Category SoftDev

Software Engineering and Development

Boxee Invites.

One of the most promising open-source projects regarding the home-theatre/TV (at last!) that combines excellent æsthetics, killer media features and social networking is Boxee. Boxee is based on the XBMC project. Note that while this is alpha quality software, it's impressively stable, yet unsupported. Boxee is currently available for the AppleTV/Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux 32bit - 7.10 and 8.04 only at the moment - and in source code form. I've got some invites for the invite-only alpha testing phase, so if you're interested drop me a comment below and I'll send you one. Update: No more invites here, comments are now closed. I'm sure you can find some elsewhere pretty easily.

'Sparse' in all ways.

Yep, the iPhone SDK does not support dynamically linked libraries. And that’s truly fantastic news for all iPhone developers wishing to leverage existing code out there. You can, of course, use a statically linked library in your code, or — if you have the code for the third-party libraries you’re going to be using — […]

Delusions.

Hmmm, what was Mark thinking when he wrote this? The warrior rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of the traditional big [software vendors]: Microsoft and […]

SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX)

The people behind the best HTML engine around (yep, that's WebKit for those that don't know it yet) just announced the next generation of their new Javascript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, just a few months after SquirrelFish itself was announced and before it was even adopted in any product. In the performance chart they posted in the linked page the engine is around 3 times faster than JavascriptCore and two times faster than SquirrelFish. Impressive.

An Empty Promise?

Ars Technica writes of the recent controversy on Google's commitment to an open source Android, the transparency of the development process and the availability of the SDK. Valid criticism for the most part, but no conclusive proof of Google's bad intentions. Yet, it'd really be a shame if Google, a company that hasn't really faltered until now, misses its chance in the mobile phone industry through the alienation of the community and the betrayal of its own values.

Did we really release 8.04?

The question serves as the subject of the eponymous thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. And it's quite valid. I'm really saddened to see the flawed argument put forward by several Ubuntu developers that 8.04 was a right decision. Even today, more than two months since 8.04 was released and some days after 8.04.1 came out, with hundreds of megabytes of updates the problems affecting 8.04 are numerous, major and extremely annoying. We still have a long way to go before reaching parity with the best (viz. OS X), let alone surpassing it. Judging by the responses on that thread, the first step would need to be the end of the state denial as a defence mechanism, acknowledging the fact that the 8.04 release (as well as 8.04.1) were full of show-stopper bugs and reminiscent of an era when desktop linux was infinitely more annoying than it is today and working towards quality (cf. punctuality). A 'release' should translate to 'usable, polished software', not 'alpha quality developer preview software'. 8.04 seemed more like the latter than the former and that needs to change.

Five GNOME/Linux Desktop Issues

GNOME, one of the two main linux desktop environments and platforms has become a very popular choice adopted by most major distributions as their desktop of choice, mostly due to its simplicity and minimalist design. While it does several things ‘right’, by generally providing a straightforward experience and ‘hiding’ advanced configuration options in its gconf […]

It's been really exhausting porting stuff to OS X

Justin Frankel lists a few reasons why Apple's developer resources suck. While OS X has some of the most modern, most powerful APIs around, much of their functionality is undocumented, forcing developers to spend countless hours reading header files or even reverse engineering while getting to know how to use them.

Google Earth Browser Plugin

Sure, AJAX, when viewed through the prism of the still world of HTML and CSS, can be beautifully dynamic. But, let's face it, Google Earth --- despite its resource-laden design and slow response on slower systems --- is a much more natural, a friendlier way to view geographic data. With Microsoft trying hard to reclaim the (tech) lead on mapping (see Virtual Earth, WorldWide Telescope), it's up to Google to stop the surge. Enter the Google Earth API and browser plugin --- software that opens up Google Earth for use within browsers and accessible by web developers. Sadly, it's only available for Windows right now --- I bet this will change soon.

WidSets. What a disappointment.

A reader of this blog sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, asking me to consider porting my Hellenic Reverse Directory Lookup widget (HRDL) for Apple’s Dashboard in Mac OS X to the Widsets service provided by Nokia. Over the past year or so I’ve been emailed another two or three times by […]