Josh On Design

It’s the Fourth of July again, which is America’s independence day for my non-US friends, and it’s time for some code cleaning.  I’ve built several open source projects over the last year and it’s time to shut some of them down.  Out with the old to make way for the new. Let’s review, shall we?

I've done a major refactoring which will make Amino easier to install, easier to maintain and, eventually, better performance and portability. Part of this work involved moving the platform specific parts to their own node modules. This means you should no longer install aminogfx directly. Instead, install the appropriate platform specific module. Currently there is one for GL and one for Canvas. I've also added stage transparency support to Raspberry Pi!

My hatred of C and C++ is world renown, or at least it should be. It's not that I hate the languages themselves, but the ancient build chain. A hack of compilers and #defines that have to be modified for every platform. Oh, and segfaults and memory leaks. The usual. Unfortunately, if you want to write fast graphics code you're pretty much going to be stuck with C or C++, and that's where Amino comes in.

This is part 3 of a series on Amino, a JavaScript graphics library for OpenGL on the Raspberry PI. You can also read part 1 and part 2.

This is the second blog in a series about Amino, a Javascript OpenGL library for the Raspberry Pi. The first post is here.

I’ve been working on Amino, my graphics library, for several years now. I’ve ported it from pure Java to JavaScript, to a complex custom-language generator system (I was really into code-gen two years ago), and back to JS. It has accreted features and bloat. And yet, through all that time, even with blog posts and the goamino.org website, I don’t think anyone but me has ever used it. I had accepted this fact and continued tweaking it to meet my personal needs; satisfied that I was creating something that lets me build other useful things. Until earlier this year.

I'm finally back from OSCON, and what a trip it was. Friend of the show wxl came
with me to assist and experience the awesomeness that is OSCON. Over the
next few days I'll be posting about the three sessions we taught and many, many sessions we attended. A splendid time is guaranteed for all. To kick things off, here is the code from my Amino talk.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.