“I’m Back”
It’s been ages since I blogged. If I were to blog everything I do every single day for the past year or so, it would be similar to a circular linked list with nodes having WORK and WORK-AFTER-WORK in them.
More than an year with ThoughtWorks, which I have to say (again!), is one of the best companies to work for, I’m on a break from work for 2 weeks. During these 2 weeks, I’m trying to learn something new, refining my existing knowledge, and as usual, dedicating some time for this.
I’ve been coding in Java in these 2 weeks, and IMO, Java is better than C# any day. Considering my transition from Java to C# and back, I’m glad that I got to experience both worlds. But, given a preference to choose a language of my choice, I would prefer Java primarily because of the amount of innovation and contributions happening on the Java front surpasses C# by a huge factor.
Next, I tried my hands on creating Signature Verification as an Open Office plug-in. I got this suggestion from someone who happened to look into the project and I thought of giving it a shot. I always was biased to Microsoft Office 2007 given the fact that it’s one of the best product from Microsoft, but was blown away with the amount of development that is happening over at Open Office and how well their framework is written. Open Office is written in C++, but can allow plug-ins to be written in Java, Python etc. The plug-ins are able to interact with the Open Office components without any hassles and honestly, it was a pleasure coding on top of Open Office. IMO, Open Office can play the part of Mozilla in the Office Application world. Its highly customizable, extremely responsive and is FREE! Go ahead guys, give it a shot. My plug in is still under development, and I’m attaching a sneak-peek preview of it.
Preview (Presenting.. the old UI and the new one under development)
Later in the week, I was watching this video on QuickSilver, which is an awesome software for Mac OS X “Only” 
, and was blown away by it’s simplicity, functionality and awesomeness!! Lol. It is such an elegant piece of software that I just have the utmost admiration for it’s creator and the software itself. As I was cribbing for having a PC with Windows on it (At least I’m happy that it’s Vista and not XP! Vista rocks), I came across this clone of QuickSilver for Windows. It is called Mighty Box and it indeed is one-heck-of-a-beauty. It sufficed my craving for QuickSilver and although it is written in Java and eats up 70+MB of run-time memory, I ain’t complaining. They are trying to rewrite Mighty Box in C++, so in case you know C++ very well (or even if you ‘think’ you know C++ very well), please contribute to this. I really want to see this grow up to be one of the best Windows software ever written.
Now, I “recognize” a pattern here, i.e., take 2 weeks off every year, get to know something new, polish your existing skills and you can get back to work with a new perspective.
Filed under: Apple, Java, Signature Verification, ThoughtWorks | 1 Comment
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