Watch it now!

I’ve added some more items, including some non-technical books

• Feng Shui, the traditional oriental way to enhance your life
• The Everything Groom Book. Know anyone who’s engaged?
• The Cathedral & The Bazaar, Musings on Linux & Open Source by an accidental revolutionary. Eric S Raymond.
• How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method
• Less: Accomplishing More by Doing Less: Marc Lesser
• Introduction to Robotics
• Shout: The Beatles in Their Generation

original

This is for my Eugene readers. I’m cleaning out my office and giving away a ton of stuff. Of particular interest, a bunch of programming and other technical books. If you are interested and live in the Eugene area give me an call at 678-458-5810.

O’Reilly Programming books (and a few others)

• Creating Effective JavaHelp: Kevin Lewis
• Java Threads, 2nd edition
• Java RMI
• Java Distributed Computing
• J2ME in a Nutshell
• Version Control with Subversion
• Programming Perl
• Advanced Perl Programming
• Perl Cookbook
• The C Programming Language: Kernighan and Ritchie
• The Peopleware Papers: Notes on the human side of software
• Software Development According 2 Einstein : a slim book of Einstein quotes and commentary.
• Usability: the Site Speaks for Itself: website usability

Fiction & Non Fiction

• Confessions of a Public Speaker, Scott Berkun (O’Reilly)
• Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com and other battles to control cyberspace
• Airframe, Michael Crichton
• Beyond Civilization, Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, Daniel Quinn
• How to be a Gentleman
• In the Shadow of the Gargoyle (short story collection including Harlan Ellison & Neil Gaiman)

Other stuff

• 512 MB SO-DIMM
• Red cushion to an Ikea Poang chair (replacements cost 35$!)

So we’d like your help. We recorded three different podcasts with different topics. If you can spare the time to listen to them we’d love to get your feedback. You can email me at joshua at marinacci dot org.

A warning, these are very rough. I’ve barely edited them, haven’t added music and credits, or trimmed them. For the final podcast we are targeting 30 minutes. Anything longer feels like something no one would listen to.

Thanks!

  – Josh

Direct MP3 links

• Programming topics: Excelsior JVM, VM Kit, Dalvik, and Flash
• Self-Driving Cars, the Price of Oil, Voice Recognition
• The Post-PC era, iPad, and browsers

Bluetooth has a use?!

While it hasn’t been widely known, because I am not widely known , I haven’t been a big fan of Bluetooth devices. Due to their short range they end up simply replacing 6 foot wires, at an increased device cost and the extra hassle of having one more thing to charge (plus interference with endless other devices). But here’s something that might change my mind..a a bluetooth hand!

This prosthetic hand lets you tweak settings via Bluetooth. It can handle up to a 200lb load, which clearly puts it into the six million dollar man range. Hmm. Perhaps that wireless technology is good after all.

Autonomous Audi TT

James Gosling, inventor of Java and my former co-worker at Sun, has been helping some Stanford students work on an autonomous car. Along with Audi, they’ve announced a TT-S that will attempt to drive the Pike’s Peak International Hill Climb. (PS, it’s partly running Java and Solaris).

eBooks as eJournalism?

Imagine the world two years from now when the tablet form factor is successful and we are all eReading. Monday Note tackles the question. Less overhead, easier access, newer long form formats emerge. The ebook as a form of journalism. The future might be Awesome!

Paper Solar Cells

They say that the key to making something cheap is to find a way to build it using microchip technology. Then you get to free ride on Moore’s law and have someone else fab it for you. Flash memory followed this trend. So did accelerometers. They were once mechanical devices the size of a soda can. Once they could be made using CPU fabbing techniques the price and size dropped precipitously, and now they are being embedded in virtually everything.

So what’s the next step beyond microchip tech… paper. If you can make something printable on paper then you can make it cheap. Amazingly cheap. And what’s what may happen with solar cells. MIT has demonstrated a solar cell technology using essentially a fancy inkjet printer. The efficiency isn’t great, but if it’s a factor of a hundred cheaper than ridge cells no one will care.

Color Schemes

Good use of color can really make your app stand out, but color can be tricky. The best color schemes often come from other people or real world objects. These sites have collections of color schemes created by people who work with color every day. They let you search by color, theme, and popularity.

COLOURlovers

COLOURlovers is a creative community where people from around the world create
and share colors, palettes and patterns, discuss the latest trends and explore colorful
articles… All in the spirit of love. (yes, they wrote that part)

Kuler

Kuler at Adobe is a Flash based color searching site.

For more on the topic of color see my Color 101 article.

Icons

Every great app needs great icons. Not only for the app itself but also within the application for buttons and indicators.

The great FXExperience blog has several free PNG icon collections that are generic and useful for lots of things. Most are small so they work well on mobile devices. Free icons for your JavaFX applications @ FX Experience

The Crystal Clear icon set by Everaldo is licensed under LGPL and includes icons for apps, actions, devices and mimetypes.

The Nuvola icon set contains 600 icons with a cute cartoon feel to them.

Icon sets for Gnome, under various licenses

Tango Icon Library: another very complete set of desktop icons.

Sounds

FreeSound.org

Free Sound has a huge collection of user contributed effects, clips, and just plain weird sounds. Great for building sampled music and effects in your games

Jamendo

Jamendo is a music site containing only Creative Commons licensed works. The perfect place to find your next soundtrack.

Imagery & Textures

Lost Garden

Lost Garden focuses on video game design. The author, Danc, has literally decades of experience in the field. You can easily lose hours reading through amazing essays on the site. Today, however, we are here for the free game graphics. Spanning both vector and bitmap, retro and modern styles, Lost Garden has game graphics for many uses

Open Graphic Design and Think Design blog

OpenGraphicDesign.com has tons of cool shapes and vector artwork. They are great as starting points in Illustrator

ThinkDesignBlog.com has free textures and vector shapes. Good for backgrounds and skinning. Plus tons of inspiration articles.

Photos

For photos your best source is images licensed under Creative Commons at Flickr. Conveniently they have a search option for just such photos.

Inspiration

Well Placed Pixels is a blog containing only one thing: screenshots of beautiful software.

My great thanks to my fellow Developer Relations Team and the many dedicated engineers who came to present, answer questions, and socialize with our developers. I know it meant a lot to the attendees to have such a personal connection with Palm. Extra special thanks to our CEO, John Rubenstein who personally addressed the developers at the end of the first day.

All in all, a great success. Slides and photos are forthcoming. Now time to sleep for a few days until next week when I’ll be speaking on HTML 5 at the Web 2.0 conference.

- Josh

Philippe Starck

Last fall Engadget did a short interview with legendary designer Philippe Starck. Wonderful insights on the world of design and creation.

Also check out the bonus round of word association with Philippe.

eComics

The most interesting ebook applications to come out of the iPad hoopla is actually the comic book readers. Most readers seem to treat ebooks just like books and focus on recreating the experience of reading a printed book, complete with faded paper and page curls. Only the comic book apps seem to be exploring new forms of interaction, stealing liberally from cinema. Kicker Studio has a great overview of the cinematic reading of electronic comics.

UI Design Tips

Flyosity has a great article on Crafting Subtle & Realistic User Interfaces. Starting from the basics of light it goes through using borders, gradients, and highlights to create the illusion of depth.

Advertising Through the Ages

A great Flickr set of ads from the fifties. I just love the style from that era.

The Evolution of Print Advertising. What it says on the tin: a brief history of ads from the 1760s to the present. I love how in the 70s even banks used psychadelic imagery.

When I picked it up it seemed smaller than in the pictures, and a tad heavier. Very solid, though. The interface is essentially a large iPod touch with a few flourishes. This isn’t a bad thing, though. The iPhone interface was clearly designed to scale to larger devices. And on the faster CPU of the iPad it absolutely flies. This is one advantage of controlling both the software and hardware. I am surprised that they didn’t put more memory in it, however, given how cheap memory is. Perhaps it was the only way to meet their margins.

The screen is gorgeous. Viewing websites, news, facebook, mail, etc. is a very nice experience. Where it falls down is content creation, specifically typing. Steve called this a magical keyboard or some such during his introduction keynote.

This is a lie.

While it may be better than the iPhone keyboard, it still sucks. Maybe for someone who is a hunt and peck typist it would be about as fast as a real physical keyboard, but anyone who is a touch typist will be immediately frustrated (and I mean *immediately*!). Now…it’s not their fault.. they’ve done the best possible with their screen real estate, but hard immovable glass is no substitute for real physical keys with edges, dimples, and movement. No comparison.

However, this doesn’t matter..

Why? Because most people aren’t touch typists. And most people aren’t content creators. I fully recognize that I’m not the target market for this. One day the iPad and similar devices will replace the desktop computer for 90% of people. (When I say ‘desktop’ I mean general purpose computers running full desktop OSes, whether or not they are actual desktops or laptops).

For me the iPad is an expensive novelty. It would live in my living room table as a nice way to read email and news feeds in the morning while I drink my coffee. Then I’d go upstairs to my real computer. But most people aren’t like me (or you, given that you are reading a technology blog right now, probably through an RSS reader). Most people use computers for content consumption and communication, not creation. And the iPad is 90% of what they want. Ten years from now 90% of computers will be something like an iPad. And the remaining 10% will be called workstations.

That said, for the target market I think the iPad will still be seen as too expensive and missing features. It will sell well but won’t be the smashing success that the iPhone was. But that’s fine… Apple’s used to that. They will slowly and carefully add features, and lower the price, until they take over the world.

So what’s missing for most people? I originally had a laundry list but after taking off things that don’t really matter anymore in the 21st century (like CD drives), I came up with only three things:

1. the iPad must sync to a real computer for software updates and other data like address books
2. the iPad must sync to a real computer to get music
3. the iPad can’t print

The first one is easy to solve. Sync over the network. Every smart phone not made by Apple can get software updates over the web (my new employer does a great job of it). I expect Apple to enable this in the next year. Mobile Me already does most of the job.

The second one is a bit harder due to the massive amount of data involved. Most people have gigs of MP3s. I expect Apple to solve it by either creating the media server edition of the Time Capsule or else offering music streaming from the cloud… Or both, they’ve sure got the resources.

The third was is already 90% solved. The iPad SDK has render to PDF support, which is most of printing. Combined with better network printing to kill off the need for printer drivers, you’d have it.

So that would be it: a laptop replacement for 90% of people. The future is here (90% of it anyway) and it’s a pad. Now if only they didn’t hate the pencil so much.