Light Writings

Being able to easily and quickly integrate different workflows is at the core of Node Red. In my case that means letting hardware control what and where music is playing by simply sending a MQTT packet to my server (running mosquitto on a pi) which is monitored by Node Red. The problem arises when working with the node-red-contrib-spotify package, which is really inconsistent with the types of input it requires and lets you guess between a list, a list of lists or a list of JSON objects. [Read More]

Sometimes, small but carefully crafted UI elements elevate an application from good to outstanding and show the love for detail the developer has put into their app. Today we are gonna look into one of those special widgets: a Glowing Progress Indicator Breaking up the Problem Tackling a complex UI component like an interactive, animated and glowing progress indicator all in one go quickly becomes overwhelming. Finding intermediate goals makes the whole process more approachable: [Read More]

What would you do, if you wanted a premium feature in an Android app, but were too greedy to spend ten bucks on it? Right, you invest >200$ worth your time for an unstable result! What really is an App? First off, you got to understand the basics. Android apps are stored in apk files, which are just fancy zip files that adhere to some defined format (like containing an AndroidManifest. [Read More]