It was 1996, I was six, and my parents took me and my brother to the Computer shop to get our very first computer. Back then in Uruguay it wasn’t that common to have a PC at home, but it was getting more and more popular. It was the beginning of the Internet as we know it Today and a lot of newspapers and magazines made lists of what kind of things you could do with it; from visiting the…
Ok, I should have written this a few months ago, but well, better late than never. After a couple months of development, CambiosUY is now available in Google Play. Unfortunately Google does not support merchant registration in Uruguay, which means I cannot provide in app purchases in CambiosUY. For this reason, the notifications feature (available for iOS) will not be available until this situation is fixed :=) I hope you enjoy using the app, and as always, all feedback is welcome!
Hey there! After more than a year, I’m back with a new post. Today I wanted to write a brief review about a book that I have recently read and that I enjoyed a lot. The book is called “The Design of Everyday Things” by Don Norman. In case you don’t know about him, Don Norman is widely known by his research and advocacy in human-centered design. You might have heard of the “Norman doors”, term referred to poor designed doors, that people…
For the last weeks, I’ve been developing my first app in iOS. Last week, surprisingly, I received the good news that the app was approved by Apple (theoretically the store was supposed to be closed by then). The app is called CambiosUY and allows you to be updated to the latest currency exchange rates in Uruguay. Some of the functionalities are; it tells you whether it’s a good or bad moment to exchange money, find the closest money exchange to you as…
A few weeks ago I had the chance to give a small talk about Web Accessibility in the place where I work. Some of the key points that I talked about were: Web accessibility benefits not only people with disabilities but also improves the usability of a website. Some of the guidelines given by the WCAG are not that complicated to implement, and you are gaining a great number of potential users. The sooner you start to think about accessibility while developing a web…
Scraping a webpage using ruby is very easy. First, install the ‘nokogiri’ gem by adding it to your gemfile or by executing the following command: gem install nokogiri Then, in your controller, open the webpage you want to scrap: require ‘open-uri’ page = Nokogiri::HTML(open(“http://webpage.com”)) Once you have opened the webpage, you are ready to access the content. Given the following html: </div> <div class=”term”> <div class=”word”>Scraping</div> <div class=”definition”>is a technique of extracting information from websites</div> </div> <div class=”term”> …. You can get the complete…
If you haven’t heard of reddit, reddit is a platform for sharing content such as news, posts and basically anything about almost every topic. The users of this site are the ones who make these content more or less visible to others by positive or negative voting it. As I said, you can find content about almost anything that comes to your mind, and the way to organize it is called ‘subreddit‘. A subreddit is like a category created by a user,…
Hi there! It’s been a while since my last post. Today I’m going to be writing about Arduino. In case you don’t know what Arduino is: Arduino is a microcontroller used for sensing and controlling things in your environment. Its easiness of use and the fact that it’s open-hardware has made it very popular in the last years. Right now I’m working on a couple of projects involving Arduino. You’ll know more about them in next posts. For one of these projects I needed to…
For the last year I’ve been working on a project to build a web app to help people to find recycling centers in their city. The idea is simple, you choose what you want to recycle and the web app will show you where you can do it. You can also specify your address or use your current location (GPS) so you can find the closest spots to you. The data come from open data sources or can be added by the users. If…
Recently, the use of pagination in the web has been slowly dropping and a new approach called “Infinite scroll” has increased in popularity. The idea is simple, instead of having several buttons to go back and forward, you can navigate through the results by scrolling down to the end of the page. The more you scroll the more results you see. Implementing an infinite scroll using javascript and jquery is not hard at all. However, making sure that it works in every browser can be…