L'America: Please, Read My Christmas Letter!

It’s that time of the year again! I get more nostalgic of Old World charm, missing out on Christmas Markets, panettone, Lebkuchen, and wildly flashing trees in the countryside. Time to acquaint you with the quaintest of American traditions, especially since it’s slowly dying out!

The first time I saw a Christmas letter I had no idea what it was. It had all the appearance of a letter: it was a piece of paper with writing on it; the writing was of personal nature; we knew the people that had sent it to us.

A Week with Amazon Echo - the Review

Really? Amazon Hardware?

Amazon’s hardware efforts have always been a mixed bag. Some of them, like the Kindle eReader, were a smashing success to the point of helping change the way we read. Others have been largely panned, like the Fire Phone.

When Amazon delivers, it gives us the hardware we expect: state of the art, but much less expensive than other state of the art. Just like everyone else, but better. You can not only read your books on the Kindle: you can buy them on it, too.

L'America: Are Canadians Too Nice?

When you live in America, there are two national stereotypes that pop up frequently and are as pervasive as they are puzzling: Brits have bad teeth, and Canadians are too nice.

The stereotypes are not only pervasive, they are thought of perfectly harmless and worthy of making fun. If you have watched American comedies, you will have seen the buck-toothed, yellow-stained Brit smile. Also common, the Canadian brute that turns all polite.

L'America: Michael Brown, Darren Wilson, and Police Racism

A number of you have asked how it is possible that a police officer shoot an unarmed person and is not just not punished for it, but not even investigated. Such was the case of Darren Wilson, a police office in Ferguson, Missouri, who shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old.

I’ll go to say in general that I agree that police has a greater latitude on the use of force than an average person. Clearly, the people that have a sworn duty to protect others deserve the deference of respect from those they protect – which includes me.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 22 - Conclusions and My Pick

This was a long journey, for sure. We went through 77 Javascript frameworks (including combinations) to find the ones most suitable for the development of a mobile single page application, to be used as the foundation of a cordova app.

We went on a tangent to see how there was a seminal year, 2012, where a great many frameworks suddenly sprung up. Before that, the selection was small. After that, things got quiet again.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 21 - Vue

Vue occupied a special place in my heart when I saw it required the least code to write. That’s a feat of its own, especially considering how lazy I am (despite being a terrific typist) and how error-prone (strike the part on being a terrific typist).

The vuejs.org web site has no clear tag line. This is what I liked best about their self-description: It is not a full-blown framework – it is designed to be a view layer that is simple and flexible.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 20 - Thorax

The tag line of the ThoraxJS.org (yes, .org) site reads, “An opinionated, battle-tested Backbone + Handlebars framework to build large scale web applications.“

I mentioned that our mobile needs don’t particularly require large scale web applications, but at the same time it’s hard to deny a candidate that has done well enough in the Todo challenge.

The fundamentals of Thorax, as the tag line states, are Backbone and Handlebars. Additionally, Thorax on its down did pretty terribly in the performance challenge, so we have to add one more dependency, Lumbar. Since Lumbar is “with” Thorax (as they both come from WalMart Labs) it’s not a stretch to think that most projects will use both.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 19 - Stapes

The alphabet has a way to balance the universe. While React was on the pointlessly complicated (not complex) side of the equation, Stapes is really minimalistic. Indeed, you wouldn’t know the index file belongs to a reactive app, or an app at all.

Our example has four Javascript files: a model, a controller, a view, and a store. That’s it. They each do what you’d expect them to do. There is an additional app.js, but all it does is start the controller and make it run.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 18 React

There really isn’t a whole lot making React stand out in a positive way in this comparison. Both performance and code length are towards the maximum acceptable, and the framework comes with its own language you have to learn, JSX.

I’ll spare you the internals of JSX. Let’s just say it’s Javascript made to use XML syntax. I guess you can get the hang of it, and maybe Mithril’s Hoarie should have a glance, but all in all you really have to be hardcore if you accept learning a new language (however little it is different from Javascript) just to code in a new framework.

PIcking Your Javascript Mobile Framework: Part 17 - Ractive

Ractive was developed by The Guardian, the UK newspaper. That makes it probably the only framework in this group not created by a technologist (if we don’t want to count out WalMart Labs).

If Mithril is the framework I wanted to love the most, Ractive is the one I wanted to love the least. The performance was not exciting, while the code length was at the far end of what we’d consider acceptable. I didn’t realize it was made by a news organization, but it seemed far removed from the needs of an app developer.