Screaming Penguin

Curated Computing Sucks

Submitted by kebernet on Thu, 05/20/2010 - 00:07

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Development

John Gruber, in his infinite cluelessness quotes:

Kontra:

Our museums are not football-field sized warehouses where art objects are indiscriminately dumped and our magazines and blogs are not amorphous containers of randomly selected articles. Our classrooms, restaurants, hospitals and indeed all our civilized institutions are firmly reliant on curation of one kind or another. The goal should be for curators to compete, not for curation to be declared illegal and unholy by the “open” zealots.

A Tale of Two (and more) Apps

Submitted by kebernet on Thu, 04/29/2010 - 17:57

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Development

This is based on a Lightning talk I gave at the Java Posse Roundup 2010 and again at the GTUG-Atlanta metting for April 2010.

I love crossword puzzles.

In the time before time, I would stop at my local coffee shop and purchase a copy of the New York Times. I would flip to the crossword and with the classic "double fold" begin the crossword puzzle. Mobile devices soon took over the world, and subscribing to the electronic version soon made much more sense than killing all those trees. Last fall, I switched from the orchards of Cupertino to an Android device, alas, there was no good way for me to do the New York Times puzzle on my way to work anymore. Time to start a project.

I developed the original version of Shortyz for Android (named in honor of, and with apologies to, Will Shortyz of the NYT) in about three weekends. It had a number of usability issues and was rough around the edges, but it was "Good Enough for Me." Unfortunately, because of stolen laptop I lost some progress on the source and my market signing key (yeah, I know). So I decided to "do it right." Forgoing the Android classes I implemented my own two-dimensional scrolling, touch handling and rendering code. Now I am quite happy with the results.