Talk Proposal: Building An App in 30 minutes on Android, iPhone and Palm Pre.

[hampton catlin]

or... "Why Live Coding is a Bad Idea"

Since I've retired to beautiful old England with all the money I made
off Haml, I've had time to
dabble in the mobile space. Between bottles of wine, I tossed off the
most popular dictionary for the iPhone. Between horseback riding
sessions, I took a side job position at Wikimedia building
m.wikipedia.org. During the long evenings at my country manor, me and
my friend Yehuda Katz were talking over glasses of Port in front of my
large fire place. Yehuda's jet was warming up outside, when we decided
to say "screw all these mobile frameworks" and we decided to use Haml,
Sass, jQuery, and Staticmatic to write a game.

After a long night of passion(ate programming), we came out with
"Color Puzzle." It's JavaScript based and runs on all 3 phones that I
give a crap about. We haven't launched it on the other platforms yet,
but... you can see a demo of the for-sale Pre version here!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8o3EJATppo

So, let me attempt career suicide by building a (painfully) easy
application ON STAGE, LIVE, WITH ALL SORTS OF PROBLEMS to give a
little meaning to my retirement. Flying my plane collection at Duxford
just doesn't seem to have the thrill it used to.

If you will, I would love to show you the method for mobile
development that Yehuda and I came up with. I haven't given any talks
in a long time, but this conference just seems too freaking awesome
that I feel I must give it my best. Therefore, I shall share my
secrets!

I'll make sure you get your £1 worth! (Plus, an American found the £
sign on a US laptop for this proposal. So... you know... be impressed
or some shit.)

--------------------

NOTICE: What is above is not *entirely* true.

[Jason Cale]

On 23 Nov 2009, at 22:50, hampton catlin wrote:

So, let me attempt career suicide by building a (painfully) easy
application ON STAGE, LIVE, WITH ALL SORTS OF PROBLEMS to give a
little meaning to my retirement. Flying my plane collection at Duxford
just doesn't seem to have the thrill it used to.

Personally I'd love to see / hear this talk, and it would rather conveniently make my proposal about Rhodes dramatically obsolete and I can focus on rambling on about ruby-processing instead.

Jase.

[David Salgado]

I'd like to hear this talk too.

D

2009/11/23 Jason Cale <ja...@jaseandtonic.com>:

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[Roland Swingler]

+2, but only if you swig from a can of stella the whole time while
giving the talk as you did at railsconf some while back.

R

[Hampton]

New proposal: Doing shots on stage while attempting to live code. Watch it turn into a syntax-error-fest.

[Alan Kennedy]

+1 to the original topic. Does the second come with a money back guarantee if code does not work?

2009/11/24 Hampton <hca...@gmail.com>

[Hampton]

The first one doesn't come with any sort of guarantee!

I'm realizing how stupid I am to have written a proposal like this. :)

[Murray Steele]

Hi Hampton,

Sounds like a good idea, but I thought I'd better check if you'd need
internets to do this demo? We're not organising any and while there
*might* be some wifi at the venue but I don't think I'd rely on it
(especially in a room full of geeks with multiple devices).

Don't want to throw a spanner in the works, but I thought it'd be best to check.

Cheers,

Murray

2009/11/24 Hampton <hca...@gmail.com>:

[Hampton]

I don't believe so!

I can do it locally in the simulators.

[James Adam]

On 23 Nov 2009, at 22:50, hampton catlin wrote:

> If you will, I would love to show you the method for mobile
> development that Yehuda and I came up with.

Would it be possible, without going into too much detail, to outline what this will actually mean? What kind of technologies will you be using/demonstrating, or should people read up on or download to get the most out of your presentation?

> or... "Why Live Coding is a Bad Idea"

Is live coding definitely the best way to get your content across?

It definitely sounds intriguing, but lets put a little meat on this proposal before we serve it up at The Guvner's table.

- James

[Hampton]

Well, its basically how to build your own XHTML/Javascript application and then have it
run on Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre.

The main technologies that we used were Staticmatic (Haml/Sass -> Html/Css) and
jQuery. Plus, some home-made Rake tasks to facilitate building and execution on the
different platforms.

What makes this approach cool is that you are basically building web views that
generate out statically (keeping it DRY) and using the import powers of Sass to
build for all of these different platforms. For instance, in Sass we can @import main.sass
into palm_pre.sass and generate out palm_pre.css with all of its custom overrides and
variables. (You know, I've never actually given a presentation that included Sass, however
its probably more popular these days than Haml).

There are other bits of technology like PhoneGap, that would actually integrate really well
with this setup, however I was planning on showing the home-grown version.

The overall theory of this was not to actually give people a step-by-step that they can follow,
but to give people a good idea about Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre development. Like,
even if you know one of them, then seeing how you build a palm pre app should be highly
educational. I feel that the details of these platforms are easy to lookup online, but getting the
gist of how to think about each of them is more difficult.

If I used something specific like PhoneGap (which has been demoed many times around the world)
I feel like I'd just be repeating myself.

And, on the long shot, I might be able to wrap everything we've done up into a new open source
project. But, time being tight, I don't know how possible that would be.

Depending on time, the talk would be

A) Using common rubyist tools to build XHTML/JS apps on 3 phones and how to wire
them up together
or
B) Showing a new mobile/web framework

-hampton.

[Hampton]

Eh, after looking into it more, PhoneGap has added some features that basically
make my talk useless. And there have been too many PhoneGap presentations.

We just basically re-implemented PhoneGap with Staticmatic.

Anyhow, I'm withdrawing my proposal because I don't think there is enough
unique meat there to warrant a talk.

Hopefully next year I'll get a ticket in time for the conference!

Enjoy guys!

[inou...@googlemail.com]

Hi, Hampton.

Which new feature of PhoneGap made your presentation obsolete?

I also tried creating game using PhoneGap before and one thing
PhoneGap did not offer for Android was persistent layer (which is
important to store results as people tends to quite the game in the
middle for phone calls). Mobile Safari(iphone) offers HTML5 offline
storage, but Android's WebView doesn't (You can use Gears for normal
browser, but not from WebView).

I am wondering if your solution does cover anything related to the
problem. I just saw the news about lawnchair (http://
brianleroux.github.com/lawnchair/), which is created by guys from
PhoneGap community, but not sure if it's installable into mobile phone
as offline storage.

Thanks.

Makoto

> >> Unsubscribe at ruby-manor+...@googlegroups.com<ruby-manor%2Bunsubscribe@googlegrou ps.com>

[Julian Burgess]

I'd still like to see the talk. Live coding is great, it sticks to my
brain better, like a screencast but more exciting, it's like theatre v
film

If I don't learn something from your work on Wikipedia I'll go back to
coding VBscript

[Hampton]

Julian: The topic covered in the talk wouldn't have really touched anything at Wikipedia... The stuff for Wikipedia is kind of standard. Just a Merb app with a whole bunch of imported Sass files to cover all the different platforms. Nokogiri on the parsing. Etc, etc, etc.

Makoto: We actually keep the scores off-phone, thereby avoiding the problem. So, no solution for storage, atm.

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