Navigate itwriting.com using a cloud-based tool:
http://affiliates.quintura.com/itwriting/quintura.html
Is this anything more than a novelty? I’d be interested in opinions.
Quintura is presenting here at The Future of Web Apps.
Category Archives: web authoring
90% of web sites are illegal
That’s according to Robin Christopher of AbilityNet, who is speaking on accessibility here at FOWA. He is referring to UK legislation that is 8 years old, requiring web sites to meet certain accessibility standards. The bonus for developers is that accessible web sites are also generally better for all users, not just those with disabilities – Christopher quotes a 35% improvement, though I’m not sure how you measure ease of use in percentages.
Why don’t developers make their sites accessible? The problem I suspect is two-fold. First, lack of resources; many sites are thrown up quickly and it seems that some developers don’t go beyond testing that it looks kind of OK in Internet Explorer. Second, a lot depends on what the standard tools and libraries produce by default. I know Adobe has done significant work on this in Dreamweaver and in Flash. Is a typical WordPress blog accessible? A good question for Matt Mullenweg, whom I will be meeting shortly.
Web identity, Facebook, iPhone debated at Future of Web Apps conference
I’m at the Future of Web Apps conference in London. Ryan Carson is interviewing Om Malik and Mike Arrington about – you guessed – the future of web applications.
Organizers Carson Systems seem to be testing the size of the market for their conference. This one follows another in London earlier this year, at a smaller venue. I suspect it is reaching its limit, though Carson consistently attracts high quality speakers. The conference aims to be an incubator for startups, though it attracts a wider audience than that implies.
As for the debate on stage, it is all pretty inconclusive as you would expect, but I’m interested in how the discussion keeps coming back to web identity issues. “Google pushing its identity mechanism, so is Yahoo, and so on,” says Malik. Carson asks how the problem of multiple identities will be fixed? Malik immediately turns pragmatist. Developers should “support them all, what do you care? Let them fight it out”.
The conversation turns to Facebook. The participants flail around. Nobody knows how significant Facebook will prove long-term, or how viable Facebook applications are for developers. There is concern that Facebook itself may just copy all the good ideas. Further, Malik is dismissive of what has been done so far. “It is amateur, preliminary stuff,” says Malik. “If it is such as great web OS, where are the smart applications? I haven’t seen any.” Asked where Facebook will be in a year’s time, Arrington says it will go public; Malik says it will be embroiled in legal issues.
Malik is not altogether negative. He sees the real value of Facebook as an identity system. “”One application which shows the potential of Facebook is Free World Dialup [FWD]. Facebook becomes a directory service. That would be my idea of a disruptive application.” FWD integrated VOIP into Facebook.
Has Google been beaten by Facebook? “I don’t think the game is over with regard to social networking,” says Arrington.
What else? I liked Malik’s comment that “You should be building web-apps that are brain-dead simple.” According to him, many web apps “don’t address the principle of fixing someone’s pain point… a lot just do too much and it’s not clear who they are for”.
Malik also noted that European startups have an advantage over the US, though not necessarily Asia. “Europe has a much better broadband infrastructure. You are seeing the next broadband platform. Second, most European startups have the ability to incorporate mobile into their business plans.
Carson touches on mobile development. Is the iPhone a viable development platform? “Why support a platform where the guys who own it don’t want it to be supported?”, says Malik. What about iPhone vs Google Phone? “Google Phone is tackling the emerging markets. iPhone is the upper end of the market.”
One more quote from Malik. “Please stop doing offlice clones. However you might thing Google docs are great, people are not using them.”
Arrington’s big tip is not to spend much money. The beauty of the web is that bright ideas can be tested cheaply.
Technorati tags: fowa, iphone, apple, google, facebook, om malik, mike arrington
Adobe Thermo: Visual programming for designers
Adobe has taken the wraps off Thermo, a new tool aimed at bridging the designer/developer gap by enabling designers to create an interactive user interface without writing code, and making it easier for designers to create components that developers can code against. Graphical components can be converted into MXML objects.
Designers will be able to work with placeholder dynamic data, giving a more accurate idea of what an application will look like at runtime.
An important feature is round-tripping between Thermo and Flex Builder. Yes, this sounds similar to what Microsoft offers with Expression and Visual Studio:
The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.
There’s a blow-by-blow account of the Thermo demo at Max in Jen deHaan’s blog post. It sounds as if it went down well at Max. Don’t get too excited though: this is a sneak preview, so no product before 2008, maybe later than that for the release version.
I’m not at the conference myself; I’ll be attending the European Max in a couple of weeks time, and I’ll find out what I can about Thermo.
Personally I’m not excited by live data at design-time. Borland has had this for years in Delphi, and it never struck me as a huge advantage. Then again I am not a designer. Round-tripping is a big feature though, and the ability to take graphics out of PhotoShop and easily convert them to programmable components sounds great.
It’s also interesting to see the unfolding of another chapter in the Adobe/Microsoft wars. There are even family connections. The Thermo team is led by Mark Anders, one of the inventors of Microsoft’s ASP.NET.
Upgrading WordPress
This blog is now running on WordPress 2.3. The differences from 2.2 are minor from the user’s perspective, which strikes me as a sign of maturity: it was already very good. Unfortunately the team did not address my number one wish, which is paged comments – but I realise I am in a minority as the feature has only 8 votes at the time of writing. There is a plug-in, but it does not work well with the theme I use. I am not complaining though; WordPress is fantastic and I am a loyal user. I have started using it for longer articles as well as blog posts; it is effective as a simple content management system for this site.
With the upgrade to 2.3 I have also converted to a Subversion install. This means I can do a Subversion update to grab the latest version, making it easier to stay current.
Matt Mullenwegg is speaking on WordPress.com architecture at the Future of Web Apps conference in London later this week. I will be there and blogging.
What’s wrong with the mobile web?
Scott Karp has some of the reasons. Ryan Stewart says all we need is optimized rich internet applications. Problem is, what proportion of the Internet’s vast resources is ever going to be packaged as RIAs targeting devices? And what is the chance that your particular device will actually be able to run these RIAs where they exist? This is not only a technical problem; there is also the issue of telecom companies locking down their contract mobiles.
My take is different. Although I agree with most of Karp’s points, I reckon we have to change the devices, not the Internet. I am a relatively heavy mobile web user, and I actually have a problem with many sites that are supposedly optimized for mobiles. They tend to presume that I am using the tiniest possible screen – my mobile screen is bigger than some – and sometimes make it difficult to access the full content of the site. I end up trying to figure out how to get past the mobile-detection, pretending to be a desktop browser.
My preference then is for devices that do smart things with zooming, scaling and paging, so that the real Web is easier to use. Based on my brief hands-on test, Apple’s iPhone is fairly good at this. So is my Samsung i600, and so are the Nokia Internet Tablets that I’ve seen, to name a couple of others.
Site designers that really want to be device-friendly should never assume that the browser is capable of running Flash 9, Silverlight, or the latest Ajax libraries. After all, plain old HTML is fantastic for diverse devices – that is what it was designed for. Having this as an alternative alongside the latest Ajaxified or RIA-based UI is great for struggling mobile web users such as myself.
The battle for the dominant Web API
Thought-provoking post from Joel Spolsky on web client APIs. He says that whoever has the best AJAX library will be the next Microsoft.
Spolsky dismisses “the p-code/Java model” (which would include Flash and Silverlight 1.1 as well as Java applets):
Sandboxes are penalty boxes; they’re slow and they suck, which is why Java Applets are dead, dead, dead. To build a sandbox you pretty much doom yourself to running at 1/10th the speed of the underlying platform, and you doom yourself to never supporting any of the cool features that show up on one of the platforms but not the others.
I don’t follow his logic here. First, “sandboxes” may be slow compared to true native code, but they are faster than any browser-hosted Javascript, at least until Tamarin comes along. Second, AJAX apps are generally as much or more hobbled than plug-in applets.
I’m not dismissing the idea of compiling to Javascript though. There are interesting projects that do this already. In addition, Spolsky seems to be thinking along the same lines as Microsoft’s Eric Meijer, who told me about the misleadingly-named “LINQ 2.0”. But I think plug-in based apps will be important as well, both as entire applications and as rich components within AJAX apps.
Personally I hope there will not be a “new Microsoft.” I’d like to see diversity based on web standards.
IBM’s new Lotus Symphony
I’ve had a quick look at the beta of Lotus Symphony, IBM’s new Office suite. It’s built on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP), which is interesting in itself, and is another salvo in the office document format war.
Why would anyone want to use the new Symphony? I presume it makes some kind of sense in the context of an integrated workflow and collaboration platform based on Notes. Considered purely as an office suite, it does not yet come close to Microsoft Office, or even Open Office.
The FAQ claims some compatibility with “Microsoft Office files” (though there’s a long list of things that might not convert correctly), but studiously avoids any mention of the 2007 Microsoft Office document formats. It should say: compatibility with old Microsoft Office formats. Note that if you install Office 2007, save a document, and try to open it in Symphony, it will not work at all. Nor will Microsoft Office (any version) open Symphony documents, unless you take the trouble to export to a format other than Open Document. What a mess.
When I searched for Lotus Symphony on Google, I was amused to see what came third and fourth in the list:
Scott Guthrie on .NET futures
I’ve posted my interview with Scott Guthrie, from the UK Mix07. It covers topics including LINQ, Silverlight, the work with Novell/Mono on Moonlight (Silverlight for Linux), ASP.NET futures including MVC, and offline web applications.
Guthrie is a General Manager at Microsoft, responsible for most of the development teams working on .NET. He did some excellent presentations at the UK Mix, intermingling live coding and demos with slides, talk, and dealing with ad-hoc questions – not an easy task.
There were several things I found interesting in his answers to my questions. On a technical level, the way Microsoft’s various implementations of the Common Language Runtime share code is intriguing. In particular, I was fascinated to learn that Silverlight and the desktop CLR are built from the same code tree. There is a second code tree for the CLR, but it is for the Compact Framework, not for Silverlight. The implication is that the performance of Silverlight and its compatibility with other .NET code should be pretty good.
How then is Silverlight much smaller than the desktop CLR? The reason is that most of the Framework library is missing. That’s the trade-off.
Another point of interest is the strength of Guthrie’s reaction when I asked about offline web applications, and Microsoft’s platform versus other approaches such as Google Gears and Adobe AIR. When a spokesperson takes the trouble to trash the competition, it is often a sign of concern.
CodeGear’s Ruby on Rails IDE is released
CodeGear has released its IDE for Ruby on Rails. Called 3rdRail, it installs an instant Ruby on Rails environment, and features code completion, project management, refactoring and integrated debugging. The Eclipse-based IDE runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, and a 30 day trial is available. I’m downloading it now.