Explosive Tutorial With Unity3D and VRTK

Robert Rice .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Opinions on the emerging Virtual Reality market vary. One one end, there are those who say it’s just a gimmick and will pass shortly. On the other end, there are those who herald it as the birth pangs of a paradigm shift in how we interact with technology.

I sit somewhere in the middle. I own an HTC Vive and it is pretty dang awesome. The experience is not perfect, of course, but with interest growing and prices coming down, it’s just going to get better.

One expression of VR’s growing popularity is that Unity3D supports VR programming. And, with the free VRTK (Virtual Reality Tool Kit) framework, it’s becoming much easier to get started programming for VR. VRTK implements many basic components, such as various movement implementations, object interaction, and projectiles.

Working on a fun little side project, I noticed one implementation it did not have: a virtual reality bomb. So, I set upon to create one myself. This post details the process I went through for creating a timed, throwable, explosive object for virtual reality using Unity3D & VRTK.

Advanced Node.js Process Management with PM2

Matthew Brown Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Node.js, Tutorial 18 Comments

If you’ve worked on any front end applications recently, you have likely had some contact with a Node/Express application. What you may not be familiar with is how these applications are managed in production.

I recently had a project where I needed to set up a Node application on an AWS server. I needed a tool to solve the technical challenges of managing the Node processes and deploying the application in a very efficient manner.

I chose PM2, which is a handy process management tool for running Node.js applications in production environments. PM2 provides a simple command line interface that makes it easy to get started. This powerful Node module has tools for managing application processes, logging, and more.

In this article, I provide an introduction to PM2, showing why it is such a valuable tool for managing Node.js applications. By way of a reference example application, we show the basic features and commands for using PM2 and give examples of generating configuration files for both running and deploying applications.

The Joy of Forms with React and Formik

Mat Warger Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, React, Tutorial 9 Comments

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces. That’s it. It’s a way to use JavaScript to define UI elements based on user-defined properties and internal state.

It has a clean, functional style. You can create simple components that compose very well into larger components, which you can then use to compose pages and entire applications. This simple composability is one of the main reasons I enjoy working with it.

But, it is not an application framework. It doesn’t pretend to be. This can be useful when all you want is some quick UI. But, as the application grows, you will need to depend on outside libraries for things like state-management, routing, and forms.

In this article, learn how to handle form input with React, from basic form input using simple state through advanced form components using Formik….

Getting to Know Custom CSS Properties

Lawrence Chabela Articles, CSS & HTML, Development Technologies & Tools 1 Comment

CSS custom properties are very powerful way for you to spice up your style sheets. They are a way to separate JavaScript behavior and styling, as shown in the ability to set information in the JavaScript for the CSS to use for its styling.

Even if you’re using a preprocessor for your CSS, there is still a place for CSS custom properties to be directly embedded in your CSS.

In this blog: we introduce custom CSS properties, show why you want to use them, how to define them, and how to change them with and without JavaScript.

An Example Progressive Web App on Android

RJ Dela-Cruz Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Mobile 6 Comments

In my experience, the best way to learn a new technology is to create something tangible with it. I recently sought out to learn Angular and Angular Material. So, I developed an experimental Angular app that uses omdbapi to query Movie Posters. It’s aptly named Movie Poster Finder.

Developing the Movie Poster Finder application, I ran into a thing called PWA, which is also known as Progressive Web Applications. I thought it was really neat that both Android and mobile Chrome treat them as native applications.

In this post, I will show an example Progressive Web Application in action, explaining what I encountered when turning an experimental Angular web application into a PWA.