Dylan Schiemann

Our English language Dojo book total is now up to at least six, with more books on the way.

Peter Svensson has released Learning Dojo, which includes coverage of the new Dojo grid, and numerous DojoX examples. There’s an example chapter on Layout available for free.

Leslie Orchard has released the Concise Guide to Dojo. I do not yet know anything about this book, other than knowing that it is on the market and that it weighs in at exactly the same number of pages, 264, as Peter Svensson’s book!

This book follows on the heels of the first three Dojo books and the fourth Dojo book.

On this day of thanks, on a professional level, I’m really thankful that Dojo is such a thriving community, and SitePen is able to work with such amazing and great companies.

A few people have asked me privately if I am upset that Alex is joining Google. The short answer is, absolutely not. Alex has been hacking on WebKit and Gears for a while now, and when we heard about Chrome, we thought it was a great way to make the open web better. I’m thankful that a company like Google dedicates so many resources to improving the open web. So while Alex is no longer at SitePen, I’m excited about the possibilities that exist with having even better browsers for building great apps for you.

On a personal level, I’m extremely thankful to have a great family, friends, and co-workers. I’ve also been fortunate to meet so many amazing people over the past few years as Dojo as evolved from small little project to tool of choice for hundreds of thousands of developers.

I was invited to speak at Adobe MAX this year on the topic of Building Desktop Applications Powered by Dojo and Adobe AIR. The talk summarized the key things we’ve learned at SitePen in adding AIR support to Dojo, as well as working on the Dojo Toolbox and the Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR. Full slides from the talk are now available:

During the talk, I mentioned the frustrations we had with ShrinkSafe and not being able to execute Java code from AIR. After the talk, one of the attendees mentioned the Merapi project, which aims to build a bridge from AIR to Java, which looks like an interesting solution to our problem of needing a place to run Rhino within our Builder tool:

Another audience member suggested we also look at a Java to ActionScript Converter. While likely not ideal for what we are doing, there’s an interesting push around the edges to solve our problem.

Aptana also showed off support for AIR debugging for Ajax Developers within Aptana Studio.

The talk of MAX so far is Flash Catalyst, a new approach to solving the tooling problem for interaction design. At this point, I have mixed feelings about the usefulness and approach of Catalyst.

At the keynote, there was a focus on a number of the great features of Flash 10, including:

• 3-D cloth simulation with a video texture
• 3-D analyzer triggered by the audio spectrum
• Pixel Bender stuff brings After Effects type abilities
• New Video component handles multiple streams and true bandwidth detection which seamlessly switches between different bit rates if a user consumes more or less bandwidth (e.g. connection or opening other windows/tabs/videos)
• The multiple streams don’t have to be for multi-bit rate - they can also be used for playlists
• Support for SMIL
• Maria Shriver was there. We still don’t know why.

The new Flash text engine is also significantly improved. It handles nice ligatures and can mix international text with local text, and the ligatures in the same text box. Supports now exists for left to right rendering, and not only does text on a path, but with full animated support.



Digital Audio Signal Processing in Flash 10 was a very popular session, and very informative, since the dynamic sound feature is under-documented. Basically, you extract the data from an MP3 file, or create synthesized sounds, and then you can manipulate the bits to add effects.

At Sneaks, Adobe engineers showed off a number of experimental technologies being worked on today. The overall production quality of the demos was great, though the applause-o-meter used to judge the winning entries did not seem to actually work. Meer Meer was interesting, as well as some of the efforts towards object cropping in images. Adobe also introduced Durango for assembling mashups and widgets, which in some ways is like ProjectZero.

After Sneaks, there was a great party at the recently reopened California Academy of Sciences. I hadn’t been there in more than 20 years, and it was a great venue for having a drink, entering a rain forest, walking underneath an aquarium, checking out a view of the city, playing foosball, and enjoying an eclectic variety of musical entertainment. Adobe threw a great party at an amazing venue.





Finally, the introduction of 64-bit Flash for Linux was a great move as it is the first platform to receive a 64-bit version, rather than being a distant third to Mac and Windows. From what I can tell, this removes one of the last obstacles to getting AIR launched on Linux as well.

Overall, the quality of the conference was great and had something to offer anyone interested in web development or web design. While there was the expected marketing slant towards Flash and Flex-based products, I appreciate Adobe inviting us to speak about SitePen and our work on open web technologies.

I had thought about writing a treatise on why bailouts are bad, but Ron Paul saved me the time with his article that is appropriately called “The Bailout Surge“, a clear poke at the Iraq Surge (emphasis below is mine):

We must remember that governments do not produce anything. Their only resources come from producers in the economy through such means as inflation and taxation. The government has an obligation to be good stewards of these resources. In bailing out failing companies, they are confiscating money from productive members of the economy and giving it to failing ones. By sustaining companies with obsolete or unsustainable business models, the government prevents their resources from being liquidated and made available to other companies that can put them to better, more productive use. An essential element of a healthy free market, is that both success and failure must be permitted to happen when they are earned. But instead with a bailout, the rewards are reversed – the proceeds from successful entities are given to failing ones. How this is supposed to be good for our economy is beyond me.

Read the full article, The Bailout Surge, for more details

ICANN has opened up the process for gTLD. I’m certain that we’ll now finally see .mac and .msn. The application process looks grueling, and the application fee is expected to be a relatively staggerring $185,000, so don’t expect to see .dojo, .sitepen, or .dylan any time soon.

That said, if someone wants to set up .lan, I’ll be first in line to pay for dy! For now, I’ll stick with dylan.io.

Something weird is going on, because the prices of everything are going down rapidly, including oil, gold, silver, etc. However, this is mainly a reflection of the dollar going up against foreign currency:

Prices of commodities are being crushed. Gold, the barometer of inflation, is being crushed in the USD even as I write, even though I reported last week that it set all-time highs in the Canadian dollar, Indian rupee, South African rand, British pound, and Australian dollar. The USDX is a nice number to look at (although technically it’s for the birds) but it has climbed sharply where some factors I did not register such as foreign dollar-denominated bank accounts redemptions, especially in places like Europe, are forcing banks to buy dollars and sell Euros, and most likely some derivative movements hidden from view.

This means gold is at an all-time high in the UK, while down more than 20% in the past few weeks in the US. So, now that everyone is in debt, and owes more on their house than it is worth, the only thing not going down in value in the US is your debt!

Michael Carter of Orbited recently published a fun and colorful introduction to WebSocket:

I was at first overjoyed at the prospect of the World Wide Web’s new status as a real boy. But such feelings were just a precursor to the greatest technology-driven depression of my life. You see, as recently as twenty years ago the world was brimming with real programmers, who knew how to do such amazing things as write programs that conversed with far-away computers by using bsd sockets. We’ve traded those programmers, by and large, for JavaScript kiddies. Its not that the real programmers all died, retired, or gave up with programming; rather, every new programmer of the past decade is a bright-eyed 22 year old who thinks he’s the best thing since Google, what with his domination of rails (, java, or php) and JavaScript.

For more of Michael’s writing about Comet, visit Comet Daily, a web site I helped create to better explain Comet.

Frank Zammetti has released a new Dojo book, Practical Dojo Projects.

I haven’t seen the book yet, so it’s too soon to review, but knowing Frank’s other books, it’s sure to be a great and informative read.

This book follows on the heels of the first three Dojo books.

A number of Facebook users are petitioning to keep the old Facebook design. I switched to the new design when I first noticed the option, and it is such a significant improvement over the old design that I would consider switching back to be a bit silly.

It’s a cleaner, more efficient, more informative design, that uses more of your screen space if it’s available. It is concise and refined by comparison to the old Facebook design. At the end of the day, a lot of people don’t like change, hence their desire to petition.

The outcome may not make the petitioners happy in the short term, but the bottom line in my opinion is that a complex social platform like Facebook cannot afford to maintain two diverging platforms indefinitely, and we’ll see the old platform removed shortly.

The new iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update can best be described as the most successful failure I can remember. Apple has sold an astounding number of phones and applications, and yet is failing in so many different ways:

• MobileMe: A terribly bungled deployment that is still suffering through issues of data integrity and push between the desktop and the iPhone is not what users expect.
• Lines and availability: Lines are long every day that phones are available, as a result of the terribly inefficient activation process. Since when did it become acceptable to make customers wait 2-4 hours to purchase a phone? I want to give you my money for a new iPhone, but I won’t until you stop wasting our time with a process designed to block people from unlocking their phones, but instead just slows things down for everyone.
• Cracking: Reports of the plastic cracking on new iPhones (sounds like the MacBook and G4 Cube mess all over again.
• Instability: iPhone software instability from dozens of people I know. My first generation iPhone is crashing much more regularly, is much much slower and less responsive when switching applications, and while the new apps are decent, the user experience for entering passwords is cumbersome, having apps not preserve state when quitting and returning later, and the phone locking up repeatedly during calls has so far not been worth the update. A jailbroken 1.1.4 iPhone was much more stable.
• StyleThe white iPhone looks terrible… 3-toned white, black, and silver? Who let this design get out the door? Saying that the white model is fugly is an understatement.

And yet, Apple can chalk this release up as yet another major success. I love my iPhone and other Apple products, but so far my expectations are not being met with the iPhone 2.0 software and the 3G iPhone experience. I fully understand why existing iPhone users are not as excited as new buyers.