ExpanDrive

All highly successful large projects battle bloat and complexity. Sooner or later, lighting a controlled burn can really help out. Microsoft has done a great job with this in their Office line. Office 2003 did a lot to reduce code size and speed launch times. Office 2007 does away with more than a decade of familiarity in favor of a new and more thoughtful user interface.

Phoenix was born out of the need to cast off the horrific bloat and instability that characterized the Netscape/Mozilla suite in 2001. Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross wanted a lean and mean browser that would load and run faster and provide a simple and extensible way of defining the user interface. They did a great job.

Renamed Firefox, the project just hit the 400 million download mark. Despite all this success, I can’t help but think that somebody needs to start a controlled burn on Firefox. Each month that passes I find myself progressively more dissatisfied with Firefox. Launch times are ever increasing despite my progressively newer hardware. It is wildly unstable on OS X – crashing daily. On Windows it is better, but not much. It doesn’t have to be like this. Don’t make me run IE.

Somebody get moving – build me me a better browser

Developing on Windows can be a real pain. I spent a few hours looking around for an easy way to perform simple HTTP GET calls inside vanilla win32 code. What a pain. WinINet is a disaster and WinHTTP is not much better. It also isn’t supported on all the versions of Windows we target, argh. It turns out that you can get libcurl [one of favorite libraries] to work on Windows within Visual Studio. Here is a quick overview how to make it happen with the 7.16.4 release.

1. Download the source and load lib\curllib.vcproj in Visual Studio

2. In curllib project properties->Configuration Properties->C/C++->Code Generation->Runtime Library change the value to Multi-Threaded /MT [assuming a release build] so it correctly builds as a static library

3. Then in the project you intend to use libcurl – in the preprocessor section, define CURL_STATICLIB and add the curl include directories

4. In the linker section add curllib.lib, ws2_32.lib, winmm.lib

5. Prosper

For good measure, I’ve uploaded a release build of this lib that you can link to in your project [skip steps 1 and 2]

This is what I’ve been looking for! I’ve complained before that the default Airport dropdown is hopelessly inadequate if you’re looking to discover an open access point, or select one that has the strongest signal. Thankfully, this guy went and made it happen. Awesome.

Here is a screenshot from their website that shows you what’s up:

Joyent Slingshot, which we helped develop, has just been released to the public as an Open Source project under GPL v2. Along with Slingshot, Connector is being made available too. Grab the source, help make it awesome.

I’m a proud owner of Parallels Desktop for OS X. It has served me admirably, but it’s time to move on.

A while back, when Parallels announced they could finally boot my BootCamp partition directly, I was in love. I had visions of Visual Studio and XCode existing side by side. Working on the SftpDrive Windows and OS X clients at the same time. Wouldn’t that be grand?

Then I tried it out, and was distinctly less enamored. It was SLOW. It worked, but I didn’t just buy a brand new MacBook Pro so I could have a slow, often painful, primary work environment that lacked any graphics acceleration. I’d love for it to have worked, but I switched back to plain old BootCamp. What can I say, I need my speed.

SWSoft is adding features to Parallels at a rapid pace, which I appreciate. However, their “core” virtualization experience really isn’t that good. Especially compared to VMWare Workstation, which I spend a huge amount of time using. I hate to do this, but let’s go over some of the major offenses:

1. 20% CPU usage while the VM is completely idle, on a fresh install. No need to explain this further, not acceptable. For references – VMWare gives me about 2-4% usage.

2. It only supports one processor. That sucks.

3. Disk usage: Parallels Virtual Disk access is WAAAY slower, especially in BootCamp. I get around a 75% performance hit using the disk in BootCamp mode. That’s a made up number, but it feels SLOW. Copying around a 1GB file, painful. With VMWare I experience no such grief.

4. Memory usage: Man, nothing makes my system, with 2GB RAM, go turbo like trying to run a VM in Parallels with over 512 megs of RAM then switch to another memory-heavy applications, like XCode.

Thanks, Parallels – you really lit a fire under VMWare’s ass. It has taken a while to get here, but VMWare Fusion is at RC1. It’s time you gave it a shot. They are using the same x86 virtualization technologies that they’ve fined tuned in other products for nearly 10 years. It’s really good – you’ll notice the difference. It’s still free, so why not? VMWare is quickly approaching feature parity with Parallels, and it blows down the doors with the performance.

Here is my least favorite Windows XP dialog:

Let’s say I have a long WEP key – maybe a random 26 digit hexadecimal string [quite common]. Not only do you have to type it in without the option of seeing the characters you type, you must type them TWICE.

This is dumb.

It is only critical that a user confirm a typed password during the process of creating a new password, just so they don’t accidentally get locked because they unwittingly made a typo while entering in the new password.

Here, OS X gets it exactly right:

Type the password once, hit ok. If I mistyped the password authentication will fail and I can try again. Brilliant. In the spirit of complaining, I do have one major gripe with the OS X wireless stack that Windows XP does a much better job with.

Head up the the Airport dropdown on your menu bar and you’ll see the list of access points that have a strong enough signal to connect to. If you’re in a public place you might see 25-30 access points. OS X gives you no indication of which of those are open or closed, and certainly no idea what their signal strengths are. Want to find one that has a good signal and is also unencrypted out of that list of 30? Good Luck.

For a while now, Magnetk has been engaged in developing ‘Slingshot‘ with Joyent. Slingshot is a platform which allows Rails developers to easily create hybrid web/desktop apps with ease and flexibility. There are some great office 2.0 applications out there, but you must admit there is but there is only so much you can do with just AJAX in terms of flexibility and performance. I love Google speadsheets, but they are slow and kind of clunky. It’s cool, but it’s very 1991.

We’re starting to run up against some painful limitations inherent in today’s web 2.0 experience. Most notable is the lack of any functionality and data accessibility while no internet connection is present. Also, there is no integration with other applications running on the end users’s desktop. Others out there are also in the process of trying to solve some of these problems – but we think we have a particularly powerful take on it. Briefly, I’ll answer the most obvious question people have:

“How is Slingshot different than Apollo or Firefox 3?”

Apollo is a great framework and certainly powerful. It will meet with great success. The Wikipedia entry describes Apollo as:

“A cross-OS runtime that allows developers to employ their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop Rich Internet Applications.”

Slingshot has the same goals – with the key difference being we allow developers to employ existing applications with no re-write necessary. Additionally, as a bit of personal criticism that you might disagree with: Flash and related technologies don’t come easily to most programmers. ActionScript is super cool, but I’ve always found the Flash platform non-intuitive and confusing. Perhaps I’m dumb; but I know I’m not alone.

Firefox 3 adds the option of local datastores for applications to access in an offline mode, and it is certainly a step in the right direction. The major downside is that it requires developers to specifically tailor their application to this framework and design for it. With Slingshot, we wanted to make it really simple for existing applications to be dropped into our framework basically unmodifed and have them “just work.”

Slingshot is bit the same but a lot different than Firefox 3 and Apollo. Here are our major design goals:

• Let developers write hybrid desktop/web applications with Rails. Rails is elegant, well designed and allows for rapid development and deployment. It’s also much easier for a novice to learn than Cocoa or C# and it enforces some good decomp and design.

• Allow Rails developers to create more robust applications that have a comparable user experience to traditional desktop applications. Drag in and drag out of data/files/etc, for starters. In the future, filesystem access to remote data [like SftpDrive...]

• Allow Rails apps to run offline with simple and transparent data synchronization

• Lightweight and customizable – we want you to make the decisions about exactly how your app runs, not us.

How this it’s done:

We started by developing application shells for both Windows and OS X that provide a consistent and stable binary environment in which to run Rails apps. One nice thing about the Rails community is that most developers are already developing their application in “offline” development mode, usually on a Mac. Similar to the Locomotive framework on OS X or the Instant Rails application on Windows, we make it easy to bring your custom environment into a stable well defined shell that you can customize in any way necessary. Gems, binaries, auxiliary worker processes – whatever. You have full control.

On top of this, we have a customized browser that runs without any of the traditional dressing [address bars, buttons, etc] of a web browser. This allows much more intimate access to the application and to the host operating system. By controlling the browser and extending it, we can build a bridge into the OS. A developer can easily tie together existing data import<->export controllers within their existing application directly to normal OS data transport mechanisms like the drag and drop interface, the clipboard, and eventually the filesystem. This is all done without modifying any of the compiled code, and is OS independent. Also, your app is still available from any browser in the world, just like it was before.

A good example of why this is important can be seen by looking at Joyent’s Strongspace. Right now if you want to upload multiple files you browse for each individual file, one by one, hit upload and wait on a page until it finishes [unless of course, you're using SftpDrive]. With Slingshot, you grab a bunch of files, and drop them onto Strongspace, and they are uploaded in the background. That was easy. Drag out – it’s the same thing, but in reverse. Drag a file from Strongspace directly into Photoshop. Awesome.

Offline mode is cool, so is integration with traditional desktop apps, but it is all somewhat worthless without an easy way to synchronize data with your live server. Slingshot data sync is designed to be extremely powerful while still being lightweight and flexible. We provide controllers and code to handle data serialization & transport in both directions. As the developer, you merely need to aggregate all the ActiveRecord objects that particular user needs to have access to offline. Slingshot does the rest. Same goes for upsync, and we have similar methods built in for files and other data types. The only extra work for the developer is deciding who gets what.

We’re quite proud of Slingshot and are very happy to be working with the fine guys at Joyent. The goals of Slingshot are quite similar to the goals of SftpDrive. Both applications target facilitating a highly connected user experience with transparent and ubiquitous data access. SftpDrive is designed to provide a more networked experience for all traditional applications speaking the one API they all speak – the file system API. Slingshot takes centrally hosted applications that are accessible from anywhere in the world and make them available with or without an internet connection along with integrating them with powerful traditional applications.

Jonathan, for about as long as I can remember, has been a proud owner and advocate of Kinesis ergonomic keyboards. He was the first among a growing group of people I know who swear by these things. Problems with RSI and CTS, for most, seem to melt away or be largely alleviated by the Kinesis. I’ve never really had any problems with my wrists/fingers, so there was no pressing reason to get one of these things. On the outside, I always thought the Kinesis was ridiculous. I couldn’t even log into my webmail without hunting and pecking away. Pair programming on it was pretty much impossible. However, after I could count 10 friends who swear by these, and finding myself [again] in need of a new keyboard I took the $300 leap and gave it a chance.

The first week of retraining micro-muscle patterns was painful, I admit. But now I find myself in love. It’s Freaking INCREDIBLE. Take a look at this thing, it’s a beauty, and the geek factor is off the charts.