Josh On Design

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.

I've posted the first beta of Leonardo 1.0, ready for your testing pleasure. More details over on the

You may be a new programmer, or a web designer, or just someone who's heard the word 'RegEx', and asked: What is a Regex? How do I use it? And why does it hurt my brain? Well, relax. The doctor is in. Here's two aspirin and some water.

Another month has gone by with no update to Leonardo, or a real release of Amino. It's interesting how life changes. When I started this projects last summer I had no idea Jen and I would be having a baby in a month, nor did I truly have any notion how much my life would change. Everyone always says having children will change your life, but you never really understand it until you do it yourself, and our journey has just begun.

In today's post I'll dive into Amino's new buffering support. At then end we'll talk about new API docs for Amino, the roadmap, and request for help on a domain name.

When redesigning Amino I had a few core goals. These goals are in place to guide the product and ensure we created something genuinely useful, and not become "yet another gfx lib".

Teach them well and let them lead the way

I've heard a lot of noise recently about these new fangled smartphones and tablets not replacing 'real computers', especially since the announcement of many new tablet products, including the HP TouchPad. That they are just expensive FaceBook machines. I've also heard people say that there's no room in the market for more devices: iOS and Android will take up the market and leave nothing for anyone else. It'll be just like the PC wars again!

I'm on the plane home from Mobile World Congress. It's been a heck of a couple of weeks. I've gotten some new coworkers, a new boss, announced our new products, showed off the new devices in Barcelona, and spread the word of webOS itself to anyone who will listen. I've got several blogs coming about what we've announced, some fun new demos, app speculation, and updates on my open source projects.

It's been a while since I've written anything, especially anything other than the topics of Amino and Leonardo. While I rarely talk about my personal life on this site, I feel I should let you all know what's been going on, and how the next few months look.

Though engineering has always been a natural fit for my career, I have long wanted to be an artist. I suppose I'm not truly sure what it means to be an artist, but I still dabble, play, and learn. That seems to be enough.