Twitter Engineering Weblog

The Twitter Engineering Blog: "Welcome! I'm Ben, and I'm an engineer at Twitter. We've started this blog to show some of the cool things we're creating and tough problems we're solving." - Besides having interesting content I love how clean the design is. Oh, if you're in the market for a job, check out the jobs listed in the right column, they have quite a few, and they're very interesting. If you're into Ruby, Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS you may be a nice fit!

Also, check out their photo stream on Flickr, it's nice to be spoiled.

Labels: CSS, HTML, Java, Job, PHP, Python, Ruby, Twitter, Weblogging

Still my favorite Potter movie poster

Wizarding World of Harry Potter

The Disney Blog [hat tip Steven Vore]: "Universal Orlando has expanded the offerings on their preview website for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter land set to open its first stage this spring. It includes a new interactive map along with descriptions of all the rides and attractions." - Wow, I haven't posted about everybody's favorite wizard in a very long time. It's funny how my excitement about everything Harry Potter has died down now the series is complete and we're not going to see another book. We still have the final two films to look forward to, but there's always something disappointing about them. That said it almost seems too late to have built The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Then again, I'd love to see it.

Labels: Potter

Fun with Wordle

Go make your own at Wordle, it's fun.

Labels: Fun

Looking back on CrunchPad

Back in November, 2009, Michael Arrington announced the death of the CrunchPad

"It's a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so...final...is a very hard thing to do. I'm enraged, embarrassed, and just...sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool."

I can't help but believe it was a good thing it failed. Yes, a good thing. Just think what would've happened to it after the iPad announcement? Sales would've dried up and he'd have been selling them out of his garage at a heavily discounted price just to get rid of them.

Labels: iPad, Life, Technology

Movie line of the week answer

Good morning movie liners, we have a winner, Mr. Bill Lazar. Congratulations Bill.

The correct answer was...

The Big Lebowski

Labels: MLOTW

iPad, mark his words

David Cole: "It's not 'far superior' -- it's way better. What's the difference? 'Way better' is what regular people say. And that's where the iPad will find an audience. Regular people around the globe will flock to the iPad, maybe even faster than they did to the iPhone. This is not just for geeks. It's not even for geeks. It's for everybody." - Wow, I don't think I've EVER seen David this excited about something, and he makes a lot of excellent points. Go read the post, I think you'll like it. I know I did.

Labels: iPad

Microsoft is failing

NY Times: "Microsoft's huge profits - $6.7 billion for the past quarter - come almost entirely from Windows and Office programs first developed decades ago. Like G.M. with its trucks and S.U.V.'s, Microsoft can't count on these venerable products to sustain it forever. Perhaps worst of all, Microsoft is no longer considered the cool or cutting-edge place to work. There has been a steady exit of its best and brightest." - I never thought I'd see this happen to Microsoft. When we moved to the Seattle area in 1993 it was a hotbed of software development, and Microsoft was probably the most desirable place to work. Now it's a second-tier destination. It's still a great place to work, just not what it used to be.

Another choice quote from the article: "Another example: When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn't like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow." - That VP was none other than Steven Sinofsky. We had plans to make Visio a world class citizen on the tablet, to really embrace it, but Sinofsky didn't like it, so the plans were flushed.

I have a dear friend that led that effort, and after many years of watching Microsoft make strange decisions, he's finally left the company. He'll be a great hire for a company that's interested in creating a truly great user experience.

Labels: Microsoft

Objective-C and C++

CodFusion [via James Robertson]: "Can Adobe just port what they have into Objective-C or use Carbon. Unfortunately no, the Flash Player is written in C++ and going from C++ to Objective-C is not very practical. Objective-C is just another superset of C. It simply adds some OOP logic and a messaging and some of the syntax is similar to Smalltalk. You can compile any C program into Objective-C but that's not currently possible to do with a C++ program." - Emphasis is mine. I can assure you, having done it myself, you can use your current C++ code from Objective-C. I took a collection of pure C++ classes, unmodified, and used them from an Object-C/Cocoa based application. That collection of classes did not have any OS specific code, which made my job easier.

That's not to say Adobe doesn't face a huge uphill climb, it really does, but it can be done. Replacing Carbon with Cocoa is going to be tough. Since they're a cross platform shop I would hope they have a nice set of frameworks that abstract most of the platform specifics from the developer, but that of course is difficult to do. The Photoshop team is in the middle of the Carbon to Cocoa battle.

Bottom line - you can use your C++ with your Objective-C code.

P.S. - I have become a huge fan of Objective-C and Cocoa, I'm just sayin'.

Labels: Adobe, Apple, C++, Cocoa, Objective-C

Movie line of the week

Good morning, and good luck, here's the line...

I do mind, the Dude minds. This will not stand, ya know, this aggression will not stand, man.

Ok, quick, what movie! Send your guesses here.

Labels: MLOTW

More from Blogger's Rick Klau

Hats off to Rick Klau from Blogger. He's really been responsive to the confusion caused by the recent changes to Blogger. You're a class act Rick, thanks!

Here's something very telling, at least it is to me, from Rick's comment in my most recent post about the Blogger changes.

This isn't a reaction to Tumblr, or WordPress, or TypePad, or anybody else. (Each are great, btw, and have lots to offer.) This is a simple challenge: we want to deliver a best-in-class experience, and creating a product with dependencies on downstream ISPs was preventing us from delivering the stable, reliable and functional product we wanted. It was also preventing us from doing more for the 99.5% of users who host with us (either on their own domain or on blogspot.com).

Emphasis is mine. 99.5% of the users who host with Blogger will benefit, who can argue with that? I certainly can't.

I've been a very satisfied Blogger user and wish Blogger all the best. I hope you guys are able give us some killer features!

Rollin, rollin, rollin, rollin, rollin...

Labels: Blogger, Web

Never count Apple out

NY Times [via Matt Scoble]: "The iPad bet could prove a loser for Apple. Some skeptics see it occupying an uncertain ground between an iPod and a notebook computer, and a pricey gadget as well, at $499 to $829. Do recall, though, that when the iPod was introduced in 2001, critics joked that the name was an acronym for 'idiots price our devices.' And we know who had the last laugh that time." - Will the iPad fail? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm sure willing to hook my wagon to it and join the journey.

Labels: Apple

Blogger changes, the future hurts

Mike McBride: "As I think about it, the last time Blogger added a feature that we could, you know, use, was categories, or maybe comments? (Upon further review, scheduled posts were available regardless of where you are publishing within the last year) Any way, it's been awhile. Almost all of the innovation at Blogger now seems to be around widgets, and other tools for use with Blogspot hosted accounts. Those of us who don't have those, get nothing. I can't help but wonder if the fact that Blogspot hosted accounts have ads on them is the reason?" - Well, I guess I'm not the only Blogger "old-timer" bit by the changes. Mike has already made his choice and upgraded to WordPress, not a bad choice at all. I still struggle with my decision to not go with WordPress, it really is that good.

I don't hold a grudge against Blogger, they need to move their platform forward and had to make a tough decision. They're looking a bit long in the tooth. Their built in templates need a complete refresh and they need to build their community. Tumblr is kicking butt and taking names. They have a beautiful user interface and they've embraced their user, and designer, community. My lovely wife and oldest daughter are hosted on Tumblr, and love it. I'm pretty sure Blogger looks at Tumblr and says "Hey, we're falling behind here, and these FTP users are holding us back." The natural choice is to kill off FTP publishing. I'm certain they'll get a number of folks to switch, I have a weblog it makes sense to do that with, but this weblog isn't it.

The bottom line; Blogger has to beef up its platform to compete with the likes of Tumblr, Posterous, and WordPress.

You can't blame them for that.

UPDATE: Here's the post on Blogger Buzz that explains the situation. - "Three years ago we launched Custom Domains to give users the simplicity of Blogger, the scalability of Google hosting, and the flexibility of hosting your blog at your own URL. Last year's post discussed the advantages of custom domains over FTP and addressed a number of reasons users have continued to use FTP publishing. (If you're interested in reading more about Custom Domains, our Help Center has a good overview of how to use them on your blog.) In evaluating the investment needed to continue supporting FTP, we have decided that we could not justify diverting further engineering resources away from building new features for all users."

I'd also like to thank Rick Klau, a Blogger Product Manager, for taking the time to address my questions personally, it helped a lot Rick.

Labels: Blogger, Movable Type, Tumblr, Weblogging, WordPress

Understanding Movable Type 5

Victoria Wong: "Getting Movable Type where I wanted it turned out to be much more of a project than I expected. I've documented the following in hopes that it'll help someone out there." - This is going to be invaluable as I move forward with my Movable Type 5 experiment.

As of this writing Movable Type is the front-runner in my weblogging tool search.

Labels: Movable Type, Tools, Weblogging

Zeldman on Flash and iPad

Jeffery Zeldman: "Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don't support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first. Additional layers of Flash UX can then be optionally added in, just as, in proper, accessible, standards-based development, JavaScript UX enhancements are added only after we verify that the site works without them." - Good design advice.

Labels: Good Advice, Web