story of a thousand birds

Story of A Thousand Birds

Bits and bytes on developing rich desktop applications and deciphering bird languages

from Twitter

@cheeaun

#geekcamp 30.5.2009

Why a “story”?

Noun (pl. stories) 1 an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment. 2

an account of past events, experiences, etc.

Why a “thousand birds”?

Photo from: http://flic.kr/p/5CDQEL

So, what is“Rich Desktop Application”?

Something sexy.

Adobe AIRhttp://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Appcelerator Titaniumhttp://titaniumapp.com/

More Power for Web Developers

• Cross-platform (Windows, Mac, Linux)

• Offline database support• File system access• Clipboard access• Drag-and-drop API

To learn Adobe AIR, I’ve tried to create a Tumblr desktop client.

… and it went into flames.

In case you don’t know what is Tumblr, go to http://tumblr.com/

Because I hit a road block with WYSIWYG editors.

That’s when another story chips in.

MooEditablehttp://cheeaun.github.com/mooeditable/

I lost interest in developing the app, and

no more AIR for me.Things gotten quiet as I focus on other stuff.

Oh well, at least, I did something and created Fx.WindowBounds

A MooTools class for animating AIR windows.http://code.google.com/p/fx-windowbounds/

which is now outdated and preceded by @kassens’s MooTools Fire

http://github.com/kassens/fire

One day, I found Titanium.

Photo from: http://flic.kr/p/5rcxS7

Why Titanium?

• Current build: Preview Release 3 (PR 3)

• Open-sourced http://github.com/marshall/titanium

• Supports JavaScript, Python, Ruby• Also supports Flash, Silverlight• Resources bundled• Better performance

Yahoo Sideline port uses ¼ memory of AIR apphttp://www.slideshare.net/jhaynie/desktop-applications-using-html-and-javascript

Titanium Developer

What’s missing in Titanium?

• No stable release yet. Still beta.• Lack of documentation.

http://titanium-js.appspot.com/ • Debugging is slightly challenging.• So, it’s all trial and error.

How to get help?

• IRC chatroom #titanium_app on irc.freenode.net

• Forum http://community.appcelerator.org/groups/titanium

• Stalk these guys: @jhaynie, @marshall_law, @keeto

Don’t worry.Beta is coming on June 9th 2009.

http://www.appcelerant.com/titanium-beta-launch-party-wwdc-june-9th-6-9pm.html

Now, let’s talk about WebKit.

It’s everywhere. AIR. Titanium. Safari. Chrome. Adium. Palm Web OS. Even your backyard.

Enjoy the WebKit magic

• HTML5 goodness• CSS3 goodness• WebKit CSS extensions

-webkit-gradient -webkit-animation-* -webkit-transform ::-webkit-scrollbar … and more from http://webkit.org/blog/

This is cool,but something’s missing.

I’ve already started enjoying some of these CSS3 goodness when developing Firefox

theme(s) – Gecko rendering engine.

What’s missing in WebKit then?

• -webkit-appearance VS -moz-appearance– lack of platform-native styling, eg. ‘button’, ‘progressbar’, ‘tab’, ‘toolbar’

• -moz-border-*-colors– multiple colors for borders http://css3.info/preview/colored-border/

To learn Titanium, I try to create a Twitter desktop

client. Photo from: http://flic.kr/p/66zSwM

Oh wait, before that, there’s this Twitter clone...

Another abandoned project of mine, sadly speaking.

Twig http://twig.appspot.com/Open-sourced http://twig.googlecode.com/

It was fun. And now, back to the Twitter client.

Google App Engine rocks, by the way.

Introducing Chidori.

Photo from Naruto animation episodes,basically found from Google Image Search.

Chidori on Windows Vista and Mac OSX(The app is still alpha at this point and the UI might change)

Stay tuned.

Follow @chidoriapp or watch http://github.com/cheeaun/chidori for updates.

Thank you.

Hope you enjoy the story.