Tuesday, November 12, 2002

Can you find the next Killer App by looking? Can you find the next Killer App by looking?. Every waking moment of every day, I think about coming up with the next Netscape Navigator or Lotus 1,2,3. The next Killer App. It's not a quest for some cool or innovative app, it's a quest for THE cool and innovative app. Every day... I just realized it now. It's a disease I caught while living in San Francisco in the late 1990s. The problem is that the cure is living through a massive economic downturn, which I escaped to live footloose and fancy-free here in Europe. I may be in trouble. The question that just popped into my mind is, can you find the next killer app by looking? Am I doomed to wander the technical world searching for this digital holy grail forever? Just a thought. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] I'm sure there are many, many people trying to find or invent the next killer app constantly. There have been suprisingly few killer apps over the last 10-20 years. Probably 5 in total if that. There are millions of developers out there who I'm sure would all love to figure out the next new big thing. My own personal opinion is that they happen by a very rare combination of the right people having the right idea at the right time with the right funding, the right marketing and the right marketplace. Also we now exist in a very different market place to the Netscape and 1-2-3 days. Since MS sucked out the oxygen of the desktop software market, I find it hard to imagine the next killer app being a traditional application, in the desktop sense.  I suspect most of the low hanging fruit of the desktop software world have been been picked - or that there's so much risk of MS attacking the venture and using their monopoly to crush any competition that it'd be too hard to get sufficient funding for a truly killer app - unless its open source. I hope to be proven wrong. 6:31:21 PM    comment []

C# language features. Time for a Java preprocessor, J*? Anders presentation from OOPSLA contains some code samples of features that will be coming in the next major version of C# (note that these features are not in the Everett Visual Studio release which is due shortly; these features will probably be hitting the streets around a year from now.) [Thinking In .NET] This is a good presentation; Anders has done a good job of cloning the Java language and adding a few nice bells and whistles. After 5-6 years developement with few changes to the underlying language I think the Java world could benefit from some similar syntax sugar. Though the Java platform is far more important than a few bits of syntax sugar (e.g. I really don't miss generics that much), it might be nice to start thinking of what enhancements to Java we could consider. Most of these enhancements could be implemented in a preprocessor that outputs Java-compatible bytecode, so backwards compatiblity could be maintained. So I've started putting together a list of features that a fictional Java pre-processor language could provide called J*. 1:33:25 PM    comment []