Josh On Design

The book is done!

Javascript has always had properties but recently support for property accessors and mutators was added, or rather it is finally supported in enough browsers that we can reliably use it. Property accessors and mutators are what we would call in the Java world "getters and setters". The cool thing about the new JavaScript version is that you don't call the getX method. Rather you can set a property the way you always have, as a variable assignment, but the accessor method is called underneath.

All of the rampant speculation about the new iPad amuses me. Not because I think the speculation is wrong, but just unnecessary. Apple is actually a very predictable company. They release and update their products according to very reliable patterns. Perhaps we just want to believe that something truly unexpected will happen, even when 99% of the time it doesn't. For example..

I'm tired of hearing people talk about how we need a new pipeline to bring oil from Canada to Texas for processing. They say we need to do this for the US to have "energy independence". This is bullshit. Anyone who claims this has no idea how global commerce works. Oil is a fungible commodity so whether Canada sells their oil to the US, China, Brazil, or Switzerland makes no difference. Let me explain.

For some reason the concept of Genetic Programming got stuck in my head the other evening. At midnight, after spending about four hours reading up on the topic around the web, I came away disappointed. The concept of evolving code the way genes do is fascinating but the results in the field seem to be very narrow and limiting. Thus began this rant.

With all of the hoopla last week about the innovative features in the new iBooks 2 I thought it would be instructive to see what could be done with pure HTML 5. I put together a little demo which adapts to screen sizes and has simple interactive content. Here's what it looks like:

Vacation and travel is over and I'm happy to say things are moving again. I'm feeling refreshed and I have a lot to share with you in 2012; starting with the new book I'm writing for O'Reilly! Read on, MacDuff.

It would be an understatement to say that the last year has been busy. With having a baby, launching and then 'unlaunching' the HP TouchPad, lots of conferences, and pushing out several open source project releases it's just been one heck of a crazy time. Throughout it all I've tried to continue blogging, though not as consistently as I would like. I thought it would be interesting to review the blog stats for the year and see what was actually the most popular posts rather than what I thought they were. The results may surprise you. They certainly surprised me.

or: "Why I won't work for a social network."

Today the other shoe dropped. Fortunately it was a soft slipper, not the steel toed boot to the head I had feared. HP is open sourcing webOS.

World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven, 188pp, 1966

First, watch this amazing video created by a newspaper industry research group. It depicts the digital newspaper of the future. The surprising part? The video was created in 1994! And yet the newspaper industry didn't listen to their own research.

I've always meant to go back and read some of the really old scifi that people have always talked about but I've never read.  Now is finally that time. As a fan of mainly 50s through 70s (Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Niven), I've rarely read anything earlier than the late forties. (Jules Verne being a notable exception.)  My goal is not so much to read the novels for pure enjoyment, but to determine if they really are worth of their place in history?  Were they really that good? Did scifi get better? Has it gotten worse again?   In that spirt, lets the the time machine to 1917.

The twit-o-sphere came alive last week with the news that Adobe is canceling their Flash for Mobile products. I even briefly joined in.  Many see this as evidence that the open web has won (it has), or a justified comeuppance for Adobe's historical slights to Apple (it might be), or perhaps vindication of Steve Jobs' rant anti-Flash (it was), and maybe even that Microsoft was really to blame (it's a stretch).  Lost in all this, I wonder, is the effect this actually has on Adobe beyond their short term problems.

I'm home all by myself this weekend (the missus took the baby to CA to visit family for a few days) so I am at long last catching up on some reading. Today's book is

Richard Kerris leaving HP for "an opportunity outside"

I am not entirely sure what to say.  It has taken me two hours to write the following few paragraphs. Though I never worked at Apple nor had a chance to meet him, I owe my career to Steve Jobs. At the tender age of 8 I learned to program on an Apple IIe and have been hooked ever since. I've used Mac OS X since the first public beta on my tangerine iBook. I used a string of iPods and iPhones before joining Palm to compete with Apple. Steve's products changed desktop computing, music, movies, cellphones, and almost everything else in our modern world, and I thank him as a happy user of those products.

Mmmwaa haa haa. It lives! I've gotten Java to run on webOS natively with a new set of Java SDL bindings. That means it just *might* time to start a new project. Read on for how it works and how you could help.

I've talked about the tablet takeover several times before on this blog. I still firmly believe my previous statement:

Hot on the heels of my Canvas talk at OSCON (which went very well. Much thanks to everyone who attended), I've put up a post on the developer blog about the great new Canvas stuff in webOS 3.0.  Most importantly, speed has been doubled for certain drawing operations! I'm very proud of the graphics team here at Palm.