Josh On Design

Note: The first half of this post was written before the Apple Watch event and the second half after. I wanted to capture my thoughts before they were polluted by endless "reviewers" proclaiming the genius/delusion of Tim Cook. I almost didn’t want to write this because I knew my conclusion would be that you can’t review any technology this personal without using it for a while, and here I am reviewing a device I haven’t personally used. That said, I think this represents more of my thoughts on the category rather than Apple Watch in particular, a category that is going to bigger than we expect. So... here goes.

Among the too many things I’ve done recently, I was a tech reviewer for a new WebGL book from Packt author Jos Dirksen called the Three.js Cookbook.

I've done a major refactoring which will make Amino easier to install, easier to maintain and, eventually, better performance and portability. Part of this work involved moving the platform specific parts to their own node modules. This means you should no longer install aminogfx directly. Instead, install the appropriate platform specific module. Currently there is one for GL and one for Canvas. I've also added stage transparency support to Raspberry Pi!

In what was by far my most popular post of 2013, Why You Can’t Build A Smartphone, I explained why building a new smartphone platform was futile. Today, like any good author, I’m going completely contradict myself. Yes, it is possible to create a new smartphone platform. You just have to follow a few constraints.

In the first two (1, 2 ) installments of this essay I covered overall system design, the window manager, and applications. I talked about how the user will communicate with the system, but I haven’t discussed much about how the system communicates back to the user. This brings us to the next big problem of today’s operating systems: notifications and concentration.

In the future touch interfaces will take over most computing tasks but 10% of people will still need ‘full general purpose computers’. We can’t let the interface stagnate. This white paper represents a decade of my thinking on what is wrong with desktop style operating systems (WIMP) style and proposed solutions. PCs are not obsolete. They just need improvements to become ‘workstations’ again.

Note: Parts II and III are up now.

I’ve used a lot of cross platform desktop toolkits over the years. I’ve even built some when I worked on Swing and JavaFX at Sun, and I continue development of Amino, an OpenGL toolkit for JavaScript. I know far more about toolkits than I wish. You would think the hardest part of making a good toolkit is the graphics or the widgets or the API. Nope. It’s deployment. Client side Java failed because of deployment. How to actually get the code running on the end user’s computer 100% reliably, no matter what system they have. Deployment on desktop is hard. Perhaps some web technology can help.

The follow up to last year’s Beautiful Lego, Mike Doyle brings us back for more of the best Lego models from around the world. This time the theme is Dark. As the book explains it: “destructive objects, like warships and mecha, and dangerous and creepy animals… dark fantasies of dragons and zombies and spooks” I like the concept of a theme as it helps focus the book. The theme of Dark was stretched a bit to include banks and cigarettes, and vocaloids (mechanical japanese pop-stars), but it’s still 300+ gorgeous pages of the world’s best Lego art. Beautiful Lego 2 is filled to the brim with Zerg like insect hordes, a lot of Krakens, and some of the cutest mechs you’ve ever seen.

My hatred of C and C++ is world renown, or at least it should be. It's not that I hate the languages themselves, but the ancient build chain. A hack of compilers and #defines that have to be modified for every platform. Oh, and segfaults and memory leaks. The usual. Unfortunately, if you want to write fast graphics code you're pretty much going to be stuck with C or C++, and that's where Amino comes in.

A post about Arthur Whitney and kOS made the rounds a few days ago. It concerns a text editor Arthur made with four lines of K code, and a complete operating system he’s working on. These were all built in K, a vector oriented programming language derived from APL. This reminded me that I really need to look at APL after all of the language ranting I’ve done recently.

I am unhappy to announce the release of Electron 0.4 beta 3.

I have a problem. Sometimes I get something into my head and it sticks there, taunting me, until I do something about it. Much like the stupid song stuck in your brain, you must play the song to be released from it's grasp. So it is with software.

I need to move on to other projects so I’m wrapping up the rest of my ideas in this blog. Gotta get it outta my brainz first.

Note: I’m a research at Nokia but this blog does not represent my employer. I didn’t move to Microsoft and I’ve never been on the Windows Phone team. These ill considered opinions are my own.

Lately I've been digging into Rust, a new programming language sponsored by Mozilla. They recently rewrote their docs and announced a roadmap to 1.0 by the end of the year, so now is a good time to take a look at it. I went through the new Language Guide last night then wrote a small ray tracer to test it out.

After the more abstract talk I’d like to come back to something concrete. Regular Expressions, or regex, are powerful but often inscrutable. Today let’s see how we could make them easier to use through typography and visualization without diminishing that power.

So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.

So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.