Archive for April, 2010
GWT-Wizard: A Wizard Widget for Your Project
Posted by BinaryMuse in Technology on April 22nd, 2010
I thought I would take a quick moment to preset GWT-Wizard, a wizard widget I designed for GWT.
GWT-Wizard is very configurable, allowing you to customize everything about the Wizard–down to creating your own custom view to plug into the widget–but also comes with a set of sane defaults that allow you to get up and running quickly. If you’re interested, check it out on GitHub. I have a hard time sometimes with over thinking and over planning things, so I’m trying to get code out to the open source community more. The project is still very young, but I’m using the widget in a production system for one of my projects, and I feel the codebase offers enough to be useful now.
If you have any comments or questions, or are using this widget in production somewhere, I’d be very interested to hear about it!
Flash 10.1 to Bring Performance Upgrades to the Mac
Posted by BinaryMuse in Technology on April 5th, 2010
I’ve only been using a Mac for about half a year now, although I’ve wanted one for quite a while longer. The performance, stability and flexibility of Unix combined with the elegance and ease-of-use for day-to-day tasks of Cocoa was a big draw to me. However, there has always been one thing I have been very, very not happy with on OS X, and that is the performance of Flash.
It’s not a lonely boat, either. Just a quick Google search turns up a whole bunch of people who are also unhappy with Flash’s performance on their Macs. But shining through the gray clouds is a ray of hope: Adobe promises that 10.1 will bring improvements. Ever the skeptic, I decided to try out the latest prerelease version* and see what there was to see.
Now, I will say that I currently use the Dev Channel version of Chrome–mostly because I don’t like Safari and Firefox eats memory like I eat spicy Cheetos… and I like my spicy Cheetos. (I’ve tried to like Opera, but I just can’t make myself. Sorry.) And Flash performance is far from stellar for me. When I’m browsing YouTube, I usually keep another tab open so I can read my RSS feeds, for instance, while the YouTube tab is completely unresponsive. When I create a bit.ly link, there is a noticeable delay after I click the "Shorten" button before I can select the new URL and copy it to the clipboard while the browser fires up the Flash on the page.
Short verdict? 10.1 is indeed faster.
The delay on bit.ly is all but gone, and browsing YouTube is as speedy as I could hope. I’m glad I installed the beta of 10.1, and I urge any of you readers who are fed up with Flash that is slow as… something that is the opposite of The Flash… to try it out.
* Can’t promise this link will work after 10.1 is released.