A Roku April Fools
If you saw my tweet about porting Chrome to the Roku, I'm afraid it was, indeed, an April Fools joke. I didn't actually rewrite Chrome in a TV scripting language. However, I did build something cool.
When you build software you have to map between two things. First is the representation that you develop with: your code, your graphics in photoshop, your CSS.. whatever it is. It's the thing you actually manipulate. Then you have the actual visual representation of the thing you are building: the app running on a real device, the page in the browser, the executing game.. whatever it is you are actually making. I believe software improves if we can minimize the distance between those two representations.
I suggest you watch Bret Victor's amazing presentation on the topic. It's long (1hr) but completely worth it. I have been a believer in this philosophy of minimizing editing distance for some time, but Bret explains it better than I ever could.
But back to the Roku
The Roku is very easy to develop for, but it still requires writing some code, turning it into an app, and installing it into the device. While not hard, it can be annoying. It also increases the distance between the editing and viewing representations. So, I decided to build a Roku power-up in Leonardo Sketch.
If you are new to my blog: Leo Sketch is an open source vector drawing tool I've been working on for a while. It can export to SVG, PNG, PDF, and JavaScript. The Roku power-up will export your current drawing into a Roku app, then compile and launch it. It is just a static image on the screen at this point, but it's a good start. In the future you will be able to add behavior and animation to the graphics. The Chrome April Fools hack was just a screenshot of Mac Chrome I had lying around, exported to the Roku through this plugin.
Leo Sketch Power Ups
Now you might be wondering what a Leo Sketch 'power up' is. It's a new kind of plugin system I'm working on, currently only available in an experimental branch. (the 'powerup' branch, if you want to try it out). Powerups are like plugins except they only have an effect when you explicitly activate them. This solves a lot of problems with traditional plugins, plus it enables a few new interesting things. I'll cover powerups more in a future blog. For now, just know that they will be awesome, and Leo Sketch will soon be exporting to far more than static image files.
Stay tuned.