An old metaphor, intended to explain the concept of “infinity,” states that an infinite number of monkeys, banging away at an infinite number of keyboards, would write code just as well as we humans can, with better commenting.
An old metaphor, intended to explain the concept of “infinity,” states that an infinite number of monkeys, banging away at an infinite number of keyboards, would write code just as well as we humans can, with better commenting.
There’s been a good deal of talk, in this blog and elsewhere, about the brave new world of the internet of things (IoT) and how it will transform our personal and business lives. The talk has been accompanied by no small amount of hype, with pundits proclaiming that there will be anywhere from hundreds of millions to trillions(!) of devices connected to the internet in the near future.
Images in apps and web pages are a bit like electricity, or the internet itself: You don’t notice them until they aren’t there. And when they aren’t there, the experience can be unpleasant.
When an image loads slowly or not at all, it’s easy to blame the network connection or the size of the image. However, there’s actually much more to it than that. An app’s ability to load images quickly depends in large part on the efficiency of its image processing routines, which use complex algorithms to load images as fast as possible without degrading image quality.
In the world of software development, enhancements in development tools and platforms tends to be incremental. Certainly, new tools, frameworks, and platforms that ease the job of software development or software project management come along with sometimes mind-spinning regularity, and we have discussed a good number of them in this space. But after that initial release, revolutionary enhancements of those tools in functionality, capability, and ease of use are pretty rare.
In ancient Roman mythology, Vulcan was the god of fire and metal smithery. It’s from his name that we get the word “volcano.” Much later, in Star Trek lore, Vulcan was the home planet of First Officer Spock of the starship Enterprise.
Continuing the flurry of posts here related to cross-platform development, we turn our attention now to yet another up-and-coming cross-platform technology: Electron. The Electron framework (formerly known as Atom Shell) enables developers to build desktop apps using standard Web tools: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
