stuff by antimatter15

l_256_241_985F88AA-12C1-4F04-A56D-1A726CB6854C.jpeg

One potential I see for shinytouch is the ability for it to be embedded in a flash application which can be embedded into a web page. Then there could be a web 2.0 style JS API for awesome canvas tag based creations. Or it could just be used to interact with another flash application or game. The reason why this is more likely able to be used as such is because setup for this is so easy that this could actually convince people to do it. With other systems you really have to convince people really well to be dedicated enough to set up the hardware whatever it is. At that point, the software is the easy part and the audience is more than glad to go through the hassle of downloading, running, configuring, and maybe even compiling. But with shinytouch aiming at a different, larger and overall lazier (myself included in this group) audience. This means that it is really important to lower the entry barrier to the lowest possible level. I think being able to just move the webcam a little bit, go to a website and follow simple directions to use their own touchscreen is a very potentially attractive concept. It could even spawn more interest in the touchscreen, natural user interface communities. This is really what I want he project to end up like. It seems quite practical to me. How do you feel about this?

(note that this is my second post entirely from my iPhone)

l_300_300_15C97183-86EE-4988-A495-C212B230EBC0.jpeg

So now I have a cool new web host: Dreamhost. I’ll be using it for at least the next year. So far it’s really great. It has everything I really wanted which isn’t much (aside from SSH access). Sure, it’s a massive overseller which has quite sky-high pricing for the purpose of bailing out really insanely cheap promotions, but I haven’t yet faced any problems with it. And may I mention that I’m largely a member because of one of their insanely cheap promotions? Don’t get me wrong, I did do tons of research prior and it seemed good to begin with, but the whole July Fourth $10 for hosting a whole year is pretty irrefutably awesome. decently fast. It actually supports URLs without a WWW (which was the reason this blog never used GoDaddy). So what issues have I faced so far? Well, not many. And since setting up is usually the most troublesome and hard part, it’s setting a good precedent in my mind. Issues ive has aren’t really hosting related. The control panel is actually really good. I don’t know why, but I really can’t stand using CPanel. I haven’t had a very good experience with it. They try far too much to make everything as if it’s intended to be something like your Netvibes or iGoogle homepage. And CPanel is remarkably unhelpful with issues (that I’ve had with SSH) and it wastes a lot of screen estate on listing basic server info that rarely changes or is useful in any way. The Dreamhost panel by comparison is menu based and intuitive. No big icons that make you feel stupid after looking for a long time and realizing it’s a huge icon in the center of the screen involving outdated and vague old desktop metaphors. Just simple menus. Sometimes it’s not very good at explaining why it switches PHP to CGI mode when you use the automatic installer. I wouldn’t reccomend it’s automated installer though. While I’ve had very few problems with using it to install the latest version of Wordpress, the configuration is a bit lacking. Also, the generated wp_config.php from the automated installer is old and actually missing a few security features that makes it harder (just add the missing lines in) to install BBPress later on. Beside that, installing Trac+SVN may be only a dew clicks to do, but getting Trac to behave as expected (logging in) requires tedious amounts of command-line-fu. The installation options are seriously quite mediocre and they use big icons too. There are only like 9 available scripts with only a few CMSes a gallery or two and some eCommerce. I can’t really do a summary, but it’s pretty good as of now. Oh and another cool thing is that this entire post was written on my iPhone. Yes. On a touchscreen device with a virtual keyboard. And that’s not bad either. I’m typing quite fast on this device and not making too many mistakes either. The reason the first post from my iPhone came so latenis because Wordpress for iPhone didn’t work on my old web host, but it works on my new one.

Microsoft and Google have fundamentally different in their business models. Google uses Advertising and Search, with around 98% of their revenue comming from Advertising. Microsoft owns a monopoly on the Operating System business. Especially with the new Google Chrome OS that’s been recently announced, It really brings the question of their positions. Can Google really take Microsoft down? What kind of financial prowess, consumer brand loyalty or user lock-in does it really need to take on Microsoft?

Google is on much shakier territory. I could leave Google just by typing in “bing.com” or “yahoo.com” in the URL bar. Simple as that. Totally intuitive, something that (hopefully) nobody needs to call Tech Support to guide them. Typing 8 letters into the URL bar and pressing enter is all it takes to destroy the Google empire.

However, what about Microsoft. They own a monopoly on the Operating System market. How easy is it to install another operating system? Well, you need about 1-4GB of data for a modern OS, you need to either burn it or buy it from a store (I figure there are probably tons of tech support calls at this point), and then likely reconfigure BIOS, go through menus, fill out several forms and select the specific partition to install the OS to. This point is already unfathomable for a great majority of the userspace.

Google is very different from Microsoft, from their core business models. The Windows monopoly isn’t going anywhere in the near future. Google could be gone tomorrow.

vX is the world’s smallest Javascript library. It’s modular, powerful, unlikely to interfere with operations of other libraries, open source (MIT license), and cross-browser. It’s designed with size first and foremost and everything else secondary. The cross-browser GET/POST AJAX function with callbacks is only 200 bytes. The closest thing is over twice the size. This extreme density is present in every function of the library.

Currently, the whole framework, including Ajax, Events, URL Encoding, Animation (including Fading), Namespacing, JSON Serialization, JSON Parsing, Document onReady, HTML entities encode/decode, Array Index, Get Elements By Class Name, Object Extending, Templating, Queueing, Class Manipulation and more. is under 3KB total uncompressed.

All functions are aliased to full reader-friendly names as well as very consise abbreviations. For example, Ajax can be accessed by.ajax or .X.

The Ajax Animator project started in early 2007, when I was in 6th grade. It was spawned by my interest in Flash in 2005 (because I liked expression by stickfigures and animation, and that it was one of the few ways to make applications or media for the Sony PSP) and my reluctance to pirate the Flash software after the trials expired. This intrest brought me to the liveswifers forum, which was engaging on a (as of yet and then) vaporware called OpenSwif. The idea for the Ajax Animator started when I was talking to a friend about a software program he used called Koolmoves. After making a forum post titled “Web 2.0 Flash IDE”, the project really started.

The development started based on RichDraw. It actually started out as RichDraw with a different layout. It was for a very long time built around the HTML/CSS/JS that was included in the RichDraw Demo. I never really modified RichDraw while using it, just building around it. I added a “timeline” (not at that time functional) which was just a dynamically generated table counting from 0-100. I added more stuff, looking for random cool scripts that made windows, dialogs, and color pickers.

Eventually, I found DHTML Goodies (mostly for it’s color picker widget), and then used it’s DHTML Suite to rewrite the entire application. After it was rewritten, It still was totally disfunctional. I added support for manual frame-by-frame animation and then Flash export thanks to freemovie. Around this time, I made a Google Code project for it and began using SVN.

After looking thorugh the DHTML Suite page, I found a link to another library called ExtJS. I ported from the DHTML Suite to ExtJS 1.0. Then I versioned it 1.0. I added some pretty neat features, like tweening, sharing, and more.

Later, when ExtJS 2.0 came out, I began developing the next version of the Ajax Animator. Also, realizing how incomplete the project was, the versioning scale was changed and it was now developing 0.20. It was a full rewrite from scratch. During development Ext 2.1 came out so development migrated to that version. This version polished things up a lot with newer development paradigms and a new vector drawing editor called OnlyPaths, contributed by josep_ssv. It had a new cross-platform JSON based serialized graphics format, and supported export to many different formats. One feature that was never ported to 0.2 was support for user accounts and server side storage.