Google Chrome is my go-to web browser for many reasons: it’s fast, supports modern web standards, and has a large ecosystem of awesome browser extensions that make life as a web developer much easier. Here are just a few that I can’t live without! 1. Awesome Screenshot Taking screenshots of your browser window is an extremely useful function. You can…
We all want things to be fast. There are numerous studies that show users get frustrated when a website takes too long to load. Services like Google have set the bar high in terms of speed and response time. Google returns highly complex search results in less than a second. Depending on the complexity of your website or web application,…
Beacons are small physical devices that broadcast wireless signals to mobile apps which can then react accordingly. In short, your mobile app will know when your phone moves closer to or further away from a beacon that is stuck on a wall (or anywhere else). The term “beacon” is commonly used to refer to both the physical device itself as…
This post is a follow up to my original post on how you can configure your iPad (or iPhone) to lock the user into a single application. This can be extremely useful if your iPad is used in a public area of your office, or as a kiosk display at a trade show. My previous post used the “Guided Access”…
If you’re not careful, the communication tools you use every day might be exposing sensitive information about yourself, your business, or your customers, to some nefarious characters. Hackers and identity thieves are real, and many of them use some form of “digital snooping” to collect the information they need to do their damage. Usernames, passwords, account numbers, and other kinds…
We’ve been using the Appcelerator Titanium mobile framework for years now (from v1.0 all the way to 5.2.0 as of this writing), and it has served us well for apps both large and small. However, we encountered a new challenge recently in one of our mobile apps: how to theme the app AND allow the user to select their preferred…
At some point in every Rails application’s life, you’ll need to perform some kind of maintenance or code update that will require taking your application offline for a short period of time. There are methods to achieve zero-downtime deployments, but sometimes it’s just easier to take your application offline for 5 minutes during a deployment. If you know that no-one…
We love coffee here at Web Ascender, and I mean we LOVE IT. We typically consume 3 – 4 pots in a morning, so the path into the break room is well-traveled! We all take turns making coffee when it runs dry, but for a few weeks straight I just couldn’t get my timing right. I’d always arrive just in…
If you manage your own database servers, at some point you’ve probably thought about moving to “the cloud”. Cloud databases provide some nice benefits when compared to traditional bare-metal servers: Ability to scale up (and down) easily Essentially unlimited disk space (no more “the hard disk is full” panic-attacks!) Automated backups and snapshots of your data Expertly-managed infrastructure, so you…
We’ve tried a lot of different tools and strategies for project management and internal communication, but one of the most effective things we’ve done is watch some TV. We mounted a TV in a common area of our office that displays a rotating dashboard of metrics about our business. It changes over time, but we’ve displayed things like: Number of…