Tastes Like Burning: An Example of ARKit and iOS Particle Systems

Derek Andre Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile Leave a Comment

We have reached a peak in computer science: I can make fire come out of my face. Apple has made it simple with an iPhone X to track a userโ€™s face and use a particle systems file to add special effects.

In this post, I will demonstrate how to โ€œbreathe fireโ€ using Xcode 9.4.1, Swift 4.1.2, and iOS 11.4.1 on my iPhone X. For this tutorial, you will need a physical device with a TrueDepth camera. The completed project is available on GitHub.

File -> New -> Project
A lot of iOS tutorials start off with creating a Single View Application. That can get boring. Luckily in this article….

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile App Service

Jeff Hopper .NET, Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Tutorial, Xamarin 3 Comments

Earlier this month my friend Ryan introduced us to Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism. In that post, Ryan started a mobile application to display blog posts which he called SimpleBlog.

In this article, I would like to continue that demonstration by adding a back-end server to persist and share these blogs. This will be accomplished using Azureโ€™s Mobile App Service which falls within its free tier services.

Yes, you did read that right: you can spin up an Azure account and have access to try out many of Azureโ€™s features. For instance, the example I am going to walk you through today can be hosted indefinitely without costing you anything, and to that, you could add nine more web, mobile, or API services. See https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ for more information.

There is no way I am going to be able to cover all the possibilities available in an Azure Mobile App service, much less what Azure has to offer. My intent in this post is to help โ€œwhet your appetiteโ€ on the possibilities by giving a quick overview of just two great frameworks that play great together: the Microsoft.Azure.Mobile.Client mobile framework tied to an Azure Mobile Apps Service….

Getting Started with Xamarin Forms and Prism

Ryan Nguyen .NET, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Mobile, Xamarin 3 Comments

In this blog, Iโ€™ll show you how easy it is to create an Android and iOS application using Xamarin Forms while utilizing Prism.

What are Xamarin Forms?
Xamarin Forms is a platform that allows developers to create native Android, iOS, and Windows applications while using the beloved C# programming language.ย 

An attractive feature of Xamarin Forms is that it uses a shared C# codebase to create a native user interface specific to their platform. Out of the box, Xamarin provides large collections of controls to get started.ย It also has the ability to access native platform features, such as camera access, GPS, text to speech, etc, by using theย Dependency Service.

What is Prism?
According to the Prism website, Prism is defined as โ€œa framework for building loosely coupled, maintainable, and testable XAML applications in WPF, Windows 10 UWP, and Xamarin Forms. Prism provides an implementation of a collection of design patterns that are helpful in writing well-structured and maintainable XAML applications, including MVVM, dependency injection, commands, EventAggregator, and others.”ย In other words, Prism helps users to write better code….ย 

Keyhole Releases Open Source, React-Based Chat UI Component

Keyhole Software Articles, Company News, Conversational Apps, Keyhole Creations, React Leave a Comment

The Keyhole team is excited to announce the release of an open source UI chat component that can be embedded in applications. This UI Component is React-based and can be used for chatbot and chat-based user interfaces.

This component is stand alone. It has a configurable implementation to talk with any server-side API. This component abstracts away its data transport middleware and, in the absence of a consumer-provided implementation, emulates its own asynchronous reply….

How an SMS Application Took a Job (i.e. Task)

David Pitt Articles, Automation, Conversational Apps, JavaScript, Keyhole Creations Leave a Comment

This blog is about a humanโ€™s job being replaced by automation. But, before you start composing emails and social media responses, know that itโ€™s a job that I think most folks would gladly allow an automated mechanism to take over.

The โ€œjobโ€ discussed in this blog is the need to contact individual users (in this case, employees) when those users forgot to accomplish a required task.

In this blog, we discuss a conversational application solution used internally at Keyhole Software for automated SMS text messaging features surrounding time tracking. The solution, implemented with conversational application platform KHS {Convo}, allowed for time entries to be submitted via text and automated, schedule-based notifications….