Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:13:00 GMT
The software is always an inducement to buy their hardware, not their reason to be.
Probably serves me right for watching their commercials on my Windows machine, but… still.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:46:00 GMT
dojo.gfx, the normalized vector-drawing API for SVG and VML that I've been helping with is now in the head of the dojo subversion repository.
There's a fair amount of work still to be done, particularly to get VML looking right, but iit's ready for brave javascript hackers to start playing with
See http://dojotoolkit.org/developers/ for details on grabbing the trunk svn code. There's a single test file (tests/gfx/test_gfx.html) that should help you get started, and ongoing chatter on the dojo-contributors list if you want to keep an eye on the status.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Thu, 27 Jul 2006 16:42:00 GMT
The OSCON slides are at:
http://www.xdraw.org/oscon_slides/
Don’t think about looking at them in any browser besides Firefox. (I’ll probably fix this next week).
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 27 Jun 2006 05:36:12 GMT
Most of the technology linked from the front page here will be showing up in one form or another in an upcoming release of the dojo toolkit, including some version of the drawing editor. Dojo’s licenses should be liberal enough for anybody.
If you’re in a terrible hurry, email me at gavin at xdraw dot org and we’ll figure something out.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Fri, 02 Jun 2006 06:03:00 GMT
Ajaxian had a link to a nice “proof of concept Ajax Visio” today that uses the Walter Zorn library.
I have a new sample up for design review by the dojo crowd. If you want to look at it:
Cross-browser javascript drawing API
And it should work in Firefox 1.5+, Safari (Canvas only) and IE (note that the IE Canvas is DirectAnimation).
The existing Javascript vector drawing editor is still up (Firefox 1.5+ only), but I haven’t added anything to it lately.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sun, 16 Apr 2006 01:44:00 GMT
Jon Stewart and I will be speaking at The O'Reilly Open Source Convention this July:Your session dates and times follow for the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2006 in Portland, Oregon, July 24-28, 2006: - Conference Session Title: No Flash Required: Interactive Browser Graphics Date: 07/26/2006 Time: 5:20pm to 6:05pm Session ID: 8692
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Sun, 02 Apr 2006 03:41:00 GMT
I must say, it’s amusing to see that the “human spam” article received 70+ comments, all but one of them spam.
And so, I tune the anti-spam settings in this blog, bow to the many lice-ridden vermin who littered this site with their repulsive, civilization-destroying botnets, and busy myself with the “nuke” button.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 14 Mar 2006 06:06:00 GMT
It's fun to do things alone, but it's more fun with other folks, even when you're afraid they might laugh at you.
So.
There's an unfinished version of xdraw you can play with. It's at http://www.xdraw.org/xdhTest.html
It needs Firefox 1.5. I've tried it on Windows, OS X and Linux and it seems to work OK on all three, though Windows is perceptibly faster.
In the build as of today, grouping handles are broken, the polyline tool does exactly the same thing as the scribble tool, and the gradient tool is just a tease for a feature that hasn't been written yet. As I said on the dojo list, it's "pre-alpha".
Developer releases are coming in about a month, and I'm shooting for a formal 0.1 by May.
If you want to help, say so in the comments here and we'll figure something out.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Mon, 27 Feb 2006 06:11:00 GMT
Recently, Jill and I were at what back in the Bubble might have been called a “networking event.”
Some very decent, successful old friends were in attendance, as were a strange mix of folks whom Jill christened “shucksters” as in an unholy mix of shyster and huckster. Or something to do with oysters. Anyway…
There was the successful purveyor of a well-known diet product, and several folks promoting email marketing, ad networks, and systems for bringing your notional Hollywood Blockbuster to Steven Spielberg’s attention.
I’ve been thinking a lot since then about human nature and the role of society. The idea that keeps bobbing up in the magic eight ball of my mind is “We’re all shucksters.”
We’re all shucksters. We would all send spam, and hawk pr0n, and phish the clueless, and Anderson our accounts, and misuse the powers of whatever office we could bribe our way into, if there weren’t any consequences.
If there weren’t any consequences.
But we’ve spend the last few millienia working out what the consequences should be, so the greatest number of us could live as well as possible with the minimum concern that we would be murdered in our sleep for our iPods.
To any reader of history, civilization is not a linear path. There are retrograde motions that make pre-Gallilean cosmology look positively mathematical. Even a vaguely open-minded search will detail our failings past and present.
Civilization is an artifact of designs that succeeded where others failed, in that fundamental objective, of providing the greatest good to the greatest number of individuals for the longest time.
You can be a major shuckster and edge out ahead of civilization for a time, exploiting fellow humans who haven’t clued into the dangers of running that free screen saver.
You can be a minor shuckster and gleefully pirate the works of living artists. You won’t get caught, probably. The artists won’t go broke because if it. Probably. But further along the path, the people who create things need to eat, and it’s a rare breed who wants three meals of fame alone each day.
Or you can realize that the moment ahead of the curve is not the little notch where a dictator builds his palace for a few decades before he’s garroted by his own starving people.
The moment ahead of the curve is in helping more people live better than they do now. It’s in joining a community that protects people rather than exploiting them.
It’s not in your nature as a solo human animal. It’s in your nature as a civilized human being.
Posted by Gavin Doughtie Tue, 17 Jan 2006 18:40:00 GMT
So, Jeffrey Zeldman posted today, complaining about Web 2.0 hype.
Who can blame him, really. I sat in the Web 2.0 conference last year. While it was fun to meet some of the recently and soon-to-be funded bright lights doing neat stuff right in your web browser, the VC crowd, beautiful and sharp, filled most sessions, seeking a score.
But Zeldman lumped in the damaging over-hype of the AJAX/Web 2.0 meme with what I would call a critical misjudgent about what Web 2.0 really is. Hey says,
“Wireframing AJAX is a bitch. The best our agency has come up with is the Chuck Jones approach: draw the key frames. Chuck Jones had an advantage: he knew what Bugs Bunny was going to do. We have to determine all the things a user might do, and wireframe the blessed moments of each possibility.”
To which I can only respond “welcome to my life.” My life being, in this case, that of an actual application software developer. Application users are not an “audience” that you can plan out a passive media consumption experience for. They’re using your software to accomplish a goal, to solve a point of personal pain, perhaps. I can’t imagine developers sitting around Microsoft going “what a pain in the ass it’s going to be creating a word processor for people… it’s like they could write anything!”
One of the things that makes Web 2.0 “different” is the idea of real software that runs well enough in your browser that the other applications you might use aren’t necessary, particularly when their connection to the Internet was implemented as an afterthought.
This is the sort of design that requires the kind of thinking taught in Alan Cooper’s “About Face”. It’s an entirely different discipline, and complaints that it’s difficult to wireframe for are simply off topic.
