December 2012
1 post
Host your site on CloudMine (and deploy it with a...
We’ve been polishing this feature for a while now, and we’re pleased to officially announce it. You can now use CloudMine to host your HTML5 / JavaScript powered apps. We’ve streamlined the deploy process: you can either drag-and-drop your site’s assets into the Dashboard, or use a git push-based deploy system.
How does it work?
Sign in to your CloudMine account and navigate to your Dashboard....
November 2012
1 post
3 tags
Teaming up with Singly for Social Superpowers
(Skip down to the video if you don’t feel like reading!)
There’s a new hip or useful breakout app coming out every few weeks.
It’s already less-than-easy to integrate with prevalent and mature APIs like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (who likes dealing with OAuth themselves, anyway?). So who really wants to keep tabs on, much less do the work to integrate with, these and...
October 2012
3 posts
Design Breakdown: UX, UI and Why — The New...
Over the past couple of weeks, the CloudMine team has made a number of leaps forward with our technology. We’ve integrated git for hosted sites, we’ve added a new level of API access for use in development mode, and we have a super secret social offering that is right around the corner.
As we increase the number of service offerings for our clients, we also increase the number of...
3 tags
There's Plenty of Sleep in Hustle
Everyone who knows us has probably seen our “There’s No Sleep in Hustle” t-shirts by now. This began with something the great Rob Spector (https://twitter.com/dn0t) said at a hackathon, and has since entered the lexicon as the CloudMine Thing We Say. We love Rob, and we love the shirts, but they are intended to be a bit tongue-in-cheek—and we’d like to clear the air about how our working lives...
2 tags
The Global Backend as a Service
A Hunch
A few weeks ago we had this hunch. Our hypothesis was that developers from around the world are building applications on the CloudMine platform. Being so intrigued with data, we hit up one of our databases and pulled down a list of IP addresses of people who signed up. We then mapped this dataset against a public record of IP address locations to aggregate their appropriate country of...
September 2012
3 posts
2 tags
What We've Learned By Evolving Our Documentation
With the recent release of our brand-new documentation, we’d like to elaborate on how the docs and our process have evolved through the product’s lifetime.
In the beginning
The first version of CloudMine was a REST API. We documented all of the endpoints and provided guidelines on how to use them. This was sufficient at first, before we had written any native libraries.
The...
2 tags
PennApps: The Hackathon that Changed Everything...
Okay, I’ll come right out and say it: I wasn’t totally on board with the whole “hackathon” thing. I like to code, and I love my job. But I do work a normal work week, and spending my weekend doing a lot more of the same wasn’t first priority for me.
That is, until last weekend, when I had the pleasure to attend PennApps, the world’s largest student-run...
2 tags
iOS Resources by Developers, for Developers
Being an individual developer can mean that it’s difficult to write iOS apps because some of the tools to do so can be costly or simply hard to find. Sure, you may be able to get along by writing little bits of it here and there on your own time - but there are many existing services that help make the development and deployment process much easier. That’s where App Dispatch comes...
August 2012
4 posts
4 tags
CloudMine goes SURFing
From getting our beginnings at a Startup Weekend and exploding on to the stage with help from the DreamIT accelerator, we’ve been able to spread our startup roots. As part of our commitment to the startup community at large, we’re going to be supporting the SURF Incubator space for digital startups. All of the SURF resident companies will have complete access to our platform for...
10 tags
App analytics and public Access Control Lists!
With the summer coming to a close we wanted to share what we’ve been working on over the past month.
What’s new?
The dashboard now has pretty graphs to show analytics for all of your deployed apps. Go ahead, be sneaky and dig deep to find out what your users are up to and see when the real action is happening.
Give your users the ability to share content with anybody who is logged...
8 tags
Forrester: "Backend as a service, the new mobile...
Being the designer amongst 7 hardcore developers who specialize in different niche worlds of software has been an interesting experience. Because designers and developers inherently solve problems, I thought it would be beneficial to merge these two areas of thought. Leveraging my understanding of visual storytelling and our developers’ understanding of french bistros – we’ll get to...
7 tags
We're a Top 10 Mobile App Development Tool!
Dailytekk, the curators of cool and useful tech, picked us as a top ten resource for mobile developers! We’re quite excited to have topped the list as one of the few BaaS players to make the cut.
Built to handle what you’re building
Variety is the spice of life and that’s the kind of ecosystem we’re supporting.
From the fresh take on Mr. Men and Little Miss with the...
June 2012
3 posts
Storm Clouds in VA, Happy CloudMiners all over
One of the benefits that our users enjoy is running their applications on our infrastructure platform. A great example of how this pays off was seen during the Great AWS Outage of 2012 recently. Our API, and more importantly our users’ apps, stayed up despite Amazon’s system-wide failures.
It all started on Friday night when our website and API monitoring
systems starting sending us...
7 tags
Bringing the BaaS
From our humble beginnings at a Startup Weekend Philly to being a Global Sponsor of all Startup Weekend events, the past nine months have been a whirlwind of growth and activity for us.
Embraced by developers — who are now running more than 1,500 apps on our platform — their feedback was instrumental in ironing out the kinks of developing apps on our backend. Months of strengthening the core have...
5 tags
Storing Private User Data with our JavaScript SDK
Most apps require storing some sort of user data, whether that’s login credentials or sensitive data. The previous post already gave a high level overview of how to use our built-in user account management, so let’s dive in a step further and see how to secure user data. For this example, we’re going to use a sample app built using our JavaScript SDK.
Keeping Private Data Safe
As an...
May 2012
2 posts
7 tags
User Account Management For Mobile Apps
We’re pleased to announce a dedicated set of tools for managing user accounts on all apps developed using our platform. All examples in this tutorial use the CloudMine iOS SDK, however, all of the operations are also available through our REST API.
Creating Accounts
The CMUser class contains all the methods you need to manage user accounts. To create a new account, initialize a new CMUser object...
4 tags
iOS SDK Refresh
We took your input, with just a bit of our own work sprinkled in for good measure, and updated the iOS library. All of the updates compile and translate into easier and faster development for your iOS apps.
What’s New?
There are upgrades across the board to make development and deployment faster. However, the three major changes that stand out are:
Run server-side code from any operation in...
April 2012
1 post
2 tags
Application-Level Data Security
We’re pleased to announce an all-new security feature for the CloudMine platform. You can now use our new API key rules interface to secure application-level data, allowing you to restrict access to your data without requiring your users to log in.
Why?
APIs like CloudMine usually restrict access to their data via the use of an API key, or token, that is sent with each request to perform...
March 2012
3 posts
3 tags
About Sexism In Tech
Some unfortunate events occurred during the afternoon, related to some very poor and offensive wording in the flyer for an event that we were sponsoring. A short summary of what happened:
An event posting for the Boston API Jam was created containing clearly sexist language. We were listed as a sponsor of the event at the time.
The sexism in the event details was pointed out to us by many...
2 tags
Announcing the CloudMine iOS SDK
Performing manual URL concatination sucks. Client-side caching and dealing with the implications of a lost network connection sucks. Having to manually break down model objects into their JSON representation sucks. For all these reasons, we are happy to announce that the first release of the CloudMine iOS SDK is available, and you no longer have to deal with any of that. Getting started with...
4 tags
Geo-Fencing with CloudMine and Urban Airship
Many mobile apps need to be able to send push notifications intelligently to their users. In order to send these, we must be able to determine when and to whom the notifications are sent, as well as the content of those notifications. It is important that users are able to receive these pushes regardless of whether or not the mobile app is open; hence, the need for the server.
Urban Airship...
February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Using CloudMine as an HTTP callback endpoint
Lots of people are using our server-side superpowers
to enhance our APIs with their own custom business logic. We are now
taking that flexibility to the next level by allowing you to use any
code snippet as its own endpoint for an HTTP callback from 3rd
party services.
Imagine you want to handle incoming SMS messages from the likes of
Twilio, SMSified or
Nexmo. Each of these services requires an...
3 tags
Password Change & Reset
We are pleased to announce support for two new user management features: changing and resetting user passwords. Usually, developers are required to re-implement this functionality for each app they write, a process which is prone to mistakes and security holes because of the sensitive nature of the information transmitted. With CloudMine, you get this functionality out of the box, without the...
January 2012
5 posts
1 tag
PennApps Spring 2012
PennApps, the best student hackathon in the country, was held the previous weekend at the University of Pennsylvania. The 48 hour hackathon is organized, run, and attented by students. It starts on Friday night with introductions, sponsor API demos, and a team formation session over dinner, and continues through Sunday afternoon.
The hackathon attracts student teams from numerous east coast...
2 tags
Limiting and Paging Objects
Many apps need to store large numbers of objects in CloudMine. Retrieving these objects later can be a problem for performance due to cellular data network latency, as well as for device memory usage. This problem is easily triggered by running a query that returns a large number of objects. A great way to help spread out the cost of all this data is to using CloudMine’s new limits and...
2 tags
Querying with Regular Expressions
One of the most common things developers want to do with their data is search through it. Up until now, our query language has supported searching by strings and numbers, which is great, but we can do better: regular expressions! Regular expressions allow users to perform complex searches of their string-based data, and we have just added support for them to our platform. The regexp syntax we use...
4 tags
Who's in my circle?
FourSquare made famous the mobile/social check-in model. Nowadays, many mobile app developers want to implement similar features for their own apps, whether for checking into locations, seeing which of your friends are nearby, or recommending a local eating or drinking establishment. Traditionally, developers would have to come up with their own mechanism of storing geographic information...
4 tags
Server Side Superpowers
A large number of mobile applications exist today. These apps have a wide range of capabilities and technical requirements. Games, for example, have extremely demanding client-side requirements and may or may not even require access to the Internet. Some games have leaderboard systems integrated with services such as Facebook and Twitter, while others have full-blown online multiplayer...
November 2011
1 post
Data modeling for your application with CloudMine
CloudMine’s APIs make it really easy for you to store and work with data in the cloud with zero setup. And though we don’t do any data model locking whatsoever, you should think about the kind of data that your app will need to store when developing a new application.
CloudMine uses a key/value storage system. Each key must be unique for your app, and values are either binary blobs...
October 2011
1 post
2 tags
The 9 Best Practices for Putting Together a Killer...
We’ve spent the last couple weekends with some awesome students and hacker evangelists at the PennApps, HackNY, and SEPTA Hackathons. Since Startup Weekend Philadelphia is coming up, I thought I’d share the 9 best practices for putting together a killer startup weekend project.
The goal of any Startup Weekend (SW) is to launch a business in 52 hours; this leads to a beautiful microcosm of the...
August 2011
3 posts
3 tags
Lean Green (or blue) Mobile Machine
I’ve been reading some of the early (2005-ish) blogs from 37signals, a company I greatly admire. I came across a post on the lean startup movement that I really liked which spoke of reducing “mass”. As we’ve been thinking about our competitive space I’ve found myself thinking a lot in good old physics terms: mass, velocity, inertia, etc.
The folks at 37signals say to embrace some of the...
4 tags
Resumes are Garbage
One of my goals as an entrepreneur is to never need to update my resume again. I want back all of the hours I spent formatting, re-formatting, wordsmithing, and adjusting that stupid thing for each job. I’m also no stranger to being on the hiring end of resumes, having used them to screen many potential interns, full time employees, and startup founders. In that time, I’ve found that resumes are...
4 tags
On Finding Technical Co-Founders
Having listened to business students bemoaning their inability to find technical co-founders for the last two years I’ve decided to echo Jason Freedman’s sentiments from his post on the co-founder issue: co-founders are something you earn, not find.
If you start the timer when I started my graduate education at UPenn, which was more the start of “I have no day job, oh crap this is real” than my...
July 2011
1 post
Hello World!
Thanks for checking us out! We are still working on writing up some awesome content for you to read. But for now, why don’t you head on over to the About Us section so we can get better acquainted?
