Josh On Design

Jen was working today, so I spent the day fixing bugs and coding new features in Leonardo. Today's awesome feature: HTML Canvas Export. Yes, oh yes! You can draw anything you want in Leonardo, then export it to JavaScript code that draws into Canvas. Why would you want such a feature. Lots of reasons:

Most of of my free time work for the past few months has gone into Amino, the UI toolkit that Leonardo is built on, but Leo itself has gotten a few improvements as well. I'm happy to announce that the next beta of Leo is up, including:

As part of my ongoing efforts to create better designed software, I some how ended up creating my own new UI toolkit. This is really a part of my belief that a decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. Amino is my experiment building software for that other 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit for these apps.

A decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. This is a very exciting development in the software world and promises to reshape the way we make software (check out the great stuff our lead developer is doing in his day job at Palm), but Amino isn't for that world. Amino about that 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit to build these apps.

A decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. This is a very exciting development in the software world and promises to reshape the way we make software (check out the great stuff our lead developer is doing in his day job at Palm), but Amino isn't for that world. Amino about that 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit to build these apps.

Today I am proud to announce a project I've been working on for the past few months called Leonardo. I've long believed there's a need for a good desktop drawing app that is completely cross platform, free, and open source. Leonardo is that app.

Yesterday Apple updated their Apple TV product, taking it into a new direction with a 99$ TV dongle that does only content streaming. Apple has long described Apple TV as a 'hobby' because they haven't figured out the right way to create a compelling TV product. Since they've spent millions of dollars building up a new data center in North Carolina to support the streaming catalog of the new Apple TV, then presumably they think they've got it figured out now.

Today I'm proud to announce a project I've been working on for the past few months called Leonardo. I've long believed there's a need for a good desktop drawing app that is completely cross platform, free, and open source. Leonardo is that app.

Over the years I've worked on a lot of open source projects. I've also worked on quite a few commercial projects. What a lot of them have in common is the need to market themselves to developers, but without any marketing budget. When I worked on JFXStudio my budget was 20$ a month from my own pocket.

Greetings Earthlings!

I'm speaking at OSCON in Portland next week, and what a busy week it will be. In addition to my personal session on marketing open source projects, I've added some Palm stuff in collaboration with HP. If you can't attend OSCON but will be in Portland I will also be speaking at the Portland Java Users Group. I'll also be working at the HP booth where we will be giving away phones, books, tshirts and some super nice water bottles. Here's the full schedule:

This is a short video (~6min) where Tim Berners Lee (Mr. Web himself) talks about the successes of open data. Take special note of the end section where the Open Street Map project is used to help relief efforts in Haiti after the earthquake.

Updated!

As part of some open source stuff I've been doing on the side I've had to generate and parse a lot of XML. I like working with the DOM because it's tree structure cleanly matches my needs, but the W3C API is *so* cumbersome. The DOM was designed to be implemented in any language, not just clean OO languages like Java, so any code using it will work but be ugly. After considering a few other XML libraries I decided to write a new one that would work with modern Java 5 language features like generics, enhanced for-each, and varargs. This library is super tiny because it simply wraps the standard javax.xml libraries in the JRE, but gives you a much nicer interface to work with. Here's how to use it (or download it here):

I'd like to ask my dedicated readership a very big favor. I'm starting a podcast with my friend Robert Cooper. The challenge is determining the direction. In a lot of the fields we are familiar with there are already some great podcasts (like the Java Posse). We can't decide if it should be programming centric, cover technology issues, or discuss things that are more future oriented (driving cars, space travel, etc.).

Yes, the future is now, and not just because I bought a 2TB hard drive for less than 150$. Bionic hands, self driving cars, and printable solar cells...

20th century advertising has taught us to associate quality artwork and polish with quality products. Given two apps that do the same thing, a potential customer will pick the one that looks and feels better. This means every great app needs great art. Since most developers aren't artists or designers by trade, I've assembled a list of resources that can help. Here are icons, fonts, sounds, color schemes, and other great art assets to help you make your app stand out from the crowd.

I'm writing this from a hotel room in SunnyVale, recovering from the tremendous event we put on for our dedicated developers at Palm's first ever webOS developer event last Friday and Saturday. The turnout was great. Over 100 developers paid their own money to drive, fly, and chopper in to Palm HQ. I taught an intro to webOS session for the entire first day, then answered questions and attended sessions the second. Topping it all with dinner at a local brew pub was a splendid idea.

A round up of interesting stuff I've been collecting lately. An interview with Philippe Starck, vintage ads, UI design tips, and electronic comics.

I haven't posted about the iPad (or tablets in general) since before the iPad announcement. I thought this prudent given that we all knew what was announced but I hadn't actually tried using one in person. Last week I played with a couple at my friends company and my initial thoughts were confirmed: the iPad as existing product today is interesting but not amazing, but as an indicator of the future is amazing.