Josh On Design

An open letter to language designers: please, for the good of humanity, kill your sacred cows. Yes, i know those calves look so cute with big brown eyes and soft leathery skin, but you know what? Veal is delicious!

If you saw my tweet about porting Chrome to the Roku, I'm afraid it was, indeed, an April Fools joke. I didn't actually rewrite Chrome in a TV scripting language. However, I did build something cool.

For Christmas Jen and I finally bought a TV after four years of distraction-less living. We finally decide it was time after countless evenings watching Hulu on my 15" laptop. We were adamant, however, that we would not buy cable. We just want a better way of watching Hulu, NetFlix, and a few other sites. To make that happen I bought the latest Roku device, Angry Birds edition.

Thanks to my HTML Canvas Deep Dive at OSCON, .net Magazine asked me to write a tutorial for them. The topic was just something interesting with Canvas. I'm a huge fan of infographics, as well as .net Magazine, so I jumped at the chance to write for them. I recently discovered an amazing treasure trove of data at the World dataBank, so that formed the core of the article.

Over the weekend I moved app bundler to its own project. It is now hosted on GitHub and has a real Ant task.

I'm very happy to announce that my interactive book, HTML Canvas: A Travelogue, is now available for the iPad. It includes the same great content as the webOS version: a complete introduction to HTML Canvas with interactive examples, for just $4.99. Several bugs have been fixed in this build, which are coming soon to webOS as well.

Every day new things happen that bring our visions of the future to the present -- or are just damn crazy ideas that have to be told. Here are a few.

Last week I flew down to California for orientation at Nokia. My return flight was supposed to leave Wednesday afternoon, but due to weather and United's bungled computer merge with Continental, I ended up stuck at SFO for a day and a half.

I finally got tired of hacking Wordpress and decided it was time for a change. My site has always essentially been static. I don't need a database or the ability to switch themes and use plugins. I'm the only author and the content doesn't change more than once a day (usually once a week). So, I scrapped WordPress entirely and wrote my own blog in Node. It only took me about a day of real hacking to get it up and running.

As you know, I've been doing a lot of ebook prototyping lately. Ever since the iBooks 2 announcement I've had this idea stuck in my head that we can make rich interactive ebooks using nothing but web technology. That lead to the toolkit I've been working on, now open sourced on github. As the first thing written with that toolkit I'm proud to announce my first interactive book: HTML Canvas, a Travelogue.

I know IFRAME, I know. We've had a good run. You've tried hard and back in the day you were somethin' special. The way you could bring in content from any domain was nothing short of amazing, and you certainly took out the trash when you bumped off FRAMESET. But that was then and this is now. A lot has changed in the past few years. CSS and AJAX are really hitting their stride and you just can't hack it. I'm willing to overlook a few margin bugs, but this?! Well this is simply the last straw.

I am happy to announce the 1.1 release of Amino, my open source JavaScript graphics library, is ready today. All tests are passing. The new site and docs are up. (Generated by a new tool that I'll describe later). Downloads activate! With the iPad 3 coming any day now I thought it would be good to take a look at what I've done to make Amino Retina Ready (™). Even if you don't have a retina screen it will improve your apps.

The past two years have been a hell of a fun ride, but alas it must come to an end. It is with sadness but no regret that I must announce Friday will be my last day at HP / Palm. This was a very difficult decision to make. I have enjoyed my time here and after seeing the webOS roadmap I'm very excited for it's future, but it is time for me to do something else.

Amino 1.1 is on it's way, and despite the small version number difference the changes will be big. We are dropping Java support and heavily refactoring the JavaScript version.

Over the past few weeks I've done more experiments and improvements to my ebook prototype. I'm still not sure what I'm going to do with it once I'm all done, but it's been an educational exercise nonetheless. Here's what I've done so far:

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.