{"id":801,"date":"2014-06-02T00:47:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T12:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbrebner.com\/?p=801"},"modified":"2025-09-10T07:44:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:44:41","slug":"the-umajin-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidbrebner.com\/?p=801","title":{"rendered":"The Umajin Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Umajin – the digital engine for creativity<\/strong><\/p>\n

Growing up in a small town in New Zealand I had the amazing experience of two parents who are both inspiring creative teachers. They embraced letterpress printmaking – using 200 year old printing presses as a way of helping students through storytelling by sharing their own ideas, writing and illustration.<\/p>\n

\"John<\/p>\n

I’m fascinated by the increasing pace of change in the ongoing information revolution. It starts with oral stories and songs moving to writing numbers ~9000 years ago, the first written symbols ~6000 years ago and then alphabets ~3000 years ago. Publishing began with letterpress and moveable type in the 1400\u2019s, to movies and offset printing in the 1900\u2019s, TV\/video in the 1940\u2019s, desktop publishing and spreadsheets in the 1980\u2019s through to the internet in the 1990\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"hyroglyph\"<\/p>\n

At the core of previous stages in the information revolution has been publishing material to broad communities, getting ideas, music and entertainment out there. What I believe sets this stage apart is the ease of adding interaction, the concept of play, of finding utility or enjoyment through ideas, content and experimentation. Moving from consumption to interaction. <\/p>\n

I love creating physical things, from a very young age I was also fascinated with electronics and computers. My journey writing apps began at age five with my first commercial contract before I started high school. <\/p>\n

\"david_computer\"<\/p>\n

I started UR\/umajin while at university and after dealing with the limitations of the early web began developing Umajin as an internet based apps platform. We used this to run a export business out of NZ that delivered important software for companies like Dell, Intel, HP and Sony. <\/p>\n

Umajin is a platform that enables anyone to create and share amazing digital experiences without having to manage the technical details that make that possible. It is the expression of a huge amount of learning and experience.<\/p>\n

\"lexus_examples\"<\/p>\n

Under the hood Umajin is also a very interesting proposition for developers. It makes it possible to create and package up new capabilities and interactions for everyone else to reuse.<\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n

Inspirational software moments<\/strong><\/p>\n

Doug Engelbart<\/strong> : the Mother of all demos : Wow<\/p>\n

Steve Vickers<\/strong> : ZX81 Basic : My first programming language<\/p>\n

Dennis Ritchie<\/strong> C : a general-purpose computer programming language<\/p>\n

Bjarne Stroustrup<\/strong> C++ : Highly performant language that supports OOP <\/p>\n

Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg, Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler<\/strong> : Smalltalk : OOP language for human computer symbiosis<\/p>\n

Bill Atkins<\/strong> : Hypercard : Hypermedia for content + creativity<\/p>\n

Alan Cooper, Mark Merker, Gary Kratkin, Mike Geary, Frank Raab<\/strong> : Visual Basic : UX and rapid application development<\/p>\n

Will Wright, Jeff Braun<\/strong> : Sim city and the Sims : Creativity and play for everyone <\/p>\n

John Gay<\/strong> : Futuresplash : Flash animation and interaction for the web<\/p>\n

John Warnock<\/strong> : Adobe Postscript<\/p>\n

Donald Knuth<\/strong> : LaTeX<\/p>\n

Maxim Shemanarev<\/strong> : Antigrain Geometry<\/p>\n

Jim Clark, Mark Hannah<\/strong> : OpenGL<\/p>\n

Gordon Romney, Ed Catmull, Jim Blinn<\/strong> : Polygons and shaders<\/p>\n

Dan Bricklin, Bob Frankston<\/strong> : VisiCalc : Rapid prototyping and simulation<\/p>\n

Cecil Wayne Ratliff<\/strong> : dBase : declarative database management<\/p>\n

Paul Brainerd<\/strong> : Pagemaker : Desktop Publishing<\/p>\n

Dan Silva<\/strong> : Deluxe Paint : Bitmap editing<\/p>\n

Marty Cooper<\/strong> : Communications & Cellphones : The Law of Spectral Efficiency<\/p>\n

James Baker, Janet Baker<\/strong> : Dragon : Voice recognition<\/p>\n

Mary Lou Jespin<\/strong> : One Laptop Per Child architecture : Computing infrastructure for the world<\/p>\n

Brad Schell, Joe Esch<\/strong> : Sketchup : 3D modelling made easy<\/p>\n

Chris Lattner<\/strong> : LLVM : Awesome masters thesis!<\/p>\n

Roberto Ierusalimschy, Waldemar Celes, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo<\/strong> : Lua : Echos of scheme, a powerful, simple syntax, interpreted scripting langauge<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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