Build vs. Buy: How to Decide When Adding Features to Your Software Project
Creating new software involves a lot of decisions. When adding features, a common question is whether to write custom code or buy an existing product. There isn’t a straightforward right or wrong answer. Many people will tell you there is, but that is too simplistic. Many factors can influence the decision. How capable is the…
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Adding Angular to Your Electron App
In an earlier blog post, I described how we could create an Electron tray application. In that post, we got a simple Electron application running. In this post, we will augment the application with Angular to provide structure and utilities helpful for building an application. This should be very straightforward, but if you try to…
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SQLite and Full-Text Searches
SQLite is an interesting database technology. While not a technology we would often use on the backend, it is great for mobile projects because of its lightweight nature. A feature many people don’t know about is its ability to perform fuzzy text searches (full text). This ability is pretty much baked into SQLite; it only…
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.NET 7 Has Arrived
.NET 7 is out, and it is a pretty significant upgrade. Performance, ASP.NET, MAUI, and C# 11 are some of the new features. Microsoft continues to improve the performance improvements of .NET. As I have discussed in a previous blog post, Microsoft has needed to improve the cold start performance of .NET for a while….
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RBAC vs ABAC
Most modern systems have some form of authentication and authorization. Authentication refers to figuring out who someone is (think of user login). Authorization refers to figuring out what a user can do within a system. Just because a user can log in does not mean they can do anything inside a system. In many systems,…
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More SQLite and Swift
In my previous blog post, I mentioned using SQLite with an iOS application. In this post, we will extend that example to support text searching. While SQLite is a single file database that is pretty straightforward to work, it contains a powerful full-text search feature. To use this full-text feature of SQLite, you will need…
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SQLite and Swift
When building an application, you often need some way to store associated data. Applications usually store less data than cloud applications, but many of the same constraints still exist. You still need to store data. Some of the data is relational, such as contacts or addresses. And having the ability to store relational data in…
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Safari Push Notifications?
At Don’t Panic Labs, we have built many iOS and Android applications over the years. Many of them have been built using some sort of cross-platform technology, like Ionic. But why so many mobile applications? Not one reason, many reasons. Sometimes customers want to be in the Apple and Google app stores. Sometimes they want…
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Estimating Your Cloud Costs
Estimating cloud costs isn’t always easy, especially if your goal is to be super exact. The desire to be super precise will probably cause you to spend more time estimating the costs of resources than the resources might cost themselves. Always remember that development time is expensive. Trying to estimate down to the dollar isn’t…
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CouchDB Views
CouchDB is a pretty amazing technology, but it is a little unique. With many data stores, you just query data. You can do that with CouchDB’s Mango queries, but CouchDB’s primary way to query data is by using views. Views are pre-created, much like creating any document within CouchDB. After creating your view, you can…
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