Ummm … 43 things is very cool … go see it.
Here’s my first thing; I’m a horribly goal-oriented person, and I’m sick of postponing my life until I do X or achieve Y, mostly because every time I actually do achieve X, there’s another X ready and waiting to take its place.
The web is going nuts over Jesse Jame’s Garrett’s latest essay on Ajax web apps, and I blogged it myself, if a bit tangentially …
But I was thinking tonight as I was revisiting the concept and turning it around in my head: how would I feel about this if I was Macromedia? Not too happy!
In fact, at www.macromedia.com right now, the ad at top of of the page says: “Great digital experiences unleashed.”
If that’s the case, why didn’t Google use Flash for Google Maps? or GMail? or Google suggest? Why isn’t Flickr built in Flash?
The answer, I think, is fairly simple: Flash is fat, and Ajax is slim.
Flash has deep roots in the world of images. Its bad name – a heritage that still lingers, to a degree – is almost entirely due to its overuse of images, dancing bears, and other glitzy gew-gaws that are good demo-ware but bad anything-else-ware. And even today, for the simplest of things, Flash apps are going to set you back something a minimum of tens of kilobytes – and that’s a bare minimum.
Whereas Google suggest which does things that absolutely blow your mind like provide sensible real-time suggestions and results as you type in search terms, is, wait for it, all of 4 kilobytes.
Ajax needs speed like Mario Andretti needs speed. Providing desktop-type performance over a thin wire a thousand miles long is capital H hard … and to do it, you need to be skinny. Really skinny.
The question is, is it skinnier than Flash can ever be? I think it is, and I think Macromedia better watch out.
Right now Ajax is hard. It’s a combination of a 4 or 5 leading-edge technologies that few web developers fully understand. You’ve got to use them and put them together just right to make everything work.
But just wait. Very shortly, some smart start-up, and probably more than one, will start providing pre-built Ajax engines: everything you need to get Ajax web apps up and running in less time than it takes to install Microsoft Word.
And there’ll be a nice user-friendly GUI tool in which to build and publish your app. Connect the dots, add your content, link in to your data sources and voila: Ajax for dummies.
At that point, Flash will once more be relegated to the image-intentive ghetto Macromedia is trying so hard to escape.
PS:
Flickr does use Flash, but only (I believe) for image editing purposes – where you would have to say it makes sense. Tagging, etc. are Ajax functionalities.
Ever thought of taking a hike … and not coming back for 4 months?
A business associate of mine, Dave Baggenstos, is doing exactly that. Very cool.
The phrase “papers, can I see your papers” brings back one massive conglomerate image in my mind of the hundreds of cold-war spy movies I’ve wasted my time on … the hero/ine is stepping onto the train or walking through the street in some Eastern bloc country with a totalitarian government.
But that could never happen here, could it? Maybe it already has ….
Speaking as a Canadian of relatively recent European descent, Europe is really ticking me off these days.
What’s bugging me? European hunger to sell methods of killing people to China.
Maybe I’m just stupid. But I have this impression that Europe thinks it’s a kinder, gentler place than, for instance, the US of A. That’s, at least, what one might think after the huge wedge (also called the Atlantic Ocean) driven between Europe and the States by the ongoing Iraq situation.
But why, oh why, are the Europeans – France in particular – always so eager to be merchants of death? It’s not OK to make war on other nations, but it is OK to sell weapons to others so they can go make war? After all, that’s what weapons are for.
Not that I have anything particularly against China. Chinese people are great. Unfortunately, their government is totalitarian, puts people in jail whenever it wishes, has occupied and attempted to destroy Tibet, is continually rattling sabers at Taiwan, does not allow true religious freedom (and in fact jails and persecutes Christians), and in many other ways, feels compelled to throw its considerable weight around. Not the kind of government you want to sell weapons to, huh?
But European principles, apparently, are up for sale to the highest bidder.
Note:
I was kind of inspired to finish this column after I read Pieter Dorsman’s blog on politics. I had been meaning to write it ever since I saw the NY Times article linked to above, but had kept putting it off. I met Pieter at Vancouver Enterprise Forum, and his blog is quite good. Plus, he’s a fellow Dutchman!
The last 3-4 posts on my blog to the contrary, I swear I am not on a bug-hunting binge right now … they just keep popping up. Finder (the windowing app for Mac OS X) kinda went crazy today.
Every time I moved an icon or a window, it left tracks somewhat like a jet contrail. So, I thought, let’s make some art. Here’s the result:
Ajax applications (Asynchronous Javascript + XML) are the hottest topic du jour, due to Jesse Jame Garrett’s essay on the topic a few days ago.
(Offtopic: I hate being scooped by Slashdot! I noticed the Ajax article a few days ago off a link at Peterme, and was going to blog it …. but … Slashdot beat me to it.)
In any case, Jeffrey Veen, another Adaptive Path associate, mentioned that 1976Design.com had a pretty neat implementation of this: the live search results it offers.
Cool – but the same rules apply: validate your input.
While doing things the old fashioned way might have brought up a standard error page, this Ajax implementation sort of hung out the dirty laundry in public, when I fed it something indigestible (an apostrophe):
I saw a Google error today for the first time ever …. Mike Skovgaard, one of our developers, found it first.
Screenshot follows, as proof:
I attended the Vancouver Enterprise Forum tonight for the first time.
It’s a bunch of people who are related to the technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurial worlds who get together every month around different topics. This month was cleantech, or green energy. Not really my specialty, but the speakers were interesting. They included Jeff Moris, a particularly clueful representive in the Washington state legislature, Kirk Washington, who, in addition to having a cool name and being one of the people in at the ground floor of Ballard Power Systems, is a venture capitalist, and a really smart young venture capitalist, Christine Bergeron, who should really get that ‘Miss’ taken off her puff page at her current employer’s site, Chrysalix.
The coolest part, though, as usual, was schmoozing with all kinds of interesting people before and after the speakers.
I met the CFO of Actenum, Peiter Dorsman. Actenum is a high-end scheduling firm with several PhD’s on staff, who you’d really do well to talk to you if you need to solve the stereotypical travelling salesman problem, or if you have 700 trucks in your fleet, and need to figure out the most efficient way to get them all the places they need to go. Pieter is the only CFO I know (not that I know an incredible number of CFOs) who is also an amateur astronomer, which is kinda cool.
I met Thomas Dowad of BeforeTechnologyLimited, who is a veteran programmer working on ways of making smart embedded systems programmable by mere mortals for mere pennies. Very cool.
And I met a bunch of really smart grad students from UBC and SFU who were working on all kinds of cool stuff: alcohol-based fuel cells, automation and robotics control systems, you name it.
All in all, a well-spent evening. Hopefully next month’s topic will be just a little bit more up my alley: web application development.
iPhoto’s slowness is turning a great iApp into the Achilles heel of Apple’s digital lifestyle.
It’s just so easy to start using, that – amazingly enough – people actually use it. And what happens when you do? Frustration and disappointment, to a degree.
iPhoto is still cool, don’t get me wrong. It’s just dog-ass slow.
I went out star-gazing last night with some astronomical binoculars I purchased a month and a half ago.
We’ve been having the most incredible beautiful clear sunny days here … and clear sunny days mean clear night skies – an amateur astronomer’s delight. I made my way down to McDonald Park, a nice reasonably-dark-sky site near Abbotsford that the Fraser Valley Astronomy society has worked to keep dark.
I’m just starting out in amateur astronomy, so I made a classic rookie mistake: not checking or remembering the position and phase of the moon. It was almost full, and VERY bright. Seriously, it was bright enough to cast high-contrast shadows. It was bright enought to read by.
Still, I had some fun scanning the brigher objects in the night sky, such as Orion. It always amazes me that so many people have no clue where the Orion constellation is or what it looks like. It’s so clear, so bright, and so obvious, that if it is once pointed out to you, you will recognize it for the rest of your life.
Look for this pattern in the night sky:
Three bright stars make up Orion’s belt. He’s a hunter, and his left shoulder is Betelgeuse, a red giant star that is the 12th brightest in Earth’s night sky. His right leg is Rigel, even brighter. And to the right an arc of stars shows the position of his bow.
Once you see this pattern, you’ll never forget it. But you’ll only see it in winter, at least if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, since that’s when our part of the planet points in his part of the Milky Way galaxy.
I also looked for a time to the north, trying to pick out comet Macholz, but with no success. I’m not sure if that was due to a mountain range between me and the northern horizon, or just my inability to pick it up.
And, of couse, I had to spend some time just ogling the moon – so bright in my binoculars that my eyes almost started watering. The huge rayed crater Tycho was spell-binding. (Go to this picture, look at the bottom part of the moon, and see the large impact crater with rays springing up across a quarter of the moon’s surface: that’s Tycho.)
It was short but sweet … next time I’ll have to time it better and get a darker sky.
I ran across this Dilbert quote in the coursework for my ETEC (education technology) 510 course today:
Change is good – you go first – Dilbert
Love it!
I pop my name into Google from time to time to see where my blog comes up, among other things, and I always find something interesting.
Such as this article on the movie “The Passion of the Christ, to which I responded almost exactly one year ago. Click the link under Insider Letters on the left side of the screen to see it, or click this link to get to it directly.
I’ve also included the text of it below …
I’m currently in the Master of Educational Technology program at UBC, and was doing some research on a paper tonight.
And I just found a nice new method ….
Forbes had a very good story on the cancellation (boo, hiss) of the NHL season today, in which Michael Ozanian correctly blames Bettman – not for being a poor negotiator or lousy boss – but for greedily following expansion money and losing the league in the process.
This particular quote is very interesting, particularly for a Canadian:
To meet the growing demand for players, team rosters were often filled with European skaters with only a fraction of the passion for the game that the Canadian players have. The NHL product lost some of its appeal to its rank and file.
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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