Josh On Design

While I have many projects in progress right now, including Amino, Leonardo, getting the TouchPad out the door, and having my first baby (only a few weeks left!); every now and then I just get something into my head and have to code it out. Last night it was noise functions.

I've posted the first beta of Leonardo 1.0, ready for your testing pleasure. More details over on the

You may be a new programmer, or a web designer, or just someone who's heard the word 'RegEx', and asked: What is a Regex? How do I use it? And why does it hurt my brain? Well, relax. The doctor is in. Here's two aspirin and some water.

Another month has gone by with no update to Leonardo, or a real release of Amino. It's interesting how life changes. When I started this projects last summer I had no idea Jen and I would be having a baby in a month, nor did I truly have any notion how much my life would change. Everyone always says having children will change your life, but you never really understand it until you do it yourself, and our journey has just begun.

In today's post I'll dive into Amino's new buffering support. At then end we'll talk about new API docs for Amino, the roadmap, and request for help on a domain name.

When redesigning Amino I had a few core goals. These goals are in place to guide the product and ensure we created something genuinely useful, and not become "yet another gfx lib".

Teach them well and let them lead the way

I've heard a lot of noise recently about these new fangled smartphones and tablets not replacing 'real computers', especially since the announcement of many new tablet products, including the HP TouchPad. That they are just expensive FaceBook machines. I've also heard people say that there's no room in the market for more devices: iOS and Android will take up the market and leave nothing for anyone else. It'll be just like the PC wars again!

I'm on the plane home from Mobile World Congress. It's been a heck of a couple of weeks. I've gotten some new coworkers, a new boss, announced our new products, showed off the new devices in Barcelona, and spread the word of webOS itself to anyone who will listen. I've got several blogs coming about what we've announced, some fun new demos, app speculation, and updates on my open source projects.

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.

Though engineering has always been a natural fit for my career, I have long wanted to be an artist. I suppose I'm not truly sure what it means to be an artist, but I still dabble, play, and learn. That seems to be enough.

For the past few months I've been working on an open source UI toolkit called Amino. It has lots of cool features like a scenegraph, CSS control skinning, and dynamic translation editing. You just have write your app in Amino and you get the cool stuff for free. But what if you have an existing Swing application and don't want to rewrite it? Don't worry, Amino's got you covered.

We are making progress on the next release of Leonardo, an open source desktop Java drawing program. One of the key features scheduled for the next release is a webservice that lets users save and share reusable symbols they've created. For example, someone could create a set of GWT mockup widgets, then share this set with others.

Below is a screenshot of a debugging app I've been working on called SideHatch. It essentially lets you open up your Amino app from the side and poke around at the innards.

Ruby Red, the first full release of Leonardo Sketch is ready for download. Leonardo is a desktop open source drawing program written entirely in Java. In this first version of Leonardo, features include:

As I write this I'm flying home from New York City where we (Palm) threw an event known as the webOS Developer Day NYC. Really, we should have called it a party, due to the extreme fun and exhaustion we all experienced. But this post isn't really about the event, it's about the webOS developer community.

I finally watched Code Rush this weekend, a documentary about open sourcing mozilla and the sale of Netscape to AOL in the late 90s. There is no doubt that Netscape created the web as we know it. The web changed everything. But I wonder about Mozilla itself. Did open sourcing Mozilla really make a difference to it's success?

AKA: a Teachable Moment in Performance Tests, Profilers, and Debugging statements.

When you go to the polls today shouldn't you make sure you have the support of a drawing program that will fight for your interests in Washington?

The Deprecation

If you're reading this blog then there's a good chance you've heard Apple has deprecated their implementation of Java on the Mac. Contrary to the resulting outrage over the last few days, I don't find change to be a shocking surprise.