Hey kids.
My new site is up - downloadable music, info about upcoming shows, photos and videos coming soon. Check it out.
And then come see me play tonight at my penultimate SF show. Penny Arcade will be at the Make-Out Room in the SF Mission District. It’s on 22nd @ Mission - a quick walk from the 24th St. BART station. New songs, awesome backing band.
We had some server problems at MyLaszlo.com so I moved the Clockblox to a more reliable server. You should update your clockblox links to point at http://www.openlaszlo.org/apps/clockblox.xml. The lead engineer on Google Modules will update the link posted on the Google Modules Homepage the next time they update the site. I’m not sure when he expects that will be.
the short story
Phew. After a month or so of hard work, we’re demoing an early alpha of Laszlo’s new DHTML backend at the etech conference in San Diego.
Check out our first example piece - a flickr-browsing photo application. I wrote the data-handling chunk of the app. Search for lzpix and look at the whole gang who put the little app together. Don’t have the Flash-player because you’re an open-source linux zealot? That’s okay. A relatively-new build of Firefox should be good enough.
Then come work at Laszlo. We can always use a few more great engineers and designers.
the long story
One of my first comments when I started working on v1.0 of Macromedia’s still-unnamed server (now called Flex) was “Hey, this is a cool idea - writing code in MXML, which is abstracted away from Flash’s ActionScript API, means that I can write code that can potentially be compiled into multiple different runtimes!” At the time I thought that Java was the only strong contender for an alternate runtime for my markup. Alternate runtimes for MXML still hasn’t happened.
One of my first questions after I left Macromedia to go work at Laszlo Systems was “Hey, what is this ‘alternate runtime’ that you mysteriously alluded to during my interviews? Java? DHTML?” It turns out we hadn’t yet developed the compiler to run applications developed in LZX (Laszlo’s XML+ECMAScript language) in multiple runtimes. I was bummed.
But now we’ve done it. You can write your code once, compile to SWF and run the results in the ubiquitous Flash player. Flip a switch (actually, append lzt=dhtml query parameter to your url or use a command-line argument to lzc), compile to DHTML and run the results in a browser natively. That’s right. LZX to AJAX, pure and simple.
Of course, we’ve still got a bit of work to do - optimization, rounding out the feature-set supported by the compiler, a bunch of stuff. But the results are pretty darn impressive. Not bad for a month’s work, eh?
I went to eat lunch with some of my old co-workers at Macr^H^H^H^HAdobe on Friday. It was nice seeing the old crowd. The (relatively) new building is pretty fancy, complete with a cafeteria area that makes good food - salads, burgers, fish and other tasty vittles.
My friend James (a.k.a. Halon) told me that he’s quitting his day-job at Adobe to spend more time working on his online music site Fake Science. I must say - I’m impressed. They have a growing collection of DRM-free music, much of which is locally-grown (SF Bay Area!). You can tell from the categorization that Halon, Cedub, Xtopher and Lunchmeat are into electronic and ambient music. Check ‘em out!
Folks at the US Department of Justice are interested in seeing what us li’l citizens are interested in searching for. They asked Google to provide ‘em with a month of query data and Google refused. Note that this isn’t about National Security or protecting America from terrorism. It’s “assist[ing] the Government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering in screening that material.” So they’re just interested in finding out how often folks encounter porn (and possibly other things in the future?) on the web.
It’s not that hard to search for adult content on the web. Lawyers are often smart people and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out how to use a search engine and see for themselves how often adult material shows up. But the government should have no special powers to get private information gathered by search engines if the search companies don’t want to make this information public.
As a public service I started making a little web application where people can post common search-engine queries and providing the DOJ with a URL that they can use to ‘harvest’ this information. I’ll post it soon. Then you can provide search strings that characterize searches that you make on Google. And Google can keep protecting the privacy rights of her users.
You know, I’m just doing my part to keep the web safe for everybody.
23jan2005 - JUST POSTED! - little Laszlo app that you can add to the list that I’m making available for interested parties at this XML feed.
The show went really well - 25 minutes of white-hot rock, a club full of friends and fans (well, friends mostly) and good feeling all around.
Jenelle’s cousin’s husband (cousin-in-law?) was nice enough to capture the first half of the set on DV and I spun it into a little concert video. Check it out, consumers of QuickTime video. Tell me if you need me to upload an MPEG-4 or other format vid.
I spent a little time with the new Google Homepage API yesterday and looked into inserting apps written with Laszlo into Google’s Portal. I played with one of the simplest BlogBox the community has developed, ClockBlox.
I followed the API specs and quickly had a ClockBlox in my Google Homepage after creating little XML file to describe the module. Because the ClockBlox is so simple there’s no need for user options.
I welcome people to use my XML file as a template to create their own Google Homepage blogboxes. Coming soon… submission of SoundBlox, PhotoBlox and LinkBlox to Google. Then you’ll be able to listen to music, look at pictures of your kids and keep tabs on the latest RSS madness all from the comfort of a single homepage!
Enough sitting at home every night with my headphones on making sounds that only I will ever hear. 
I’m the first band playing at the Bottom of the Hill on 15 December in SF so show up early. I think I go on around 8:30pm and will only play for 20 or 25 minutes, so get there early.
It’ll be all new stuff. Sorry folks that are itching for the oldies like ooh i love you girl. I even set up a myspace account for the throngs of future fans. I must say, I’m not super impressed with myspace (or Friendster or any of the other ’social networking’ sites that I’ve played with for that matter) when it comes to GUI. Drop me a line - lzsocial AT caveteen.com (replace the AT with an @) - if you’re interested in talking about creating a social networking app using Laszlo. I should have more time to think about new personal projects after the show is over.
I’m a little late at bringing attention to it, but folks at the company that I work launched Laszlo Mail, a demo version of Laszlo’s kick-ass web-mail client. Check it out. It’s quite an accomplishment and I’m difficult to really impress when it comes to stuff like this.
Sure it’s not as full-featured as your desktop email client yet, so do your part and submit a bug report with features you think are missing.
Stay tuned for more “Digital Life” stuff from Laszlo. Oh, and drop me a line- replace the AT with @ in the email address - if you’re a Designer or Software Engineer looking to work on cool stuff like this. We’re always looking for good folks.
The tricky part of creating a class that displays a scaled reversed character is figuring out what to stretch & what to flip. Ultimately, the best solution was to add a single view wrapping the (resizing) text with a stretchy view that is flipped and positioned to take the flippage into account.
<class name="revletterblock" font="black">
width="100%" height="100%"
options="releasetolayout"
bgcolor="${blockcolor}"
>
<attribute name="letter" type="string"></attribute>
<attribute name="blockcolor" value="$once{canvas.colorhash['orange']}" type="color" />
<attribute name="color" value="white" type="color"></attribute>
<attribute name="borderwidth" value="2"></attribute>
<view width="${-parent.width}" x="${parent.width}">
height="100%"
stretches="both">
<text name="char" text="${classroot.letter}" resize="true">
fgcolor="${classroot.color}" />
</text>
</view>
</class>
Using Laszlo’s default resizelayout to lay the block characters out, the full cover reproduction looks like this -
<!--
resize laid-out view
stretches to fill parent unless told otherwise by layout
-->
<class name="lview" height="100%" width="100%">
<attribute name="axis" value="y" type="string"></attribute>
<resizelayout spacing="2" axis="$once{classroot.axis}">
</resizelayout>
<lview name="t" axis="x" width="100%" height="100%">
<lview width="40%" axis="y">
<revletterblock letter="Y" options="releasetolayout">
<lview height="60%">
<lview axis="x" height="60%">
<revletterblock letter="O">
<revletterblock letter="P">
</revletterblock>
<lview axis="x" height="25%">
<revletterblock letter="A">
<revletterblock letter="R">
<revletterblock letter="G">
</revletterblock>
<lview axis="x" options="releasetolayout">
<revletterblock letter="E" id="e">
<revletterblock letter="I">
<revletterblock letter="H">
<revletterblock letter="P">
</revletterblock>
</revletterblock>
</revletterblock>
<revletterblock letter="T" options="releasetolayout">
</revletterblock>
</revletterblock></lview></revletterblock></revletterblock></lview></revletterblock></lview></lview></revletterblock></lview></lview>
next…. physics? layouts? more type experiments? code-generating projects?