Paul Hummer

I'd like to announce the general availability of a YUI 3 Nightly combo server. Each night, it will check out and create a new build of the YUI 3 source code, and serve it via a combo handler. In order to use it, just point your YUI_config to the new combo loader. Information about it can be found at the main page at YUI Nightly Doc Page.

Why did I do this? There are a few reasons. First, Ubuntu One can't use the Yahoo! CDN because we're using SSL. This means we have to run our own combo loader. The problem with this is that it's a pain to go out and get new YUI and plug it into my dev environment just to get surprised by something that broke or something that changed, etc. With the nightlies, I can regularly just point YUI to this combo loader and let it run.

I'm using this in "production" for a small personal site, but I wouldn't recommend it be used it any production site that actually has uptime requirements.

Comments, questions, and pull requests welcome.

Update: The URL has now been changed to http://yuinightly.com/.

...K-I-S-S-I-N-G

The Web and Mobile Ubuntu One team is in Buenos Aires, Argentina (along with most of the rest of the Ubuntu One teams) exploring the boundaries we may experience merging the Web and Native App experiences. I realized very quickly in this exploration project that I needed an end goal. Since we are already using YUI on the web part of Ubuntu One, I figured that I needed to figure out where the limitations of YUI would be there.

Enter PhoneGap.

It became very clear that it'd be much better to use one of these "glue" frameworks than to roll our own (the important reason being that we'd rather do more fun things). One of the first things I noticed is that the default PhoneGap doesn't really "compile" out of the box, which annoys me. Once I linked in the www folder properly, I had a good stub.

Using the YUI Loader in PhoneGap is not impossible, but it's relatively impractical. It stores a whitelist of URLs that you can get to, and even then, javascript is so required on the site that we can't afford to not have javascript. At this point, I realized that all the front-end tweaking/ricing I've been doing for the last year or so gets thrown out the window. I broke down and made giant rollup files for yui.js and yui.css.

As a sidenote, I also took the time to actually explore the YUI App Framework by coding rather than reading about it (which I've done a lot). There is an example Todo app (thus, the reason why I made a todo app). So I essentially cargo-culted that code.

Sometime during this cargo-culting, I realized one very important thing: Debugging PhoneGap apps is a pain in the ass. It really is. It resulted in this late night tweet (which I was at least half serious about). Unless you're a human jslint machine (and if your name is not Doug Crockford, I assert that you are not a human jslint machine), you're bound to make typos and syntax errors and such. You don't really get a decent access to the console1. I tried running the app in a normal desktop browser but I found that events I was expecting either weren't firing or weren't being handled (without a console, I don't know). I eventually went digging into the PhoneGap js that comes with the default template, and realized that I needed to just kill the PhoneGap js when testing in my browser. The browser only takes you so far, but it at least helped me to get the YUI toolchain sorted out.

I then took a bit of time sorting through the touch-specific interface and adapting the App example to that interface. For instance, hover events are useless on mobile. I also found that the "keypress" event for the Enter key in an input wasn't firing with the keyboard "return". Apparently, the iPhone wants the form input wrapped in a form itself, and then it'll show the "Done" button in the on-screen keyboard, which will send the right event (make sure that the form doesn't actually submit).

The end result is MoarTodo2. It's a really ugly app, but it's academic and I just wanted to learn about the toolchain. I can't imagine not using something like PhoneGap (it doesn't have to actually be PhoneGap) to build a mobile web app to be distributed through the various app stores. I expect there will be more to the debugging story, but it's still a learning curve.

I still feel pretty strongly that the Native vs. Web argument will continue, and that they'll still have their various places. I look forward to a day when that argument is settled, but I also look forward to the Year of the Linux Desktop, the rapture, and Santa Claus.

1 I didn't try Weinre because I had switched to using iWebInspector a few weeks ago (when I wasn't using a PhoneGap container), and so didn't have it immediately on my system. I'll probably have to go back and try it out in a PhoneGap context.

2 Xcode creates new projects with Git. I'm not making a political statement here. I just pushed it where it was easiest. Don't hate.

Last night, I came home from a meeting, kissed my wife, and was walking back upstairs when my coat started vibrating. I pulled my phone out to see that I was too late, and wasn't able to answer a phone call from my dad. I called him back, and here's a summary of the beginning of that conversation.

Me: "Hi dad."

Dad: "Hi"

Me: "Did you call? What did you need?"

Dad: "I did. I installed Ubuntu and now I'm trying to figure out how to install the driver for my video card."

Me: "Waaaaaaaaaaitaminute. There's a backstory here that I have to know before we go any further."

My dad is "technical". I remember as a little kid realizing how excited my dad was when he was installing Windows 95 the day it came out. I spent summers and school holidays making money at the company he worked for by being the floppy swapper when installing software. He was also the person who introduced me to the term "freetard". He's always been pretty resistant to free software, and sometimes for good reason (ever tried sending a document back and forth between on OpenOffice environment and a MS Office environment multiple times?). Last year for Christmas, my little brother Matt received a netbook that got infected before Christmas Day was over. I offered to put Ubuntu on it (something he wanted) but my dad was so resistant that he went out and bought a USB CD-ROM drive just so he could make sure Windows stayed on the machine.

For me, Ubuntu has never been about "So easy my mom can use it", but "So simple my dad doesn't have a reason not to use it".1

As the story unfolded, my dad had been exploring the idea of virtual machines for a client, and had installed Ubuntu in a Virtual PC environment on Windows 7 host. Unfortunately, his video would only give him 800x600, when his Windows XP guest would fill his dual-monitor setup easily. He expected this to be a driver issue (Virtual PC apparently doesn't have a driver pack for guests like VirtualBox and VMWare do). I found this article, but as I looked at the instructions, I thought "Holy crap. I wouldn't even do this." It became pretty clear that Microsoft Virtual PC was a pretty hostile environment to anything non-Windows.

At this point, my dad starts asking about the Windows installer he saw for Ubuntu (Wubi). Most of his concern centered around whether or not it was going to screw up his Windows partition (it doesn't). After a bit of talk about Wubi, we ended the phone call.

This morning, I get an email from him that says:

Installed 32-bit Ubuntu on my system last night (Wubi). Booted this morning and found that my USB keyboard/mouse combo is not recognized at Ubuntu login screen. No time to troubleshoot this morning before work and probably won’t spend a great deal of time on it, but wondered if you had any ideas of things I could try this evening.

Sounds like he's got a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo that is having problems. It's not a happy ending just yet, but it's a giant step in the right direction.

The Chasm. Ubuntu is crossing it.

1 I gave my mom my old laptop, running Ubuntu, and connected to Landscape so I can manage it for her. She's not technical, and Ubuntu satisfies most of her computer needs (the only one that it doesn't satisfy is that she has no genealogy software that's compatible with the other software she uses).