Lead me, Master of the soaring vault
Of Heaven, lead me, Father, where you will.
I stand here prompt and eager to obey.
And ev’n suppose I were unwilling, still
I should attend you and know suffering,
Dishonourably and grumbling, when I might
Have done so and been good as well. For Fate
The willing leads, the unwilling drags along.

It appears that over time, applications I use tend to mysteriously lose functionality when they are “updated” or “new” versions are released. Yes, I use Apple Inc. products. The latest seems to be the inability to set GPS data in photographs that don’t already contain them. Apple’s new Photos application completely lacks the feature and Aperture (no longer being updated) will not allow modification of the originals. Hence, there I was, just back from a trip around the Grand Canyon with a bunch of photos that needed to be Geo-tagged and no easy way to do it.

Today iOS version of the Portland Women’s History Trail went live in the Apple AppStore.

Late last week the Android version of the Portland Women’s History Trail went live in the Google play.

There are a number of quirky tasks to complete when you get ready to publish an app in either the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. They are not the type of thing I, as a developer, usually think about when starting a project. As the Portland Women’s History Trail gets nearer to “submission ready,” I’ve steadily chopped away at that list, but the first major task was making a fundamentally HTML/CSS/JavaScript application work when bundled and offline took a bit of research and ultimately, doing things the “right way.”

I had the opportunity to present at this year’s University of Scouting (Pine Tree Council, 2015) on Ham Radio. The class was well attended and there was a wealth of information to share – not all of which could be done in the short hour we had allocated to us. The attendees were mostly unlicensed Scouts and adults looking to understand what would be involved in earning the Radio Merit Badge and becoming a licensed Ham.

Jekyll has really been a great tool to develop a site with. It allows me to take a bunch of content and lay it into templates to generate a static website, with dynamic-like content, that can be served from nearly anywhere. With jQuery Mobile and some JavaScript thrown in, an entire application is easily born. This was the approach I took with the Portland Women’s History Trail project. However, my troubles began when working to bundle the HTML5/CSS/JavaScript into an native app with Cordova.