In the future touch interfaces will take over most computing tasks but 10% of people will still need ‘full general purpose computers’. We can’t let the interface stagnate. This white paper represents a decade of my thinking on what is wrong with desktop style operating systems (WIMP) style and proposed solutions. PCs are not obsolete. They just need improvements to become ‘workstations’ again.
Note: Parts II and III are up now.
I’ve used a lot of cross platform desktop toolkits over the years. I’ve even built some when I worked on Swing and JavaFX at Sun, and I continue development of Amino, an OpenGL toolkit for JavaScript. I know far more about toolkits than I wish. You would think the hardest part of making a good toolkit is the graphics or the widgets or the API. Nope. It’s deployment. Client side Java failed because of deployment. How to actually get the code running on the end user’s computer 100% reliably, no matter what system they have. Deployment on desktop is hard. Perhaps some web technology can help.
The follow up to last year’s Beautiful Lego, Mike Doyle brings us back for more of the best Lego models from around the world. This time the theme is Dark. As the book explains it: “destructive objects, like warships and mecha, and dangerous and creepy animals… dark fantasies of dragons and zombies and spooks” I like the concept of a theme as it helps focus the book. The theme of Dark was stretched a bit to include banks and cigarettes, and vocaloids (mechanical japanese pop-stars), but it’s still 300+ gorgeous pages of the world’s best Lego art. Beautiful Lego 2 is filled to the brim with Zerg like insect hordes, a lot of Krakens, and some of the cutest mechs you’ve ever seen.
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.
I recently added the ability to set individual pixels in Amino, my Node JS based OpenGL scene graph for the Raspberry Pi. To test it out I thought I'd write a simple Mandlebrot generator. The challenge with CPU intensive work is that Node only has one thread. If you block that thread your UI stops. Dead. To solve this we need a background processing solution.
A post about Arthur Whitney and kOS made the rounds a few days ago. It concerns a text editor Arthur made with four lines of K code, and a complete operating system he’s working on. These were all built in K, a vector oriented programming language derived from APL. This reminded me that I really need to look at APL after all of the language ranting I’ve done recently.
I am unhappy to announce the release of Electron 0.4 beta 3.
I have a problem. Sometimes I get something into my head and it sticks there, taunting me, until I do something about it. Much like the stupid song stuck in your brain, you must play the song to be released from it's grasp. So it is with software.
I need to move on to other projects so I’m wrapping up the rest of my ideas in this blog. Gotta get it outta my brainz first.
Note: I’m a research at Nokia but this blog does not represent my employer. I didn’t move to Microsoft and I’ve never been on the Windows Phone team. These ill considered opinions are my own.
Lately I've been digging into Rust, a new programming language sponsored by Mozilla. They recently rewrote their docs and announced a roadmap to 1.0 by the end of the year, so now is a good time to take a look at it. I went through the new Language Guide last night then wrote a small ray tracer to test it out.
After the more abstract talk I’d like to come back to something concrete. Regular Expressions, or regex, are powerful but often inscrutable. Today let’s see how we could make them easier to use through typography and visualization without diminishing that power.
So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.
So far my posts on Typographic Programming have covered font choices and formatting. Different ways of rendering the source code itself. I haven’t covered the spacing of the code yet, or more specifically: indentation. Or even more specifically: tabs vs spaces.
The Art of LEGO Design: Creative Ways to Build Amazing Models
Apparently my last post hit HackerNews and I didn’t know it. That’s what I get for not checking my server logs.
Allow me to present a simple thought experiment. Suppose we didn’t need to store our code as ASCII text on disk. Could we change the way we write – and more importantly read – symbolic code? Let’s assume we have a magic code editor which can read, edit, and write anything we can imagine. Furthermore, assume we have a magic compiler which can work with the same. What would the ideal code look like?
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.