Mobile Web App in Practice

My Manning book has shifted tracks slightly. It was originally going to be a cookbook. It’s now part of Manning’s In Practice series so the title has changed to reflect that. With that slight adjustment out of the way we’re heading into serious production mode. For what it’s worth, my contribution is about 1/2 done at this point. The other authors are a little bit behind me, but they’ll start to crank soon. I’ll be sure to update once I have some solid dates.

Project Z

I won’t call it Project X since I worked on one of those already and I don’t want to confuse anyone that previously heard me talk about that behemoth. I signed a contract for another book project a few weeks ago. That’s in the planning stage right now. So much so I’m not even sure of the final title just yet. What’s interesting is that it’s a revised edition of a popular title by another author, so once we get the title sorted out and I can talk about it it’s going to be exciting.

I think it’s going to be a great project.

Sapient

Six months in, Sapient is going well. I’m enjoying myself personally and in terms of the big picture things are really starting to fall into place. I’ve got two excellent JavaScript engineers starting on my team in Bangalore this month. We’re really trying to build out a great team in India so it feels good to have found two strong guys to anchor our efforts over there.

What I’m trying to do now is build out the team here in North America. The focus is here in Boston, but I don’t think I’d turn our nose up at someone in New York or Toronto, for example. In Boston I’m looking for both senior and mid level people who are interested in building nutty JavaScript applications using bleeding edge technology. For example, my current project has me hacking away at both Raphael and D3. Fun times. If you’re an experienced front end engineer who’s tired of working on marketing sites and want to expand your horizons with some real application work, lemme know. I’d love to hear from you.

Also, I’m not a bad guy to work for (unless everyone is lying to me.)

CanvasJS

Call this a soft-alpha. I’ve been working (along with Bob Holt and Marc Neuwirth) on a little Canvas helper library called CanvasJS.

There are currently two areas of focus:

• Chaining any method that doesn’t return an explicit value is chainable.
• API Enhancements These range from new concepts (getting the boundingBox of the last operation, getting the currentPos (x and y) of the ‘cursor’,) missing methods (circle, rectangle) to convenience methods (canvas properties are now getter/setter methods.)

Additionally, I’m thinking it would be cool to offer polyfills for certain features that might have been missed in implementation or might be new to the specification.

Marc and I have both used it on projects at this point so I feel like it’s probably okay to talk about at this point. I’m going to buckle down and finish up the loose ends for a decent release. That’s basically documentation and a few API loose ends.

Here’s what the code looks like:

var ctx = new Canvas( "ctx" );
ctx.reset();
for ( var i = 0; i<1000; i++ ){
  var color = 'rgb(0,' + Math.floor(255 - i/7) + ',' +  Math.floor(255 - i/100) + ')';
  ctx.beginPath()
     .line({
        x:.4*i,
        y:.4*i,
        angle: i,
        distance:i * .40
      })
     .strokeStyle(color)
     .stroke();
}

And here it is in action.

I think it’s kind of cool.

H5BP Ant Build Script

Finally, we’ve been busy as hell on the Ant Build Script. In just the past couple of weeks we’ve simplified the way we handle concatenation (thanks dholth!) and added Less CSS (thanks Chris Rowe!) support. I’ve been really happy with the project since it’s split from the main HTML5 Boilerplate repo. We’ve got over 400 watchers and over 60 forks, which isn’t too shabby- we’re working our way up the “shell” rankings on github (we’re coming for you wemux). Which isn’t to say we don’t have a lot to do. We do. It’s just fun to watch the progress and feel like the project still has some good traction, even on its own.

The Sapient team that put on the event was phenomenal.

Here are a couple of photos.

And here’s proof I was in India.

What’s even more exciting is that we’re finally set with co-authors to do the technical chapters. I wanted to take a minute to introduce them, since they’re going to be the real stars of the show, providing the hands-on expertise the book is going to deliver. Me? I’m just a table-setter.

Anyway, here they are, the rest of the team (in order of appearance in the book):

Mike Morley

Mike is going to be doing chapters on the core technologies (HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript.)

MIKE MORLEY is a freelance mobile user interface developer at 9eggs.com and has spent many years building web applications for financial institutions and digital media agencies. For the past few years he has specialized in developing mobile web applications for a range of clients from UK high street retailer New Look, the car manufacturer Ford and the UK lottery. When not building mobile web apps he may be spotted on the golf course or walking along the coast near Colchester (UK), where he lives with his wife Rachel, his young son and Chocky the dog.

Rich Freedman

Rich is going to be working on the jQuery Mobile section.

RICH FREEDMAN is a consultant at Chariot Solutions, where he works with a wide variety of technologies for clients ranging from startups to members of the Fortune 500. Rich has over 20 years of application development experience. He has been blogging about software development for several years, is a DZone MVP blogger, and has reviewed several books for Manning, including JQuery in Action and Roo in Action. When he’s not programming or reading or writing about programming, he’s probably in the kitchen, whipping up a gourmet vegan meal, while thinking about programming. Rich lives in Lambertville, New Jersey, a small and architecturally wonderful 18th century city.

Lee Boonstra

Lee is going to be working on the Sencha Touch chapters.

Lee Boonstra lives together with her partner in Amsterdam the Netherlands. While doing her study (Art & Technology) in 2004 she started her own web development company to continue to grow and learn new technologies. Right now her focus is more on mobile (web) apps. Her most successful app is available at the Apple Appstore and Google Chrome webstore: Spotlib.

In the last year of her study she worked for Accenture as a senior back-end (Java) developer for clients such as UPC and KLM/Air France.
After 3 years she decided to make the move to the front-end. “I think it’s advantageous to understand back-end technologies while working on the front-end. I’m a creative person and I like to have a nice workflow and see my changes directly on the screen.” In 2009 she started working as a front-end team lead for eFocus, one of the top 3 fullservice internet agencies in The Netherlands. “I’m working with a lot of (front-end) technologies & frameworks, and that is why I love my work so much: jQuery (Mobile), Mootools, Dojo, CSS3, HTML5, XML, SQL and recently Sencha Touch”. As a team lead she works on both mobile and web for middle to large scale clients, such as Deloitte, Heineken and Philips.

Beside technologies, Lee’s other passions are alternative music, attending concerts and festivals and (what she is famous in Amsterdam for) being a drag king performer and model. And let’s not get started about how extensive her videogame (console) collection is…

I’m late with this post. I’ve been busy! Finishing this post has been tougher than I imagined it would be.

Starting a new job is tough enough, adding in two visits to New York, one to Toronto and getting ready for HTML5 Live have made it even tougher. I think I’m through the toughest part of the transition now, so here I am, writing like a madman.

Anyway, I promised to talk a little bit about my new job. I won’t go into exhaustive detail, but I know some of you are interested, so I might as well get it out of the way now, before it doesn’t feel like a “new” job any more.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve moved over to Sapient Global Markets. My title is Senior Specialist, Platform.

As for what I’m doing, my job splits into three basic components- thought leadership, building a world class front end engineering team and bringing cutting edge solutions to clients.

• Thought leadership. I’m not a huge fan of the phrase, but “writing and talking about emerging technology” doesn’t fit as well in a job description. I’ve already been doing this as much as possible. The difference with my new role is that it’s written into my job description and mandated from up on high. So, now I’ve got scheduled time for the kind of activities (writing, speaking, open source work) that I previously had to fit in around client engagements (which rarely happened) or after hours in my “free” time. Hopefully you guys will get some benefit out of me being able to write a little bit more.
• Building a team. I’ve been instrumental in hiring and have worked developing junior staff for a few years now, so I’m pretty comfortable with this aspect of the job. The two key differences here are that I’m basically starting from scratch at my new role and I’ll be looking to build a truly global team. I’m not 100% sure what the eventually distribution will be, but I’ll be filling out slots between Boston, India and potentially a couple of other spots around the world. Making sure a team with that sort of geographical spread feel like a “team” will present a new wrinkle.

  Another clear challenge is cultivating front end engineering talent in India. Traditionally, people doing front end work there are junior and are doing so as a steppingstone on their way to writing “real” code- C# or Java. The combination of looking ahead to getting to do “real” work and the limited experience these guys possess have conspired to make it tougher than it should be to staff front end engineers in India. Hopefully I can help to change that by getting young Indian engineers excited about the web as a platform and open standards in general.

  By the way, one of those roles is already open. We’re looking for a Senior Interactive Developer in Boston. Come work with me. It’ll be fun. Shoot me an email, if you’re interested.

• Client Work. The interesting challenge at this job is that I’ll be working with clients who are much more conservative than some of the organizations I’ve worked with previously. Educating some of the financial services giants on the power of the open web platform and delivering work that leverages those technologies in novel, but concrete ways will be an ongoing challenge. The good news is many of the cooler open web technologies are tailor-made for markets based businesses, so I’ll be selling them on Canvas, SVG, WebSockets, etc. Should be fun.

And that’s it. That’s the new gig. It’ll keep me busy for a while, I think.

I have no video. Video exists and I will share it as soon as I see it. I think it went pretty well, other than the fact that I surprised myself with the ending. I had adjusted some slides and forget where the last one was… all of a sudden it was over. Oops.

Still it went pretty well and I’m definitely going to do the same presentation at other venues. It’s a pretty good topic, I think, and I could tweak it to be super technical or more high level depending on the audience.

Thanks to the HTML5 Live folks for having me down to speak. It was a good time.