Category Archives: Tech Talk

Some potentially life-threateningly boring discussion.

Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents

Interesting first shot by Mark Bernstein, with promises for more:
Mark Bernstein: NeoVictorian 1: Civilization and its Discontents

Why do I say we are unhappy?

• Our scientific conferences are filled with papers that focus on incremental improvements observed when asking unskilled laborers (whom we call “novices”) to perform office chores. We call this “usability”.
• Scholars interested in arts and humanities computing are strangely obsessed with box office and weirdly uninterested in making software, or making meaning.

I’m looking forward to more…

NaNoWriMo Technology Suggestions

Took a look at this thread over on the geared up NaNoWriMo.org site and figured I’d write down my favorite tech suggestions.

It’s basically culling my tools from this post, as well as a few of the general tools from this post:

Writer.app for drafting, Tinderbox and OmniOutliner for thought organization and outlining, Mellel for general word processor formatting when I’m at that stage of the process.

Not that I’ll be doing much during November other than being spit up on, not sleeping, and changing nappies.

The Code Behind the New Mobile Horoscopes

Not a single, solitary person has asked, but here it is, anyway. The technology behind the mobile horoscopes is a combo of our lovely SMHoroscopesWriter, a custom Cocoa app the Q.I. Software team worked on, which now exports two different kinds of HTML and an XML format for general consumption (you, too, can integrate horoscopes into your app!).

But the real interesting stuff comes from iUI, which you can grab from here. Really, really nice JS and CSS library… it makes it really easy to make your app look nice for the good old iPhone…

Getting Started with the JavaFX Script Language(for Swing Programmers)

openjfx: Getting Started with the JavaFX Script Language(for Swing Programmers)
:

Below is a summary of the JavaFX Border classes and the Swing borders to which they correspond:

Oh dear God in Heaven. Now, when someone pointed out this new language from the Java team, I thought, “Oh man. Rich content market. Taking on AJAX, Flash, and Silverlight. Yay.”

Being the curious sort, and since this is usually my job, to check out the latest and greatest (well, okay, maybe not in the job specs, but it’s something I do for my job, anyway), I downloaded it. Figured I’d skim the tutorial. I glanced through the installation article with NetBeans, and clicked on the tutorial link at the bottom, which led me to the article above.

Holy Pete and all the Angels on High… what are they thinking? A rich media framework/language built on SWING? Argh.

Oh wow. And it gets better. I just downloaded the demos, without thinking (it must have been the shock of an “easy-to-use rich media environment” using Swing as it’s primary interface programming mechanism). After a couple minutes downloading over a pretty reasonable connection we have…:

200705091613
Embed that.