Atlanta Startup Weekend ended up being pretty cool. I met a lot of smart people and will hopefully see many of them again at the next professional gathering (whatever that might be). After three days with practically no sleep (preceeded a solid week of work), I was practically useless this past Monday. I managed to get through the day and even fix some bugs — it worked out. The cool thing is that one of my tasks for this week involves adding .Net language support for the Appcelerator framework. What’s that mean? You’ll be writing Appcelerator apps backed by a C#/C++/VB.net backend in the not too distant future.
Why would anyone care? Well, I suppose you _could_ go the ASP.net route, but Appcelerator makes for a spiffy front end and it’s reliable to boot. It’s open source, easy learning curve, and is muy badass (as far as web frameworks go). The Skribit widget was written in it (although it’s not finished — it’s missing status messages and such).
All of this means that you might be seeing me write more freeware soon — maybe some webapps, just for fun. We’ll see how it goes.
So I’m losing my mind trying to wrap Jack Slocum’s table for use in Seamless and things are going alright — I even manage to get it to render in Internet Exploder. Unfortunately, his rendering stuff (or maybe Yahoo!’s?) uses the table’s container sizes to help lay things out (quite logically, actually). The problem with crops up when one tries to render a table when the parent container is initially hidden, i.e. it has a size of zero by zero pixels — not conducive to rendering, of course. After two weeks of hacking away at this, getting things working little by little and then running into a lack of dynamic resizability/flow control, I gave up.
Jeff and Nolan were open to just rewriting the entire widget as a lightweight custom renderer instead. The new Seamless table is really just an iterator that loops over a html template, specified inside of our seamless:iterator tag. The convenient thing about it is you can make the table look like anything you want plus it’s significantly faster than the old table (which could also do custom rendering, but only rendered in Firefox — the new one is cross browser) . It’s nifty stuff. We’ll be launching the beta of Southern Fried Tech soon and you guys can check it out (it’s used extensively through out the site).
First of all, I’m not one who hates Microsoft — in fact, I rather like them most of the time. Why is it so simple for every other browser out there to just WORK when it comes to JavaScript and CSS, yet IE (even the famed v7) can’t even render simple things properly? I’m VERY annoyed. I’m starting to think that part of their backend is nondeterministic as I had this simple thing rendering and a refresh (with NO code changes) resulted in the same issue again. I’m going to lose it — this is simple, WHY DOESN’T IT WORK? MS should just drop IE all together and start over from scratch, keeping standards in mind.
So I started work at Hakano today and it was pretty laid back. Exactly what I expected from Jeff and Nolan — a nice work environment without a lot of pressure (not that Appforge had any pressure either). The only thing is I’ll really need to buy a laptop (about 2 grand unless I get one of those handy 25% off Dell notebook coupons) to make things work well as I don’t feel comfortable putting my personal stuff on someone else’s machine. The other thing is I’m not quite ready to make the “switch” to the white devil of computing yet. We’ll see how it goes.
I think I’ll actually get my hands on some code tomorrow, which is cool. I’ve been itching to do something useful for a few days now, since the big “belly-up. “
Starting my new job Thursday — should be fun stuff
How I Roll