Podcast #003: Do I look more like Hannnibal or Murdock?

Recorded on December 3, 2009, this episode features Chris Lloyd, Gerard Gualberto, Chris Miles, Lou Franco, and myself, talking mostly about user interface technologies and tools.  Lots of tangents, of course, so everyone else is sure to be either very confused or amused upon listening.

Hey, leave a comment or question below, and maybe we’ll read/answer it “on the air”!

• User interface chatter:
  • Chas talks a bit on background about the NetBeans Platform-based application he’s recently completed
  • The perils of using native-looking Swing look & feels, and the trap of having to make one’s application “look native”
  • Is Swing still slow?
  • Is Silverlight a potential deployment mechanism if you have a jvm-centric codebase, given the cross-compilation that ikvm makes available?
  • Javascript + canvas is pretty impressive these days.  The particle system demo referenced in the discussion is here.
  • We chatted about Cappuccino for a while, a javascript-based web framework that provides Cocoa-inspired UI components.  The examples look pretty slick, and there’s some in-production apps (280slides, Mockingbird) that really highlight what can be done.
  • Web development tooling sorta sucks, especially for non-techies (who are often the ones producing web content these days).
  • You’re probably using “thick-client” apps right now on OS X that are actually just wrappers around embedded web containers (webkit, really), and building such apps look to be a lot more pleasant than any other heavyweight UI framework that you might use to build “native” apps.
• Dave Winer says twitter clients should be scriptable.  I don’t think any of us care enough to agree or disagree.
• The 1% twitterati that think that twitter is so great because questions and such get answered so quickly (this is the Jeff Atwood Syndrome, perhaps), need to come back to earth.
• Charter is monitoring Twitter in-real-time to find people bitching about service.  They are watching.
• Companies, open source project maintainers, et al. better monitor Twitter and such
• Ruby on Rails vs. JRuby on Rails — the key is: which do you know how to deploy and manage better (classic rails vs. just-another-java-war)?
• Even after however-many-years, there’s still a lot of churn in how to “do Rails”, especially around deployment
• I want to use the A-Team theme song as an intro to the podcast.  That’s not legit of course (barring a proper license for “redistribution”, feh).  But just for this episode, it’s OK, because we review the song on an artistic level. 😛
• Somehow, we ended up going pretty deep into the rabbit hole of music copyright, fair use, licensing, distribution, cover bands, etc. etc. etc.
• Miles got a cease-and-desist letter connected with his downloading a torrent. Seriously, what?!?

Enjoy!