August 2010

Smalltalk in Byte Magazine, August 1981

Smalltalk has been immensely influential over the years, in some respects never more so than today (see Objective-C and Ruby). It was unveiled in the August 1981 edition of Byte. Most of that issue's editorial pages were dedicated to articles on the language, its implementation, the integrated programming environment it provided and some discussion of practical applications.

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July 2010

Callable

A couple of projects required that I get fairly serious about working with Javascript. And like so many I found a nice little language muddied by the vagaries of DOM implementations and some unfortunate syntax edge cases. The flexibility of having functions as a first class entity was something I'd been aware of in the abstract, but working in Javascript really drove it home. About the same time I had to do real work with Objective-C and Cocoa, both on Mac and iPhone.
The compositional flexibility of Javascript and Cocoa was liberating and disconcerting. After all there's real utility in the rigidity of C++'s type system; the compiler becomes an ally in the exploration and definition of a problem's characteristics. But those Javascript and Objective-C callbacks are themselves compelling.

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June 2010

Natter

Multiplexing comms over a single bidirectional channel is a useful ability. ZStreamMUX has proven itself, but to support fully bidirectional substreams it uses a pair of threads for each MUX instance, and another thread for each pending listener. For RPC-ish situations this is overkill.

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April 2009

YadTranscode

YadTranscode is a useful little command line tool. There's a bunch of data formats out there that might look different at first glance but on reflection can be seen to be isomorphic.

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March 2009

ZooLib BBDaemon

The ZooLib BBDaemon lets multiple Mac applications talk to USB-connected BlackBerrys concurrently. Obviously this is something that Research in Motion could make possible, but as they haven't we're posting a pre-built installer that takes the pain out of getting things working.

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February 2009

The Missing Sync for BlackBerry

Mark/Space has released The Missing Sync for BlackBerry 2.0. This latest version provides a rich suite of synchronization options, made possible by a device-side Java application developed by Electric Magic. The Mac application uses our ZBlackBerry Mac/Black SDK for its USB communications.

December 2008

Zorap, Web-Based Video Chat

Zorap web pages are multi-party multimedia environments. Video from your webcam and audio from your microphone, photos, music and video from your own computer are shared to tens of your friends via a Zorap Server. Web content, including YouTube and other video sites are similarly shared, all in an exciting and customizable drag-and-drop interface.

Electric Magic implemented the Mac-specific portions of the Zorap web plugin, supporting Safari, Firefox and other modern web browsers.

September 2008

SiteGrinder Photoshop Plugin

If you’re a Photoshop virtuoso, MediaLab’s SiteGrinder carries those skills over to the creation of exciting web pages. The SiteGrinder Photoshop plugin takes your document’s layers and attributes, crunches through them and generates HTML, CSS and optimized web graphics ready for the public.

SiteGrinder’s UI is beautifully implemented in Flash, and Electric Magic helped MediaLab get that UI working in older and newer versions of PhotoShop.

July 2008

OS X Accessibility from Java

Our client’s application is a scriptable form-filling engine, used by their customers to automate computer-based form submission. Their engine is written in Java, and uses the Abbot GUI testing framework to drive third-party UIs. For Mac OS X support we implemented a JNI shim that made the AX API usable from Java.

March 2008

Mac/BlackBerry SDK

The BlackBerry is a very popular mobile communications device. Official Mac support from Research in Motion is limited to providing the PocketMac utility as a free download. With no official SDK the Mac/BlackBerry ecosystem has seen very little activity.

ZBlackBerry is a suite of code that implements the BlackBerry USB communications protocol in a generic fashion. A few hundred lines of code let Macs use that protocol. A few hundred more allow multiple Mac applications to talk to a single BlackBerry simultaneously, something that has not been possible till now.

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