Sketchpad for Google Wave
The semester is over and my capstone project is done. Meet “Sketchpad”, a gadget for Google Wave. Sketchpad can be inserted into a Wave conversation to provide simple collaborative drawing in real time. Put simply: you can see participants drawing on the canvas stroke by stroke as they are doing it. The project is based on, and uses code from, Christopher Clay’s excellent CanvasPaint which he released to the public domain.
The project is not in a stable state but it is usable as an interesting demo in Firefox only for now. I would like to put more time into it and get it working across all browsers, not to mention plenty of other gaping issues with it.
Google Code is hosting the project at http://code.google.com/p/sketchpad-for-wave/ and the following link should take you straight to the official installer if you have a Google Wave account:
Sketchpad for Google Wave (alpha v2 installer)
In keeping with the requirements of my capstone class I am also posting the requirements and design documents for the project, as well as the presentation slides used for the various presentations given throughout the semester.
You should watch this many times both because it is cute and because I could possibly win a MacBook according to this competition. This is my house-mate’s cat, Hades. She isn’t very good at cracking open the shell, but she tries.
How We Get Crackin – Hades tries to eat a Pistacio on 12seconds.tv
I don’t understand; I really don’t. There is a big (growing) movement among the haters. Facebook is getting closer and closer to forcing everyone over to the new layout and phasing out the old one, and they’re becoming more and more frantic. There’s a couple of groups over a million members strong: Petition Against the New Facebook, 1,000,000 Against the New Facebook Layout plus plenty others of smaller sizes but the total Facebook population is over 100 million; are these significant numbers in the big picture?
I take back what I said. I can understand a little why people are so upset, but only because the changes are so radical. I’m not too proud to admit that the new interface isn’t flawless. It’s stumped me more than once while trying to find my way around, and in a couple of places it was downright broken. This hasn’t been the norm for the new Facebook layout, and compared to a lot of applications out there, it’s a shining example of navigation design. The problem with all this noise people are raising is that they could spend as much time as they are joining groups and posting in forums to just get used to the new site. Complaints about being lost in the navigation are only a part of the complaints. A lot of them are just plain ignorant. I’ll tackle this top ten list posted by the leader of the Petition Against the New Facebook group.
Continue reading ‘To the Haters of "New Facebook"’
Score! I found benchmarks of both engines on one of the dev’s blogs. Check out this sweet action, then click through at the bottom for more.
Brendan’s TraceMonkey Update
Go do a YouTube search for “swype demonstration” or “swype tc50″ to see what I’m talking about.
Please, oh please Apple, license this and put it in the next big iPhone 2.5/3.0 software update next year or whenever that’s lined up. As nice as the iPhone software keyboard already is, this is somewhere in the neighborhood of next best thing to the invention of the PC (which was also yours, Apple). Obviously this software was aimed at the iPhone from the start, not some Windows Mobile pressure based touch screen junk, so do the mobile world a favor and let destiny take its course.
We want Swype on out iPhone’s!
