Matt Croydon::Postneo

Month: July 2004

  • Happy Techblogiversary!

    Two years ago today I started blogging at postneo.com.  I did start my livejournal in September, 2001, so I have been at it a bit longer than two years.  Either way, today is my techblogiversary.

  • Emulated Cross Platform Development

    I managed to coax Xcode on to my new emulated Mac this afternoon.  I’m excited to finally have OSX as a viable (yet slow) development environment.  Building the above sample project took longer than it would have if OSX were running natively, but it’s not, so I’ll cope with it.

    I’ve been experimenting with some binary versions from CVS by Richard Goodwin and the SDL builds by apophis.  They have been a little faster but there’s usually something useful broken at any given time (which is to be expected).  It looks like 0.3.0 will have some major improvements when it comes out.  I’m most excited about the idle code which should save my poor laptop from flooring it the whole time it is emulating.

    Update:

    The latest 0.3.0-pre from CVS is significanlty faster than 0.2.0.  Right now it doesn’t seem to be handling CDs properly, but I’ll just switch back to 0.2.0 if I need to load something from CD.  Another big advantage of 0.3.0-pre is that it has the idle code baked in.  This means that when my virtual mac isn’t doing anything it’s not hammering the processor in my laptop.  It’s much better than 0.2.0, where the bottom of my laptop approaches the temperature of the sun.

  • Rendezvous Javadoc

    Someone on the the Rendezvous mailing list pointed out an excellet collection of references for Apple’s Rendezvous API. Of most interest to me is the Rendezvous Javadoc.

  • Dive Into Series 60 Python

    For the past month or two, I have been tinkering with Python for Series 60. I regret that I have not had enough time to pound on it, but what I have played with has been awesome. I can parse HTML, like an adaptation from this page of Dive Into Python. When things like from sgmllib import SGMLParser just work, I’m amazed. Hey, check that out, I’m parsing HTML on my phone. Rock!

    Series 60 Python is still a research project at Nokia. There are no guarantees that it will ever see the light of day beyond limited testing. There’s only one problem: sockets. It always comes back to sockets. Don’t get me wrong, sockets are available in Series 60 Python, but you can’t do something like urllib.urlopen(url). That little thing is keeping a lot of people from doing useful things with Series 60 Python. Part of the reason that so many people use and love Python is because it’s sort of runnable pseudocode. It’s intuitive, it makes sense, and the syntax that you think ought to work often does. Once writing a Python app for a platform becomes much harder than that, you start loosing developers quickly. So many killer mobile apps that would be awesome to code in Python involve the following steps:

    1. Grab a specific resource (XML, HTML, etc)
    2. parse the resource and do something with the data
    3. interpret and present the data to the user

    If the first step is overly complicated, or doesn’t work as Python programmers expect it to, you’re going to loose a lot of potential developers quickly. There’s a bit of a catch 22 though: Nokia needs to be sure that Python for Series 60 is a worthwhile project, so they’ve seeded it to developers. However the developers are frustraed because they can’t just type urllib.urlopen(url). Which came first, the useful apps taking full advantage of a connected mobile platform, or the infrastructure to do so?

    It is obvious that Nokia has put a lot of time and effort in to Series 60 Python. There’s a lot beyond your standard Python distro buried in there. It would be an absolute tragedy to see this die half-ripened on the vine. Hey Nokia: you’ve done a great job so far, keep it up! Hey developers and bloggers: make some noise! Play with it. Have fun. Post your thoughts. Let them know what you think.

    Further Reading:

  • Multiplatform Rendezvous: Big News

    Apple opened the Rendezvous floodgates yesterday with new multiplatform Rendezvous releases. Most notable was the technology preview of Rendezvous for Windows XP/2000. It ships with Howl-like IE integration (Russ wants a Firefox plugin), but more important are the hooks. The platform ships with .dlls so that developers can bring on the apps with Rendezvous/Zeroconf integration. The package also ships with .jars so that Java developers can have access.

    This really is big news. Now we Windows users can become full-fledged citizens of the Rendezvous world.