Much Ado About Blogging » Web Technologies

Cocoa, Cappuccino and the Palm Pre

B. Terhechte — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 13:50:29 +0000

Palm’s Andrew Shebanow (former Adobe) on Cocoa on iPhone versus JS on the Palm Pre and it’s effect on application quality and developer interest:

That’s a complex question to answer. But the thing to keep in mind is that is not a zero-sum game: I expect many developers will work with both webOS and iPhone, and that is perfectly fine. But I also believe that we will be able to attract additional developers who want to leverage their HTML/CSS/JavaScript knowledge but can’t or won’t deal with the strictures of iPhone development.

I do think he’s right in that many developers will want to target both plattforms. In this case the Cappuccino Web Framework seems to be godsend. It doesn’t feature everything that Objective-C 2.0 and Cocoa on the iPhone offer, but it should seriously ease transitions. Actually, if I was 280 North, I’d try to add the Palm Pre Javascript extensions to Cappuccino as quickly as possible in order to attract that horde of iPhone developers on their gold rush.

I for one am happy that I can target Mac OS X, the iPhone and Web Applications with one framework (more or less) and one language (more or less). Sometimes it drives me crazy to jump between PHP/Symfony, Python/Django, JS/Prototype/Ext and Objective-C/Cocoa.

I got my iPhone

B. Terhechte — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 15:56:44 +0000

As you can see, I just got my iPhone today. Software version is, due to Carrier-Reasons still at 1.0.2, and I plan to keep it that way for some time.
First impression is: Awesome. Absolutely awesome and amazing.
Although it lacks some of the features which I would take for granted in modern Mobile Phones, it shines on many other feature-comparisons.
I’ll write more soon.

Crash your iPod Photo, with a Video-File

B. Terhechte — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:39:47 +0000

I invested some time in studying Apple’s current implementation of M4B
files and found a way implement a regular frame-based Video-File in
there. I searched some Open Source Utilities to aid me an my way, wrote
a Python script to generate such a file, tried it in iTunes, and was
amazed. The file shows Video-Content in iTunes, without running the
Quicktime-Player (Video is shown in the Cover-Window). It’s basically
just a hack which adds a new Cover-Frame every 4ms (which is basically
regular 25fps PAL Video). However, when I, then, tried it on my iPod
Photo (20gb U2 Edition), it crashed directly. Upon starting the file it
crashed and rebooted. I tried some other File variations and got always
the same results. I’m anyways releasing this file as it still might be
that other iPod Color Models may play it, who knows, there could be
hardware differences between the U2 edition and the other editions.
So, grab the unofficial first iPod Video File here and wonder how it crashes your iPod
Btw. I’m in no way responsible for any damage done to your iPod by playing and or using this file.
If there’s interest, I’ll release the how-to create those videos, too.

Download the File here:

Google Sitemaps

B. Terhechte — Mon, 06 Jun 2005 08:42:47 +0000

Google anounced a new technology called Google Sitemaps which should
help search engines and webmasters alike in refining search engine
resutls. It allows to give the search engine a list of pages which are
to be crawled, including a last modified, priority and chang-frequency
attributes. I implemented this technology into my blogcms-thingie now.
I’m anxious to see how this will change the way google indexes this
site.
Link: Google Sitemaps

Hell Just Froze Over.

B. Terhechte — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 16:13:16 +0000

Google… Slashdotted?…

Rounded Input Boxes in HTML anyone?

B. Terhechte — Fri, 20 May 2005 14:38:32 +0000

I’ve been waiting for something like that for quite some time, I even
hoped that it’d make it into css3 but well here it is, although just as
proprietary Gecko/Mozilla code.

Using funny stylesheet-properties like ‘-moz-border-radius’ one can
give borders rounded corners. This allows to create rounded boxes,
inputboxes, backgrounds and whatnot without using those nasty four
8×8px corner-images. But well, just like other extensions I doubt that
this will make it into CSS soon (if), so it’s just usefull if you
develop intranet-applications and/or have control over your audiences
browser-version. (Or if you wanna present your firefoxed visitors some
sneaky gimmicks their IE-Friends won’t have).

There’re even more interesting new properties, take a look over here:

(Although nothing can beat Safari’s damn cool text-shadow property)

Technorati Ping

B. Terhechte — Thu, 12 May 2005 20:10:32 +0000

I build a small Technorati Ping via XML-RPC into my blog. Everytime I update my blog now, technorati
is getting a small ping so they know about my update. Actually, the
mere reason why I write this entry is so I can see if it works

Ah yeah, since it’s just a cheap 8liner of PHP Code, I’ll upload that
one soon, for others to implement in their proprietory blog systems.

Safari Passes Acid2 Test :-)

B. Terhechte — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 17:44:34 +0000

The Web standards project has released the Acid2
test for Web browsers. It is a pretty crafty HTML+CSS test designed to
ensure that browsers are properly implementing support for those
standards.

Every browser fails it spectacularly.

Almost every browser that is;
Mac OS X ‘Safari 2.0′ passes the test now (patched)

So while Microsoft is busy updating IE7 so they’re at least compatible
with specs drafted in 1996 (Png Alpha) Apple is once again on the
bleeding edge, having the first browser which passes the Web standards
project test suite.
Congratulations to Dave Hyatt

Another good thing is that the Safari HTML engine ‘khtml’ comes from the KDE Konqueror-project and so it won’t probably take long until the Konqueror passes this test too

Ah yeah and in case you wonder: khtml != Gecko (the engine that fires
the famous mozilla firefox browser), so these developments won’t help
Firefox pass the Acid2 test. I just tried the test with Firefox 1.0 and
I’ve to say that it looks better than in my current unpatched Safari
1.3, so I guess it won’t take long until Gecko/Firefox passes this test
too.

Just a pitty that the Safari 2.0 from tomorrow’s upcoming Tiger doesn’t already support this.

Let’s see when the IE will be able to pass this test

Addendum to Adobe buys Macromedia

B. Terhechte — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 09:07:15 +0000

Ok, I
just read that the main reason why Adobe went to buy Macromedia was
that they were afraid that Microsoft was going to do it first. From
this perspective, it’s a great move, as it should garant future
versions of Flash and or Dreamweaver under Mac OS X. Thanks guys.

Adobe buys Macromedia

B. Terhechte — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:35:33 +0000

Aw; I don’t know how to rate this yet, but seems as if Adobe is going to buy Macromedia.
A buyout usually leads to the End-Of-Life of most of the bought
companies products – or the merging of both companies technologies. As
Adobe is the company who buys Macromedia it’s clear that they’ll always
favourize their products instead the Macromedia ones.

Lets see what we have here:

Photoshop vs Fireworks

Photoshop is gonna be the clear winner, being one of the stealth Adobe
products. I don’t know enough about Fireworks to judge which functions
might be worth being implemented in Photoshop, or even if there’s a use
in continuing the Fireworks line though.

Freehand vs. Illustrator:

Tough decision. I know that Freehand is widely accepted especially in
the fashion industry. And I think that these two applications are quite
seperate in terms of use and basic concepts. However, I think that
merging these two applications could turn out to give birth to a damn
fine application as there’re things I love in Illustrator which I miss
in Freehand, and there’re things I love in Freehand which I miss in
Illustrator.

Dreamweaver vs. GoLive:

Well, tough question; I love Dreamweaver, although I don’t really use
it that much, but that’s because I’m hardly doing design stuff anymore,
I’m mostly coding pure php or python or c, which works far better with
specialiced editors. However, everytime I have to do Html/CSS on a
bigger scale I tend use Dreamweaver as it features many nice tools
which help tremendously in the creation process. Golive, on the other
hand, sounds to be quite good too, but seems to be quite different to
Dreamweaver; So doing a switch wouldn’t be that easy. Adobe probably
prefers GoLive which could mark the death of Dreamweaver; Who knows,
but if – what a pity.

Flash vs. (I Forgot The Name):

There was that Flash competitor from Adobe (LiveMotion?). 100% Looser.
Flash wins on all battlefields. Although I don’t like the Flash MX 2004
IDE that much, but Flash 8 promises to be a helluva of a good product.
If Adobe are going to stall the Flash Application in favour of
Livemotion they’re “A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

I hope that they’re not going to treat the Macromedia products just
like Macromedia treated HomeSite back when they bought it.. Lets see
what the future brings. And I’m not even getting into monopoly problems
like lack of innovation;