programmierung - 22.10.2012 - 15.5.2013

Updated Cocoa Contrib. Wow - CCL now has completely new (and significantly expanded) capabilities for OSX GUI programming. This is growing slowly.

davazp/jscl · GitHub. Wow, impressive. A Common Lisp that runs as a REPL in the browser. What's exciting about it is how complete it is - after a (defun anton (a b) (+ a b)) I directly did a (disassemble #'anton) without any problems and it gave me the generated JavaScript code. Other constructs from the CL world also work smoothly. Definitely worth keeping an eye on, could become exciting (e.g. a JSCL on Node.js?).

Chathead Basics « Piwaï.info. If you're wondering how these Chatheads in the Facebook Messenger work, here's the explanation. There is a special permission that allows you to draw over other windows.

LiveCode Community Edition Overview | RunRev. Yep, it's out. GPL3 version of LiveCode. And yes, all target systems are included - OSX, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS. And they've streamlined it too, the DMG is significantly smaller than the one from the last release (ok, many of the missing things are things that belong to the commercial parts, but still). And it really looks nice, sure, the language is wild, but hey, it's a much better GUI Builder than anything currently delivered with Android tools.

lein-droid Wiki. I'm playing around with alternatives to raw Android Java programming again, and this could be an interesting candidate as you can play with Clojure.

twotoasters/AndrOAuth · GitHub. Check it out, Koken uses OAuth for API security and this has been quite tricky on Android so far. The linked project should make it much easier.

LiveCode Markdown converter. Don't ask. Just playing around.

Robot-Will/Stino · GitHub. Since I like to use Sublime Text 2, I should check this out - it allows you to program Arduino under ST2. However, I don't know how well it works with Digisparks, which have different programmers and compilers.

Connecting Arduino to Mathematica on Mac OS X with SerialIO using the SerialIO package under OSX. Sounds interesting for data collection and preparation from sensors.

embedXcode - Home. If you don't like the Arduino-IDE and prefer a larger IDE and work on a Mac, someone has integrated the Arduino toolchain into XCode.

Pushing the Limits of Self-Programming Artificial Intelligence | Primary Objects. Some people really have very strange hobbies.

GT.M. And since I'm at it, here's the third open source Mumps implementation. This one was once commercial and became free in 2000. So it has quite a few years under its belt and is not some hobby project by some enthusiasts, but is indeed commercially operated (e.g. for licenses on systems other than Linux and OpenVMS). If you read through the description, they've thrown the whole collection of buzzwords at the tool. Ok, for a language that simply maps its database as global variables into the programs, STM is so to speak already built-in. Even if that might be a bit of a cheat.

Mumps. Yes, yet another implementation that seems to even implement some of the archaic job controls and other obscure artifacts. Well, since NoSQL, Mumps is probably respectable again. However, you have to compile this yourself, as there are no binaries directly available for OSX.

Mumps/II MultiDimensional and Hierarchical Toolkit. Yes, I'm back to absurd programming languages and found a Mumps that is open source and runs on various systems. I don't know what I'll do with it, but it will have to be something painful.

Pudb 2012.3: CUI Debugger for Python. On servers, you don't always have the option to start heavy IDEs or even have graphical displays. The alternative - debugging with pdb in the console - is not always great either. And remote debugging doesn't always work as desired depending on firewalls and gateway computers. It's nice when someone takes the trouble to build CUIs for debuggers.

usb-serial-for-android - Android USB host serial driver library for CDC, FTDI, Arduino and other devices. - Google Project Hosting. Very nice, this will certainly be interesting when I delve deeper into the Arduinos. Maybe it even works with the DigiSpark. Building control consoles for Arduino projects with Android would certainly be quite practical.

Write Yourself a Haskell... in Lisp 17 February 2013. I always find this kind of thing exciting, even if I have to admit that I probably won't do anything with it. Still, it's interesting to read.

Controlling Arduino with Android using Processing. This way, you can quickly build a control system and a matching console for the Android phone with simple sketches, without having to pull out the big IDE. And since the Arduino environment is also based on Processing (at least the surface of the programming environment), it should be easy for both Processing and Arduino fans to understand the other side.

328eForth. Hmm, whether this will catch on is questionable. Commercial Forth systems have rarely been successful. On the other hand, the description sounds quite interesting. But somehow, I would almost rather cobble together a Forth myself.

AmForth: Atmega Forth. Wow, cool! A Forth for the ATMega chip used in Arduinos. I think I should look into this for my Digisparks to see if I can get it to work.

Sync API - Dropbox. Finally, a normal sync for Android and iOS. So far, you had to program the sync more or less yourself, but I like this much better when you can simply write local files on mobile devices and the sync then happens automatically in the background.

dashclock - Lock screen clock widget for Android 4.2+ - Google Project Hosting. I'm not a big fan of lock screen widgets, but this one is visually quite nice, expandable, and open source. This could work.

php.js - PHP VM with JavaScript. Simply move PHP execution to the browser. Hey, then the security vulnerabilities in PHP will only have local effects for the user and no longer for the server!

The Larch Environment. Another approach to visual programming, but unlike many other approaches, it is a mix of textual Python and visual representation of code and data structures. Looks quite interesting as an environment in which to experiment with elements of the language.

storm-gen - Lightweight DAO generator for Android SQLite - Google Project Hosting. Hmm, I could take a look at that, another ORM for SQLite under Android.

Back To Top: Android vs. iOS. An article about a curiosity in Android that has also irritated me several times. On iOS, you can quickly scroll to the top if you tap the title bar. On Android, there is nothing similar as a system-wide gesture. And it is not so easy to build something universal, as this article explains.

the_silver_searcher - Interesting for anyone who, like me, manages and searches through large source trees. Essentially something like ack - an automatic grep that runs through entire hierarchies and additionally filters files by various patterns, taking into account gitignore and hgignore. And all this not as a Perl script like ack, but in C with various native libraries and various optimizations for searching. It doesn't get faster than this unless you use pre-generated indexes (which come with their own problems).

Blaze — Blaze 0.1-dev documentation. Hmm, I could have sworn I already had that, but never mind. Blaze is essentially a compiler that transforms numpy-like code and passes it to runtimes for evaluation. Specifically, it also supports many parallel runtimes and parallelization of evaluations. The data types are also significantly more developed than in numpy - the authors themselves consider Blaze to be the natural evolution of numpy. What fascinates me about it is the integration of a quite extensively developed array programming library into Python - since I've been playing around with J, I find array languages fascinating.

IOIO for Android - SparkFun Electronics. Also an interesting project, a friend pointed me to it today: an IO board for Android smartphones. It simply plugs in via USB and is accessed through a simple Java library. It has various analog and digital inputs and outputs, I2C and other goodies. You can even get a Bluetooth kit for it if you don't want to communicate via radio. Pricier perhaps than what you're used to in the Arduino environment, but still, sounds cool. I'll wait for my Smartduino first, though, which also has Android support.

MariaMole | dalpix.com. If the normal Arduino IDE is too simple for you (although I would say that the simplicity is the great bonus), you can check out this project. This is a rather classic IDE with which you can build Arduino programs.

Java 3D Engine | Learn Java Programming in 3D. Looks very interesting, especially because it has a close integration into an IDE (BlueJ) with a focus on learning to program. And meanwhile, you can also directly generate Android applications from it and, for example, build your own games or toys.

imwilsonxu/fbone · GitHub. Not so uncool at all. I'm actually a Djangonaut, but Flask has always interested me a bit, as it's quite a good basis for more compact projects. With the integration of HTML5 Boilerplate and CSS Bootstrap, this could also be interesting for small web projects with frontend. Although Flask offers enough room to grow to realize larger things - it's just that for larger things I often still reach for Django. But especially for the typical web service with additional HTML presentation of the data, this can really be practical.

Cubes 0.10.1 Released – Multiple Hierarchies Data Brewery. I think I've mentioned this before, but hey, TV repeats things all the time. And it looks even better, what you can do with it. I really need to take a closer look, there's a project where I think I could use it. I need to check how to integrate it, though, because my project uses Django and its ORM, and Cubes uses SQLAlchemy. It could be interesting to mix them.

The SQLite RTree Module. And another extension for SQLite, this one a standard extension. R-Trees are tree structures optimized for range queries - that is, range queries such as "is this given rectangle contained in the list of rectangles".

The Gaia-SINS federated project home-page. Just quickly bookmarked in case I need it - spatial data (GIS data) can be efficiently indexed and queried in SQLite with an extension. Since I am a declared fan of SQLite, this is quite interesting. And it is implemented as a dynamically loadable extension (of course, this only works if the SQLite you are using is also enabled for extensions - unfortunately this is often not the case, installation might require a recompilation of SQLite, but it's not that terrible).

plan 9 was the system that took the ideas of Unix even further and, building on that, enabled a distributed system with distributed resources and seamless networking as early as the late 80s. Just think about where we would be today if it had become mainstream. Tablets that directly use network resources, that directly use complex applications on CPU servers in the network and that the developer can directly access for debugging from his workstation, without any hacks.

ActiveAndroid | Active record style SQLite persistence for Android. Hmm, let's take a look - another ORM for Android, but one with quite interesting syntax. The source also promises a few more things like e.g. Joins. If migrations are also reasonably implemented (this is often lacking), the project could definitely motivate me to switch my little tinkering project.

Official Website | FreeBASIC Programming Language. Just stumbled upon it (don't ask), a free Basic compiler that is oriented towards QuickBasic.

The ElfData Plugin. For future use, more efficient string classes and structures than the standard ones in RealBasic. And basic structures for parsers and tokenizers. Eventually, I want to build my own Markdown processor for my Desktopwiki instead of constantly calling external tools.

Cloud Storage Programming Interface - Store everything. This looks quite interesting - a C# library for accessing various cloud storage. It also supports Dropbox and, most importantly, it supports Mono for Android and MonoTouch, which I could use as a basis to rewrite my small Android project in C# for testing.

F# and MonoGame on the Mac. If you want to build games on the Mac, you have an interesting option with MonoGames. This is a reimplementation of the Microsoft XNA APIs. So basically, it's just the continuation of Mono into the gaming area. Pretty cool stuff - and because a cool thing alone isn't enough, the linked article provides the whole thing with integration in F#, the functional language for .NET from Microsoft. Unfortunately, for iOS, MonoTouch and for Android, MonoDroid are required, which means there is a slight hurdle to overcome in terms of acquisition (the licenses are not exactly cheap, so maybe not quite the knockout for hobbyists).

couchbase/Android-Couchbase. Might be interesting as an alternative to SQLite - especially if you work less with structured data and more with documents. Because CouchDB offers real advantages there. Additionally, you get a sync infrastructure for automatic replication of database changes to a central server. And without having to build text exports with Dropbox-Sync like with SQLite solutions. Although the latter works surprisingly well in the situations where I need it.

Processing on iOS. Just stumbled upon it. What it says - processing.js in a spartan but usable mini-IDE. Nice for in between. And somehow fits well with the tablet. Ending sketches is a bit awkward, you have to tap or press on a bar at the top or something, which nobody tells you. But otherwise everything is clear. There are two more that I found, one costs 89 cents and delivers an interface analogous to PDE and the other is pr0c0d1n6 - it's quite expensive at forty-five, but it has a really usable IDE.

OpenXION. For the sake of completeness: an open-source implementation of an xTalk language (the family to which HyperTalk - the language of HyperCard - belongs) in Java. You could, for example, incorporate it into your own projects as a scripting language.

uliwitness/Stacksmith. And since we're talking about HyperCard again - Stacksmith wants to build a clone for OSX. Although I wonder why they exactly follow the (pure black-and-white) original in the graphical representation.

NovoCard. Wow, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time. Unfortunately, it's not for Android yet, but for the iPad, but it could revive my old iPad for a while - a Hypercard clone for iOS that comes with a scripting language based on JavaScript in this case. Everything onboard on the iPad, making it ideal for tinkering on the go. And in general, I think the Hypercard structure fits tablet computers pretty brilliantly. I'll probably play around with it.

mono/xwt. Maybe I should take a look at this high-level GUI toolkit for Mono, which, in addition to a GTK backend on the Mac, also has a Cocoa backend. With this, you can program across platforms without having to pay the look-and-feel penalty of GTK (which is simply ugly on OSX).

misfo/Shell-Turtlestein. If you work with Sublime Text 2 and use many command line tools, this plugin is very helpful - you can execute commands directly from ST2 and get the results displayed directly there. Commands run directly in the directory of the current window or you can also start a terminal there immediately. Very practical for alternative build systems, or to quickly search for something in the directory with grep.

Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT. Nice overview of the history of Windows APIs and then a detailed look at WinRT and why it's not as new and independent as Microsoft claims and how it's really integrated into the system environment (TL;DR WinRT is modernized COM based on Win32 with automatic wrappers for .NET and JavaScript).

wilhelmtell/dis. If anyone gets the idea of building something like a distributed Twitter based on git: someone has already done it, source is available here. Just with bash, git and the linux coreutils.