I'm not a big fan of Eclipse from a UI perspective, but I do acknowledge that it's pervasive in the industry and some big projects are using it extensively. Plus it's better than 'vi' and the command-line. I guess 😉 Anyway, I'm sure I'll get used to it. Here's a really simple tip on using Eclipse with Android : Read the rest of this entry ...
So having gone through my 1000+ unread feed items, emails, blog comments and sundries, here's what I think I missed while on our pilgrimage to worship a mouse in the south. Feel free to clue me in further in the comments below. Oh, and the vacation was fantastic, fwiw, though I did miss internet access that wasn't filtered through the foggy and tiny lens of WML. I gots to get me one of them new-fangled phones that can browse the real web real soon now. Read the rest of this entry ...
Alp Toker, one of those graphics heavy hitters, has woken up to give us a nice summary about the 'skia' graphics library which Google uses for the Chrome browser. I like that it has animation and SVG awareness 'out of the box', but it probably won't be a major player until it's fully ported to all the major desktop platforms and has matured a little.
Google is going to release a new open-source web browser tomorrow (Sept 2nd, 2008) called Google Chrome. Lots of information contained in forty pages of this comic book. The rendering engine is WebKit, but it has its own JavaScript engine (V8) that compiles the JS into bytemachine code and uses more efficient garbage collection. It also follows the thoughts of the Internet Explorer team of putting the tab at the root of the UI and letting each tab be its own process (not just thread). Oh, it comes with Google Gears pre-installed too.
This all sounds good: security, stability, anti-phishing, sandboxing, 'superfast' JS. Of course there's only one true test though.
At first I was wondering if this was a fork of WebKit, but I think the only thing that would make sense would be for Google to work in parallel with WebKit (continually updating Chrome's rendering engine with new versions of WebKit). Everything else would be part of the Chrome open source project. If you're in the know, drop a line below.
Ok, I'm happy. A completely open source browser that supports SVG and is (sort of) co-sponsored by two big companies with lots of cash (Google and Apple).
I had the idea within the SVG IG to use Google Doctype to build up SVG reference documentation (better than what is currently at wiki.svg.org), since DocType is supposed to be all about the "open web stack". Since the articles are copyright Google but licensed under the Creative Commons license, I figure this can't hurt if Google turns all evil on us one day.
However, any time I've experimented with Doctype has shown that the project isn't quite ready yet for primetime. I base this on the fact that every time I try to submit a change, I get a long delay and then a 502 error. Mark has assured me they are working on both short term and long term solutions to this problem. He also offered to give me offline commit access to add SVG articles (and even tests) en masse to Doctype. That was a couple weeks ago, maybe now that holidays are over this can become reality? 🙂