Learning AJAX

Turns out that you should know JSP before you start learning AJAX. Well, looks like I get to learn both together. Just started night school for a Masters in CS. I think it'll be interesting, but I have some trepidation about time constraints. It should help that APT is going to freeze soon so that I won't be under as much pressure to deliver the outstanding bug fixes/features.

Learning Groovy

Groovy looks like a cool thing to know. It looks like it's strictly better than Beanshell. It's a JVM language which is a superset of Java. I'm not planning on using any part of it except that it allows dynamic execution of java code. How cool! I'm expecting to author a scripting language in Groovy that will act as an controller for our application. It's been really easy to setup so far and I like it.

What makes twitter genious?

Twitter really shines when it comes to contrast...

Objective C lesson

After a fair amount of debugging on iD20, I discovered the following. If a UIView (or any other graphical container) has the property 'User Interaction Enabled' set to NO (or FALSE) then it, as well as it's children won't receive any touch events. So don't put your custom component inside of a parent that is blocking touch events.

Crows, the new and improved Ape

Pretty amazing - Crows can combine tools to solve problems.

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2010/04/clever-crows-complex-cognition.html

Even cooler? Crows use features of the urban landscape to access food they wouldn't otherwise be able to eat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPGknpq3e0&feature=related

JavaFx 1.3 released!

17 days after giving up on Java 1.3, it's been released. I may try and migrate FxBattle to 1.3 just to see how the performance goes. If it's much better then perhaps I'll put some work in and polish it up. If I do that, I'll be sure to update here on what the results were.

So far, Objective C is going okay. It has some really nice APIs that just work. The learning curve hasn't been too tough, but I'm far from having a sense of what is elegant and what is ugly. Working with G and R will be fun. I'm looking forward to binding together the Persistance, Import, and Presentation layers and seeing what we come up with.

Abandoning Fx 1.3 for Objective C (iPad for the win!)

So after waiting most of a year for JavaFx 1.3, I'm tired of waiting (as mentioned before). FxBattle is officially on the back burner when Fx 1.3 comes out I may give it another chance, but no guarantees-- I'd rather write something fun on a working and used infrastructure. So what will I be doing?

I talked to my partner in side projects and we're writing an iPad app. Yup, I'm on a whole new band wagon. But this one isn't going to stagnate for the next 10 months. This one is going to be a party (and I hear there's going to be a band).

But what will this new genius app do? It's going to be a very simple tool to help run grid based games like D&D. We'll model a map and markers on that map. Markers can represent monsters and heroes. The map will be grid based and support 'depth'. That's going to be roughly the minimal set of features for the first result.

Later we'll want to add lots of things I'm sure. But for now that should be enough features to be useful for our D&D group. So now all I need is the SDK. But guess what? The newest version won't run on Leopard (my current OS) and the old versions appear to have been nuked. All I want to do in brand myself, why won't Apple(tm) help?

UPDATE: Haven't tried this yet, but found a blog post with direct links to old versions of the iPhone SDK (including versions that will run on OSX Leopard and others).