Technology Tussles
Managing complexity in an ever changing world
Why Software Projects Overrun
Last week saw the launch of Squbes onto the Google Play store. Something to celebrate – but it was nearly a month overdue – and the iOS release was a week later. So what went wrong and why do software projects overrun? Underestimating complexity When estimating how long a software project will take to deliver, […] (more)
Creating lightweight web sites with PHP
Back to basics So I’ve had a couple of months of using WordPress now, and I have to say for blogging, site which are going to grow rapidly or for multi-editor sites, I would definitely recommend it. I still believe, however, it is overkill for many uses cases. HTML is very good at what it […] (more)
Updating CocoaPods to run Flutter Apps on iOS
Having successfully run a couple of Flutter Apps on Android devices and the iOS Simulator (from AndroidStudio), I was not expecting there to be much of a problem getting my App running on iOS. Unfortunately as soon as I tried to run my code from XCode I hit an error A quick search revealed a […] (more)
Styling PopupMenuItem with Flutter themes
In my previous post I looked at creating a reusable popup menu in flutter and applying a flexible theme from ThemeData. After a bit of testing I’ve uncovered two minor wrinkles. The first is that the icons in my PopupMenuItem don’t take their style from iconTheme as I had anticipated. Instead, for some unknown reason […] (more)
Reusable overflow menu in Flutter
One of the problems of learning new languages is that the majority of example code shows only the simplest use cases. With Flutter particularly I have found that the samples in the documentation and answers available on Stack Overflow are built to solve specific single widget needs rather than being coded for reusability. When you […] (more)
Styling Flutter (Part 2)
As part of my flutter journey I have been updating an app I wrote a few years ago, and applying some dynamic themes to it. In part one (Styling Flutter – Nightmare in Themesville) we looked at how to use the ThemeData object to apply a dynamic dark theme to light theme switch. In this […] (more)
Flexible Themes in Flutter
Following on from my last post about the potential pitfalls of Flutter themes, let’s look at some of the benefits. Looking at articles on Medium and answers on StackOverflow it seems that a lot of people fail to grasp the power of themes, and apply styles in an ad-hoc fashion at the widget or property […] (more)
Post Office Horizon Scandal
Organisational Culture It is nothing to do with me, but I have been thinking a lot in the last few days about the Post Office Horizon scandal, and the ability of large software systems to ruin people’s lives. As I write, Paula Vennells is finishing her wholly inadequate testimony to the independent inquiry. I was […] (more)
Styling Flutter – Nightmare in Themesville
One of the great things about Flutter is how quickly you can progress with a project. Everyone says it. Flutter development is fast. Except when it isn’t. Where it comes unravelled for me is when I try and apply themes to my project. I’m a big fan of generic code. Declare something once, use it […] (more)
Creating reusable patterns for WordPress Themes
As I’ve hinted at before one of the advantages of writing websites from scratch is that you get to be in control of everything. Of course as a site grows in complexity that can become a disadvantage too. Control, however, is addictive – and now I am using WordPress I am working hard at bending […] (more)
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