BirdWalker, then and now
“About time, too. He’s been looking dreadful for days; I’ve been telling him to get a move on.“—Albus Dumbledore about his phoenix Fawkes after Fawkes burst into flame
Birdsongs, Musique Concrète, and the Web Audio API
In January 2015, my friend and collaborator Brian Belet and I presented Oiseaux de Même — an audio soundscape app created from recordings of birds — at the first Web Audio Conference. In this post...
Highlights of the first Web Audio Conference
I recently had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the first Web Audio Conference, co-sponsored by IRCAM and Mozilla. I wanted to share some of the great things that I learned about there. Meyada,...
Using Google Maps in a responsive design
[When I’m not in the office, I’m often out birding and photographing birds. To keep track of my life list and bird photos I wrote a Ruby on Rails site hosted at birdwalker.com; you can...
Video of my YUIConf talk about open web app development
The YUIConf folks have just posted their recording of a talk I gave there last year. I had planned to talk generally about the Firefox Marketplace, how it differs from other app stores, and how...
Replacing Google Image Charts with D3.js
[When I’m not in the office, I’m often out birding and photographing birds. To keep track of my life list and bird photos I wrote a Ruby on Rails site hosted at birdwalker.com; you can...
DevCon5 -- on learning from games, Monty Sharma, Mass Unity
Monty Sharma gave a great talk this morning at DevCon5 about the current trends in games and what the rest of us can learn from them. He centers on three big ideas:
jsEverywhere: Apathy is the Enemy of Awesome by Nancy Lyons
Nancy Lyons of geekgirlsguide gives a real end-of-day pep talk about how failed communication and collaboration can kill projects. I’ll put in a few of her zingers and how I understand them:
jsEverywhere: PhoneGap CLI and PhoneGap Build Steve Gill, Adobe
Steve Gill is demoing “Cordova Client”, in which you have command-line tools to build, deploy, and manage Cordova-based applications on Blackberry, Android, and iOS. This is still in beta. It’s at github.com/filmaj/cordova-client. It requires Node.js,...
jsEverywhere: From Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery by Morten Nielsen
Morten’s presentation is a hilarious, compelling fable of what happens when a .NET shop relying on manual processes becomes a victim of its own success and ends up with an exploding number of software versions...
jsEverywhere: End-to-End W3C APIs by Alexandre Morgaut
Alexandre is giving a great overview of the history of JavaScript, popular API’s, and the role of W3C and other standards bodies. He gives a shoutout to Kevin Dangoor for CommonJS, then proposes the idea...
jsEverywhere: Single Page Applications, Josh Powell
Josh Powell is giving a great talk about how to make single page web applications with JavaScript. The main focus is on how to break free of the web 1.0 tyranny of doing a page...
Firefox Aurora Marketplace for Android available now
Earlier this month, Mozilla announced the Firefox Aurora Marketplace release. We’re hoping that Aurora users, our awesome early adopters, will go experience the Firefox Marketplace on their Android phones and let us know what they...
David Kaneda and Josh Clark @ DevCon5 NYC
This session has David and Josh riffing about designing for mobile. Device context is different from User Context. Just because you know they have a small screen, you don’t know whether they’re focused or distracted,...
Allan De Consta Pinto (Microsoft) @ DevCon5 NYC
Allen is a technical evangelist, he’s here to talk about building native Windows 8 Apps with HTML. He emphasizes that Windows 8 makes Touch and the Windows Store first-class citizens. Nice detail: you can set...
Caridy Patino @ DevCon5 NYC
Caridy describes how Yahoo! built Axis on three different platforms using Mojito. He talked a lot about lessons learned while building a complex UX on iOS, Android, and Chrome desktop.
Tyler Smith (AppMobi) @ DevCon5 NYC
Tyler Smith talks about how to make great cross-platform games with HTML5 * Research and choose an HTML5 game engine (see bebraw’s excellent list at github) based on features you need, size, cost, and mobile...
David Kaneda @ DevCon5 NYC
David Kaneda is talking at DevCon5 NYC talking about cross-device development: * You only get access to four touch events on most devices right now. See Boris Smus’s pointer.js as a nice abstraction layer. Enhance...
Greetings from DevCon5 NYC
Greetings from DevCon5 NYC. Our morning starts with Peter Lubbers giving an HTML5 overview. He’s reminding us about some important fundamentals: * Web Origins (see RFC 6454) are everywhere. You need to understand not only...
Jeff Atwood's PHP Singularity
I recommend this great essay by Jeff Atwood about the horribleness of PHP and what to do about it. I first encountered PHP when I did the second implementation of birdwalker.com, my website for birding...
John Lilly - Lessons From Mozilla: WordCamp San Francisco 2009
I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I just watched this: John Lilly - Lessons From Mozilla: WordCamp San Francisco 2009. John lays out the state of the world from the Mozilla...
HTML5 Gaming, Ashley Gullen (Scirra) and Tyler Smith (appMobi), DevCon5
Notes from HTML5 Gaming, Ashley Gullen (Scirra) and Tyler Smith (appMobi), DevCon5 Scirra makes Construct2 The number one reason why your App is slow – software rendering instead of HW acceleration Why? graphics card drivers...
Intro to Canvas, 8bitrocket, DevCon5
Notes from an Intro to Canvas, 8bitrocket, DevCon5 Firefox Canvas performance got really bad six months ago, slowly coming back now Retained mode (Flash, DOM) versus Immediate mode (Canvas) They still use Modernizr.js to test...
State of Mobile Web Gaming, Keith Wright, DevCon5
Within Android, breathtaking diversity of screen resolution, processor speed – HTML/JS/CSS parse speed ranges from 0.4 to 1.4 seconds (put JS at end of the page!) even with JS in cache later OS version doesn’t...
David Kaneda, Mobile Design, DevCon5
-webkit-touch-overflow is cool but only mobile safari; in the meantime, see iscroll4 Sencha invested several engineers for six months making the scroller work well Zynga just released their scroller (can also work with Canvas) David...
Ronjon Nag, Future of Blackberry, DevCon5
BlackBerry 10 Jam coming next week in Orlando, FL many acquisitions including torch mobile, the astonishing tribe set the stage for blackberry 10 platform Q: why BlackBerry? A: 77 million smartphone subscribers; 55 million blackberry...
Sy Choudhury, "Future of Mobile Computing", DevCon5
Notes from Sy Choudhury, Qualcomm, “Future of Mobile Computing”, DevCon5 Makers of Snapdragon processors. Sy declares the javascript performance problem officially solved [we agree] Cool demos of optimized HTML5 canvas performance for GUImarks in their...
David Kaneda, "Web, Native", DevCon5
Notes from David Kaneda, “Web, Native”, DevCon5 cool contrast between early wikipedia page versus Sencha touch app running in mobile browser most of the world’s traffic stop signs are red and octagonal form follows function:...
Andrew Lunny, "Anatomy of an App", Adobe / PhoneGap
Notes from Andrew Lunny’s talk, “Anatomy of an App”, Adobe/PhoneGap “Native versus HTML5” is not the distinction you should worry about. “Is your App a citizen or a tourist?” Is your App a jerk or...
Peter Lubbers, "Connectivity features of HTML5", DevCon5
Notes from Peter Lubbers’s talk, “Connectivity features of HTML5”, DevCon5 [He’s the guy with the ‘HTML5’ license plate in California] Peter shows a very cool demo of impress.js being controlled live using websockets from his...
birdwalker.com and the difference between Apps and Websites
For my first six months of working at Mozilla on our Apps ecosystem, I would tell everyone that HTML5 developers should have an easy time getting their stuff into our Marketplace, because “it’s just the...
getting lost in Cambridge
While on spring break years ago, in a time before GPS and smartphones, my friend and I were trying to get to a movie theater while visiting Cambridge, MA. We stopped a stranger on the...
Martin Fowler on doing painful things more often
In this post entitled “FrequencyReducesDifficulty”, Martin Fowler explains why doing painful things more often reduces the pain. Think pushups, cleaning the catbox, refactoring ugly code, and integrating multiple subsystems.
Legacy code is like unwanted inventory?
In this May 2011 post, Michael Feathers asks us to consider the cost of carrying around all that legacy code, making an analogy with how lean manufacturing folks become more efficient by reducing the amount...
Michael Feather's next book
Ever since I first discovered Michael Feather’s “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” I’ve been a huge fan. I find it both inspiring and a great book to teach from. While catching up on his blog...
TDGotchi!
I heard about this from @ralekseenkov. TDGotchi is an Eclipse plug-in that creates a virtual pet, like the old Tamagotchi, except that this one doesn’t thrive on simulated feedings. It thrives on watching you fix...
RubyOnAles wrap-up
RubyOnAles2011 was a blast! In addition to getting in some serious hacking with JQuery, Rails, and the eBird API, I got to meet some cool ruby people, hang out in the cozy environs of the...
Mark Pilgrim on "Why Specs Matter"
In this timeless essay about how developers typically approach implementing a standard or specification, Mark Pilgrim mercilessly divides us developers into Morons and Assholes. I imagine you don’t want to chose one or the other,...
Michael Feathers on "Data-Rich Development"
In his recent post “Data-Rich Development”, Michael Feathers talks about supplementing the recent emphasis on incremental design through TDD with a longer-term perspective gained through analyzing changes to the codebase over time. As a budding...
RubyOnAles 2011, here I come!
Next up for me is a quick jaunt up to Bend, Oregon for Ruby On Ales 2011. I’m a Rails enthusiast but haven’t really connected with the Rails community until now. Really looking forward to...