Future Projects
I enjoy writing code. I’m not very good at it, and my experience is that I don’t work well when coding in a group, but the point is that I enjoy building things that run on a computer. I enjoy the feeling of accomplishment that comes from seeing a system work and knowing that my handiwork was involved. Most of it isn’t really my effort, of course: the heavy lifting is done by the folks behind PHP and WordPress. I merely ride on the back of giants.
But that’s talking about web development work. More specifically, the enhancements I’ve made to my client Antonio’s site in recent weeks. What I’ve been dreaming of doing, however, is something similar but not quite the same.
I want to write a desktop application. Or rather, two desktop applications.
The first is a cross-browser, cross-platform bookmark synchronizer. The idea is simple: as part of my work, I use multiple browsers on multiple operating systems on multiple computers. It might seem like a silly thing, but I want the bookmarks in every one of those browsers to be exactly the same. I bookmark sites all the time, and it drives me crazy when I can’t access a bookmark because it’s living on a different partition.
The second application is a simple mouse-button to keyboard-shortcut mapper for OS X. A number of such applications already exist, but they’re shareware, and I want to write one that’s open-source. It would also be a great opportunity for me to learn about the Carbon API as well.
I don’t expect that writing either of these applications is going to be easy. While I have written modestly-sized web applications in the past, I have never succeeded to building a non-trivial desktop application from scratch. There’s just too much complexity. Traditional applications have to deal with threading, event handling, and all sorts of other dross. Web applications are hosted by a web server which handles most of this complexity—I just have to handle the POST data and I’m done! This is a gross simplification, I know, but web development just seems easier to me somehow.
Now that I’ve laid these plans out, however, it’s time to get started working on them. You know the mantra: Release early, release often.
Posted in Geekiness, Personal by jiunwei at May 26th, 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Louis Tan Says:
This is a bit of a long shot, but do you happen to know of any tools which allow you to easily backup some critical files to your personal webspace? Let’s say, for example, I would like to use a directory on my domain as a backup space. Aside from manually uploading via FTP, can you think of other possible methods to handle online backups?
June 27th, 2008 at 8:02 am
jiunwei Says:
You can definitely automate backing up a directory to FTP by setting up a cron job, but this will require you to get a little geeky. (I think you should be able to figure it out though. Essentially you edit
/etc/crontaband have the computer run your backup script at a particular time everyday.)If you want a GUI solution, however, I’m afraid that I don’t know of anything that’s free on the Mac. I believe Transmit allows for automated backups, but I can’t find any evidence of this on their product page. I’ve also heard good things about Jungle Disk, which uses Amazon S3 for storage instead of your own web host.
One last note: be aware that plain FTP is unencrypted, so anyone can eavesdrop on your files while they’re in transit even if the destination folder is private. Use SFTP instead if this is a concern.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 am
KH Says:
About that project .. I’ve just noticed Shoes! at http://shoooes.net which is not only cutesily named, it seems to be a pretty good idea, and I’ve heard it’s relatively easy to use too.
Go check it out
I will at some point… “later”. And it seems to be in Ruby, which you *might* have some experience with. 
KH
November 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am