To educate, inform, inspire

A cautionary tale

February 3, 2016 - General , Technology , Web - by Mark - 1 Comment

I recently experienced a situation which has several “lessons learned” and I thought I would share. Since many readers of these articles are students and former students, you may benefit from this experience. The saga began in late December, 2015. My wife got a phone call alleging to be from […]

Philips HUE API

January 13, 2016 - IoT , Mobile Apps , Technology , Web - by Mark - 1 Comment

My first weblog post in 2016 focused on the basics of using the Philips Hue lighting system. As I mentioned, one of the features of this environment is the ability to interact with the RESTful API via a web interface. You need to determine the IP address of the bridge […]

Philips HUE and Internet of Things

January 6, 2016 - IoT , Mobile Apps , Technology , Web - by Mark - 2 Comments

One of the presents I received over the holidays was a Philips Hue starter kit. [Thanks again, Ben and Lindsay.] I had been thinking about getting one of these myself. As you may suspect, I am always keen to learn new technologies and approaches. For those who may not be […]

Adobe Post

December 23, 2015 - Adobe , Mobile Apps , Technology - by Mark - No Comments

Adobe released a new app for the iPhone [Post] on December 17, 2015. At the moment, this seems to be iPhone specific (I tried it on my iPad and was not pleased with the results – for example, it was very difficult to edit the supplied example text). On the […]

Floid

December 16, 2015 - Mobile Apps , Technology , Web - by Mark - No Comments

I have been working with an interaction design tool called Floid. Presently, it is only available for the Mac platform. This tool is easy to use to develop working prototypes of various apps and web pages. The generated code is HTML5 (and validates). I developed a very simple example to […]

UX Rebels Summit overview

November 20, 2015 - Learning , Technology , Web - by Mark - No Comments

I had the opportunity to participate in the UX Rebel’s Summit this week [Nov. 17, 2015] (hosted by Christopher Schmitt). I found this to be a great online event and wanted to share some insights and thoughts from the event. Keep in mind, I have 189 pages of screen captures […]

Mobile App Development with BlueMix – part 5

November 18, 2015 - IBM , Mobile Apps , Technology - by Mark - No Comments

Last week, I focused on using the IBM BlueMix facility to create a simple Hello World app which pings the IBM BlueMix server instance you created. Those looking for my previous posts on BlueMix can find them linked below (in reverse chronological order): BlueMix app development with Kinetise [these links […]

Mobile app development with BlueMix – part 4

November 11, 2015 - IBM , Mobile Apps , Technology - by Mark - No Comments

I have been covering the IBM BlueMix facility in several weblog posts. These are linked below (in reverse chronological order): BlueMix app development with Kinetise [these links open in a new browser window/ tab.] BlueMix Cloud Foundry Node.js app BlueMix overview For those who have been following these posts, we […]

Techsmith Fuse

November 4, 2015 - Mobile Apps , Technology - by Mark - No Comments

I often need to take screen captures on mobile devices and then annotate and share them with students. One of the tools I use for this is Techsmith Fuse. I like it because it is very simple to use. I take a screen capture on a mobile device, open Fuse, […]

Rules to think about

October 7, 2015 - General , Security , Technology , Web - by Mark - No Comments

We are near the midpoint of the fall semester at school. From time to time, I observe certain things and thought it might be helpful to put these together as a set of “rules” to think about – particularly for students in the CMWEB program at school. Of course, these […]

Displaying your tablet on a desktop

September 30, 2015 - Apple , General , Mobile Apps , Technology - by Mark - No Comments

Although I have made several prior weblog posts on this topic, I thought it might be appropriate to revisit this in light of iOS 9 and Windows 10 being generally available. For reference purposes, here are two of the prior posts I have made on this topic. Reflection (and more) […]

Dark Web Overview

September 16, 2015 - Security , Technology , Web - by Mark - 2 Comments

Based on a recent article in Wired Magazine, I thought it might be helpful to touch on the “dark web” a bit. After all, I do teach CMWEB 270 (Web Application Security) and often talk about the dark alleys on the Internet. But, first, a few disclaimers. Seriously. I do […]

Captivate Draft

September 9, 2015 - Adobe , Learning , Technology , Web - by Mark - No Comments

Adobe recently released a new version of Captivate (9) for both Mac and Windows computers. Along with the desktop version, there is now a free iOS app available – Captivate Draft. Essentially, this allows you to create learning modules in environments where a laptop might be impractical. You can also […]

Internationalization

September 2, 2015 - Technology , Travel , Web - by Mark - No Comments

I was asked to cover two topics at our next Web Professionals meeting on September 8, 2015. The first dealt with a continued discussion of security. The second dealt with the issue of internationalization. Since I don’t know if there will be sufficient time to cover both topics, I thought […]

Autoprefixer

August 26, 2015 - Technology , Web - by Mark - 2 Comments

I am sure many readers already know about this tool, but I thought it would be appropriate to cover as I am teaching the CMWEB 220 class on CSS this semester. As we should know, we live in an imperfect world. This is particularly ture when it comes to browsers […]