A team of Developers, Designers and Geeks. All about hacking and building things.
Python is known as a dynamic, (https://wiki.python.org/moin/Why is Python a dynamic language and also a strongly typed language) language. Most developers love it but some feel mad without type checking or type-hinted auto-completion. In Python3.5, Type Hints is introduced to further delight developers who want those features.
Continue reading “Type Hints – Better type at Python”
In WWDC2015, Apple announced iOS 9 for iPhone and watchOS 2 for iWatch. It has been a huge revamp for watchOS. Not until now, a watch app finally runs natively on the watch.
That means the code is now executing on your watch instead of the phone. By reducing multiple times of data transfer between devices, this is going to make the app loads a lot quicker and responds in a shorter period of waiting time.
Continue reading “Spentable (Expense Tracker): How we built our first app for watchOS 2”
We have many pixel lovers at Oursky. We strive for perfection in the UI design process, and most importantly, make sure developers implementing them perfectly.
Here we share our internal 101 guideline for developers, wish it will help more junior developer building Web like a Pro. Continue reading “UI 101: Simple Rules that make great front-end”
SQLAlchemy is arguably the most powerful and ubiquitous ORM framework for Python.
At Oursky, we have been using SQLAlchemy for quite a period of time and appreciated the flexibility and elegance it provides over the Data Mapper abstraction. No doubt, it works very well for modern web applications but what about long-running background jobs? Would the abstraction get in your ways? (tl;dr: yes, but we still prefer it)
Here are some hands-on experiences from us.
We built a popular iOS application with a song recommendation system at the backend. The system suggests a top list for 20 popular songs.
Previously our editors hand-picked popular songs by download count and gather a new playlist as a recommendation to users. Now, we want to automate this process and generate the playlist weekly.
Continue reading “SQLAlchemy in batches: Generating a top playlist”
In one of the Android app projects at Oursky, we started using Realm for data caching. So users won’t have to look at blank pages when they log back to the app, waiting for remote API results.
We think it’s a minimalistic yet reliable solution, and is worth giving it a shot for your next app. Just beware of the differences between versions, follow the conventions, and pay extra attention when using with other libraries.
More is discussed below in details and with example snippets.
Realm is the mobile database solution that proposed as a replacement for SQLite & Core Data.
It’s like using SQLite with an ORM (as those who used SQLAlchemy may have experience), with a lot of awesome and convenient methods for data transactions.
However, Realm is NOT built on top of SQLite. It persists on its own persistence engine.
Realm is also cross-platform that supports both iOS and Android, so developers who write Java, Swift, Objective-C can share the same Realm files painlessly.
Continue reading “Hands on Realm Database for Android projects”