Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Four Guys From Rolla have a... Four Guys From Rolla have a tutorial on RSS. [Scripting News] 8:13:38 PM     XML for managers: When to innovate in... XML for managers: When to innovate in application design (Builder.com) In examining the areas of XML application that inspire caution, a good first step is to consider the weaknesses of XML in general. It should be noted that most of these weaknesses are consequences of XML’s tender age and that some of the shortcomings are the result of the fact that the technology’s rapid growth on the Web has outpaced its development. [IBM DeveloperWorks: XML News] 8:04:19 PM

Sunday, March 16, 2003

Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and... Fast Company: How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows. If it takes too long to deliver results or an additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and trust are sacrosanct. A nice article that reminds you to focus on your mission and don't forget your customers. [Tomalak's Realm] 7:20:46 PM     Social Software's Emerging Norms Clay Shirky: Social Software and the Politics of Groups. When the internet was strange and new, we concentrated on its strange new effects. Earlier generations of social software, from mailing lists to MUDs, were created when the network's population could be measured in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of millions, and the users were mostly young, male, and technologically savvy. In those days, we convinced ourselves that immersive 3D environments and changing our personalities as often as we changed socks would be the norm. That period, which ended with the rise of the Web in the early 1990s, was the last time the internet was a global village, and the software built for this environment typically made three assumptions about groups: they could be of any size; anyone should be able to join them; and the freedom of the individual is more important than the goals of the community. The network is now a global metropolis, vast and heterogeneous, and in this environment groups need protection from too-rapid growth and from being hijacked by anything from off-topic conversations to spam. The communities that thrive in this metropolitan environment violate most or all of the earlier assumptions. Instead of unlimited growth, membership, and freedom, many of the communities that have done well have bounded size or strong limits to growth, non-trivial barriers to joining or becoming a member in good standing, and enforceable community norms that constrain individual freedoms. Forums that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users, especially those convened around contentious topics, have often broken down under the weight of user hostile to the conversation [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 7:01:43 PM     ISVs and Desktop Flash Apps Here's a comment from Jeremy Allaire's blog that talks to using Flash as a Desktop app environment. The following are his words. Kevin Werbach posted this comment in reply to [Jeremy Allaire's earlier post] about Flash as solution to cross-platform desktop apps: So, why do you think these developers don't use Flash today? Lack of awareness, cost, performance, missing features, compatibility, bad associations from cheesy animated Website intros... or something else? I know Flash has significant support from ISVs and platform vendors, but not the boutique tool creators. I'm pretty close to the issue and will offer up a few comments. Hopefully Kevin Lynch or others from Macromedia can chime in on their blogs, too. Here's a shortlist: Yes, lack of awareness. Flash MX is a year into the market, and it definately takes a long time for platforms and brands to be established and re-defined. However, at the same time, Flash continues to gain awareness as a cross-platform app environment for browser contained applications, and industry analysts generally consider Flash the leading rich client today. Very few ISVs realize how deep the Flash runtime is in terms of its programming model -- for example, very few people realize that 80% of Internet desktops have a runtime that can do real-time messaging, and multi-way audio and video, APIs that are native to Flash Player 6. Cognitive Dissonance. This is what Kevin calls "bad associations from cheesy animated Website intros". Like it or not, Flash cut its teeth in motion graphics and animation, and over the past few releases evolved into an application platform. That brand and association is widely accepted. As a result, software developers generally filter out Flash from their architecture considerations because of this history. But in the early 1990s the same could be said for Windows (buggy desktop shell for DOS), and through many releases, broader and better tools, and focused marketing it became established as the premier desktop software platform. Deployment Limitations. Flash's primary runtime container is the browser today, and for ISVs building desktop applications that is a limitation. While there are many third-party products for building desktop-contained and integrated Flash applications, they are not well known in the ISV community. The original vision behind MX was for Flash to evolve outside of the browser, both on the desktop and devices. Macromedia continues to make great progress on that, so ISVs should keep a close eye on the Flash runtime container model. Programming Model. Today, building Flash applications requires a hybrid left-brain/right-brain skill-set. That's reflected in the nomenclature and workflow of the Flash IDE, which uses concepts like Movies, MovieClips, Timelines, Symbols, Layers, etc. in addition to classic software programming concepts like Components, Objects, XML, ECMAScript, and Web Services. Macromedia understands the diversity of developer types, including pure ISV-style application developers, and will surely deliver the right range of products to better optimize development workflow. In my new role at General Catalyst, I've had the opportunity meet with ISVs who've built Web application front-ends. Most of them have standardizead on Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows and the DHTML object model therein. The apps look and behave OK, and I'm sure they had lots of pain getting it all to work. I invarably introduce the concept of Flash as a rich client, and it's striking how few are aware of what Flash has evolved into, but all are receptive to the opportunity. [Jeremy Allaire's Radio ] 6:31:11 PM

Friday, February 28, 2003

Back to Blogging, and More Dan Gilmor points to a great interview with Marc Canter (of Macromedia fame) [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 9:23:59 PM     Email Address Enkoder Hiveware[base ']s Email Address Enkoder 2.0.4 is a free application for Mac OS X 10.2+ (Jaguar) that does a better job of protecting your email address from spam than any other product we know. Instead of merely breaking up and printing out a standard mailto: tag, the Enkoder generates a unique and random key and ties [it] to an encrypted array containing your address. [Zeldman.com] 11:58:34 AM

Wednesday, February 26, 2003

"We don't serve your kind here..." Dive Into Mark, a great blog whose name inevitably conjures slightly disturbing imagery when read the first few times, has a cool article on how Mark used Apache and the mod_rewrite module to stop evil spambots, spybots, and unwanted robots [~] by definition, those that don[base ']t respect the Robot Exclusion Standard [~] from stealing his bandwidth, content and email addresses. [PlaybackTime] 8:24:15 PM

Friday, February 14, 2003

Inside WebCore Dave Hyatt of the Safari team has posted docs on the new WebCore libraries. "I've begun writing some documentation on WebCore, so that people interested in contributing patches to WebCore can start learning how KHTML and KWQ work. You can find rough drafts of what I've written so far here". [Surfin' Safari] 7:47:10 PM

Tuesday, February 11, 2003

Feeling Chad's pain. In his column this week, Chad Dickerson fesses up to the dirty secret of XML content management. The blurb reads: "XML isn't a panacea, especially if the semantic integrity of data hasn't been maintained properly." No one intended for our XML data to grow unwieldy over the past few years, but it did. It takes a lot of hard work and attention to maintain the semantic integrity of the data represented in your XML, as your business morphs and changes and new people come along to touch and manipulate the data in different ways. It's particularly difficult when you're converting data created by people, ensconced in the daily ebb and flow of messy human life, into a machine-readable format intended for the ages ... [Jon's Radio] 2:38:01 PM

Monday, February 10, 2003

I keep hammering this weblog about Macromedia's products because I believe that they will be an important component in more and more corporate applications. While the ability to mix Flash's UI with XML processing and backend integration is obvious to web developers it hasn't penetrated into corporate IT circles as deeply. 3:56:39 PM     Macromedia: Cult, or Menace!? by John Dowdell; In our own work, we're shifting access to information and access to capability directly outwards, away from centralized power centers and outwards towards the decentralized population. [Macromedia - Designer Developer Center] 3:33:54 PM

© Copyright 2003 Peter Loats. Last update: 3/18/03; 8:14:30 PM.