Adam Jordens@littlesquare:~/

I got an IM today from a friend and former colleague who works for a company (not to be mentioned here) that develops software incorporating substantial use of XUL. Besides the recruitment offer, I was intrigued with their usage of XUL. In their case, XUL makes perfect platform sense and is a necessicity but that’s a point for future discussion.

To date I’ve had only a cursory understanding and interest in XUL. Conceptually it’s pretty cool but until tonight I had never taken the time to look a little bit under the hood. So I’ve spent the last few hours working through a few tutorials getting a grip on the general GUI design/layout aspects. No real brain science here and it’s quite trivial to throw together a nice looking UI.

Yesterday I downloaded Visual C# Express 2005 and built a little app that connected to GMail and would read my messages to me. Pretty simple and C# is on my list of languages to brush up on, shouldn’t be a big deal given my day in - day out exposure to Java. Now if only Microsoft provided some better voices in SAPI. I’ll upgrade to SAPI 5.1 but I doubt it’ll improve matters.

Tonight was XUL, and who knows what the rest of the week will bring. I like the challenge that picking up new technologies presents and I’m going to try and dedicate more time to it when outside of the office. Immediate plans for further XUL exposure is the cloning of a few existing native application user interfaces. Shouldn’t pose that big of a challenge but at the same time will force exposure to the entire XUL specification.