A publication on software development

Mar 25, 2016

How to setup Google reCAPTCHA in a ReactJS app?

Google’s reCAPTCHA is an industry standard when it comes to fighting bots. Integrating it in a regular web app has almost become a no-brainer, thanks to plugins available on almost every platform to do the job. With this expectation, I started…

Umar Ashfaq

Apr 18, 2015

How to install ColorThief in a NodeJS project?

ColorThief is an incredibly cool library that not only gives you dominant color of a given image but also generates a color palette out of it. However, trying to make it work in a NodeJS project can become devilishly hard because of its…

Umar Ashfaq

Jan 2, 2015

Why my browser sent duplicate requests to the server for a page?

I have a specific page in one of my webapps, requesting which from browser sent duplicate requests to the backend controller. We spent hours and hours but found no clue: there was no page refresh tag in head, no…

Umar Ashfaq

Oct 18, 2014

When not to use Q.denodeify?

Q is a promising promise library, and Q.denodeify is a savior from pyramid of doom in NodeJS apps, but:

Do not use Q.denodeify for those NodeJS functions which don’t follow error-first callback approach.

Legit use:

Umar Ashfaq

May 20, 2014

An Easy Way To Use Contact Picker

API for selecting a contact in iOS seems unnecessarily difficult, it becomes a nightmare when you have to use it again and again at different places in your project. I think the idea of delegates is over-used in iOS, and they could have made things much simpler by…

Umar Ashfaq

May 8, 2014

Mimicking JavaScript’s alert, confirm and prompt in iOS

While some people argue against these functions, I think they are pretty good tools for rapid prototyping. And I really missed them in iOS, so I created similar functions in my iOS projects. Here is how they can be used:

[sourcecode…

Umar Ashfaq

May 2, 2014

How to make scrolling work on an iOS app screen?

Among many other things, scrolling is one that we take for granted when developing web apps. As soon as content grows beyond visible screen, good browsers themselves add scrollbars to the screen. Try making it work on an iOS app screen, you’ll…

Umar Ashfaq

Apr 30, 2014

Taming UIAlertView

There are a few things in iOS development which are surprisingly difficult, UIAlertView is one of them. If your UIAlertView contains only one button, which cancels the dialog, things will be easy. But as soon as you’ll think of adding more buttons to it, you’ll realize that you’ll need to…

Umar Ashfaq

Apr 29, 2014

How To Extract String Reference To An Image In iOS And Then Load The Image Later?

Recently I had to create this flow in one of my projects:

Let the user select an image from the gallery.
Store the image reference to Core…

Umar Ashfaq

May 29, 2013

Hacking Into A Java Class

Official Java Docs may call it Anonymous Inner Classes or name it with some other heavy-weight formal jargon, but I would like to call it hacking into a Java class because with this technique you can inject your code into an existing class method.

For example, if you have a message…