Open Source Golf Scoring App on Meteor JS

We are currently tied into development for Truckily, a mobile app and marketing software for food trucks, and being ever learning as we can be, wanted to test out the viability of async data uploads through javascript frameworks.

In the past (and currently) we use Backbone.js, and Knockout for one page apps. We heard and followed the release of Meteor, a new rapid development framework for async web apps. 

Because of the ‘new-ness’ of Meteor, building on it was fun, but we had never decided to use it on live projects, until now. This summer, Meteor was able to raise $11.2Million to continue development of their platform, and further develop with a solid team.

So, in an effort to test it out, and also build a tool to track our own golfing hobby, we built “golf-scoring-meteor-app”. This app will allow you to score a golf game for any number of players, from any mobile device all live. If you are golfing with 4 people, one can add strokes to your count, and another will instantly see the resulting additions. Pretty neat.

Check it out on Github [Fork it, modify, rework, do whatever, or contribute to make it even awesomer]. We included all you need to take the files, modify the name - deploy it on your own meteor server and save it to the homescreen with app icons for all iOS versions (we excluded iPad, because you just dont carry iPads to the golf course). 

Have fun with this, and let us know if you have any suggestions or updates you might like to see.

-Derek

Twitter Bootstrap 2.1 Released

Yesterday Twitter Bootstrap 2.1 updates were released after a few week beta. The main improvements include bug fixes, the ability to ‘affix’ items to a link, as well as a few image classes and improvements to the fluid grid offsets.

Ok, so the main framework of Bootstrap remains the same. But what is the one thing you can do TODAY that will save you time and make your designs just a touch more customized?

Image Classes!

Take your images, or even better, your dynamic profile pictures and add in a class to the image, instead of creating your own .image-class in CSS or doing the styling inline. Add the class=”img-circle” to create a profile page much like popular social-commerce website Zaarly uses. 

This little trick can spruce up an aging network, and would be a fun idea to integrate into Wordpress themes (and plugins).

Fun with Wolfram Alpha - July Edition

Most techies have tried out WolframAlpha for the computation engine and algorithms that provide true knowledge responses to questions and equations. Even Siri is using the logic within Wolfram to provide John Malkovich answers to the meaning of life. 

One of the craziest functionalities in Wolfram is the ability to find out overhead flights based on your physical location. Pretty neat, but this has been covered many times before. Try it out for yourself at WolframAlpha…

Scroll down and you get a map of the stars and flights correlated against each other. This shows the whole sky above your head, and maybe in this case, if it was night you could actually figure out where flights are. Neat!

This map below shows the COOLEST feature in my opinion. In an attempt to figure out what other objects are ‘nearby’ or ‘overhead’, I figured to search for other things that fly. One thing was Satellites. Turns out this does work! Searching for overhead satellites will show the visible satellites (highlighted in red) as well as their name. Neat to find out who, and which countries have satellites buzzing overhead. 

The readout of ‘visible non-debris’ satellites shows links to a description of the satellite (if available) and the country of origin. At the time of this search, there were 1761 visible satellites over Kansas City. Random information, but fun to try out when trying to kill a few minutes. 

Do you know of any more Wolfram Alpha tricks, advanced features, or neat functions? Leave a note! 

Using Cacoo for Virtual Wireframing

Using Google+ does have benefits, especially the Hangouts function. One interesting add-on is Cacoo, a live drawing and modeling app that can be used for (among other things) wire-framing. 

An interesting use-case is to use this as a client-developer live discussion and brainstorm whiteboard. Instead of requiring an on-site meeting, we can now conduct whiteboarding from anywhere with internet access.   

  

 The final images and graphs can be exported as any number of image filetypes, giving an easy way to upload these as reference on your Dropbox or Evernote accounts (For even more cloud redundancies!).

We plan on implementing Cacoo Wireframing sessions even if we don’t need to, just because this is way too fun.

-Derek

Derek Kean: Hosting Static Websites on Amazon Web Services S3 →

derekkean:

Wanting to create a website and host it somewhere without going through the issues of buying a year’s worth of hosting? Amazon Web Services is amazing at providing on-demand hosting and delivery solutions with high reliability up-time.

So without more pandering, let’s begin.

First, sign in to…