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Entrepreneur, author, blogger, open source hacker, speaker, Java rockstar, developer advocate and more. ex-Sun/Oracle guy with 30 years of professional development experience. Shai built virtual machines, development tools, mobile phone environments, banking systems, startup/enterprise backends, user interfaces, development frameworks and much more. Shai is an award winning highly rated speaker with a knack for engaging the audience and deep technical chops.
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This series includes posts from the gdocweb blog and discussion of gdocweb itself. gdocweb lets developers convert Google Docs to websites on GitHub pages.
Note: this post was originally published on the gdocweb blog. gdocweb has its first few users and one of the big complaints is about the tediousness of going through that wizard every time you just want to test a change to a document. I don’t want gd...
Codename One is starting a staged move from Maven Central to a free Cloudflare R2 repository, with dual publishing, a smaller release payload, and an explicit cutover plan.
The new Codename One maps routing API turns coordinates into road-following geometry, distance, duration, legs, and steps through OSRM or an application-defined service.
Codename One now exposes on-device vision, language, and LiteRT inference in the core, while a guarded loopback MCP transport lets an LLM inspect and drive real applications.
A deep look at Codename One's HealthKit, Health Connect, workout, nutrition, Bluetooth sensor, and simulator API, including the privacy rules that shape its unusual design.
Codename One Push V3 adds typed messages, managed credentials, segmentation, analytics, and Surface updates. Existing push apps should test the new cloud endpoint before next week's cutover.
Note: this post was originally published on the gdocweb blog.
When using Google Docs it’s often tempting to reach out to the font or color toolbar to design your document as you see fit. This would work great for simple sites but as gdocweb evolves you might find it produces a result that isn’t as attractive as you might want. The reason for that is due to two important features we just added to gdocweb: custom colors and dark mode.
We recently updated gdocweb with a new theme: Adaptive.
The Adaptive theme is identical to the default “Basic” theme but when it’s running on a device set to dark mode it will render the website with a dark version of the theme. As you can see below, this blog automatically adapts to light or dark mode. However, the transition wasn’t seamless.
The initial design of the blog was based on a template from Google Docs. In this template “Introducing gdocweb” was defined as a “Heading 1” style, but it was later customized to appear a bit differently from the actual “Heading 1” definition.
Headings are an important part of the web, in general your page should have only one “Heading 1” and multiple “Heading 2” elements (and possibly 3, 4, 5 etc.). If you break these rules you might suffer a search engine penalty. But it goes deeper than that, once you customize the style of the heading we can’t override it. That results in dark blue text on black background. Not very readable for the most important line within a post...
The solution is simple and it includes two parts. The first is to use styles in the document by placing the cursor on the heading and invoking “Update ‘Heading 1’ to match (or the appropriate style you want to customize). We then need to select “Apply ‘Heading 1’” to re-apply it to the current line. Besides the obvious advantages with dark mode, this also helps keep the document consistent. E.g. if we want to change the font or color for all “Heading 2” entries we can do that in one place and they will all update.
But the real advantage is in gdocweb. We can now customize specific colors within the theme. This is useful for dark mode but also useful for applying brand colors on top of the theme. We can pick replacement default colors for background and foreground of various elements and make the replacements apply only for light or dark mode. This is all a part of the themes section as seen in the image below.
Ideally the themes should include the right colors out of the box but the ability to customize these colors is a crucial one. Let us know in the comments if you need deeper styling and what your technical level is. One of our planned features is a style override that will let you inject a custom style file to the page. However, this would require technical understanding and control of CSS, I’m not sure if this is something that would fit with our main demographic.
You can see the document that generated this post here.
