Monthly Archives: February 2008

Playing with Dashcode

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I’ve been playing with Dashcode today, creating my first ever Dashboard widget (something that I wanted to do for some time) as part of a whole project I’m working on right now.

Basically I’ve discovered that there are, roughly speaking (and please correct me if I’m wrong), two kinds of Dashboard widgets:

  1. Those that you cannot resize, but have nice shadows, “glass” effects and gradients;
  2. and those that you can resize, but do not have shadows, “glass” effects and gradients.

There is no way to get resizable and shadowy widgets at once. At least, not that I’ve found. It seems like Dashcode generates at design time the background images (as a PNG file) for the widgets you’re working on (I suppose that this is done using Quartz), and this cannot be done at runtime (I suppose, again, because of performance considerations…!).

Of course I discovered this while creating a widget that would have had to look good and be resizable. Of course I couldn’t get both :) Another thing that makes me wonder about this dichotomy is this phrase in Apple’s own documentation:

Live resizing means that your widget can change its size and contents based on the user’s preference. Try to limit using live-resizing to cases where it is absolutely necessary. If your content can be shown in a fixed, simple user interface, do so.

All in all, my first impression of Dashcode is that it is a fine IDE, somewhat buggy, but fine for what it does. I still prefer TextMate for editing the JavaScript code inside the widgets, but that’s a personal preference. The workflow for creating widgets is easy to follow, the object model is easy to understand, and I could have a reasonably useful widget in just a couple of hours of work.

Archimedes Reloaded

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Give me an API and I’ll move the web.

OK, I’m actually building the API myself this time. That’s why so few posts this month. RESTful, featuring multiple export formats, secure, configurable, usable on top of any existing Django application. It can even generate its own wrappers in a myriad of programming languages.

Programmers are draftsmen

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Interaction08: IxD’s in Savannah; Alan Cooper:

Programmers are draftsmen. However, they are different than pre-industrial workers. They are self-directed and know better than managers what to do. They respect intelligence, not authority. You can’t tell them what to do, you can only coerce them. Their satisfaction comes from the quality of their work. Unlike pre-industrial craftsmen, post-industrial craftsmen are smarter and more highly trained, even in the higher levels of management where they work. This creates a conflict because management is industrial. It’s based on command-and-control. It’s tracked quantitatively through cost accounting, based on the idea that you purchase raw materials and you purchase labor that transforms those materials into offerings, and you scale up with factories, and that’s how you profit. That simply doesn’t exist in the world of software.