Tony is a Geek

We bought an Amazon Fire TV stick earlier in the year, so that we could use the Amazon Prime Instant Video service on our ma-hoo-sive Samsung TV (rather than via the X-Box). This weekend I looked into "what is the Fire TV stick"? turns out it's running Android. I also was a little disappointed that none of the Apps allowed me to run an app that would display the Crunchyroll Manga/Anime shows.  After checking the official forums it turns out there is no Crunchyroll app for the Fire TV stick. This got me thinking....the Fire TV stick is running Android and the Crunchyroll app is a .apk app.... I'll now explain,  how to go about getting Crunchyroll onto the Fire TV stick and watching all those great Manga/Anime shows! >>>>>>>>> CLICK HERE to view the photo's of how to get this working <<<<<<<<<<

Okay, okay, okay..... so this "might" be a little bit of a promo for IBM, but I have to say this is a really interesting field to work with. There are loads of scenarios that you can think of where you could utilise the beacons to detect the location of a persons smartphone If you want to get up and running using IBM Presence Insights via Bluemix, click on the following link and press the BIG red button at the bottom, it'll guide you through all you need: https://presenceinsights.ng.bluemix.net/piui/ Here's the link to the generic sales/marketing web site link To be able to try this out, you'll need: Android smartphone (okay, you "can" have an iPhone....but, pfffhhh, if you must, there is an SDK for both) A couple of Beacons (you can get some from beaconinside.com - they're not the smallest, but they'll do the job and not break the bank) Some time to write a sample app using either Eclipse+ADT or Android Studio I'll ...

The more I see Augmented Reality blurring with Virtual Reality and "new" ways of thinking, the more I am liking where things are going for 2016. I backed the KickStarter project for Oculus Rift a couple of years back, when I got my headset and access to the code I was excited by the possibilities.  Unfortunately, it was just too new and I didn't have the time to dedicate to writing 1000's of lines of code for libraries.  I had the vision, but not the time. I see now that a lot of those libraries have now been written, so what I had in mind can now be achieved in a couple of days of hacking code together. I'm impressed. Check out the original article here.

I thought I would do a write-up and share how to use the Wikitude SDK for Android to allow you to see how awesome Augmented Reality is from your phone. Here's a little YouTube video showing the outcome of the slides presentation above: any questions, feel free to ask.

Here's a great article from Ray: Working with Ionic, Box, and IBM MobileFirst Summary = Box is a cloud storage provider much like Dropbox, but also provides some pretty cool workflow services as well.  While it is still early, you'll soon see some interesting collaborations between IBM and Box.  Ray, sets out to see how easy it would be to integrate Box into a Hybrid Mobile application using both Ionic and IBM MobileFirst. Check the article out , it includes a Video too:

Official IBM press-release Ionic press-release Yes, yes, yes..... this is several weeks late.  What can I say, I've been "busy"  :-) The good news is, IBM has this product called IBM MobileFirst (I may have posted a thing or two about it?!) that helps support making, managing and securing the back-end services of your Mobile applications.....and Ionic Creator is just an awesome front-end product for building the Mobile application itself. Officially putting these two things together is great news (I've been doing it un-officially for quite some time, so it's great that it's now official news).

A quick sample video on React Native integrated with the MobileFirst Platform Foundation

Create high-performance mobile UIs with Famo.us Level up to a native-code user experience for JavaScript apps With the Famo.us platform, mobile web UIs written in JavaScript can be as compelling as native-code implementations. Work through this article's examples to find out how Famo.us helps you easily create a high-performance user experience in your mobile apps. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-famous/index.html

4 Free ebooks to learn AngularJS 1. AngularJS Succinctly 2. Recipes With AngularJS 3. Practical AngularJS  4. AngularJS in 60 minutes  Find out more here: http://www.jquerybyexample.net/2015/02/4-free-ebooks-to-learn-angularjs.html

Whilst building my ACE! app - I needed to be able to upload images for the events / presentations / speakers and attendees. I thought, hey, that's simple, we've been doing this on normal web-servers for decades, I'll just write a server-side php page (a couple of lines of code) that saves the posted files to a folder and then I'll know the URL to reference them.  Sorted! I should have it all finished before the kettle has finished boiling for my cup of tea. Then I pondered for a bit.  How does this now work in the PaaS world (Clouds like IBM Bluemix, Google AppEngine, Amazon, that Microsoft one, etc...).  Ah, not such a simple solution now.  But a challenge.  Whilst drinking my cup of tea, I then set about making this work on IBM Bluemix. Here's a Slides.com presentation of how I made this work for me: