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 The Pro comes with reasonably beefy CPUs but they will be out of date in a few years.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.
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?
I hate smartphone lock screens. Not the concept itself, but the many implementations. Everything I’ve seen is too minimal or too complex. This is prime real estate we are talking about. Surely we can do better. Since it’s been on my mind a lot lately I thought it would be fun to redesign the lock screen starting with first principles. Note: I’m a researcher at Nokia by day. This blog and the opinions on it have nothing to do with my work at Nokia. All ideas are my own and do not reflect anything Nokia is working on. This post also does not reflect a desire on my part to actually build a new lock screen for any OS. This is purely a design exercise to explore the space and see if we can do better.
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.