Skip to main content

Porcupine is Sharp

I caught wind of InnoScript's Porcupine realease, today. They seemed to have done something pretty spiffy, even though most of the work is done by XUL. It says it works on IE, as well as Mozilla browsers, but I'm not sure how that works if its a XUL-based system.

Everything in the demo is pretty responsive. The widgets are full-featurse and intuitive, and they do everything you think they should. The icon widget didn't select tho, or drag, but it double-clicked. Column widths are draggable, tables are resortable, and menus are quick. Its all very nice for a web app in JavaScript.

The whole time I looked around in the demo, I kept thinking to myself how things like that could be done in Athena, and what is there to support it today and what is missing that needs put in. The Divmod-guys didn't seem opposed to that sort of thing.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Porcupine is not based on Mozilla XUL. It uses a XUL motor of its own called QuiX. The XML UI definitions are not Mozilla XUL compatible. Don't know though if its possible to transform QuiX files to Mozilla XUL using XSLT.

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operat...

Announcing Feet, a Python Runner

I've been working on a problem that's bugged me for about as long as I've used Python and I want to announce my stab at a solution, finally! I've been working on the problem of "How do i get this little thing I made to my friend so they can try it out?" Python is great. Python is especially a great language to get started in, when you don't know a lot about software development, and probably don't even know a lot about computers in general. Yes, Python has a lot of options for tackling some of these distribution problems for games and apps. Py2EXE was an early option, PyInstaller is very popular now, and PyOxide is an interesting recent entry. These can be great options, but they didn't fit the kind of use case and experience that made sense to me. I'd never really been about to put my finger on it, until earlier this year: Python needs LÖVE . LÖVE, also known as "Love 2D", is a game engine that makes it super easy to build ...

Using a React Context as a Dispatch Replacement

React Contexts are the pretty little bows of the React world. Here's a really quick example of the kind of messy code you can cleanup by using contexts, without dragging in a larger dependency like Redux or even Flux. Starting backwards with a diff showing lines of code I was able to remove: All the properties I was able to remove were just pass-through. The Carousel component didn't care about any of them, but it had to pass through these callbacks so the multiple TaskList components inside the carousel could invoke actions. They were removed from the Component class itself, too, since it no longer needed to pass them through. Where did they all go? My ActionContext removed all the need for these passthroughs by providing a single simple helper method, action(), that components rendered under it can access.   I really enjoy the pattern of passing a single callback through a context and removing what used to be lots of callback properties. Of course, I cou...