By : Shabda Raaj

This is next in the series of apps I am building using various mobile technologies. It is the same app as build using Java for Android for calculating the Tax payable (in India). You can get the code for Objective-C, Java-Android, and PhoneGap.

First the impressions

Phonegap was the easiest to work with among the Objective-C, Java and PhoneGap, by far. I created the app as easily as

Step 1. Write the app and test it in Browser using the Chrome developer tools. Step 2. Start a project in Xcode. Step 3. Copy the HTML and CSS files to project ...

By : Shabda Raaj

We recently started with Mobile Application development. I am learning Android using the Commonsware book, and highly recommend it. This is a very short guide to getting you running your first Android app.

What will we build

We will build a simple tax calculator for India, per the rules given here for tax calculation. In this app, we need to gets users income and various tax deductible expenses. After that we need to update the UI to show the tax. You can see the final app and code on github here.

Setting up

1. Install Java and Eclipse
2. Install Android SDK ...

By : saikiran - Designholik

CSS3 is hot, Now you can create rounded borders, add shadow to boxes without images, embed fonts and many more things.

Here is the list of some CSS properties introduced in CSS3 and their browser support.

Property	Browser Support
	IE9	Firefox	Chrome	Safari	Opera
border-radius
box-shadow
border-image
text-shadow
word-wrap
@font-face
background-size
background-origin
transform
resize
box-sizing
outline-offset
column-count
column-gap
column-rule
@keyframes
animation
transition

By : ashok

Titanium Mobile is Appcelerator's development platform for developing cross-platform native mobile applications. In this article we will be introducing you to installation and developing applications using Titanium.

Installation

Follow the steps mentioned here, to install Titanium and the corresponding sdks for your developement platform

Hello world application

Creating a new application and aplication structure is elaborately described in appcelerator gettting started guide

Creating Forms

Field Label

var win = Titanium.UI.currentWindow; // get refernce to the current window
var label = Titanium.UI.createLabel({
    text: 'Label Name',
    height: 50,
    color: '#000000',
    font:{fontSize:14},
    top: 20, // vertical postion of label on ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• Troy Sobotka has a blog post on why GIMP is inadequate in the real world. Slightly worrying post.
• Kevin McCarthy has an article on "How 3 companies (Yammer, Proxlet and Bocoup) use Node.js"
• Pingdom has released a jaw-dropping article on "The Internet in 2010". A whopping 107 trillion emails were sent in the year!
• Mathias Meyer has an exhaustive item on the different levels of monitoring with examples of services and software.
• Yann Malet has written a neat post on how to write custom filters integrated into the django admin with a few lines of HTML.
• bebraw on reddit ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

Welcome to the first post of 2011!

• The Eldarion Team has launched "Gondor: An effortless production django hosting". Currently, it is in private beta and going by the homepage sounds very exciting.
• PK Shiu has graphically explained the workflow of South, the most preferred migration tool for django.
• Andy McKay has written an article on how to integrate bleach, an HTML whitelist and sanitizer with django. Rather than escaping the user's input completely (like innocuous formatting tags), it escapes only the risky tags like script tags.
• There is an interesting article on O'Reilly Answers on "5 Things You ...

By : saikiran - Designholik

This is a good book for anyone who's just starting out in web design, especially those with a creative slant than a technical one. It is all about principles of design, layout ideas, color theory, textures, typography.

Information Architecture

Importance of information architecture (IA) is explained, like how to take the requirements before starting the design process and how to start the design process. Unfortunately most of the clients do not provide enough information for design process.

Grid system

Very well explained about the importance of grid system. I found some interesting things like “The Rule of Thirds”, “960 ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• Django Dose community catchup episode #32 is out. Listen to it here.
• Luke Plant has released a django app called django-anonymizer. It anonymizes sensitive data like customer information while maintaining the database structure intact.
• Armin Ronacher who contends that web development is dangerous (and rightly so!) blogs about the common mistakes made by a web developer.
• John Anderson has a very interesting post on "Tips and Tricks for the Python Interpreter". Must read!
• Charles Leifer has written a generic app to provide for auto-completion of django models. Currently, it supports the solr, redis and sql database backends.
• Kyle Neath has ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

My colleague Javed had written a fantastic article a short while back on "Seven reasons why you should switch to Vim" and as an emacs user I thought I should share my setup too. One of the coolest things at Agiliq is that we are free to use the development tools of our choice. As a case to explain the point, everyone at agiliq uses a different editor and if someday a flame war would escalate to the third world war, I assure you it would start from Agiliq ;-)

Though I have been using emacs for more than two years ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Pragmatic Guide to JavaScript is the Pragprog's book by Christophe Porteneuve which I have wanted to read for a while.

I went into this book expecting to read actionable and task focussed book on modern JavaScript, and this book does not disappoint on that count. Using 35 tasks which you are going to need in your browser based JS development, this books teaches required JS techniques.

However I went into the book expecting a framework agnostic approach. This book however is very heavily focussed on Pototype. Initial chapters start as framework agnostic, but they soon turn into Prototype based ...

By : Shabda Raaj

The Principles of Successful Freelancing is book I read after The Principles of Project Management.

My motivation from this book was to use freelancing advice and use that for our (larger) business. This book is razor focussed on Freelancing and even more on people who are starting with or considering starting freelancing. If you are in this group I consider this book very well written, and a must read, but if you are part of a larger group, the razor sharp focus makes this not worthwhile.

Chapter wise it is:

1. Chapter 1: Considering Freelancing?
2. Chapter 2: Prepare for the Transition ...

By : Shabda Raaj

The Principles of Project Management is the book I am reading after Outsourcing Web Projects.

I went into this book expecting lot of actionable steps I can use for our projects right away, however this book is heavier on theory. Guess I can not complain with the name being The Principles of Project Management.

In their own words the book has,

So What Is Project Management Anyway?

This chapter forms an introduction to the art and science of project management. Here, we talk about the key phases every project goes through and why project management skills are increasingly important today ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Sitepoint had a book sales running recently where they made all their books available for sale at 7$. Being a sucker for good books and deals, I bought more than I should have. Here is the review of the first I read, "Outsourcing web projects."

This books is written from the viewpoint of buyers, but as a vendor, I have some insights (IMO) from the other side.

It starts with these chapters.

• How to Have Vendors Competing for your Job.
• How to Find the Perfect Outsourcing Partner.
• How to Get the Best Price for your Project.
• How to Get it ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

It's been a while since we posted a link roundup. With holidays starting soon, we thought of advancing the post.

• In the second part of the series the Open Source team at The Washington Times writes about "App-centric django development". Here they discuss the files required for a complete app.
• Are you a full-stack programmer? Interesting article by Carlos Bueno of Facebook on the various interconnections in computing.
• Daniel Greenfeld wrote a post on why he prefers stupid template languages. His post received reactions from Armin Ronacher, author of Jinja2, Mike Bayer of Mako and Steve Holden, chairman of ...

By : Javed Khan

The protocol enables XMPP entities to create nodes (topics) at a
pubsub service and publish information at those nodes; an event
notification (with or without payload) is then broadcasted to all ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Unfuddle is the tool we use for our non open source development. I have found it to be the best tool for Software Project management, in particular I think it is superior to Basecamp and Assembla.

When you start using Unfuddle, the number of things can seem overwhelming. This tutorial should help you Unfuddle the Unfuddle.

The Unfuddle Glossary

Unfuddle has,

• Projects: Top level Things which need to be done.
• User: People who are working on a given project.
• Ticket: What a User works on.
• Milestone: A timed list of tickets which should be completed before this given time ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Keeping url structure sane plays a major role in user experience, by making it easy to go to specific pages and navigate the site. Some real world urls and how they could have been better follow.

The Bad Urls:

• http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1967820
• http://area51.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=99
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa336522.aspx

The Good

• Easy to develop for. The id referred is the Primary key

The Bad

• Hard for users to select the correct page from a url bar dropdown
• Bad for SEO

Neutral:

• Easy to guess next and previous ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• In Washington Times' article on app-centric django development, they discuss the pros and cons of breaking your project into multiple apps.
• Luke Plant writes how class based views in django views makes the code feel a bit like Ravioli (too many small classes with difficulty locating and identifying their functionality).
• While we are at Ravioli, here is an interesting presentation about "How to stop writing Spaghetti code" in node.js.
• Eric Holscher has a post on how to use Haystack search to index non-database content.
• Facebook has written a blog post on "The underlying technology of Messages". Most of the ...

By : Javed Khan

• policystat writes about shifting seamlessly from PHP to Django
• allbuttonspressed has come up with part 2 of their tutorial on using django-mediagenerator to power an offline HTML5 canvas app.
• No surprise. TextCaptchaBreaker breaks TextCaptcha with amazing accuracy. It's on github too.
• If you know a bit of jQuery and are looking to learn YUI3, you might be interested in this Rosetta Stone
• Essential JavaScript & jQuery Design Patterns For Beginners might be a good weekend read. Looking forward to it.
• Django core devs discuss the future of with and include templatetags
• Firesheep steals authenticated sessions by sniffing network packets with ...

By : Shabda Raaj

Unfuddle is our preferred tool for private repos, project management and ticketing. We recently wrote a slick script to summarize our Unfuddle status. So here is it.

import getpass
import simplejson
import sys
import urllib2

from datetime import datetime, date

try:
    from settings import *
except ImportError:
    ACCOUNT_DETAILS = {
        'account': '',
        'username': '', 
        'password': '',
    }
    SEND_MAIL = False

if not ACCOUNT_DETAILS['account']:
    ACCOUNT_DETAILS['account'] = raw_input('Enter unfuddle account name: ')

if not ACCOUNT_DETAILS['username']:
    ACCOUNT_DETAILS['username'] = raw_input('Username: ')

if not ACCOUNT_DETAILS['password']:
    ACCOUNT_DETAILS['password'] = getpass.getpass()

class Unfuddle(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.base_url = 'https://%s.unfuddle.com' % (ACCOUNT_DETAILS['account'])
        self.api_base_path = '/api/v1/'

def get_data(self ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• jQuery 1.4.4 and jQuery mobile alpha 2 were released this week. Progress on the jQuery mobile development seems to be very brisk at the moment.
• Eric Holscher wrote a series of posts on building a django app server with Chef.
• Do you generally have a tough time deciphering captchas? TextCaptcha is a service that uses text based questions to separate the humans from machines. It's got an API too!
• Django Dose community catchup Episode #30 is out. Check it out today.
• All references to the project name from the imports in the django tutorial have been removed ...

By : Shabda Raaj

We have a (semi) new app. This takes your Github account and creates Github pages from it. It displays a summary of your account, and of all your apps. Get it at github

Readme

Takes a github account, creates html pages for it, and puts it on Github pages.

How it proceeds.

1. Get data for specified account from Github API
2. Uses Jinja2 to write ReST docs.
3. Build html from the ReST docs.
4. Pushes the html to a Git repo from which you build github pages.

tl;dr: Yo dawg, I heard you like github, so I put a github in ...

By : Shabda Raaj

I have written the same web app in various web frameworks. Get it from Github.

Copied from the Readme.

This is a set of apps which creates the same application in various Python web micro-frameworks.

The app(s) talks to Facebook, and finds out recent people who have posted a public status with the text "so starving".

This idea came from reading Onion.

We have the same app in these frameworks.

Microframeworks:

• appengine
• flask
• web.py
• juno
• bottle
• itty
• tornado
• pyroutes

Full stack frameworks:

• django
• web2py
• pyramid

If the framework included template engine and caching, that was used directly. Otherwise ...

By : Thejaswi Puthraya

• Jacob Kaplan-Moss has a beautiful article on concrete inheritance vs abstract models for inheritance. Must read!
• Charles Leifer, the current maintainer of Django Snippets has an exhaustive blog post on setting up search using the Solr backend for Haystack.
• Chris Heilmann has an interesting video on "Reasons to be Cheerful: being a web developer is awesome!"
• Andy McKay defends the plain old non-reusable Django apps as they are easy to write, rapid to develop and have very little boilerplate code.
• Piotr Malinski has a blog post on how to use web based image editors within django apps.
• Derek Gathright shows ...

By : Javed Khan

So you want a better IDE for developing django, huh? Why not give good old vim a try?

Use pathogen to maintain your vim plugins (and sanity). Using this, you can clone the repositories listed here to .vim/bundle/ and start using them right away.

Also, consider adding your .vimrc and .vim to a repository. Include .vimrc inside .vim and symlink .vim/.vimrc to ~/.vimrc to version control your .vimrc.

My vim files can be found here. Also, here's an imgur album demonstrating these plugins in action.

1. Syntax highlighting for django templates

Starting from vim 7.1, syntax ...