The Idea Ether

Team matters

Or more accurately...teams matter! With the initial Beta release of indi I wanted to say some words about my team. A little over a year ago we were all working on DARPA research projects, and we, as a team, decided to go the "product route". Now, switching from a consulting-oriented company to a product-oriented company is a lot of work, but more importantly it requires the entire team's commitment to make it a success. And I must say that our team has kept that commitment. Building what we have in just shy of a year is a huge effort. Each person on our team continues to amaze me in how well they each pick up and learn what needs to be learned and to do what needs to be done.

Dave and I have worked together for close to 19 years (yeah...exactly!) He is one of the best programmers I know. Right now Dave handles lots of our low-level code development. Whether its integrating extended MAPI with Ruby or the building installers with the OS X Carbon API or even scripting iCal with AppleScript...Dave just plows through and produces incredible results. We have to perform some major back-flips iterating on an implementation that gets things right, and no matter how much work it takes Dave to accomplish a task, he is ready to start over if its the right thing to do. As every programmer knows, the worst feeling in the world is to solve a hard problem and then have that solution become unnecessary because of a change in requirement...but Dave is always positive, always ready to do what must be done. Most of Dave's work in not thrown away mind you, its just something that I really admire about him.

Tom is another amazing programmer. Many of you guys may know Tom since he administrates RubyForge. As part of our product effort Tom has been working on all our service infrastructure. Tom has picked up Ruby on Rails in no time, and has produced a great foundation for us to build upon. Not only is Tom kicking at building the services code though, he is also great at building the client side of that code. I have just never been good at tinkering with all the stuff you have to to configure things like Postgres, Apache (or GForge...ug), but Tom not only does a great job, but actually automates (with tests) everything he does to verify the integrity of what he is building. Of course, while all this is going on, Tom continues to work on PMD and RubyForge. Oh, Tom also single handedly built the beginnings of our Linux support for indi (Evolution plugins, runtime, etc) but since the Flash 8 player does not (yet) support Linux, that work has to sit on the sidelines...for now!

Ryan and I have known each other almost as long as Dave and I have. Ryan is an artist...but I don't mean a graphics artist (although he is amazing with Photoshop)...I mean an artist. Ryan is actually a very good musician, but again, than is not what I mean. Ryan and I have done most of the UI development for indi. Ryan is an artist in the sense that he always programs with style. Everything he does has a style that is driven by his artistic sense. He constantly iterates his implementations seeking a balance of form and function. Ryan had to ramp to learn ActionScript 2.0 last spring...and learn it he has. When Ryan and I first worked together at a company named Roku 10 years ago, Ryan was tasked to build a calendar (month, week, day view) in Java 1.1. Now, if anyone remembers Java 1.x...it was very hard to achieve good performance with AWT, but Ryan produced with flying colors. He also NEVER wanted to build another calendar again! Of course, then comes indi and what is the first thing I ask Ryan to do?...yeah...build a calendar. Ryan always delivers great results with his UI work, and is a stickler for details, which anyone who puts the indi card games in slow motion will immediately see.

Last but very much not least is Mark. Mark is my COO, but the first thing to know about Mark is the "C" in his title in no way means his view of work is delegating and controlling those who work for him. You see, Mark served as a Marine, and as such believes that his job is to do whatever has to be done. Mark handles everything administratively for our company, and I mean everything! Mark deals with payrolls, accounting and all the other crap (his words) that makes a company tick, and its no small task. Its a huge amount of work...and most of the time its not very fun work. Mark is tireless at performing it though. None of us ever worry about the admin side of the company with Mark there, which lets us fully focus on building our product. But that's not it by a long shot, Mark is also Business Development, Marketing...oh and he wrote the indi Getting Started Guide because you know how much developers like to document.

That's my team. They are great to work with, and great at what they do. Best of all, I count all of them as friends. How awesome it is to work doing something you enjoy with your friends? I do want to add one more group to our team...those being our investors. Our investors believe in us and we want to make sure we are worthy of that belief. I don't just add our investors because I'm the CEO and its good form, it takes a lot to produce in this fast-moving world of high-tech. We are all one team working toward a common vision and that is why we are going to succeed. Now for Beta 2...

Get indi baby!

Well, after a year of very hard work, we have finally entered a (limited, invitation-only) Beta for indi. What is indi? You can find out here: http://getindi.com. indi is our answer to folks who believe that you need to put all your stuff on their servers to gain anytime-anywhere access to it.

Technically indi combines a lot of the work I have done in Ruby such as FreeBASE (plug-in framework for the FreeRIDE IDE), Jabber4r and Alph (Ruby to Flash bridge) with the work I have been doing in Flash/ActionScript...specifically the ActionStep port of the OpenStep/Cocoa App Kit to Flash. This combination creates a cross-platform execution environment with Ruby as the data manager, and Flash for the UI.

indi runs on OS X and Windows right now, and as soon as Flash 8 is supported on Linux it will run there as well. indi is more like a platform than an application, and its going to allow us to give some really cool capabilities to our users and deliver on a vision we have of digital independence (reverse the two and you get in..di - indi).

Anyway, we have a busy schedule ahead to release our next Beta in about 4 weeks at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference.

Flash and Web 2.0

Mike Chambers from Macromedia posted on his blog about what Web 2.0 is and how the Flash platform relates to it. Having spent the better part of the last six months building a substantial application with Flash which, as a by-product, has produced the ActionStep open-source component framework and using the MTASC compiler for building swfs from ActionScript, I will say that Flash is far better suited to building applications that feel like desktop apps, but that operate in a distributed manner. If Web 2.0 is "the Web as a platform" as Mike says, then Flash should be seriously evaluated for projects that are trying to build applications for that platform. If you want to just use HTML and AJAX, that's fine, but for us Flash is a must...and when you see our applications you will understand why.

ActionStep and Rails

Some may have heard the crazy story about my integrating ActionStep and Rails at OSCON. ActionStep is an OSS component framework for Flash written in the ActionScript programming language. Rails is...well that goes without saying. I was slotted to speak on ActionStep on Thursday in the Emerging Tech track. I have to admit that although I have been doing Ruby programming for 4 years, I had never touched Rails. My job really has nothing to do with Web frameworks and such, and time slips by... Anyway, OSCON presented an opportunity to see Rails in action and I sat through David's great tutorial session. Rails is a really nice Ruby framework, and it struck me that it would be cool to come up with a templating language to build ActionStep-based UIs with Rails. Monday and Tuesday I iterated on a design with David, Dave Thomas, Glenn Vanderburg...all the fun Ruby folks, and came up with something linguistically nice. David asked me to add to my ActionStep/Rails syntax slides into my presentation as a 'teaser'. Here is an example of the templating format:

NSView :test do
  attributes :rect => {:x => 0, :y => 0, :width => 200, :height => 400}, 
             :backgroundColor => 0xdddd00
  publishes :selected_person_id => execute { names.selectedItem.label }
  NSButton :hello do
    attributes :title => "Test", 
               :rect => {:x => 10, :y => 10, :width => 20, :height => 20}
  end
  ASList :names do 
    attributes :items => @names, 
               :rect => {:x => 10, :y => 50, :width => 100, :height => 200}
  end
end

Having slides that showed this format was cool with me...but on Wednesday night all that changed. I went to hang with the FOSCON folks, and presented the teaser slides to them. People really liked the syntax and the implications of what having a Flash framework attached to Rails could mean. Then all hell broke loose. Well, actually not hell proper, but chaos harnessed in a very Ruby way by _why the lucky stiff. After his side splitting performance I went back to my hotel around 11pm and decided to just implement the syntax in Rails and ActionStep. I mean, how hard could it be to build a Rich Internet Application framework? I started at 11:30 with two Dr. Pepper and by 6:00am had stuff rendering from Rails to ActionStep. I crashed for an hour and a half, and then went to the David's keynote on Rails. His keynote gave me just the boost I needed to push it a little further and I spent the next hour getting data sent back from ActionStep to Rails. At my 11:30am session I was able to fully demonstrate Rails dynamically creating and serving an ActionStep-based UI. You could update the text templates, press refresh in your browser, and the UI would re-render with your changes. Round-tripping data...the works.

I would like to say that it was just a few lines of code, but that is not quite the case...its a few more than a few. I will be creating a Gem by the end of the month to allow people to play with things, and until that time I wrote up what the syntax looks like...you can see it here in more detail:

http://www.osflash.org/doku.php?id=actionstep_rails

To Open Source and all that it implies..um...ok, I need to sleep now.

PS. United Airlines sucks, I just needed to get that out.

ActionStep source is on SourceForge

Well, I went released (in CVS) what I have been busy working on for the last month. ActionStep source is now available on the project site under a BSD-style license. Whew. Porting OpenStep to ActionScript is quite a pain, and there is so very much to do. The goal was to mirror the API as much as possible (with necessary syntactic variations). In Objective-C you would create a button like this:

[[NSButton alloc] initWithFrame:NSMakeRect(10,10,50,20)]

In ActionStep you do this:

(new NSButton()).initWithFrame(new NSRect(10,10,50,20));

Other than that, the API is going to attempt to support as much as my/our little fingers can port. I have NSButton and NSTextView working, but will be making them better over the next few days. Scott Hyndman has joined in and is working on NSBox to get his feet wet. NSNotifications all work, target-action, the responder chain...good times!

When I can lay out a strategy for total domination of the UI world, I will post again, for now I need to sleep.

Ruby 1.8.2 in Tiger

Nice...the Apple team included Ruby 1.8.2 in Tiger. Tis a sweet thing indeed. If you want to build extensions for it though you need to install xCode Tools. And then, there is a minor problem with the shipped rbconfig.rb file. The wiki on the rails site here documents the change.

You can also use RubyGems to fix it too thanks to Chad Fowler who already built a Gem (fixrbconfig) to fix the problem. After you install RubyGems you just do this:


% sudo gem install fixrbconfig
Password:
Attempting local installation of 'fixrbconfig'
Local gem file not found: fixrbconfig*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'fixrbconfig'
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed fixrbconfig-1.0


Then run (from another terminal window):


% sudo fixrbconfig
====================
This program will replace your rbconfig.rb , located in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0/rbconfig.rb
Press enter continue or ctrl-c to abort.
Backing up original rbconfig.rb in /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/powerpc-darwin8.0/rbconfig.rb.bak
All Done! You should be able to compile C extensions now!


Its nice when package managers ship fixes to OSes on the same day the OS ships!

Now, full steam ahead with Ruby on Tiger!

[UPDATE] Lucas Carlson posted this very nice script to fix both the rbconfig.rb file and download and install readline support (which gives you command recall in IRB). Very nice indeed! If you have already applied the rbconfig fix, you can just snip out the lines starting with: curl ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline...

Speaking at OSCON 2005

So, my talk on ActionStep was accepted for the 2005 OSCON conference which is being held in Portland from August 1-5. Its a high honor to be accepted at this event, and I thank the program committee for selecting my talk. I will not disappoint. As to what ActionStep is...heh...its coming! ActionStep is an open-source (thus OSCON) component framework for Macromedia's Flash player that InfoEther is paying to develop. There is a lot of open-source momentum building in the Flash community and ActionStep's goal is to be one piece of the puzzle. Another significant piece is the MTASC ActionScript compiler which is freaking incredible and makes ActionStep possible. I will be posting more about ActionStep soon, and will be switching my CVS to the SourceForge project soon as well. Oh, and don't worry, Ruby is still my best friend...this ActionScript language is a necessary evil!

Jef Raskin

Jef Raskin passed away yesterday. My heart goes out to his family and to those close to him. I only met Jef two times, but in both instances he was a vibrant and engaging person. At last years O'Reilly FOO Camp Jef brought his small model planes and to the delight of the children flew them around the parking lot. Five years ago when I was working on a prior software project (Roku) we were close to engaging Jef to help us build the user experience. That, unfortunately, fell through but I did get to visit Jef at his house on the coast of California. We spent the afternoon in a dialog about The Humane Interface and his vision for The Humane Environment (THE). His son seems to be carrying on his father's vision at The Raskin Center. The very computer that I type this on owes much of its existence to the creative mind of Jef Raskin and I will always remember him for both his accomplishments and his dreams.

New InfoEther site live

We just updated our site at infoether.com. Check it out if you get a chance. It's a database-driven flash-based site and the backend has some crazy cool stuff one of our folks developed. Its likely overkill for a corporate Web site, but hey, when you have a bunch of crazy cool developers working for you, why not!

RubyGems marches toward 1.0

We have a lot to celebrate today in the world of RubyGems...we passed the 5000 download mark of RubyGems and over 20000 gem libraries have been downloaded and installed. Chad Fowler has captured this nicely on his blog.

Its not too long before we reach the 1.0 milestone...but with over a hundred Ruby libraries already available and more coming every day, there is no time like the present to install RubyGems and experience an elegant solution to package management for an elegant dynamic language.

Viva Ruby!