Form and Function

When I purchased my Mac Pro, I had an option of which keyboard I wanted, I ordered the wireless keyboard, knowing how small it was, and thinking it would be next to useless for coding, but perfect for a family Mac-Mini.  Well, I actually kind of like the keyboard, the key-throw is good, I can type fast and it is really light/elegant.  BUT, it is pretty diminutive, and so light that when I use it in my regular seated position (feet elevated on desk, very reclined in my chair) with the keyboard on my lap, it kept slipping down.  I found myself unconsciously holding it in place with my left thumb so it wouldn't slide down.  Typically with large keyboards, the pad of my palm would rest against the bottom keeping it in place.

Update:

For those Flex developers out there who have not heard of the Flex 360 events, it is a GREAT opportunity to learn more about Flex, share information with other Flex devs and just generally have a great time. I attended the event in Atlanta, and Tom & John put on a great show. The sessions are really informative and pretty informal, which creates a great atmosphere for sharing and collaboration. At this event I will be speaking about Data Visualization and Dashboards with Flex 3.   I did a similar talk at Adobe MAX back in 2006, but it was on Flex 2, and geared to a less advanced audience.   So for this preso, I am going to have to crank it up a notch and come up with some pretty slick examples that push the boundaries of Flex, and show people how I have been building and teaching dashboard development to other Flex devs over the past couple of years.

It has been almost a week now after my transition off a wintel machine onto my new heavily loaded Mac Pro.  Like so many others before me, and the millions who will follow after me, it has been an epiphany.

I have been a hard-core windows guy for the past 15 years, just devouring everything Microsoft.  I am/was deeply intimate with almost all of Microsoft's software offerings from their (anti)productivity suites in their Office Tools to their back end server stacks like Exchange, SQL Server, Biz-Talk, Commerce Server, IIS, GreatPlains/Dynamics, Sharepoint and more.  I also exclusively developed in MS frameworks like VB (from years ago), C# etc..  all designing and developing business applications.    I was one of three Principals at a medium sized local MS Gold Partner consulting shop in charge of delivering multi-million dollar custom MS applications leveraging technologies in the above mentioned stacks.   A few years ago I slowly started to drift away from MS, the first material separation occurred when I adopted Adobe Flex as the primary development technology for my new startup and was just shocked with the refreshing change of the "open" community nature that Adobe adopted in its beta.

Now a couple of years later, with Apple making it almost impossible to ignore their presence with their adoption on Intel chipsets and the ability to run Windows side-by-side with OS X I made the leap.  What is amazing, is that leap is a more like a short step, the effort involved to make the switch is getting smaller and smaller.   I can't say enough good things about the quality of the Apple hardware itself, the 8-core is a dream, and even more importantly OS X feels like what a computer is supposed to feel like in 2008.   Spotlight (OS X's universal search tool) is just so easy... you have a thought like "where is file XXX" and you just type "XXX" into spotlight and there it is.   No more waiting several minutes while Windows search agonizingly moves through your non-indexed files at a snails pace (although  I am not sure how fair that is since I was not using an 8-core processor with 14GB of RAM on my wintel box.)    Lots and lots of little things are just so much more seamless and intuitive with OS X.   

This is not to say it is all roses, there are little things here and there that I miss from Windows, but overall the experience is such that you feel like you can forgive OS X for its shortcomings, while you want to blame Windows for theirs.  To Microsoft's credit they still have a few amazing products that I have mentioned before, like Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005.  Microsoft also has the very unenviable challenge of trying to support an OS that is 20+ years old and has successfully maintained backward compatibility on a ever shifting hardware platform that has to support billions of permutations of hardware configurations.   Apple on the other hand got a fresh start with OS X and they completely control the hardware platform, which is a much easier proposition.  It will be interesting to see how Apple is able to successfully avoid the bloat that will come with time as their adoption rates increase and the need to support backward compatibility becomes more prevalent.

So my message to any windows users considering the switch to Apple is to go for it, you will not regret it in the slightest.  The only issues I have found thus far is that GoToMeeting requires Windows to host meetings, and QuickBooks online has tied themselves to ActiveX technology via Internet Explorer.  For both of these I simply run VMWare fusion, although I will probably migrate to Adobe Connect for meetings, and I am hopeful Inuit will release a Flex client for QuickBooks sometime in the near future with their QuickBase announcement.

Help, I think I have become addicted .... to Apple.

This weekend, while out with my wife (sans the kids), I made my SECOND trip in 2 days to the local Apple Retail Store. I left the store about $500 lighter after picking up a bright pink Nano for my wife and an Apple TV (at $229 how can you resist??) At this point I can just feel myself getting inexorably sucked into the vortex of quality, attention to detail, and desire that Apple has come to embody in most of its products. It started a couple of years ago with my MacBook purchase that was simply used to make it easier for me to test our website within safari. This was followed up a few months ago with an iPhone purchase, under the auspices of keeping up to speed on current UI and usability trends in the industry. Now my addiction to apple … I mean research … has me buying iPods like candy and buying devices I didn’t know I had a need for. Next up is replacing my aging P4 with a brand new Mac Pro 8-core with some serious memory (12GB should do.) After buying the iPhone I was truly hooked… there is something about the products Apple produces that creates this incredible emotional desire for “more of that” (at least for tech people like me.) I commented to my wife that the desire I have for Apple products is quite similar to what I witnessed in her when we walked into the Louis Vuitton store and my wife was ogling a pair of $1,200 shoes. It is really an admirable and amazing feat that Apple has pulled off, by focusing on quality and attention to detail at every level from product design, implementation, to even the jewel like packaging materials, they have created a desire for their products that I have not experienced with any other technology outside of the lust people feel for cars like BMW, etc. Apple doesn’t get it right all the time though. On OS X I still can’t understand their fascination with spawning windows like rabbits in heat, and on a much more trivial note the shopping bag that the Apple Genius put my purchase into required an instruction book to figure out how to carry. It was this weird contraption with two separate ropes going through a total of four riveted holes in the bag… I wasn’t sure if it wanted to be a knapsack, hammock, or some weird S&M device… Walking through the mall I constantly found myself trying to figure out how to hold the damn thing properly… I think they got a little too clever for themselves on that one.


Okay, back to my addiction…. Yesterday I plugged in the Apple TV to our widescreen HDTV in our bedroom, within 10 minutes I had our modest iTunes collection of about 3k songs and our photo library of about 2.5k pictures streaming from it. So last night my wife and I sat down to “rent” a movie, I was a little disheartened to see that once we started watching it we only had 24 hours to finish it… I wrongly assumed it was “ours” for 30 days. That issue aside, we never even got to the movie… We became so fascinated with watching the slideshow of our photos and listening to music. It was an amazing experience for me… we had about 7 years of photos from before our wedding, various trips to Tahiti, Hawaii, coast of California, the birth of our two sons, etc… It was just amazing to watch and recall. It gave me a whole new appreciation for taking photos, as I was completely engrossed and entertained. It gave my wife and I an opportunity to reminiscence and connect at a level that so far eclipsed just watching a movie together. After a couple of hours I ended up knocking off and going to sleep. This morning I found out my wife stayed up past midnight watching our slide show.. Now I am not sure how entertaining this experience would be after seeing these photos for the umpteenth time, but I can tell you it was a real eye opener for me in terms of its intrinsic entertainment value. When we finally get around to watching the movie we rented and delving into some of the other features of the Apple TV I will report back.


- Tom

After the response I received on the first release of the Gauge component I thought it was time for an overhaul of the code since this original code was written when I was learning Flex back on the alpha bits of Flex 2.0. Since that time Flex has moved on, and I have learned quite a bit.



This version of the component is a complete re-write of the code and is vastly simpler and easier to read/extend. First a thanks to Peter Ent, as his stab at a gauge was infinitely better thought out than mine and much more compact, the component code is very close to his, with a couple of modifications. The other bigger, and what I consider very significant change for this component is how it leverages Degrafa… which if you are not familiar with and you are doing any component development you are doing yourself a disservice by not taking a close look at it. I used this little mini project as an excuse to really dig in and find out what Juan, Jason and the rest of the Degrafa team had been working on since they seemed to be popping up everywhere.

When I dug into Degrafa I was REALLY impressed at several levels. Not only are the examples just plain sweet visually, but the framework itself is very elegant, compact, and infinitely extendable. In this version of the gauge I built two skins completely in Degrafa and MXML markup, you can toggle the skins and they will still respect the color of the styles you choose. BTW, the skins can be set via CSS, and you can have separate skins for each part of the gauge (bezel, face, pointer, center, indicators.)

The beauty of this approach with Degrafa is three fold. First I am using MXML to create complex geometric relationships which is infinitely easier to do in markup versus procedurally because the markup itself creates visual relationships through the inherent nesting and grouping structure of XML. Second, Degrafa does a great job of leveraging Flex’s binding mechanism, which in my opinion is one of the most powerful things within Flex. Finally the workflow is vastly improved, I can do everything from flex builder and not jump between Flash for building vector assets and exporting to symbol .swfs etc…

On some later post I will probably dive into the framework itself, since I ended up having to extend it in a couple of areas and it only took me a few minutes to do so. For example the “tick” marks you see on the gauge I ended up copying the VerticalLineRepeater which extends the base Repeater class, and within 20 minutes after modifying a few methods and adding a couple trig functions, I had this arc of lines that I could declare in MXML… I remember the first time I did that in the original gauge component it took me hours to fine tune procedurally via the API.

At Juan’s urging I wanted to get this up so it could be shared with the community, as such the code might stand a little clean up here and there, but overall it should be pretty easy to follow. I am also going to be writing an article for InsideRIA that goes into all the gory details of building out this component with Degrafa, which was actually quite simple and very enjoyable.

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Caveat... The tweening of the pointer is a little flakey, as I threw it in at the last second, and I need to do a better job of handling the rotate effect and updateDisplayList collisions.

Well it looks like i have been accepted into the iPhone SDK beta developer program.. I must say that thus far the experience has been far more like a Microsoft Beta than anything else, where you are made to feel privileged to have been accepted after jumping through a corporate bureaucracy.

I am not sure how widespread the program is now, potentially they are allowing everyone in. What was odd though, is that last week I got an email requesting faxed copies of my articles of incorporation for BrightPoint Consulting (the company I registered under) which I faxed over. Just a few moments ago (a week later) I receive an email telling me that upon signing the license agreement and forking over my $99 I would be enrolled. I promptly did both, and now I am an "official" iPhone developer. I find it odd that it required such a manual process... I would assume this is pretty manually intensive if they are having humans read and correlate faxes to each developer account.

Last week I downloaded the latest bits from the second release of the iPhone SDK beta. I see that Interface Builder is now included, which is supposed to be the "magic sauce" for creating UI' s in Cocoa applications. But as I had thought, it still requires quite a bit of work to set up an application. The good news is that it appears that there is finally some documentation on the JavasScript DOM api for touch/gesture events. I planned on exploring that a bit further when I could carve out some time.

I will post again when I receive the SDK if there are additional resources provided outside of what everyone else see, and if my sharing does not violate some license EULA.