Blogs

I’ve been working on a few applications where I want to get access to native, global keystrokes and mouse movements, so I’ve been using the JNativeHook library, which seems to work well on Mac OS X systems. I’ve been using Scala for all my coding the last few years instead of Java, so here’s a quick Scala port of the JNativeHook GlobalMouseListenerExample:

Just a quick note today that Boulder, Colorado will be home to a triathlete “Ironman” competition this Sunday, August 3, 2014. Participants will swim 2.4 miles in the Boulder Reservoir, ride their bikes for 112 miles, then run a 26.2 mile marathon on the streets of Boulder. You can find more details about the event at the BOULDER Ironman web page.

As a quick note today (July 26, 2014), I’m glad to see that many Java developers and beginning Scala developers have said that the Scala Cookbook is the best Scala book available. I wrote the Cookbook from the perspective of a Java developer (as opposed to something like a functional programmer), and I’ve also taught computer programming classes for many years, so I considered these people to be in my target audience.

I don’t like to write basic CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) code, and furthermore I don’t like to charge clients for writing such basic code. As a result, I wrote a tool I named the Cato CRUD Generator to generate this code, rather than having to write it manually.

Over the last few days I’ve updated Cato so it can generate Play Framework CRUD code (Scala code, to be specific), including the following:

When I write software for myself, I usually think of my software application from the perspective of a business analyst, and write down short user stories, as shown in the image of the index card. First I write the stories, and then I cross them off when I finish them.

When I wrote the Scala Cookbook, I didn’t know that the page count of the book would dramatically grow when the book was converted from MS Word files to PDF files. My editor told me that it was roughly a 1:1 ratio, but it ended up being significantly different, more like a 1.2:1 ratio. As a result, ~140 pages of the book had to be removed to reach the size my O’Reilly editor wanted, about 700 pages.

I ran across this story about Sencha Touch speed and an app named Fastbook. In short, the video at that link shows how a Sencha Touch mobile app is faster than Facebook’s native iOS and Android apps(!). Here’s a little text from the story:

I've been using Sencha Touch lately to develop a mobile application, and in very good news, Sencha Touch now supports the iOS 7 look and feel with an iOS 7 theme named Cupertino. You can find more information about it at this link:

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If you work in Boulder, Louisville, Westminster, or Golden, Colorado, and your organization wants to learn Scala, send me an email.