Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Tech
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.
UX Design
An outline of principles that will help you design more compelling data visualisations, from the respective strengths of various means for visually encoding values to the most appropriate patterns for conveying relationships.
Tech
In the first part of a series on running an interactive environment (REPL) on .NET, I talk a little about why you might want one, and cover the non-C# options.
Data Engineering
Big Data is a hot topic these days, and one aspect of that problem space is processing streams of high velocity data in near-real time. Here we're going to look at using Big Data-style techniques in Scala on a stream of data from a WebSocket.
Tech
Betamax is a tool to help with testing applications that consume web services by allowing the developer to record responses and then replay them. In this post we look at how we can use it in Scala.
UX Design
Last week I spoke at and attended UX Scotland 2013, a new user experience design conference organised by Software Acumen. Over the course of 2 days, 31 sessions and roughly 130 delegates ensured that Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh was filled with ideas, discussion and enthusiasm. Overall, the conference was a definite success and I'm delighted to hear Software Acumen are already planning to repeat it next year.
Tech
In the final article in the series, we take the RESTful API we've created and integrate it with MongoDB for persistence using the Salat library.
Tech
Taking a macro that can extract path elements from a query string and turning it into a fully fledged RESTful API, backed by an in-memory database.
Delivery
Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum are Agile methods based on the same underlying principles, but they also differ in purpose.
Tech
In this article we'll look at ways to overcome one of the main restrictions of def macros - the ability to only generate functions.
Tech
Diving in head first into Scala Macros, generating code using the language's abstract syntax tree. I'll be looking at how to create a function that in subsequent articles we can turn into a generated RESTful API.
Tech
My latest iOS development article has been published on Ray Wenderlich's site, this time I look into how to develop custom iOS controls.
Tech
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.
Tech
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.
Tech
This blog post describes the addition of a two-finger rotation and three-finger pitch gesture to the Windows Phone 8 Map control.
Tech
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.
Tech
Announcing a one-day conference at the Royal Society, London UK, on the 14th of May.
Tech
First off, this is a biased blog post as I am heavily involved in less.js at the moment.
Tech
Recently I contributed a change to Knockout which allows it to run without hacks in a non-browser JavaScript environment.
Tech
For a long time now, extends in less have been bubbling away. When I joined the less team in September last year it was one of the highest asked for feature requests. We decided that 1.3.x releases would fix bugs and implement minor feature requests and that 1.4.0 would include extends.

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