Wednesday, August 11, 2004

The future of Web applications Reporting back on the BayCHI Rich Internet Applications Panel. The panel yesterday went very well. It was a full house, there were many first time BayCHI visitors in the audience. And I never had so many people come upto me at the end of the evening and said that... [Rashmi's Blog] It was indeed an interesting presentation/panel. There's some very clever, engaging stuff going on in RIAs. Made me feel like a real piker when it comes to Web site development. I can barely code a file upload page and write a style sheet, and here are folks building applications in Flash and Flex and Laszlo and so on, making some very slick looking effects, way beyond HTML and CGI and such. It's almost a relief to think that I'll never have to develop this stuff because I just am not  wired to be a developer -- so I should stick with what I'm good at, learn to talk the language, and then get a job collaborating with the folks who do know how to do this. 4:53:38 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Unusable + inflexible != accurate Last month I noted some issues with usability encountered by a certain government body using SAP's software; software that its CEO claims must be inflexible in order to be accurate. Well, they're at it again, only this time it seems you can't use SAP's financial software to create a budget: The Computer Ate My Budget. . .  Now, the city of Tacoma, Washington is admitting that their $51 million SAP implementation has made it impossible for them to do a budget. One of the reasons the city spent so much on this fancy new computer system was to have more accurate data for budget forecasts. However, it turns out that SAP doesn't actually have a budget module, so they've been trying to kludge stuff together. Right now, that means that the city can't actually figure out how much money they'll at the end of the year, or how much they're likely to bring in. Computer glitches certainly happen, but you have to wonder why the city would agree to switch on the system that couldn't do some of the most basic features it was supposed to. [Techdirt] 1:10:18 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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