Josh On Design

It's been a while since I've written anything, especially anything other than the topics of Amino and Leonardo. While I rarely talk about my personal life on this site, I feel I should let you all know what's been going on, and how the next few months look.

Of Death and Life

The last couple of months have been a bit rough. My wife had two deaths in her family only five days apart. We've spent most of the last two months with family and traveling to California. At the same time Jen and I are experiencing the joys of having our first child. Our son, Jesse Paul, is due May 27th. The name 'Jesse' is from the biblical father of David, which means "Gift from God". 'Paul' is from my uncle who passed away last year. Uncle Paul taught me to program as a child and had a huge influence on me and my career, and so is very special to me.

Onward

Now that we are home, with no more travel in sight for my wife at least, life should return to normal. There's more travel for me, however. In a week I'll fly down to Sunnyvale to spend a week with my team at Palm HQ and prepare for our big event on February 9th. This is going to be huge. I can't wait for you to see what we've got in store. After the event I'll be home for a day and then fly to Barcelona to talk about our new products at Mobile World Congress. If you are going to be at MWC, give me a shout for some drinks.

After MWC I'll have some time at home before doing a series of smaller events (which I'll talk about later), and then be home for Jesse's birth.

Coding

I haven't done as much work on my side projects as I wanted, and things will slow down even more once Jesse is born, but I'm still making progress. Here's a rough roadmap:

Leonardo, the open source drawing program. I've been slowly polishing the UI and adding features. Object effects are high on the list (dropshadow, blur, emboss, etc.) as are a full set of gradients and texture fills. I'm hoping for another release by the end of February which will also include more path features like transforms, rotation, and converting shapes to paths. The big UI overhaul and sharing features will have to wait for later.

Amino 1.0: a full UI toolkit. I've continued to fill in missing features and controls, including the new Table and Tree/TreeTable views. I've got a few more bugs and memory leaks to fix before I'll call Amino 1.0 final and finished, but I think it's close.

Amino 2.0. I've started working on Amino 2.0 in a branch. Amino 2 is an almost complete rewrite, including a new cross platform stack that will support Java2D, JOGL with shaders, and potentially HTML canvas. It will be much more modular; strictly separating a super fast 2.5d graphics API, a flexible scenegraph, and then the current Amino GUI widgets and CSS on top. If you've seen this screenshot of playing a high def video through a realtime pixel shader, then you've seen the potential of this approach. The new design will make Amino more flexible and easier to evolve. I don't have a timetable for when it will be done, but I plan to open the repo for contributions very soon. For developers the APIs won't change much, but the under the hood changes will be huge.

So, in short, Amino and Leonardo have a strong future, just a bit slower than originally planned. I also have great new things coming with webOS and I can't wait to teach you how to use some of the cool new stuff. So bear with me. The future looks both bright and busy