My PhoneGap Presentation to Ottawa JS

So on Wednesday night I did my Introduction to PhoneGap/Apache Cordova (GitHub repo) presentation for Ottawa JS at the beautiful Shopify lounge. I've given this presentation a ton of times so I decided to give it a twist this time around.

The first thing I did was convert my old slide deck into a reveal.js presentation. Then I popped all the assets into a PhoneGap iPad project to see how it looked. Well, reveal.js looks and works great on an iPad.

At this point I started to get fancy. When I got to the part of the presentation where I would usually switch from the presentation software to Eclipse/Xcode to show the code and emulator I decided to call out to PhoneGap to take a picture instead. All I needed to do was include cordova.js in the app and make a call to Camera.getPicture and the results were:

this is my view from the stage

the view from the audience

And Darren took a picture of me taking the picture, while the picture I was taking was being put up on the big screen which is also in this picture. So I was able to do a presentation on PhoneGap in a PhoneGap app calling the PhoneGap API. It got meta pretty damn quick!

The Ottawa City Councillor PhoneGap app

So a couple of friends of mine wanted to learn more about programming mobile applications so we decided to get together and create an application for the Apps4Ottawa competition.

We settled on creating an application that would enable folks from Ottawa to learn more about and connect with their city councillors. Sadly, I didn't even know who my city councillor was until I started working on this app.

It uses the open data Ottawa to get the city councillor information and it the Open North API to do reverse geocoding to turn your GPS co-ordinates into the correct ward.

Currently the app is available on the Google Play store and we are going through the process of getting approval for the app on the Apple store.

PhoneGap was definitely the way to go with this project. We developed pretty much in Android then when we were ready to release a version of the app we just compiled it in Xcode and it just worked. The only thing we changed were the break points for the CSS media queries to deal with the different iPhone screen sizes. Support for Windows 8 and BlackBerry 10 are also coming as we have time.

I'm going to write up a post later in the week to talk about some of the micro libraries we used in order to accelerate development.

Please give the app a try and let me know what you think of it and what can be done better. If you are so inclined we wouldn't mind a vote or two in the app in the Apps4Ottawa competition.

My Speech Rec in the Browser Slides

I was able to do my presentation on speech rec in the browser at last nights Ottawa JS meeting. The slides/code for the talk have been posted up to my Ottawa-JavaScript-SpeechRec github repo. Honestly, it is a pretty light talk but that was its intention as it was going to be an amuse-bouche before heading off on holidays.

In order for you to run the question/answer part of the code you'll need to get a product key from Wolfram Alpha. Then go into index.html and find all instances of <INSERT WOLFRAM ALPHA KEY> and replace them with your api key.

Also, David grabbed a pretty good picture of me contemplating life, the universe and everything in-between right after my talk. I think it is just begging for a funny caption.

Do your worst, or best, internets.

Speaking at January's Ottawa JS, This Time for Real

So I was supposed to give this presentation at Decembers Ottawa JS but well pneumonia had something to say about that. The next meeting will be held this Wednesday January 9th at 6:30pm at the gorgeous Shopify offices. My talk is all about developing speech recognition web apps which of course is me pulling the guts of my Android app, Anna, and making it work in the browser.

It should be a good time so if you can make it out it'd be great to talk with you.

Speaking at Decembers OttawaJS

Hey, if you are in Ottawa I'll be speaking at the next OttawaJS meeting. The meeting will be held on Wednesday December 12th at 6:30pm at the gorgeous Shopify offices. My talk is all about developing speech recognition web apps which of course is me pulling the guts of my Android app, Anna, and making it work in the browser.

It should be a good time so if you can make it out it'd be great to talk with you.

Ottawa Android PhoneGap Droidhack

On Saturday the Ottawa Android group was having our latest Droidhack. This months Droidhack was sponsored by the fine folks at Nitobi who may be better know to you as the guys who started the PhoneGap project. They sent out some nice swag in the form of shirts and stickers that were well received by the group. Since this was a themed event on PhoneGap Android Plugins I did a quick presentation to get everyone up to speed and then we got to hacking.

Most of the day I spent helping others setup their environments and getting them going with their first PhoneGap application. I was able to provide some helpful hints to Chris Saunders who works for Shopify and put together an Android Shopify plugin. I was able to spend sometime on working on my DropBox plugin for Android. So far I can login and logout of DropBox but there is still a bunch of stuff to do that I hope to get to in the next few weeks.

All in all it was a pretty good day of hacking and I think a bunch of people learned some new ways to think and got exposed to PhoneGap. Also, huge shout out to Macadamian for providing us with the office space, wifi and food for this event. I know that I and the other Ottawa Android organizers really appreciate it.

Droidhack with Imerj's Smartpad

On Saturday September 10th we had our latest Ottawa Android Droidhack event with participation from Imerj. They had a number of their new Smartpad devices on hand for everyone to play with and they were providing folks with their SDK.

The Imerj Smartpad is a dual screen Android device not unlike the Kyocera Echo but unlike the Echo the Smartpad does not have a flimsy hinge. The Smartpad opens like a book and doesn't require any flipping, pushing or clicking.

Although the Smartpad does not run stock Android and you will need to get the SDK from Imerj in order to take advantage of the dual screen phone. In the time I had to play with the phone I was able to get a PhoneGap application running on the device without any changes to the application or PhoneGap code.

The next Droidhack will be held on October 8th and the focus of the day will be creating PhoneGap-Android plugins. So if you've ever wanted to learn more about PhoneGap and you'll be in the Ottawa area you should stop on by.

Friday Book Heads Up: Guy Gavriel Kay in Town

No book review today. Just a heads up that prolific Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay will be in Ottawa this Sunday to promote his latest book Under Heaven. He'll be appearing at the Ottawa Writersfest in the Mayfair Theatre, 1074 Bank St at 2:00PM. Don't forget to pre-purchase your tickets.