stuff by antimatter15

μwave June 2 Wave View

Microwave June 2 Search

Over a few days, things can change fairly quickly. There have been several speed improvements, a new Forum-Style blip rendering option which arranges blip linearly by the time edited with each containing a formatted quote of the parent to establish context. Attachments are now fully supported, including thumbnails and download links. The operations engine was totally rewritten which uses asynchronous XMLHttpRequest, a new callback based system and support for a batch operations (which means fewer requests and faster responses). A wavelet header containing a list of all participants in the entire wave has been added, as well as an Add Participant button. A specialized, extremely fast gadget viewer was added, which allows for blazingly fast rendering of two popular gadgets (and more will come), it works by bypassing the entire gadget infrastructure and loading trusted code directly inline with the DOM. There is a “New Wave” button which allows people to create new waves directly from the client. The OAuth backend was authenticated with google, for more secure login transactions. Blips have a new context menu which allows for features such as Delete Blip, Edit Blip and Change Title. A full changelog can be found here.

Try it out.

Steganography Kitteh

For no real reason, I was reading the Wikipedia article on Digital Steganography and saw the interesting image where an image of a kitty is extracted from some boring trees. I decided to port the example to <canvas>.

Microwave Wave-View May 29

Microwave Search-View May 29

I like bragging when I do something nobody else has done before. And μwave is the first true third-party wave client which is compatible with Google Wave. It’s free to use at http://micro-wave.appspot.com/ and works great on mobile devices. It supports searching for waves, opening them and writing replies.

Currently it doesn’t know read/unread state of the waves from the search panel and doesn’t know read/unread blips, but as of time of writing, its a limitation and flaw in the current version of the Google Wave Data API (introduced just ten days ago at Google I/O). Expect this to be resolved in the near future with upcoming versions of the API and this application.

The source code for the server component is open-source and can be found on github (though it’s slightly outdated, but the important stuff is there). It’s fairly simple (It’s based on the original example code so I’m going to have the same MIT license), but one of the few python scripts which can do authentication with google and pass commands to the data api. It relies on the Python OAuth Library.

The Blip renderer component of this is licensed under the MIT license and can be found on the old microwave repo. The only part left is the interface, which is going to be the usual GPLv3.

For a little bit of history, this isn’t exactly a new project. The google code project has existed since January 9th, 2010. The purpose was to create a mobile-friendly version of Wave Reader. But that goes even deeper, I can trace it back to the original Static-Bot dated to October 18, 2009. Then, the Google Wave embed API allowed people to view waves only if someone had a Google Wave account and was logged in at the time. This was quite problematic as Wave was still a limited preview which not many people had and probably hampered adoption.

Another separate but eventually convergent issue which led to the microwave project was “Desktop Wave Reader + GWave Client/Server Protocol“ post which I made on October 29th of 2009.

During late October of last year, I reverse-engineered some of the features of the Google Wave client. Up until then, the only published specs were the federation protocols, which dealt with how multiple wave servers would use a common protocol to allow multiple users without a central authority and for the gadget and robot apis. Notably missing was a client/server api, for a user of specifically the google wave client, which did not yet support federation (and to date, preview still does not), and to browse/view the waves in one’s inbox without needing to switch to an entirely new provider. The first component was the ability to read waves. After that was accomplished, I tried to reverse engineer a more complex aspect of the protocol, which was the ability to search waves. I eventually realized that that component, search was part of a larger puzzle, which was the real-time BrowserChannel wire protocol which virtually all of wave was based. I made some progress, but near the end, I gave up in frustration. Luckily, someone else became interested in the same thing, and Silicon Dragon basically got search working.

This happened now in early December. I started on a project called Wave Reader, which merged the ideas of static-bot with the desktop wave reader and a new functional blip rendering engine. At that time, the Google Wave client was still horrendously slow, taking several minutes at times to load large waves.

On January, I began a project to merge Wave Reader and the wire protocol (search). I thought an awesome name would be microwave (or μwave) and started the code repo on January 9th. I worked on it a bit, so that it was mostly complete, with search and loading all working, with one missing component: login. Eventually, I got bored and the project lay abandoned for a few months.

This gets us to basically 4 days ago, when I started working on a renaissance of the μwave project, based on the recently released Google Wave Data API. The first component was creating a new blip renderer specifically designed for parsing the new (much cleaner) json format which is part of the robots api. Then I created a client around that and created a python backend for having it work on app engine.

The Future is always awesome to prophesize about. In the coming weeks or days, google will probably update the data api to allow for information like So, while http://micro-wave.appspot.com will likely remain free and maintained for the forseeable future, I do plan on making a paid iPhone/iPad app. The iPhone app may have some extra features like offline/caching support.

sin(sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)))/sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y))

http://antimatter15.com/misc/f(x).html?sin(sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)))/5.html?sin(sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)))/5 )

http://antimatter15.com/misc/f(x).html?sin(sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)))/sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)).html?sin(sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)))/sqrt(sq(x)+sq(y)) )

I think function plotters are cool, and since 3d is all the hype nowadays, why not make a 3d function plotter? I like how WolframAlpha does it quite nicely, but it doesn’t allow panning/moving of the camera. Just as a disclaimer, I made this because it’s cool, not because I spent lots of time on it, on the contrary, it’s taken from the three.js 3D Canvas library floor demo with a 3 line change to make it pull a function from the URL.

Today I went to the magical Apple Store and tried out the iPad for the first time. I really have to say that it’s quite magical, though it doesn’t fulfill the criterion for Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law despite what Jonathan Ive says. Though I really haven’t tried any large area multitouch interface before (sadly), and I would expect it to be a somewhat similar if not exact replica of the experience. Keynote and Numbers were pretty neat (I suck at typing on the iPad in any orientation, so I don’t like Pages). That’s enough to show that iPad is not just a content consumption tool as the iPod and iPhone primarily are, but also content creation.

Anyway, in a few minutes I just swapped the mousedown, mousemove, mouseup events with touchstart, touchmove, touchend events respectively in the core of VectorEditor, while adding a new MobileSafari detection script (var mobilesafari = /AppleWebKit.*Mobile/.test(navigator.userAgent);) and in a quite analogous “magical” way, VectorEditor works in iPhone/iPod Touch and theoretically iPad, Just dragging the vectoreditor files over to the Ajax Animator folder and recompiling should bring iPad support to Ajax Animator with virtually no work.

I haven’t tested it. Downloading XCode 3.2.2 right now so hopefully I can test it soon. Stupid how it’s what? 2.31 gigabytes?!

And possibly, I could use PhoneGap to hack together a App Store app which does the same thing (and maybe charge for it, which might be a bit cruel as this application is open source and works equivalently online - but I guess that’s okay for those people who don’t read my blog >:) ). Maybe get enough to buy an iPad :P

Anyway, though I’m pretty late to this and my opinion probably doesn’t matter at all, here’s a mini iPad review: It’s really really cool, feels sort of heavy, really expensive, hard to type on in any orientation (interestingly it has that little linke on the f and j keys with the keyboard which feels useless since I always thought the point of that was so you can tactile-ily or haptically or tactically or whatever the right word is, find the home row, but since there’s no physical dimension to an iPad, it just strikes me as weird and wanting of that tactile keyboard). Otherwise, browsing really really feels great. Only thing I miss is the Macbook Pro style 3 finger forward/backward gestures (@AAPL plz add this before iPad2.0, and also, get iPhoneOS 4.0 to work on my iPhone 2g or at least @DevTeam plz hack 4.0 for the 2g!).

Oh, and for those lucky enough to have a magical iPad, the URL is http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/ipad/ at least until there’s enough testing to make sure that I didn’t screw up everything with my MobileSafari hacks.