Technology Servants

About Technology Servants

Bill Pringle

Technology Servants specializes in helping small to medium size businesses and non-profit organizations use technology to become more efficient. We will meet with you to understand your current and future needs. We will study your methods and identify areas where we can help you better achieve your objectives.

We believe that the best way to use technology to help an organization is to make things easier for people. We look for ways to automate manual procedures that take significant time or are prone to errors. We also look at how information is communicated within and through the organization, looking for ways to improve the flow. In some cases, we can increase your efficiency without additional technology. When additional technology is necessary, we try to use open source tools to reduce your costs and allow you to customize applications to suit your specific needs.

Shopping List - an iPhone SQLITE tutorial Part 3

Bill Pringle

This is the third in a series of articles about programming on the iPhone using SQLITE. If you have not yet done so, you should probably read part 1 and part 2 before attempting this article.

In the last article, we learned how to add new elements to the shopping list. During this session, we will learn how to delete and edit existing articles. The edit function will finally allow us to add notes, change the quantity needed, etc. from the application. Former versions required us to do that in the database.

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Shopping List - an iPhone SQLITE tutorial

Bill Pringle

Introduction

This is the first in a series of articles on writing applications for the iPhone. The application is a shopping list program that I had written for my old Palm Pilot and am adapting to my iPod Touch. For the iPhone, I am using SQLITE, a free database program that comes with the iPhone SDK. This article covers an initial "bare bones" version of the application. Future articles will cover some of the more advanced features.

The application works as follows: A database is created that contains a list of items that you normally buy. Each item has a name, how many you need (possibly zero), and notes for additional information. In the full version, there is also a list of stores you frequent. For each item, you can indicate what stores carry each item, and filter the list by stores.

For this version, we simply have a single list. The items you need have a check mark next to them. As you buy the item, you can uncheck it. When there are no more checked items, you have everything you wanted to buy. In later versions we will get fancier, but this is simple enough to get you started programming, but still have enough functionality to be useful.

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Shopping List - an iPhone SQLITE tutorial Part 2

Bill Pringle

Introduction

This is the second in a series of articles on programming the iPhone / iPod Touch. In the first article we created a shopping list with minimal functionality. The user could display a shopping list and toggle the "needed" status of the entries. In this article, we will learn how to start making changes to the list. If you haven't done it yet, you should read the first article of this series.

In this version of the application, the user will be able to add new items to the shopping list. We will also add the methods needed to change or delete items, but we won't develop the views necessary to make those changes until a future article.

The basic work flow is that when the app is first loaded, the root view displays the shopping list in a table view. If the user clicks on the Add button, the root view is replaced by the Add View screen, which allows the user to enter the information about a new item. If the user clicks on the Save button, the new item is saved in the database and the shopping list is refreshed by reading the database again.

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Database Tricks

Bill Pringle

This is the fourth in a series of articles about improving your web sites.

Read the first article.

Read the previous article.

This document describes some things you can do to improve your database driven web site. Some of these suggestions require some programming and Database Administrator (DBA) skills. If you are not familiar with these skills, you should find someone who could help you with these techniques.

Databases provide a great deal of flexibility to a web site. It allows you to create templates and then insert database query results to provide a large number of web pages with very little work. It also allows you to update the content of the web site easily – even in real time under the right conditions. However, they do have some drawbacks. Pages tend to display slower and search engines can have difficulty understanding what is on your web site. This document provides some tips on how you can overcome these drawbacks while still taking advantage of their flexibility.

Most dynamic web pages consist of a page template which is displayed for all pages of a given type (item list, item detail, etc.). Typically, the template includes the static information: page header and footer, navigation, side bars, additional links, etc. The dynamic information is then obtained by sending a query to the database to request the current information for the specific page, formatting the query results and inserting that information into certain sections of the template page.

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