NPM Deploy Script for Alexa skills and AWS Lambda

As a follow up to Alexa Skills and AWS Lambda Aliasing wrote up a little NPM script to get some folks started. # Create a unique filename based upon the current time timestamp=`date +%s` echo $timestamp filename="myProject.$timestamp.zip" # We don't want to upload all the modules required to run our test harness' so prune out […]

Alexa Skills and AWS Lambda Aliasing

After the last post (Before Submitting Your Alexa Skill You Need to Do This One Important Thing), I had someone ask me to clarify things a bit regarding aliasing and the skills certification process. Specifically, could aliasing be used to give the best of both worlds. Namely: Protection of Production Code Ease of quick code […]

Before Submitting Your Alexa Skill You Need to Do This One Important Thing

Amazon has made it extremely easy getting started developing an Alexa skill. They offer some very mature SDKS, an active development team, free hosting, and some pretty decent documentation. The problem though, is that they made it really, really easy. Easy to make some development mistakes. Today lets address the most serious, in my opinion. […]

Building the NativeScript CLI from Source

So today I needed some features in NativeScript that had been committed to their repo, but had not been released via npm yet. I thought I’d be smart, clone the repo and just build it myself. It wasn’t quite that simple, so here is the path I took to get it all working on OSX. […]

Getting Started with Gimbals

So one of the biggest questions I get asked after giving a session on beacon technology is ‘where do I get beacons?’ Google is your friend in this regard, with tons of new hardware vendors rolling out new beacon brands. I really like the Gimbals though as a starter bit of kit. Why? First 3 […]

Titanium Studio Tip: Maximizing an Eclipse Heritage – Talking to JIRA

Titanium Studio is based upon the Eclipse product family. Because of that, we can install a good number of Eclipse add-ons into Titanium Studio. In this article, we will walk through how to install the add-ons required so we can manage our issues from within Titanium Studio. 1. In Titanium Studio, choose ‘Install New Software…’ […]

TiShadow – Educational Potential

Let me tell you a little bit of the back story to this segment or the series. Here in the states Tim Poulson from Rochester and I have been discussing the use of Titanium in a classroom environment to teach, not just mobile program, but programming in general to high school aged students […]

TiShadow – Increasing Productivity in your Shop

Today’s article will be on the use of TiShadow within a development shop. Personal Application I want to first give you an idea of what part of my workspace looks like and show how: Now, these are not all of the devices have for testing, this is just the ones I’m using currently. From top […]

TiShadow – Getting Started (Part 2)

So this evening I was in a good mood and had some free time available. So combine those and you get part 2 of the getting started article, which wasn’t originally planned. As I’m a very visual guy, I figured a few screenshots might help some of you get started building your custom client for […]

TiShadow – Getting Started (Part 1)

The Problem One of the most frustrating things about development is the time wasted waiting for the compiler to build up your binary and then installing it either in a simulator (emulator if on Android) or on an actual device. It doesn’t matter if you are using Titanium, or xCode or Eclipse, it just takes […]