seanmonstar

Chrome for Android

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:28:35 -0800

Exciting news for Android. It’s always been a wonder why the stock Browser wasn’t Chrome, and now it is. And it really rocks. The tab interface is fun to use.

However, since it uses an updated version of the webkit rendering engine, it should need to load that library upon initialization. The standard engine is always in memory, something that’s held back Firefox for Android. Yet, Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from this.

Perhaps the mobile Firefox engineers already know, but I can think of 3 possibilities:

There’s a way to keep the new libraries in memory.
There’s a way to replace the default engine
Or they just handle the loading in a better way.

Whichever it is, hopefully mobile Firefox can find a way to improve their loading to be close to equivalent to Chrome’s loading.

The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:01:05 -0800

The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid:

Hugo Bille’s analysis of how Super Metroid guides a player while the player feels they are discovering things in the chaos on their own:

Watching him, a complete newcomer to the genre, still find his way around Zebes in pretty much the same way I’d do, almost never once getting lost or stuck for any considerable amount of time, made me question how that could be.

A Broadcasting Network

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:55:47 -0800

A Broadcasting Network:

Dieter Bohn, over at The Verge, describing Twitter’s evolution:

The recent redesign of the Twitter web pages and its official Twitter apps that shuffled Direct Messages off to a corner is essentially a side effect of this basic attitude: Twitter isn’t a messaging company, it’s a broadcasting (social) network.

The thing is, I’ve only ever seen it as a broadcasting network. To me, it’s an extension of my blog. I can write things on Twitter that are short, and perhaps less important, because the barrier and expectation is lower. I never expect to have deep conversations over Twitter.

As much as Twitter hated the term earlier, they are starting to accept that it is a micro-blogging platform.

A new direction for web applications

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:10:18 -0800

A new direction for web applications:

As I said last night, I don’t see how nodejs is the solution, by itself, for a web application that talks to many services. I’d still say that MVC is the best solution we have seen so far. Python has great support for long-running async tasks, talking to various databases, and the like.

That said, I love my JavaScript. Here’s where I see nodejs being a win: writing JavaScript on both sides of the stack feels great, and it gains small amounts of CPU time by making file I/O asynchronous. For other long-lasting tasks, such as resizing an image, you still need to set up a task in a queue for other CPUs to crunch.

Cross Device Jabbering

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:17:42 -0800

People love to talk to each other. Especially when they’re friends. People do so every day across SMS, Facebook, and GTalk. It would be better for everyone if companies worked together to let everyone communicate with their friends in an easier fashion. It’d be easier than you might think.

GTalk comes as part of Google’s suite of apps by default on Android phones, so everyone who has one has an account. Plus, everyone who has a GMail account, is also signed up to use GTalk. Google+ Chat recently uses GTalk in the webapp, but the mobile version is some other service that can’t chat with people on a desktop computer.

iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads sold now come with iMessage, which intelligently blends SMS with a chat-like service. The way it manages to decide which service to use is the model that all these companies should use for what I describe below.

Even if your friends don’t have smartphones, many have a Facebook account, and use it all day long. Facebook released an app, Messenger, that does similar things as iMessage, where it tries to use its Chat service to talk to your friends before reverting to SMS.

GTalk and Facebook Chat already use the Jabber protocol (or XMPP) to communicate. There’s reasons to believe that iMessage could be close to supporting the Jabber protocol. iMessage and Facebook Messenger already intelligently pick which service to use. These 3 companies could work individually to allow their application to try to guess, based on contact information you already have of the user, if they can be reached through the Jabber protocol on one of the other services. This would cut down tremendously on the need for SMS, as well as alleviate the need for a user to have to remember the best way to contact one of their friends. The computers should figure this stuff out for us!

I understand the desire for lock-in¹, but at this point, each service is so big, it would be better to improve communication between them, and compete on other features. Each company needs to admit that they aren’t going to have all the users, and so it would actually make their service better if it included our friends on other services.

Is there anything here with saying Facebook Chat is using it’s social network advantage to require people to only contact Facebook friends through Chat? Sounds ridiculous, right? It also sounds a lot like the complaint over Search Plus Your World. ↩

AMD is Not the Answer

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:00:05 -0800

AMD is Not the Answer:

Tom Dale, reiterating why AMD is the wrong solution for JavaScript applications:

In my opinion, having to write this out for every file sucks.

And:

If build tools are required anyway, a much simpler solution should fit most developers’ needs.

The end.

Antitrust+?

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:56:14 -0800

Antitrust+?:

MG Siegler, regarding Google’s comments that other social networks haven’t shared their data for indexing:

Those other companies can argue that it’s not in their best business interest to open that data. In effect, Google would be forcing them to hurt their business if they were to open the data up.

So, essentially, the “other companies”, such as Twitter and Facebook, will claim it’s not fair that Google can show data from Google+ and not Facebook, when Facebook doesn’t want to share its own data?

Personalizing Search

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:40:14 -0800

Personalizing Search:

Personally, this really excites me. Google has always been useful for un-biased information, but when you wanted to know if a movie was good, or where to eat, you got a bunch of strangers opinions. We all know a friend’s opinion trumps 1,000 strangers.

I hope it will eventually be like this: I want some some good Mexican. Oh look, John and Kevin both recommend La Cantina.¹

The algorithm could analyze places that I already like, find my friends that also like those places, and see where else they enjoyed in the same category. ↩

Samsung Will Not Upgrade Galaxy S Phones

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:26:00 -0800

Samsung Will Not Upgrade Galaxy S Phones:

Samsung, regarding upgrading the Galaxy S software to Android 4:

A full update to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich for the GALAXY Tab(7-inch) and GALAXY S is not practicable due to hardware limitations.

This, as the Nexus S (which is the same internal hardware) is running Android 4 right now.

If an OEM were to release less phones a year, but provide excellent support for them for more than a year¹, I could strongly recommend to my friends to only buy from them. But I can’t recommend Samsung, since they don’t.

I can only recommend Google’s Nexus brand, now.

Heck, most OEMs hardly support their devices for more than a month. ↩

"Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:20:41 -0800

“Dreamweaver was attempting to be helpful, but the moment it reformatted my code, I threw a fit. YOU TOUCHED MY CODE. Dreamweaver never recovered from that horrendous first impression.”

- Michael Lopp

"Few outside the technological field even knew his name, yet his work has impacted every person who..."

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:05:41 -0800

“Few outside the technological field even knew his name, yet his work has impacted every person who has ever touched an electronic device. And I mean that quite literally.”

- Gene Yuh on the death of Dennis Ritchie.

Or: Competition is Good

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:00:06 -0800

Or: Competition is Good:

John Gruber on the threat of Google:

A different perspective would be that Google is the bigger threat, and that using Apple products is a way to better protect our privacy and personal information.

This was in response to Dave Winer suggesting why he uses Android:

If there is no alternative to iOS then Apple will have exclusive control over what makes it to market. That is a future none of us should want to live in.

I agree that both threats are very real. Which is why I hope neither wins, but that they continue to compete, forcing each other to be less evil.

The Old Republic

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:25:12 -0800

The Old Republic:

Star Wars: The Old Republic launches next week, and I’ve long looked forward to this game. I know what I’ll be doing as the year ends.

Ghostery

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:37:46 -0800

Ghostery:

I was slowly working on an add-on to block social buttons on websites, but I recently just found Ghostery. They have an extension for Chrome and Firefox, and it rocks.

Widgets the Right Way

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:21:03 -0800

Widgets the Right Way:

A lot of sites are using widgets more, be it for ads, or these terrible social buttons that have emerged. Besides not wanting to spend time downloading the social buttons that I won’t use, what I hate the most is that they all have this in common: If they lag, they stall the rest of the page.

That’s because they document.write their contents into the page, which prevents all further rendering until they’ve loaded. Don’t do that. Read this from Rich Thornett about how to make your widgets suck less.

Asynchronous UIs

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:11:14 -0800

Asynchronous UIs:

A great post by Alex McCaw, creator of the Spine MVC JavaScript¹ framework, about how front-end developers do Ajax interactions wrong. Users shouldn’t be stopped because we’re waiting on the server to respond. The interface should respond immediately, and a background sync action should be kicked off.

I’ve been thinking about this for the past year, and wanted to reflect these ideas in Shipyard, and make them come alive in the Add-on Builder, myself.

I refuse to use CoffeeScript, so it’s off limits to me. ↩

Past Month of Shipyard

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:45:32 -0800

Last month I got to start working on Shipyard almost full-time, as I need it to make Add-on Builder work by the end of the quarter. I’m not ready to call Shipyard 1.0 until I’m confident with the API for Models, Controllers, and Views. Models are largely done, Views need some work, and Controllers need a start. Besides that, though, what has happened to Shipyard in the past month?

Here follows a changelog-ish list.

Animations
- A merge between MooTools’ Fx.Tween and Fx.Morph classes
Events
- addListener returns a Listener object with attach and detach methods.
- support for once
- legacy API
  - official API for EventEmitters is addListener, removeListener, and emit
  - previous methods will soon log a DeprecationWarning, before being removed by 1.0
New utils
- Logger
  - Makes the console more familiar for Python users
  - Doesn’t error if there is no console available
- Cookie
  - Thanks to MooTools
- Color
  - Thanks to MooTools
DOMEvent
- Thanks to MooTools
Env
- provides browser and platform
A briefer test runner
- Only prints dots for successes, F for failures, and prints errors at the end

If commit lists are more your thing, you can look to GitHub. The next month should see event delegation, and more work on the View/template system.

The difference between Chrome and Firefox

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 08:10:00 -0800

The difference between Chrome and Firefox:

When people ask me why they should use Chrome or Firefox, I tell them that feature-wise they’re pretty competitive. This sums up the difference greatly:

This is a Google product and it has to benefit Google. It isn’t merely about making the web better, it is also about promoting Google products and giving them an advantage over competing services. […] Even if it requires violating your privacy.

Firefox wants the web to be better, and Chrome wants Google to be better.

Galaxy Nexus on The Verge

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:42:16 -0800

Galaxy Nexus on The Verge:

Joshua Topolsky about Ice Cream Sandwich:

I want to note that moving around all of these screens is buttery smooth. There’s no lag, no stutter. Animations are fluid, and everything feels cohesive and solid. It’s like Ice Cream Sandwich is more “there” than previous versions of Android.

I’m very excited for this new version. However, as neat as the Galaxy Nexus seems, why does it have to be almost 5-inches? I want something to fit in my pocket, not a sad attempt of tablet.

var that = this

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 12:00:05 -0800

I used to think say you should use that in the question “What variable should I name this for closures?” This was because self is already a variable that points to window. However, I’ve since revised my opinion on what is a good variable name in this case.

I now find that and self to be too vague.

Instead, I think the variable should be named after the Class that you are currently coding in. As always, it’s easier to explain with code:

var PackageController = new Class({

    doSomething: function() {
        var controller = this;

        someEl.addEvent('click', function(e) {
            controller.react();
        });
    }

});

The reason is because once you start delving a couple nested functions deep¹, I find myself sometimes wondering if I bound that to the value I wanted. This way leaves little to wonder about. And since you read code far more than you write it, best to write the most readable code you can.

I know, some of that can be solved by moving the functions to named methods on other objects, but you’d be lying if you said you never happened to have a function for a .forEach loop, and then another inside for an .addEvent, or something similar. ↩