Josh On Design

Thanks to a few nights of sleeplessness I've made some updates to RazzMaster, a command line tool for remotely configuring Raspberry Pis.

When I first picked up this book I thought it was for kids; similar to No Starch Press’ other comic science series: Survive! Inside the Human Body.  I was completely wrong. This is real physiology at the high school to early college level. I’ve learned quite a bit by reading through the book, and I’m a 40 year old engineer who reads constantly.

Early open source pioneer Brian Behlendorf famously said, "the most important requirement [in open source] is the right to fork.” He wisely observed that the right to fork source code generally ensured it never actually be done. The mere threat of forking creates an incentive driving good behavior. Most open source communities are able to self-police well enough that true forking is a rarity.

PubNub is a startup in San Francisco that provides a Real Time Data Stream Network as a service.  This is a relatively new concept so the easiest way I can explain it is by comparing it to a CDN.  

JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ, WebStorm, and many other IDEs, recently announced they are moving to a subscription model. This has proven to be somewhat controversial.

Semantic-Editor-JS (hereafter called SE), is a new open source library for building rich text editors. You can play with the demo or get the code on Github.

Or: Now I Know Why Old Men Drink Scotch

The last few weeks I've been working on a new web-based rich text editor. It’s a semantic editor, or “What You See Is What You Mean” (WYSIWYM). You edit using styles you define then import or export to whatever you need.  Following cues from Medium and others on the perils of content-editable, I stopped relying on the browser to store the model. Instead I built an internally consistent model that only uses the DOM for handling input and pastes.  This approach makes the editor robust, flexible, and very easy to customize.

After a long three and a half years at Nokia I’m ready to leave. I’ve been through several re-orgs and my team has been dissolved. I’m hoping you can help me.

Is software getting better or worse? Some say we are making software ever more bloated. Some say we don’t care about quality anymore; that worse is better. Some say we haven’t changed how we write software in 40 years. It's still ASCII text on disk. (Yes that would be me, saying that). Certainly our programming languages haven’t improved. We still write billions of lines in glorified C code!

Yesterday, amidst the Independence Day Fun, I lost my phone.  Or rather, it flew away on the rear bumper of my mother in law’s car.  

It’s the Fourth of July again, which is America’s independence day for my non-US friends, and it’s time for some code cleaning.  I’ve built several open source projects over the last year and it’s time to shut some of them down.  Out with the old to make way for the new. Let’s review, shall we?

I’ve been wearing an Android or Apple Watch for a few months now and I’ve come to one conclusion. While you don’t want to buy these quite yet, when the good version comes out in a few years we will all become superheroes.

For a recent project I needed a nice HTML table library to render a long table of data with fixed headers. Figuring there must be a million of such libraries, I started searching around. This would seem to be a simple thing, yet after a day of searching I still couldn’t find a good solution.

A year ago I speculated that Apple would never make a TV. If they ever did, I said they'd integrate a FaceTime camera with complex image processing, but I didn't think they would make a TV at all. There's just not enough opportunity in that market to make it worth Apple's while. It's low margin and no room to differentiate the product.  

As smartwatches have slowly faded into existence from their sci-fi past, I have always wondered: what is the killer app? What is the feature (or actual app) that would do something so useful I’d wear it on my wrist, put up with a mostly-off screen and laggy voice control, learn a new interface, and charge it daily. What would it do that makes me want to actually buy one despite the limitations?  After living with my Apple Watch for a few weeks I think I finally know. The watch itself is the killer app.

I've been writing unix-ish code for more than two decades (crap, I'm old!) but last week I discovered something I'd never used before, the stdbuf command. It solves (well, works around) one of my longstanding problems working with command line programs: buffering.

Today I received my Apple Watch. Compared to the three Android Wear watches and a few fitness sensors, I can safely say it’s the first smart watch that merely sucks instead of being truly horrible. All of these devices will continue to get better and better, longer battery life, simplified UI, etc.  Soon we won’t know how we lived without them. But that’s not important right now. What’s important is when we look back in history we will say 2015 is the day we started to wire up humanity.

As part of my research at Nokia I often test and analyze products from other companies. This gives us an awareness of the state of the industry, and helps us to focus our efforts. This week my target was the Samsung Gear S smartwatch. As of yet I have been unable to actually test it. This is my story. And the story of why Samsung should be broken up into smaller companies that can actually make good products.

Smartwatches are coming. By Christmas they will be everywhere. And we won't know how we ever lived without them. Or so we are told to believe. But if you were a company making a smartwatch, how would you know what features to build? How would you know which features will fit the "something people didn't know they wanted" category? You have to predict the future. Turns out, that's hard.