Copying PHP is Fine -- If You Get It Right: Bad Macromedia!  Bad!

While I'm definitely not a Flash fan, I do try to be objective.  Still I see a comment like this:

From Mesh on Mx:

One thing to note, is that we have made the Flash Remoting Documentation available under our livedocs system, which is similar to the PHP documentation at php.net.

Um.  Ah.  Hmmm.... I use www.php.net daily for documentation.  And the Macromedia stuff is nothing like it.  All Macromedia's documentation seems to be is a static set of html pages (actually JSP) with next and previous buttons.  What makes the PHP documentation awesome is that anyone can (and does) add a comments to clarify, expand or give an example.  Sure some of it is wrong from time to time but it's much more frequently right.  And very, very useful.  Did I miss something?  How is "livedocs" like php's documentation?

 

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Daypop Seems to Be Gone

Sorry for the inconvenience. Daypop has been out of service for the past two weeks.
It turns out Daypop is out of disk space. Check back here for further updates.

How'd I miss that?  So I surf over to MIT's BlogDex only to find out that they too are a FontBitches!  (What?  You thought I gave up on that tirade?.  Nope.)  I tell you there's nothing like 10 point white type on a dark blue background.  Sigh. 

MIT Media Lab: Not a font aware designer to be found I guess.

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What a Great Essay: Do Da Scoble!

Nice to see such refreshing honesty:

You heard it here first: Robert Scoble was wrong.

In 1995 I said Borland would die.

I was wrong.

I had just seen Phillipe Kahn introduce Delphi. He seemed drunk to me and obnoxious. A sore loser, after all, Microsoft had kicked his ass. And he attacked Visual Basic, which was the language that gave me 10 years of pay checks (I was an editor with Fawcette Technical Publications BasicPro Magazine which then became Visual Basic Programmer's Journal).

But, as someone who was a Borland developer for 9+ years, I'm not at all certain I'd go back.  Don't get me wrong -- Delphi is awesome but Borland burned a lot of people.  I'd say their key marketing challenge is restablishing trust.  Before I buy a tool these days -- for anything -- I know that the cost of the tool is the smallest part of the equation.  The real cost is in using the tool; learning it and then being orphaned by the vendor and having to move on.  So as much as I agree with Scoble that Borland does a good job, choosing tools is something that we do more wisely now than in the old days.  Thinking ahead to the future is much more common now than it once was.  So before Borland could lure me back, they have to make me trust them and that's awfully hard. 

Here's one thing that could do it: Delphi for OSX support.  For professional development tools, it's always been "do something else" when it came to the Mac.  Visual Basic?  Nope.  Visual C++? Not really.  Turbo Pascal or Delphi?  Not a chance.  But if Borland brought out Delphi for OSX then it sends a very real, "we're serious" message.  This would give one tool that could let you build GUI apps across three different platforms.  Now that would be awesome.

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Charles Simonyi Leaves Microsoft

Interestingly Charles Simonyi has decided to leave Microsoft.  He is, without question, a brilliant man in both good and bad ways.  Not only did he give (or inflict) Microsoft Word on us but he also abused us with Hungarian notation; one of the more arcane ways to name variables ever invented.  He's apparently going to be building new "intentional" development tools.  Still I saw several issues with what's been reported (NY Times, Wall Street Journal and online sources) that makes me wonder if his leaving is being "spin doctored":

• I'm kinda disappointed to hear that he's pursuing visual development tools.  This is one of those areas that's been around forever (I used Serius on the Mac in the late 80s).  More on these tools.  And, yes, I know that James Gosling of Java fame is doing this too so it's trendy (and like a Microsoftie to copy someone else's direction) but I'm still not convinced that this type of development is viable beyond the teeny tiny prototype.
  
• In the WSJ, they said that the market he was pursuing was too small for a company like Microsoft but still needed a company to do it.  Huh?  This is very strange since Microsoft will often release small scale tools.  Look at some of the things like J++ which Microsoft built when Java was just getting started (admittedly, it had a lot of buzz) or the new .NET tools which is just a tiny market right now.
  
• Given that development tools require a huge framework of supporting technology like parsers, IDEs, compilers, etc, does it even make sense for him to have left?  Couldn't he have done it as a small scale effort inside Microsoft?  Or is he going to leverage Open Source tools for this?
  
• From the NY Times:
  
  "Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there."
  
  Ah Hello !  Why?  Ethics?  Favoritism?  This is a man with a personal net worth measured (last I looked) in the near billion $ range.  If not over a billion.  Why does a publicly traded company like Microsoft choose to give away intellectual property?  This smells like the GE / Jack Welch thing.  Will it be disclosed in Microsoft financial statements?  Will he personally pay income tax on the value of them ?

Note: The comment about Hungarian notation is an opinion.  Hungarian notation can be good or bad depending on how seriously you take it but I am not a fan.

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Photo of the Day

"Where I Wish I Was"

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How You Know a Really, Really Good Product: Jira

I just got the nicest email from Matt Mower of LiveTopics fame (well future fame?).  Anyway, we were talking about a software development project and, out of the blue, he recommended Jira by www.Atlassian.com.  Jira is a very cool "issue tracking" software product that is created by Mike the "Rebelutionary".  It really is a next generation tool for issue tracking with such features as CVS-To-Jira and Email-To-Commit.  Anyway, I know that Matt has no relationship to Mike and Mike's actually on a whole different continent; Australia.  Matt's just a smart guy who has looked at these type of products and recognized that Jira is top notch.

That's how you know a really, really good product -- when people make unsolicited recommendations that don't benefit them at all.  Very cool.  Thanks Matt!  Thanks Mike!

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Very Cool!  Marc Canter Has a Blog

Marc Canter, one of the original founders of Macromedia, now has a blog at:

http://blogs.it/0100198/

Very, very cool.  He's hosting this using Radio through Paolo's http://blogs.it/ domain which is a pretty nifty vanity domain.  Marc is one of those utterly irrepressible fellows that if you ever have a chance to see him speak at a conference, run -- don't walk, and get a good seat.  He was the keynote speaker at Web Builder 2002 and was just a gas.  It was my first high tech keynote that included the keynoter bellowing out opera (Marc's also a trained Opera singer).  Marc is also running BroadBand Mechanics, a new startup.

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A Moment of Epiphany -- When You Realize that Web Based Applications Rule -- Even at Home

I just had a moment of epiphany when I realized, once again, why web based applications rule -- even at home when Outlook is "available".  For a lot of us, we use web based applications like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Calendar, etc when we travel but revert to a full Outlook / Entourage / whatever in our office.  Well here I was, at my office (also my living room but let's not go there, shall we?), and it was one of those situations we've all seen too often -- my computer stopped responding. Just one of those mysterious circumstances where nothing I do is doing anything.  We've all seen it and short of a restart, there isn't really anything to do except wait.  And I knew that waiting would clear it up -- there was just some kind of system level thingie gone wrong (ain't it fun to talk geeky?).  So I was waiting.  And waiting.  And the phone rang!  Cool!  Distraction.  Oops -- it was a new client wanting me to go to her office and discuss a project. 

That's right!  I needed my calendar.  And I knew that my machine wasn't going to do it.  So I turned to my Linux laptop and went to the url for my web based calendar.  And scheduled the appointment.  If I had been using Outlook then I would have either had to a) go by memory (bad) or b) admit that even my computer was dead (embarassing).  Quite honestly neither of those approaches would have been acceptable.  As much as I like the rich GUI of something like Outlook, these attributes matter more to me:

• Reliability
• Ubiquitous Accessibility to My Data
• Predictability

Unfortunately conventional or "fat client" based applications fail on all these attributes i.e.

• Reliability?  Even running under something like OS X, applications still crash more than we like.  And Windows 2000 / Fill In Windows Version Here is pretty much a joke for reliability.
• Predictability? Conventional applications just aren't predictable.  Change to a friends computer and the software might be different.  Or your computer will hang for a period of time -- you know it will come back but not when.
• Ubiquitous Accessibility to My Data?  Sure -- if your machine is always reliable, always with you, always turned on, always networked, your data is accessible.  Unfortunately that is all too often not the case.  Machines aren't reliable; we don't want to carry even a laptop everywhere we go; and networking is hard.

The real problem here is that the expectations of the customer have outstripped the ability of conventional applications to deliver.  Now that we are much more connected, we want computers and our data to be like a telephone -- always on and always working.  Sure telephones don't have rich interfaces but they succeed on the criteria of Reliability and Predictability.  Since phones don't store data, it's not fair to grade them on the third criteria.  And conventional applications are just not there yet and they may never be -- they aren't designed for it.  Web based applications, for all their myriad flaws, are designed for this always networked world and that's why they rule.  We're only now starting to see rich DHTML based user interfaces that give us the power of fat clients.  www.oddpost.com is one such user interface.  But there will be more.

Note: I'm aware that not everyone is lucky enough to have a 2nd machine sitting around.  But, if I was in a real office setting, I could have gone to the cube next to me and done the same thing with a web browser.  The analogy still works.  And web applications still rule.

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Inexpensive Email Marketing Tool

I just ran across Constant Contact from www.roving.com which purports to be an email marketing tool offered on an ASP basis starting at $10 per month.  I'm not normally big on very low prices (you get what you pay for) but someone I respect a lot uses it regularly. 

Note: It's very, very unclear to me that email marketing works all that well anymore -- we're all so innundated that we just blip by email newsletters and the like.  And, I tend not to trust metrics on high page views of email newsletters and the like since the preview pane in mail clients causes the tracking gifs to be activated.  The only trustworthy metric is click throughs based on a call to action like "View our white paper".  If people click through on that link then you know your email marketing campaign works.

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Compensating Bloggers Worldwide

We've talked about wishlists.

And then there's the Amazon tip jar.

And, now, from the Brunching Shuttlecocks, there is: Go.

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