misanthropic nonsense

Sometimes, the coolest apps produced by a software company will never be shipped to the customer. In this case, though, “cool” is in the eye of the observer, and the observer would need to be another programmer. I am, of course, referring to internal tools. 

At a typical software firm, such tools can range from system-monitoring suites to back-office systems to tools that ease the process of software production.

Well, Antair is no different, and today I’d like to show you one such internal tool. We call it Peapod.

Peapod - an internal tool used at Antair (click for larger version)

The various titles for BlackBerry produced by Antair start with similar scaffolding code. We’re talking about thousands of lines of code including everything from our custom font engine, to the device-specific resource manager, to logging and licensing facilities. Because we often need to rig up a one-off sandbox project to test out a new feature in isolation, we need a way to quickly put together a basic, but fully-featured BlackBerry application. That’s where Peapod comes in.

Peapod is an in-house, custom-built code-generation tool that allows us to generate a shiny new BlackBerry application, with exactly the features we need, with the click of a button. Similar to what Visual Studio would do for you for a Windows app, or what Xcode would do for a Mac app. Custom BlackBerry applications, however, don’t have the luxury of such IDE assistance. But with Peapod, a task that used to take 45 minutes of coding, now takes two seconds flat. The screenshot above is one of an earlier edition of Peapod. The BlackBerry simulator in the screenshot is running the latest build of Antair’s upcoming BlackBerry product – RE:mind.

After filling out a few fields and indicating the basic features we needed from an application, Peapod generated the workspace file, project file, and all of the clean, tested, scaffolding code on which Antair RE:mind was built.

Outside Antair's offices - May 14th, 2009

The good city of New York has decided that the street outside of Antair’s offices needs a little sprucing up. 

That’s a good thing.

In a year, when our office lease is up and we move into a bigger space, the people in the company taking over our current office will enjoy lovely shading in the summer.

In the meantime, every monitor in our office is shaking, and everyone’s butt is getting a nice massage as the jackhammers are doing their thing 4 floors down.

That’s not so good … at least not while we’re trying to get a new product out the door.