The PhoneGap demo is really starting to grow beyond the capacity of a single screen since tons of new features are being added all the time.  It’s even showing a few examples of the tab and navigation bar features, but they didn’t really do anything beyond just throwing out alerts and log statements.  I decided to change that to show just what’s possible with a PhoneGap app.

I really don’t like making tweaks to my blog itself, since I’d much rather be writing my blog posts themselves, or the software I talk about in my blog.  So any time I spend working on just the blog software’s configuration feels like wasted time.  But frankly, while I liked the simplicity of Blogger for all my previous entries, it was just getting on my nerves.

I didn’t like the editor interface, I didn’t like how difficult it was to tweak the HTML and theme settings, and frankly it was just too difficult to update.  And since I run my own server and manage my own websites on it, I figured to hell with it.  I’ve started migrating to WordPress (it saddens me that I’m not using Perl for my blog, but alas, I have no time to tweak anything).

My interactions with marketing has been very spotty throughout my career. I know and accept that marketing plays a huge role in business, both online and offline, but I just can’t seem to wrap my head around it. I’m one of the types of people that create. Those that sell, and those in the middle that help both types around them either create or sell, are very useful. I just can’t figure out what the hell it is that they do.

A while back David Roe had sent me a patch for an implementation of the ActionSheet control for PhoneGap. He was using it in an application of his, and probably due to my plea for patches from the PhoneGap community at large, he submitted this little tid-bit to me. Since I’ve been making some pretty big strides toward implementing a unified callback and event dispatch mechanism within PhoneGap, I refactored a bit of it, and created a generic Dialog class for PhoneGap.

Last night, and on my commute in to work this morning, I made some updates to my UIControls branch on Github, largely around adding callback and event support to the Alert notification code.

I’ve been working on providing more feedback into JavaScript from the commands run inside of Objective-C.  So far PhoneGap has been largely one-way, you push actions into PhoneGap and maybe you get some sort of response out in some general sort of way, but most of it has involved polling mechanisms.  Well the DOM and JavaScript in general has a native facility for dispatching ad-hoc events.  And it’s super easy to call from Objective-C, if only a little bit verbose:

My wife and I had to go up to the interior of BC to clean out an old storage unit of the junk I don’t need anymore, and close it up for good.  Luckily for us this went faster than we’d expected.  Instead of 1-2 days of cleaning and carting stuff off to the thrift store, it was 2 hours of sorting through what I wanted, and left the rest to be picked up by the thrift store on Monday.

It’s too bad I can’t use it at work, but HTTP::Engine rocks my world. It does “The Right Thing ™” for negotiating HTTP requests and their content in a wonderfully transport-agnostic way. That means that if you’re running in mod_perl, FastCGI, plain ‘ol CGI, or even running as a stand-alone development-mode daemon, it will just work.

At my work, we’re building new user interface components to our email security appliance product, and for the first time we’re building a web interface that will be used by a potentially high number of public users. Up until now, all of our target users were internal to our customers, meaning system administrators and a small number of workgroup users. Now however, their customers and the recipients of potentially a high number of emails will be able to interact with our appliance. This means we have to scale a lot higher than we have needed to in the past, all with limited hardware and memory.

I’m a big fan of all things Apple, and as you can tell from my past blog posts I’m a big fan of iPhone development. I’ve even dusted off my aging C skills, and have learned to love Objective-C. The one thing I haven’t learned to love, like all other iPhone app developers, is their application release process, and the seemingly arbitrary app store acceptance department.

Don’t get me wrong, I think how Apple fiercely guards the App Store to prevent bad, buggy, or offensive material from getting on there is a great thing. Some of my mother-in-law’s students in the class she works in have iPhones or iPod Touches, and these little 10-year-olds love the little apps I’ve put out. They’re fun, light-hearted, and they get a lot of enjoyment out of these and other apps. It’s reassuring to know that if I install an app, it won’t crash my phone (too badly) or that a child won’t be offended by them (too much).

It’s probably not the kind of Iron Man competition that you’re used to hearing about. This one is a challenge to blog at least once per week, every week, about Perl and Perl-related technologies.

My buddy Matt Trout, co-founder of Shadowcat Systems, creator of DBIx::Class, a core contributor to Catalyst, as well as all sorts of other great Perl goodies, is starting a blogging contest to try to get the word out that Perl is still alive and well, and perhaps try and overthrow the public perception that Perl is use old-school “use CGI;”. And he’s also a hilarious public speaker too.

I think work wrecked my brain a bit today. I have so many ideas running through my head, and just not enough time to catch up to them all. It happens to all of us from time to time, but the thing is I have so much fun with work, that it’s hard to moderate myself. I think I’m going to head home, listen to some Bob Marley, and when I meet up with my wife and her parents at the pub, I’m going to watch the hockey game, drink some beer, and enjoy my evening without technology.