Josh On Design

I've been wanting to get into electronics and building physical things for a while. I have a lot to learn though. My only exposure to micro-controllers was when I played with an Arduino for a day about two years ago. The last time I picked up a soldering iron or drew a schematic was my lone electrical engineering class in college nearly twenty years ago. My degree is in computer science with a focus on graphic and AI giving me a decidedly software-only career. This makes picking up electronics both challenging and fun.

or, an epic post in which Josh declares his boredom of smartphones, creates a new world order, and redirects this site towards evil purposes.

I mentioned a few days ago that I updated my Canvas Deep Dive ebook and dropped the price to free. But wait, there's more! I've also completely open sourced the book. My goal with Deep Dive was always to disseminate information as widely as possible. There is no better way to do that than giving it to the world.

This week at OSCON gave an updated version of my 3 hour Canvas tutorial. I think the session was well received. It was one of only a few tutorials that was completely sold out, 200 seats taken. But if you couldn't be one of those two hundred I don't want you to miss out.

I am giving a presentation on the future of desktop interface at OSCON in a few weeks. To help prepare for the session I'd like to use you, gentle readers, as my guinea pigs. The following essay is an extremely rough version of what I will be presenting. Please imagine it with humorous illustrations and no grammatical errors. I will greatly appreciate your feedback. What parts should I expand? Where are my arguments unclear or flawed? Would you come to see this talk?

I'm not sure I'll ever be ready to tell everything about my time at Palm. Certainly not now. Perhaps in a novel or an 8bit video game, one day. I don't know. I really enjoyed my time there and made wonderful friends. It was also two straight years of frustration. For now I suggest you read The Verge's excellent in-depth article on the 31 months from Palm's 2009 CES debut to the end of the platform (and possible rebirth?). After you read it come back to compare notes. Below are some inaccuracies or clarifications based on my own recollection of events. Think of it as directors commentary if the director was forced to sit in the back and watch through a 3 inch screen.

I'm really enjoying my new job at Nokia. Unfortunately there is not much I can talk about since I'm exclusively doing research for future products. This is a change for me. I'm used to talking about what I work on. In fact, it's been my job for the past 4 years to do just that. On the other hand, the reduced travel schedule has given me more time to think about other non-smartphone related things, which is quite a nice change. And last week I came to a realization: driverless cars will change everything.

Building Mobile Applications with Java Using GWT and PhoneGap

I recently wrote an amusing rant on programming languages called "An open letter to language designers: Kill your sacred cows." It was, um, not well received. If you read some of the comments on Reddit and Hacker News you see that most people think I'm an idiot, a novice, or know nothing about programming languages. *sigh*. Maybe I am.

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.