The PagePacker challenge
By now we’ve seen plenty of toy demos of the various scripting language bridges to Cocoa. The word is out that scripting languages can be used to build significant applications, but the gap between demonstration and reality still seems wide. Also, it’s not easy to compare and qualify bridges. Microbenchmarks miss the point; as a developer, I want to know “can this bridge go all the way with me?” And, “if I get stuck, then what?”
Delicious Diversion
Are you getting tired of waiting for Wil Shipley to release Delicious Library 2?
I hear that he is adding the ability to publish your library online. But why wait? Here’s a web server that you can inject into Delicious Library and start sharing your library today. It’s primitive, but you can easily customize it to your heart’s delight. It’s the same web server that I used in my screencast, and it is built using NuAnywhere, which ships with Nu and NuHTTP, a reusable web server component that I wrote to plug into Cocoa applications.
A Nu Screencast
This weekend I used Snapz Pro to make my first screencast. Call me lazy: I did it in one take and there’s no audio, but I think the result is pretty good for a first try. It’s also given me a couple of ideas for more online demos to do soon.
Click here to read more and to see my screencast.
Thanks to Jonathan Rentzsch for twitter-coaching me in screencasting and for compressing my video.
David Lynch, Bob's Big Boy, and Me
I used to go to Bob’s Big Boy restaurant just about every day from the mid-seventies until the early eighties. I’d have a milk shake and sit and think. There’s a safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner.
So wrote David Lynch in a brief book titled Catching the Big Fish. Subtitled Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, its purported theme is how Lynch’s twenty years of Transcendental Meditation have helped him think creatively. But it’s both less and more than that. It is less in its lightness on details about meditation and it is more in the insight it gives of Lynch’s creative career.
RubyCocoa Resources: Call for Volunteers
Posted today to the rubycocoa-talk mailing list:
With all of the work that has gone into RubyCocoa for Leopard, the articles that I wrote for my RubyCocoa Resources site need an update.
On Pyramids and Creativity
Quoting A Conversation with Alan Kay:
If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.
Git for Nu
Many visitors to Programming Nu have already seen this, but now that Nu development has gone public, I’ve switched from Subversion to git for version control. So far my only problem has been stupidly typing “git clean” before committing files (don’t do that!). But everything else has been great, including having gitweb to browse my repository on the web.
Objects and Closures
Timely observations by Steve Dekorte:
A language that uses objects on the bottom can use them for everything, but a language with closures on the bottom needs other types or “atoms” for things like numbers, lists, etc and then scatter around functions for operating on those other types. If you care about simplicity, consistency and organization, this is a big difference.
Beginning with Nu-0.2.0, Nu includes full support for Lisp-style closures.
