2011 · 3 min read

Tech

Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?

Microsoft's recent change in stance over Silverlight, promoting HTML5 as "the only true cross-platform solution for everything", seems to have sidelined Silverlight as a niche framework. This has understandably caused a great deal of upset and confusion in the .NET development community. Despite this, Microsoft are remaining steadfast and tight-lipped...

Colin Eberhardt · 16^th Aug 2011 · 6 min read

Tech

Talk on Cross-Platform XAML Applications @NEBytes

I am happy to have been invited by NEBytes to give a talk on cross-platform XAML applications later this month. The event kicks off at 6:30pm on August 17th at Room 120, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, with the event including both my presentation and a talk on Office 365 by...

Colin Eberhardt · 9^th Aug 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Implementing a Windows Phone 7 Conversation View Part Two

This blog post describes how to implement a conversation / messaging style application with Windows Phone 7. It covers how to style the speech bubbles and the scrolling of the conversation list view when the phone keyboard is shown. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post which...

Colin Eberhardt · 8^th Aug 2011 · 4 min read

Tech

Capturing Windows Phone 7 Panorama Images

The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is widely used in applications and to many has come to symbolise the Metro Design Language. Search for panorama images and you will find numerous promo-shots of Windows Phone 7 applications which display the panoramic contents of the application hub, with an image of...

Colin Eberhardt · 21^st Jul 2011 · 3 min read

Tech

Implementing a Windows Phone 7 Conversation View

This blog post looks at how to to create a conversation view, mimicking the SMS messaging interface within Windows Phone 7. This post shows how we can select different DataTemplate for each item in an ItemsControl to achieve this effect. The Windows Phone 7 SMS messaging interface graphically illustrates between...

Colin Eberhardt · 15^th Jul 2011 · 4 min read

Tech

From Silverlight to HTML5 CodeProject Article

I have just published an article on codeproject which describes the differences in development between Silverlight and HTML5. In order to illustrate the differences, I have re-implemented my Windows Phone 7 JumpList control using HTML5/CSS3. You can see this control in action below: (NOTE: this will look best in a...

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Jul 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Silverlight UK User Group Presentation on Cross Platform XAML

Earlier this week I presented a talk to the Silverlight UK User Group on cross-platform application development with WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. Thanks to Gergley Orosz for these pictures Thanks to all who attended my talk. Here is a copy of the presentation I gave: You can see...

Colin Eberhardt · 1^st Jul 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Visiblox MVP Giveaway

Readers of my blog will probably have noticed that I have a keen interest in both charting and performance. My friends over at Visiblox have combined these both to create what is one of the fastest charts for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, see my recent benchmark blog post...

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd Jun 2011 · 1 min read

Tech

Metro In Motion #8 - AutoCompleteBox Reveal Animation

When I started the Metro In Motion series, I thought I would probably post three or four articles and be done. However, every time I use my Windows Phone 7 I seem to spot a new 'native' fluid UI effect which I would like to use in my own code....

Colin Eberhardt · 20^th Jun 2011 · 4 min read

Tech

Metro In Motion Part #7 - Panorama Prettiness and Opacity

This blog post details a simple metro-in-motion behaviour which reduces the Panorama control's contents while the user slides from item-to-item so that they can really appreciate your fancy background graphic! For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll briefly recap. My aim is to provide...

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

Tech

Metro In Motion Part #6 - Rolling List Location Indicator

This blog post describes the development of a rolling list location indicator. This indicator mirrors the behaviour seen in the native Windows Phone 7 calendar which rolls from one date to the next as the user scrolls. For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll...

Colin Eberhardt · 6^th Jun 2011 · 5 min read

Tech

A Simple Windows Phone 7 MVVM Tombstoning Example

This blog post shows how to implement tombstoning within a Windows Phone 7 application that following the Model-View-ViewModel pattern. UPDATE: I have published a update to this blog post to handle the new dormant state in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango). Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a...

Colin Eberhardt · 23^rd May 2011 · 13 min read

Tech

Metro In Motion #5 - SandwichFlow