Working for Beer

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Beer, Beets, Battlestar Galactica. Oh my! I feel it is safe to assume that beer is pretty popular here in the good old USA. Thirty years ago, everyone was drinking their favorite big brand: Bud Light, Miller Light, or — my personal favorite of the classic big beers — Coors Light. Now the world has…

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Mobile Technology Choices – Executive Summary

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Delivering applications for mobile devices is essential for many business applications. For much of the business software we write at Don’t Panic Labs, some sort of mobile experience is necessary and can be done in many ways. This post will walk through many of the options available today. There really isn’t an “always do it…

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2018 Don't Panic Labs interns

Notes from the 2018 Summer Interns

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Hello! We are the seven 2018 summer interns of Don’t Panic Labs (Matt Kachek, Jack Rowen, Luke Farritor, Lexie Karkazis, Taylor Bernt, Noah Costello, and Lee Hayes). In this blog post, we’ll share about the projects that we worked on (MyLNK, TeamMates, and BenefitEd) as well as share some of the experiences we had outside…

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Creating a Barcode Scanner App with Ionic

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Scanning a barcode or a QR code is a pretty common business request. Luckily, almost all users walk around with devices capable of scanning barcodes: their phones. In this blog post, we are going to step through creating a mobile scanner application using Ionic, Xcode, and an iPhone. Create a blank app called “IonicCamera”: ionic…

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Apple Make MacBooks Great Again

Apple: Make MacBooks Great Again

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Dear Apple, I love my 2014 MacBook Pro. It has been a rock-solid development machine, especially when I’m building mobile apps. You’ve made it pretty rough to do iOS development on anything else, but I can let that slide because your hardware is sooo good. But as computers often do, mine is beginning to slow…

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Getting Started with Ionic, Part 3

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In my previous post, we did things that really didn’t utilize any device features. In this post, we are going to use two native device features: email and phone. Let’s get started by installing the email plugin. ionic cordova plugin add cordova-plugin-email-composer
npm install –save @ionic-native/email-composer Using this plugin can be a little tricky. We have…

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Getting Started with Ionic, Part 2

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In my first Ionic blog post, we just got started creating a simple app using Ionic. In this post, we are going to create a simple application that is a basic contact manager. To speed this along, we are going to build off of what we started in part 1. The first change is ironically…

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Getting Started with Ionic, Part 1

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There are many strategies to building mobile applications. Some people prefer to go the 100% native route, writing their applications in Swift / Java. Others like to use Xamarin and write one application in C#. There are yet still some that just write a single website that works well in mobile. In this article, we…

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Two Months of Mobile UX: Just Don’t

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I’ve been on the road for about a month and a half now traveling Europe. My 15-inch MacBook is many things, but light is not one of them. It remained at home and I’m on the road with an Android phone and an older model iPad. Traveling this way has helped me see with maddening…

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The Day Microsoft Told Me “We should see other people”

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In my July blog post (Why I’m Betting on Windows Phone), I shared my history as a Windows Phone user and continued confidence in its future. As a user of their phone/mobile OS for around 10 years, I was dumbstruck by the new Lumia phones: they’re not available or compatible with Verizon. The news was…

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