Josh On Design

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.

Today I'm doing a three hour hands on tutorial at OSCON on HTML Canvas. All you need is a text editor, Chrome, and basic JavaScript knowledge. By the end of the session you'll know a ton about Canvas and have built your own little video game that can run almost anywhere. The full lecture notes and hands on lessons

The TouchPad is on it's way to stores, the catalog is full of apps, and Jesse finally went to sleep.  It is done.

I'm very excited to announce that two of my presentations have been accepted to OSCON this year (thankfully back in Portland again). OSCON is one of my favorite conferences because I get to learn as well as teach. There is such a diverse set of topics that I try to get out of my comfort zone and learn something new every year. (One year it was an intro to Arduino). OSCON will be this July 25th-29th in Portland Oregon. And let me tell you: Portland in July is simply beautiful, with the best microbrews in the country.

Jesse is one week old today. An amazing week it has been.

After several months of work, nestled in between getting webOS 3.0 out the door and prepping the nursery for the pending arrival of my first child, I am happy to announce the release of Amino 1.0. I have been eagerly following the development of HTML 5 Canvas support in the major browsers as well as ensuring the HP TouchPad will have great support for it. Amino is a great way to use the power of Canvas is modern mobile and web applications.

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.