JavaScript All The Things – Or – Why You Should Pay Attention To JavaScript

This post is inspired by all the comments I’ve seen this week about JS in the enterprise. I would have never imagined this 10 years ago, but JavaScript is now pretty much ubiquitous. Here are a few reasons why you need to paying attention to JavaScript if you aren’t already, and why you should definitely not write it […]

IBM Acquires StrongLoop – Leveling Up Node.js in the Enterprise

Today IBM announced the acquisition of StrongLoop, Inc,  leaders in enterprise development on Node.js and major contributors to Express, LoopBack, and other Node.js tools and frameworks. Node.js is an incredible tool for rapidly building highly performant and scalable back end systems, and you develop it using a familiar core language that most front-end developers are already accustomed […]

Say What? Live video chat between iOS & WebRTC with Twilio & IBM Watson Cognitive Computing in Real Time

What I’m about to show you might seem like science fiction from the future, but I can assure you it is not. Actually, every piece of this is available for you to use as a service.  Today. Yesterday Twilio, an IBM partner whose services are available via IBM Bluemix, announced several new SDKs, including live video chat as a […]

Data Management for Apps that Work as Well Offline as They Do Online

Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking at ApacheCon in Austin, TX on the topic of data management for apps that work as well offline as they do online.  This is an important topic for mobile apps, since, as we all painfully know already, there is never a case when you are always online […]

Video: The Next Generation of Native Apps Built with IBM MobileFirst

Last month I had the opportunity to speak at the DevNexus developer conference in Atlanta on building native iOS apps IBM MobileFirst. DevNexus is a great event, and it is always a privilege to attend – I highly recommend it for next year.   If you weren’t able to make it, no worries!  Most of the sessions were […]

IBM Watson QA + Speech Recognition + Speech Synthesis = A Conversation With Your Computer

Back in November I released a demo application here on my blog showing the IBM Watson QA Service for cognitive/natural language computing connected to the Web Speech API in Google Chrome to have real conversational interaction with a web application.  It’s a nice demo, but it always drove me nuts that it only worked in […]

GeoPix: A sample iOS app powered by IBM MobileFirst for Bluemix

In this post I’d like to show a fairly simple application that I put together which shows off some of the rich capabilities for IBM MobileFirst for Bluemix that you get out of the box – All with an absolute minimal amount of your own developer effort.  Bluemix, of course, being IBM’s platform as a […]

Updated: Parallax Effects in Hybrid/Web Apps

A while back I wrote about adding parallax effects to your HTML/JS experiences to make them feel a bit richer and closer to a native experience.  I’ve just added this subtle (key word *subtle*) effect to a new project and made a few changes I wanted to share here. If you are wondering what I […]

Getting Started with IBM Bluemix Mobile Services (MBaaS)

I recently wrote an overview of IBM Bluemix’s Mobile Back-end as a Service offerings. I wanted to elaborate on the offerings, plus provide in-depth technical and implementation details, so I decided to produce this 5 part video series on Getting Started with IBM Bluemix Mobile Services. This post specifically covers native iOS, though there are also Android and […]

MBaaS – IBM Mobile Cloud Services, Bluemix & MobileFirst

MBaaS, or Mobile Backend as a Service, seems to be a particularly hot topic these days. MBaaS generally refers to backend services for mobile applications that provides data storage, user management, push notifications, and other pertinent mobile APIs.   This is more than just “Cloud Services” which more generally refer to a scalable virtual cluster of computing […]