jason grey

One of the products I’ve been working on for a number of years now is getting some visibility in a very cool way - the owner of the company is going to be exhibiting the product at the MIT EmTech conference in September this year.

The product is called Evenhere - its a platform for enabling product placement along a video time-line. The results can be presented on the web, on a set top box, or in any number of other interesting ways.  See the website for more information.

I’ve recently finished the functionality of my first native iPhone application. Here are some thoughts:

• Apple makes it easy to “do the right thing” as far as the UIKit libraries go, pretty nice, and cleaner & easier than Swing or .NET in many ways. Very humanistic.
• Unless I’m missing something, common tasks like field validation don’t seem to be built-in, that’s a hassle…
• No SOAP libraries yet either.
• Interface Builder isn’t quite there yet - many components still missing, so unless you’re doing a pretty simple UI, better code it by hand (which isn’t really that bad…)
• I’m not a huge fan of XCode - the code completion is very weak compared to eclipse, as is the display of errors/warnings - many more clicks/research needed to diagnose what’s going on.
• Managing your own memory sucks…
• Since I’m coding the UI by hand, lining things up pixel perfect is quite a hassle. I’d be nice if they had the concept of a layout manager, like Swing/AWT, laying out components in a grid is not intuative (many examples I’ve seen use UITableView and a whole mess of ugly switch statements - very inconvenient & hard to maintain.)

Read on for more about the app…

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I’ll be presenting development best practices in the Flex/Flash/AIR tomorrow at mn.swf camp. Check back on this post for a copy of the presentation after I’m done.

Here is my presentation.

So, I got interested in developing an application for the iPhone, but I don’t have a decent Mac to develop on. I found that the iPhone development is based on a subset of the Mac Cocoa framework. OSX came from NeXTStep. Cocoa is mostly NeXTStep libraries… hummm… how can I learn Objective-C/Cocoa on a PC… let me think… Read the rest of this entry »

This is an embeddable from a site I did the technical architecture work for that launched recently for KMBC Kansas City, and will be rolled out to many other TV station sites soon. Give it a click to view the entire experience.

1. Cool that it can work with plain JS and XML
2. Fast rendering engine
3. Cross platform/browser
4. MediaElement events not great - may be due to the beta version.

I’m currently working on a very simple video player in SilverLight that will be controlled via JavaScript.

One of the most important concepts you can learn is Object Oriented programming. Once OOP is mastered, learning any object style language becomes much simpler. Common OOP languages used on the web: Java, C#, as well as scripting languages such as JavaScript, and ActionScript.

Check out this wikipedia article for a general overview of OOP and many links out to OOP theory, and even a few links about what’s BAD about OOP.

Google’s got another great beta out there - Google Base. It’s a place for you to post your own content. They take it a step further by allowing you to define (or use predefined) content types. Each content type has a set of attributes. Then, custom search interfaces are provided against the content types, for example, see recipes. Doesn’t seem like there’s an API out there yet, so I think this is of limited use for now.