These are my links for June 8th through June 11th:
- SparkleShare - Sharing work made easy - Hylke's fantastic little project to make collaborating with his fellow designers easier. Note the fantastic, but minimal, graphics - classy.
- Embedded in Academia : Why Take an Operating Systems Course? - I completely agree, the title should probably be "Why Take a Hands-On Operating Systems Course" - I had an OS course at University but it was a subset of a larger systems course and very high-level theory. Would have preferred a dedicated, hands-on, OS course.
- Barrelfish - "a new research operating system being built from scratch in a collaboration between ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Microsoft Research Cambridge … exploring how to structure an OS for future multi- and many-core systems." - Another interesting OS research project from MSR.
I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.
These are my links for June 8th from 21:06 to 22:57:
- The BitC Programming Language - "BitC is a new systems programming language. It seeks to combine the flexibility, safety, and richness of Standard ML or Haskell with the low-level expressiveness of C."
- Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment - The Reader in Apples Safari 5 is actually just a bundled (and tweaked) copy of Arc90's Readability. Add this fantastic bookmarklet to your Firefox or Chrome browser and get the readable hotness.
- The LLDB Debugger - Apple have just released a debugger built on the LLVM infrastructure released under the LLVM BSD style license. Very exciting! OS X only at the moment, but I've no doubt we'll see a Linux backend.
I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.
These are my links for May 19th through June 4th:
I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.
These are my links for May 11th through May 18th:
- Lightspark, an innovative FLOSS Flash player, reaches Beta Status | Technology Temple - FLOSS FLash player with a JIT built on LLVM. Definitely one to keep an eye on. Particularly fond of the developers for prpviding features above and beyond what Adobe's Flash provides (an inspector and profiling overlay are only a keyboard shortcut away).
- banksimple - A bank startup, a little different but it worked for Egg and Smile, though they're just subsidiaries of larger banks (afaik). No hidden fees and great customer service are features of a service I can get behind. I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out, wish I was in the US and could sign up. The cheque deposit process sounds fun enough for me to start asking for them again…
- Firefox 4: the HTML5 parser – inline SVG, speed and more ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog - Wow, I hadn't realised that HTML5 explicitly specified how to parse HTML, a compatible web future? Especially as Mozilla have implemented their tokenizer to be closer to IE's, meaning old HTML should work better too!
I wrote about about why these posts are being generated here: Sharing Links.
Recently K had a software update on her Palm Pre, following this we decided to checkout the state of the app store. The conversation was brief:
“Is there a tube map yet?”
“Nope, I’m afraid not. Still nothing.”
“Can’t you write me one? You like programming ….”
“Well, yes. I do. I can …”
Irrefutable logic! I do like programming and I can write one. I’m no JavaScript developer but heck, time to learn it and give it a try!
Thus I set about poking around on the WebOS developer site, installing the SDK and following the Hello World tutorial. I’ve got to hand it to Palm, this is a *really* nice developer experience.
They have a decent emulator (by wrapping VirtualBox in a little launcher UI, palm-emulator), a rails like project generator (palm-generate), a simple packager and installer for getting things onto the (emulated) device (palm-package and palm-install) and there are a bunch more programs they provide which I assume are equally useful. I’ve yet to try out their IDE support yet, as I’m not an IDE person and just wanted to get stuck in and I already have js2-mode enabled in my editor of choice.
One criticism I have against the developer experience is that API docs, the sample code and the tutorials seem to use different coding styles. This is confusing to a new developer, especially one who doesn’t know JavaScript! Of course style doesn’t make the code, and one assumes that all of the demo/sample/documentation code is functional, but it would make things much easier to learn if there where a consistent style so that paradigms are more easily recognisable.
Once I’d finished fudging through Hello World I palm-generated a new project and hacked together the start of a tube app.
After several iterations I realised that the easiest way to have a pannable map was just to load the map into an <img> and have that inside a Mojo Scroller widget. This after an evening trying to make ImageView do things it can’t… I quickly loaded this 3 lines of HTML “app” onto K’s phone to prevent her having to carry a paper tube map, now I can take my time playing around with the WebOS API’s and hacking together a more full featured tube application for the WebOS.
