For the past few months I've been working on an open source UI toolkit called Amino. It has lots of cool features like a scenegraph, CSS control skinning, and dynamic translation editing. You just have write your app in Amino and you get the cool stuff for free. But what if you have an existing Swing application and don't want to rewrite it? Don't worry, Amino's got you covered.
We are making progress on the next release of Leonardo, an open source desktop Java drawing program. One of the key features scheduled for the next release is a webservice that lets users save and share reusable symbols they've created. For example, someone could create a set of GWT mockup widgets, then share this set with others.
Ruby Red, the first full release of Leonardo Sketch is ready for download. Leonardo is a desktop open source drawing program written entirely in Java. In this first version of Leonardo, features include:
AKA: a Teachable Moment in Performance Tests, Profilers, and Debugging statements.
When you go to the polls today shouldn't you make sure you have the support of a drawing program that will fight for your interests in Washington?
If you're reading this blog then there's a good chance you've heard Apple has deprecated their implementation of Java on the Mac. Contrary to the resulting outrage over the last few days, I don't find change to be a shocking surprise.
A decade from now 90% of people will use phones, slates, or netbooks as their primary computing device. This is a very exciting development in the software world and promises to reshape the way we make software (check out the great stuff our lead developer is doing in his day job at Palm), but Amino isn't for that world. Amino about that 10%: the content creators who need killer desktop apps, the programmers who want great tools, and the knowledge workers who need to manage incredible amounts of information at lightning speed. Amino is the toolkit to build these apps.
Today I am proud to announce a project I've been working on for the past few months called Leonardo. I've long believed there's a need for a good desktop drawing app that is completely cross platform, free, and open source. Leonardo is that app.
As part of some open source stuff I've been doing on the side I've had to generate and parse a lot of XML. I like working with the DOM because it's tree structure cleanly matches my needs, but the W3C API is *so* cumbersome. The DOM was designed to be implemented in any language, not just clean OO languages like Java, so any code using it will work but be ugly. After considering a few other XML libraries I decided to write a new one that would work with modern Java 5 language features like generics, enhanced for-each, and varargs. This library is super tiny because it simply wraps the standard javax.xml libraries in the JRE, but gives you a much nicer interface to work with. Here's how to use it (or download it here):
There's been a ton of talk lately about several mobile operating systems and their problems, such as language restrictions, fragmentation, and anti-competitive practices. It's never a good idea to talk bad about your competition, so I'll take this opportunity to simply say a few things about the webOS (the OS that powers Palm's Pre and Pixi phones) that you might not know.
I'm excited to show you all one of the things I've been working on since I joined Palm.
A big part of my new job at Palm is education, in the form of tutorials, blogs, and of course speaking at conferences. Two new speaking engagements have recently come up. Palm Developer Day and OSCON.
Lots of people have opined on Apple's iPad, many deriding it's closed nature and lack of features. The thing is, those problems don't matter to most people. The iPad isn't for you or me. It's for everyone else. I've spent the last 20 years hoping we would have the technology to build such a device, even though I knew it was a device I would not personally use. But that doesn't matter..
You might be wondering where I've been the past few months. JavaFX and Java Store work has definitely heated up, which has taken up the bulk of my time. I've also been working on Project Maitai, a tool for reactive visual artwork, as well as traveling to Sweden to speak at OreDev.
As many of you may know, user interface design is a passion of mine. I want software that both looks pretty and acts well. I've had lots of ideas on the topic, often bleeding over into art and traditional design, in addition to usability. After thinking about it for a couple of years I've finally decided to create a blog dedicated to the topic: www.joshondesign.com
One of the big announcements at JavaOne was the Java Store. I'm especially proud of it because I've been secretly working on the project for the past few months. Since the announcement I've gotten a lot of questions on the store and how it relates to the rest of the Java ecosystem. To supplement the excellent FAQ I thought I'd answer a few questions.
Technically I'm on vacation this week so don't mention this post to my boss. I simply couldn't wait to blog about cool stuff we put into JavaFX 1.2. Shhhhh!
I've just arrived in SF for my fourth JavaOne conference. Despite the usual chaos this year's prep has gone very well. We have a ton of new things to show you. Most importantly we have the new release of JavaFX. As previously noted it has REDACTED, and REDACTED as well as greater REDACTED to make your apps run. Which, as you can imagine, is totally awesome. And of course the big news is support for REDACTED and REDACTED, as you can see in the screen shot below:
I don't normally post about job offers, but this one is simply too cool to pass up. The guys at Limewire are looking to hire a new Swing developer. For those of you who don't know, Limewire is the premier peer-to-peer file sharing client on the Interwebs. These guys have been doing killer Swing GUIs for a long time and even inspired some of the hacks the book Chris and I wrote. If hired, you'd get to work on their audio player and develop a new video player for the Limewire client. Sounds like a dream job.
A lot has happened since I last blogged. The JFXStudio hit 33k hits with 50 posts, I've started working on a new secret project built with JavaFX, and we had a rockin' booth at SXSW last week. I'll cover SXSW and our new party app in another blog soon. First things first: Developer Challenges!