Updates

Currently beavering through several bits and bobs.

Trying to help my boss sort a draft out for the website which is quite kool.

Been doing quite a bit on Codepen, check this pen for some kool drop down boxes.

Been playing with button and bits to create some good looking stuff!

My First App!

Over the last few days I have been playing around with App Inventor 2.

With a Google account you can create android app using a scratch type block code system.

Instead of writing the code out you place blocks together to gain the action your require. 

I have just finished building my version of the first tutorial video. My app is now available on Google Play here.

Called Talk to Me, its a text to speech application. Type in a word or phrase and it returns it out loud. Very basic and simple but fitting for my first ever app. I made a few tweaks with a pitch bar to change the pitch of her voice.

I'm proper proud of myself. I know some people with be thinking well anyone could make that and yes they could be that to point it so easy I highly recommend people to try it out and download my app of course.

Download my app..... oh and give your phone a shake lol.

makegameswith.us

I have just completed the course on cloning flappy bird, which is a the free course.

The site revolves around there summer and on-line academies. The latter is a $99 course running from the 23rd June till 10th August. 

No word of future course as this course has already started. I haven't tried to enrol to see what happens, it might give you other option at that point but doesn't look like it.

The summer academy is an 8 week course running in Palo Alto, California or New York City. Price is *cough* $5000 *cough*

Bit out of my range me thinks!

They offer a free* iOS Game Development course. I put "free*" for two reasons. The first is the obvious one, you need a mac that runs OS X Mavericks. Secondly the games you develop can be sold on the app store, ported to Android and they help you with artwork but take 30% of your iOS sales and 50% of Android. Free cost wise but you paying in the end. If you don't have a Mac your paying alot, you'll need to buy one!

Course is delivered well, worth checking out as a brief introduction to objective c but no content rich unless you have a mac but I don't.

Just a word about Code.org

I posted the other day about how I had finished the intro to computer science course of code.org.

Some thing that I didn't realise was the amount of courses available but they are links to external sites. Some paid some free but code.org is a vast array of computer science related content and we'll worth a look for anyone not just kids. Each course has an age who its recommended for.

Currently I'm looking at an iOS game development game course with makegameswith.us.

Well worth looking at!

Completed Code.org's "Intro to Computer Science"

Today i managed to complete the course. Through a lack of time and the nature of the site this hasn't been top of my priority.

Couple of things struck me about code.org on how useful a tool it is for children. 

It is without a doubt aimed at children but the course itself has the necessary component for coding.

I'm going to try and get my girls on it and see if they can work it out.

My Website update

For anyone trying to get onto my site current its is down, i hadn't noticed part of the terms of service with 5gbfree.com is that you had to keep its active and i had not made any additions to it for a bit so they cancelled my account. i'm hoping ti get a domain sorted soon so we'll be back up asap.

Thanks

Udacity update

I haven't to well over the last couple of days. I've had a chest infection and have a couple of days off work trying to recover. During these days I have have mostly been sleeping but there is only so much I can do before my back start to hurt and I feel worse than when i went to bed.

For the rest of the time i have been sitting at my laptop on Udacity.

I wrote a review on Udacity, when I did my reviews of the coding tutorial sites not long after I started this blog. I was impressed with how the content was delivered, the fact I could do most of it on my iPad but the price for a paid course was huge compared to the other site I had reviewed.

Anyway I received an email to tell me I could now do my courses on my phone through the new android app. I thought "cool" so I checked it out and it does offer a great on the move option for learning. It's presented very well through a Samsung Note 3 that I have. A Few months back I sat down and finished lesson one and some problem sets of the intro course. So when I went on the app I thought i'd look at what else was available. I found a couple of interesting courses and one was about app building in Salesforce. So I sat down and worked through the courseware and I enjoyed it. It wasn't quite what I expected but still well delivered course and very informative.

Think i expected it the be building mobile applications but i would of realized it wasn't if i had have read the course data properly. 

Udacity

Udacity again takes a different approach to teach coding. A different but similar approach. (confused?)

First I want to get something off my chest about Udacity. 

They offer a variety of courses in various coding related topics, I personally am working my way though the "intro to computer science". Udacity employs free course-ware and paid enrolment. the difference illustrated in the below picture.

So you get in class projects, tutor support etc etc. Udacity charges per course per month, course have a length but as the next picture shows:

Wow, yes that $150 per month. now I understand that the guy teaching is a professor of computer science at Stanford university but I don't want to pay Stanford tuition fees.

I can't fault how the lesson are delivered though. This is what I was talking about earlier that there approach it different but similar. 

The tutor( I forget his name ) (on the "intro to computer science"  course) present his lessons though an interactive white board. Writes with his pen and this translates to the screen your viewing through. Very clever way to do it in fairness, I really like the way he writes a quiz on the board and it allows user interaction. 

Another cool feature is they have an iPad app which allows full access to the site content. Hooray! This is a god send, for this reason alone I will complete as much of the free content as possible on my iPad.

New laptop update

I went ahead and purchased a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad from eBay courtesy of 3000rpm computers.

I have to say I’m very impressed with it, the laptop itself is a nice size and weight, the keyboard feels nice, not to mechanical or unresponsive to touch its just right and the performance is awesome. Boots from its 120gb SSD in about 10secs. Applications load instantly, no waiting for your web browser.

Very impressed, as with refurbished laptops it only has a 30mins guarantee on battery life and its like it know it, as it won't last any more than 30mins!

But I used it plugged in most of the time anyway plus I may look into getting a new battery for in the future.

I've not got round to putting Ubuntu on it yet, not sure if I will but we'll see.

I have however been playing StarCraft 2 on it quite a lot and it works flawlessly.

All in all a good purchase.

Another good purchase was a mouse i purchased from eBay.

For £1.98 bargin and great bit of kit.