Archives

Archives / 2013 / August
  • HTML5 Threading with Web Workers and Data Storage with IndexedDB - MSDN Article

    In a previous article, I looked at the HTML5 <video> tag and History object, two of the many features that developers have started to implement to give users of their apps new input controls, jQuery Mobile features, location and mapping, and much more. In this article, I continue exploring HTML5 features with a look at Web Workers, which let you speed up your client-side applications, and Indexed DB, a client-side data storage mechanism that is the preferred storage approach going forward in HTML5. (Before Indexed DB—also known as the Indexed Database API—work was focused on a standard named WebSQL. That work was discontinued in the fall of 2010. IndexedDB is the result of follow-on work to create a standard for data storage in Web browsers.)

  • Shrinking an image in iOS with Xamarin.iOS and C#

    Images taken with the camera are rather large in the iPhone.  How do you shrink them down?  I need to shrink them because I am going to send them to a web service and I want to spend as little time as possible in the upload process.  While I am not sure that this is the best code, it seems to be working for me.  I want to put this out for sharing and if you have a suggestion on how to make it better, please let me know.

  • Video and History support in HTML5 with Internet Explorer 10 - Article on MSDN

    Who hasn’t started looking at the mobile Web and HTML5—features like the viewport, new HTML5 controls, geolocation and many others that are part of smartphones, tablets and advanced browsers? With these features, developers have started to provide users with fairly common, new input controls; jQuery Mobile features; location and mapping; and much more. In this article, I describe two features that you might not be familiar with: the <video> tag and Web history. The <video> tag lets you display video without the need for plug-ins like Flash. Web history allows users to use the Back button to return to the previous page in an AJAX application.

  • UIRefreshControl Timeout with Xamarin.iOS

    The UIRefreshControl doesn't have a timeout mechanism built into it.  Once the refresh begins, the control will display that a refresh is occurring until the .EndRefreshing() method is called.  Because we are in a mobile environment, the data may never come back.  We don't want to display the UIRefreshControl forever.  Solving this problem is actually pretty simple.  Setup a timer and when the timer runs, call .EndRefreshing().  Here is some code I used for this:

  • Using the UIRefreshControl with the UICollectionView in Xamarin.iOS

    If you have used Twitter on an iPhone, you are familiar with the concept of pull to refresh.  When you work with a UITableViewController, there is a .Refresh property that can be used to assign  a Refresh Control to.  A UICollectionViewcontroller has many similarities.  Unfortunately, the .RefreshControl property is not one of them.  How in the heck are you supposed to provide the same functionality in the UICollectionViewController?  It is actually rather simple, but not documented by Apple.  I found this on Stack Overflow and translated it to Xamarin.iOS.  The steps are: