QuirkeyBlogEst. 2005

ATOM

Though at its base ATOM is just another spec for publishing syndicated data on the internet ATOM as a means of building RESTful API’s is much more. I’ve tried to ignore the evangelism of ATOM by Tim Bray and Niall Kennedy and stick to good ol’ RSS2 for all my feeds, but I think its about time I spend some quality face-to-face with the ATOM Publishing Protocol and figure out ways I can integrate it in to the applications I’m working on.

In general I really love the idea of RESTful web services, particularly ones were the data sent in an out is standardized and relatively easy to parse and render.

Io

I heard about Io a while back when Sam Stephenson (creator of prototype.js and 37signals dev) mentioned it in an article in Treehouse Magazine. I poked around and was pretty enthralled by the small but very active community. Io is a very straightforward language similar to Ruby/Smalltalk but very different in its syntax and implementation.

I’ve been following the mailing list for some time but haven’t had the chance to really sink my teeth in and write something.

Objective C/Ruby-Cocoa

I love OS X. Since I switched a number of years ago, I would never even dream of going back and have become quite a mac zealot, getting most of my family and a lot of friends to jump on the Mac Wagon. OS X is probably my main reason for loving my Mac. Its simplicity, ease of use, and seamlessness and beauty make it a pleasure to work in. Before I was ever writing web apps – I always wanted to develop for the desktop. Now that my coding skills have gotten much farther, I think its about time I did just that, and the tools and environment that Apple provides seem to make this pretty straightforward. I already bought a book on Objective-C and Cocoa programming I’m looking for some good time to block away to get started.

Ruby-Cocoa makes this dream even more awesome. The fact that I could code in a syntax that I’m already very comfortable with should make this a pretty painless process.

Processing

Computer generated/assisted art is something I’ve been fooling around with since I printed out a ASCII rendition of a Alfred E. Newman on my KayPro II. The idea of Processing, a natural language and compiler for creating animated displays really gets me excited. I got even more excited when I watched some of the demos.

Epilogue

The main problem with all of this learning is I learn best by doing. With these tools and languages it may be a chicken and egg type deal. I really want to learn these but I don’t have a specific project that needs to be executed. Though, Im sure if I was comfortable in developing with each – Id come up with 1000 ideas of things I could do. Anyone have any ideas? Something to get me started?

Posted November 30th, 2006 in Development, Geekery
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