Kevin Whinnery: Archive

The Team of Engineers I Want

I am all in on Appcelerator - it’s victory or death for me and this company now. We’ll see which one it is. But assuming it’s the former and not the latter, I really want to run a software company and build out one of the many world-changing ideas floating around in my head. And to do that I’ll need to build a team of engineers I want to work with. I’ve read a...

Nov 7th

trevmex's tumblings: Building Rails Apps for the... →

trevmex: #railsconf 2011 Notes Yehuda Katz (@wycats) How do you build Rails apps that work with rich client-side applications? Rails can be very useful, even if you are not rendering HTML, Rails makes making APIs really awesome. It can work well for machine-to-machine communication. “If all I’m doing…

May 19th

4 notes

Higher taxes not hurting (even helping) Norwegian... →

In the States, it is popular to assume higher taxes are always and in every situation bad for business. There is no statistical data to support such a claim, and there is compelling evidence to the contrary (or at the very least suggesting that personal income tax rates and business prosperity are not inextricably related, as many Republicans would have us believe). Our collective inability to...

May 17th

May 12th

Apr 16th

Mobile March 2011 Presentation

Here are the slides from my talk at Mobile March 2011 - thanks to Justin and the crew for putting on a great event! Titanium Overview (Mobile March 2011) View more presentations from Kevin Whinnery

Mar 21st

oAuth: Awful Technology, or Worst Technology Ever?

Every day it seems like I see another tweet or plea for help from a developer flailing about trying to implement oAuth in their desktop or mobile application. This is because oAuth is probably the least user friendly technology I have encountered in my decade of software development. As frustrating as it is useless, I cringe every time I need to come near it. For the busy, here are the...

Nov 23rd

Blog - Zach Waugh: The difference between Apple... →

zachwaugh: Every time Apple releases a new product, it becomes more and more clear that no other company really gets it. The next war for winning consumers’ hearts - in both hardware and software - will not be based on tech specs, but on usability and user experience. Computers are already way faster than…

Nov 11th

39 notes

3 tags

“The App Store℠ has revolutionized the way mobile applications are developed and...”

– Natalie Kerris Apple nat@apple.com (408) 974-6877

Sep 9th

Jun 3rd

MinneBar Titanium Slides

Here’s my presentation from this weekend’s MinneBar conference: Titanium @ MinnebarView more presentations from kwhinnery.

May 24th

Box Layout in CSS

One of the last lingering things I thought Flex had on HTML/CSS was a proper horizontal and vertical box layout. Turns out that in CSS 3, we finally have a proper box model! I adapted this tutorial to show how you do a vertical box in Webkit (Titanium, Safari, Chrome) - ought to work in FF by using a -moz prefix, but haven’t tested there yet: Check out the Safari docs on the box- family...

May 20th

“No company — no matter how big or how creative — should dictate what you can...”

– John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, Founders of Adobe (source)

May 13th

Apr 26th

766 notes

Upcoming live Titanium Training

On the heels of the Titanium 1.x release, I’ll be on the road at two training events in April. The first will be at 360|iDev in San Jose. On the Sunday before the conference, I’ll be delivering a 4-hour primer on Titanium Mobile development in the morning, followed by an open hack session in the afternoon. More Information…. The second event will be in Atlanta (birthplace...

Mar 30th

“I’ve always found that courage comes from remembering that we fight for...”

– Barack Obama

Mar 17th

Mar 11th

Save images to the local filesystem in Titanium... →

Quick example I whipped up to show how this might be implemented.

Jan 21st

1 note

“Maven builds are an infinite cycle of despair that will slowly drag you into the...”

– Kent Spillner

Jan 5th

Nov 21st

Titanium Tip: Twitter update w/ HTTP Basic

Here’s an answer to question I get a lot, which is how to post a tweet using Titanium. It’s not rocket science, but I thought I would write it down real quick:

Nov 12th

“Treat the JavaScript global window scope like a public toilet. You can’t...”

– Dmitry Baranovskiy [paraphrased, but I think pretty close]

Nov 12th

JBoss: A classic Freemium model (Article)

Great article on how JBoss built their sales organization: Full Article » Excerpt JBoss is a great example of the Freemium model. It perfectly illustrates several important principles of the Freemium model: By giving away a really great product for free, JBoss developed a loyal following and active community that virally spread the word to other developers. This led...

Nov 10th

Nov 5th

“If you ask me, it’s best to steer away from naming anything ever. I never...”

– Paul Cantrell, MN Ruby User

Oct 29th

Distributing Titanium iPhone apps for test →

A very quick and dirty guide to distributing iPhone apps to beta testers when using Titanium mobile.

Oct 26th

“The dumber the customers, the more effort you expend on the process of selling...”

– Paul Graham of Y Combinator, from What Startups are Really Like.

Oct 26th

“On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at...”

– Farhad Manjoo highlights my least favorite “feature” of Google Wave, in It’s Just Fancy Talk. (via davidkaneda)

Oct 22nd

19 notes

“Let’s not pretend that we know what time it is because we know what we saw last...”

– Guy English, on his blog on Cocoa development

Oct 8th

360iDev Recap and Story

I’m currently sitting in the Denver international airport after a great Titanium lab session at 360iDev - horrendous network connectivity aside, it was a good event and we had several people stop in over the 4 hour session. We went over the basics of Titanium Mobile and talked about the benefits of Titanium even for grizzled iPhone development veterans. My favorite story of the event is...

Sep 28th

“I don’t consider languages without anonymous lambdas to be powerful enough for...”

– Yehuda Katz, Software Development Badass

Aug 24th

“But with blast shield down, I can’t even see! How am I supposed to fight?”

– A fencing participant at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, upon having their helmet knocked over their face.

Aug 23rd

3 tags

_why must I cry?

Feel free to play the video below for dramatic effect while reading this post. So if you’re in any way connected to the Ruby development community, you’ve heard about the sudden departure of the enigmatic and eccentric _why from the whole of the internet, deleting his web sites, code repositories, and other works overnight. Especially among my esteemed colleagues in the local Ruby...

Aug 23rd

3 tags

jQuery, XML Parsing, and XML Namespaces

I recently ran into a fun problem as I was using jQuery to parse an XML document that contained namespaced nodes. I first tried something along these lines: $(xmlDoc).find("namespace:tag").text();. FAIL. This shouldn’t work since : is a special character in jQuery selectors. So as per the instructions in the Selectors documentation, I escaped the colon in the tag...

Aug 17th

9 notes

3 tags

Competing Against Free (Health Care Edition)

Incendiary comments and misinformation have been flying from the left, right, and center as the congress and President Obama try to extend health insurance to those 46 million Americans who lack health care coverage, as well as improve the quality and efficiency of the health care system. Notwithstanding the ludicrous claims by some that Obama and the Democrats intend to institute a forced...

Aug 15th

3 tags

A Mac is more expensive than a PC?

UPDATE: I should say that while the content of this post hardly breaks new territory, this is my on the record response to some friends of mine who routinely mock my Apple fanboy status and ask why I overpay for hardware. Over the last few months, Microsoft has been airing ads touting the value of PCs as compared to ‘expensive’ Macs. I applaud the effort from a marketing...

Aug 10th

1 note

Breaking UI conventions comes with a price →

As sort of a follow on to my last post, this article takes a look at over-design as a mistake made by many iPhone applications: Why make things look, feel and work complicated and why do designers like to re-invent the wheel? The answer is simple: they want the application to be different; look different and stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, a different look isn’t necessarily helpful...

Aug 7th

Jul 29th

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks...”

– Thomas Edison

Jun 24th

Titanium Tip: Faster Dev Cycle in Android

For those of you developing Android applications with Titanium Mobile, I recently learned that there is a much faster way to deploy changes to your app to the simulator without restarting the simulator. In the Titanium Developer, simply click the “Launch App” button again to redeploy your application to the simulator. It takes ~5-10 seconds on my MacBook Pro, but that’s way...

Jun 24th

Titanium Tip - Embed Fonts →

Titanium tip of the day - don’t forget to embed fonts for a unique visual style in your app.

Jun 22nd

Adaptive Web Sites →

An interesting read on using information from how a user interacts with a website.

Jun 15th

Twitter Insanity

Obie Fernandez recently posted this link to a story about how Twitter may or may not ruin the application for “power users”, and that Twitter staff people use the app to follow a more selective group of people. As I read through the article, I found myself wondering what the problem was. Twitter employees are only following (gasp!) between 500 and 1000 people! Heresy! I enjoy...

Jun 7th

I had no idea you could do this either... →

(Multi-line strings in JavaScript via snook.ca)

May 5th

Joe Mauer’s 2009 theme song, really funny if...

Apr 3rd

Debugging Titanium Applications

Titanium PR3 was just released, so to help showcase the desktop goodness I am porting Yahoo!’s Sideline desktop application (currently implemented for Adobe AIR) to Titanium. During that process I have learned a few things about debugging in Titanium, so I thought I would share those now. Titanium is built using Webkit, which contains the very useful Web Inspector for debugging your...

Apr 1st

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Getting Started with the Entourage Service Broker for Java and the Eclipse IDE (with Java EE extensions). View Full Size…

Mar 25th

Mar 24th