Posts Tagged → programming

8 months with Texture (a.k.a. AsyncDisplayKit)

I have to admit that I love React & React Native. I began using React in 2014, and React Native in 2016. I loved RN not because of its cross-platform mechanics, but for its pragmatic approach when designing user interfaces and its ability to componentize a screen. A component can have its own state, and if the state is mutated the user interface depending on this exact state will re-render to reflect the new values.

It speeds up development and also makes the developer to avoid bugs with states not reflecting the values. The majority of my time is spent developing native apps, for which I had been trying to find an equivalent to React Native in terms of practices, to no avail. Until I stumbled upon AsyncDisplayKit (now named “Texture”).

I though I should share my experience so far.

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R.I.P. iGreekNews part 2

In an unexpected turn of events, I was forced to take down iGreekNews. In short, Apple didn’t like that iGreekNews consults RSS feeds from various sources. I find it strange, considering that the purpose of RSS is to be free, and it is a means of communicating with news sources.

In any case, I cannot continue supporting it or try to mess with lawyers in order to gather any evidence that Apple may require. My full day job doesn’t leave me enough time to do that.

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Vuforia SDK + remote video streaming on iOS

I recently have undertaken a project on iOS that requires integration with the Vuforia SDK. It’s an augmented reality proprietary framework, built for iOS and Android and has been very popular due to its innovative recognition library. One of the coolest demos that are appealing to advertisers or people looking to incorporate commercial campaigns inside their applications concerns the ability to play a video on top of a target. Vuforia even provides a sample application for that. However,  remote video streaming on texture does not work on textures.

This is a long standing issue, with people on the forums asking for a solution, some providing either free solutions which are outdated and / or non-performant, or paid solutions that are very expensive.

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A few thoughts on Parallelism

It’s been a while. I am very sure many people experienced connectivity issues to my server. I believe these issues have been resolved. While searching in my old archives, I stumbled across an essay that I had written as a small part of a bigger exam in the university in France, a while ago. It seemed like an interesting read. It concerns parallelism, how it affects development, and also includes a few thoughts about Automatic Parallelisation.

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Country border highlighting with Leaflet.js

Not too long ago I finished a project on Big Data for the University. One part of this huge project was the implementation of a dynamics map that would be responsive to mouse hover and mouse click. When the mouse would hover over a country, the whole country borders would be highlighted in the map, and if the user clicked inside those borders, we would display tons of interesting data using D3.js.

For map displaying and operations on Google Style maps, look no further than Leaflet.js.

All examples I found on the Internet would either not provide proper callbacks, or would not provide these features for the entire world map. Providing callbacks for a world map is extremely difficult in terms of performance optimisation, for reasons that will be explained below. For now, let’s briefly explain how it works.

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