Josh On Design

No Starch Press is on a roll with its series of Lego themed books. While most of them are about model ideas or construction techniques, Beautiful Lego is different. This is a Lego art book. In classic coffee table style it is filled with gorgeous photos to thrill the reader. Beautiful Lego does not seek to discuss 'can Lego be art', but takes it as fact. These are works by artists, just artists using the medium of Lego instead of paint or clay, and the results speak for themselves. Stunning.

Almost since it was first released, fans of the Raspberry Pi have asked when it the hardware will be updated with better components. A faster CPU perhaps? Double the RAM? Built in wifi? The list of components you could upgrade is long. This request was brought up again when the Raspberry Pi foundation announced the sale of the two millionth Pi.

Now that Apple has given us final specs and cost for the redesigned Mac Pro I’ve heard complaints that it is underpowered and non-expandable, especially for the price. The Pro comes with reasonably beefy CPUs but they will be out of date in a few years. The buyer can only expand the ram and disk, and not so much on the disk side given the lack of available space. So how can this be worth the $3000 entry price Apple is charging?

Update the OS

The webOS auction has ended successfully. Every item sold, some for far more than I thought they would. Combined with some anonymous donations we raised over 6000$ for the Hill Family. I am overwhelmed and incredibly grateful. I knew the webOS community was passionate but I had no idea. We couldn’t have done this without your support. Thank you so much!

My name is Josh Marinacci. I used to be in the webOS Developer Relations team at Palm. I'm auctioning off all of my webOS devices and swag that I've collected over the years, including some very rare items, to help my brother in law fight cancer.

One last update before the auction begins. I'm labeling everything and checking that all the devices charge. No bum-devices here. I can't vouch for the never been opened vintage PalmOS devices but everything that is open will charge.

Thank you for helping me Bridge The Gap, a webOS auction to help my brother in law fight cancer. Your support means more to me than I can say. I'm constantly amazed by the passion of the webOS community. I have some new updates to share with you.

I love symbol fonts. My new favorite is Font Awesome, an open source font with over 300 icons. Symbol fonts are great because they are pure vectors. They scale with everything else in your page and look pixel perfect on any DPI display, retina or otherwise.

Hi. My name is Josh Marinacci. You might remember me from the webOS Developer Relations team. Despite what happened under HP, webOS is still my favorite operating system. It still has the best features of any OS and an amazing group of dedicated, passionate fans. I deeply cherish the two years I spent traveling the world telling everyone about the magic of webOS.

After over a year of living with my custom built blog system I'd finally had enough last weekend. Time for something new. Something less buggy. Something extensible. So I took a day and rewrote it from scratch.

Recent Projects

• 8 part blog series on building a web browser from scratch in 100% Rust.
• AminoGFX-GL: an Javascript hardware accelerated scenegraph for the RaspberryPi. (see this screenshot I made a few years ago).
• PureImage: a 100% pure Javascript implementation of HTML canvas for use on the server with Node. Supports JPG, PNG, and TTF fonts. Use it for server side image resizing, unit testing, or rendering into gigantic offscreen bitmaps.
• SideDeck: realtime HTML presentation framework. Try it here.
• Silly.io: The Ministry of Silly Things, an open source wikipedia for computable data.
• Brainshell-Parser: parser for a unit based calculator. See it live here.
• AMX: yet another node process manager.
• MeowLang, a simple programming language built from the ground up on Ohm. Written for this blog series on how to build your own language in under 200 lines of code.
• Razzmaster: CLI program to find and configure headless Raspberry Pis on your local network.
• URLExpander: a super tiny URL expander written in Node + Express.
• PixelEater: a web-based pixel drawing tool with layers, palettes, zoom, and eyedropper.
• Pixel Font Metrics Editor:
• XmasCard 2016: a retro JRPG comedy Christmas card.

Older Projects (mostly dead)

• FontSlicer: render glyphs from Font-Awesome and other icon fonts as PNGs, with selected color and font size. All client side. Shows off PNG and zip file manipulation in the browser.
• photonsh: a simple shell implemented in pure JS. See the blog post for details.
• HexCanvas: draw pixels, turns into hex code for Adafruit LED matrixes.
• BabyCad Plate: simple tool to position holes in a flat plate, then download an STL for 3D printing.
• BoxMatic: simple browser CAD app to make a box w/ holes in it for 3D printing. Shows 3D rendering using OpenJSCad. Does 2D rendering with Amino.
• ANT task to bundle of Java 6 (not Java 7) apps as desktop executables. github project
• Flying Saucer: Pure Java CSS 2.1 HTML renderer. I haven't worked on it in a while, but there's still a community around it. Good for rendering PDFs. code, Wikipedia Page
• Leonardo Sketch: a desktop drawing tool. written in java.
• Arduino X: Java: alternative IDE for Arduino, rewritten from the ground up. github project
• Electron: Alternative IDE for Arduino, written with Atom Shell. No longer in development. Github repo.
• Javadocs 2020: an early attempt to reinvent JavaDocs

I have written countless articles and blogs, spoken at many developer conferences, and written three books. This is a sample of my work.

I am Josh Marinacci: manager, developer advocate, software engineer, researcher, usability expert, and general miscreant. I have a passion for great user experiences. I live in Oregon with my wife and kiddo. I'm currently helping to keep the Web open and free at Mozilla. I also write bad sci-fi short stories.

SparqEE's Cell is a just launched Kickstarter project to build a GSM data module ready to integrate with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or any other embedded hardware kit. In addition to the cellular board they are also offering SIM cards with discount data service; a first in the projects I've looked at.

So I been thinking. Design comes in waves. First it was page curls and drop shadows. Then came glossy buttons and wet floors, followed by shiny badges and rough textures. Today 'flat' is the leading trend in UI design. It certainly defines the look of Web ’13. Even Apple has jumped on the bandwagon. But what comes next? Where do we go from here? Whither 2014?

Lately I've been experimenting with Functional Reactive Programming, or FRP. There are several good libraries to use FRP with Javascript. I chose Bacon.js. I'm finding FRP to be very useful but hard to understand.

By what standard should we measure if code is "beautiful"? I argue it should be not lines or speed, but rather conciseness and clarity. Can someone who is not familiar with the language still understand what the algorithm does? Can someone not familiar with the task still get a feel for how it works? This metric favors shorter code over longer, but not at the expense of readability. Beautiful code should be as close to expressing the underlying algorithm as possible. How close is the actual code to the most straight forward pseudo code?

I've always wanted a magic wordprocessor. Something that helps me organize my thoughts and build ideas organically, rather than spend all of my time worrying about formatting. Something for the internet / cloud age. Given that Microsoft Word hasn't fundamentally changed in over a decade (or possibly two), we aren't likely to get such software from them. Instead, I decided to play around with some ideas using my new favorite programming tool: OMeta.

Animation is just moving something over time. The rate at which the something moves is defined by a function called an easing equation or interpolation function. It is these equations which make something move slowly at the start and speed up, or slow down near the end. These equations give animation a more life like feel. The most common set of easing equations come from Robert Penner's book and webpage.