system.reflecti0n.net

I was sceptical at first… really sceptical. Mostly because the hype about it didn’t serve this app very well. Mostly that hype sounded like a promise to let you use web pages offline. Yeah, in an age where we got fast Internet access at work and at home, an offer like that doesn’t raise as much as a big whoop from anybody.

Then, in spite of not being so impressed, I got to trying it out just a month ago because I heard good things about Twhirl and that just happened to use Adobe AIR. So from installing Twhirl I could see for myself that AIR is more than offline web pages. It’s really a platform for making web applications outside of your browser. And that’s not bad at all. Like the great urban philosophers told us: don’t believe the hype.

Given the hard times ahead for the tech industry, we’re going to see a lot of unemployed web developers in the near future. I expect some of them will direct their attention to Adobe AIR in their spare time

Now I’m on to my second AIR app: RTM Notifier (yeah, I’m so into web 2.0, I’m really Web 2.9—practically Web 3.0, but that’s another story altogether).

These days you can’t have too many gadgets on your desktop anyway, so pick the ones you’re going to like to use. The dedicated-purpose gadgets like Twhirl come with a fairly light footprint and because they know they’re small, they don’t bloat their scene with pointless extra features. They just do what they meant to do and little else. If only we could get the same out of our paid-for software.

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Ok, there’s been a hullabaloo of commentary about Steve Ballmer musing about Webkit, as recycled in Techcrunch last week: Microsoft Probably Not Really Considering WebKit For IE

But really, it’s not such an absurd idea. When you look at the two leaders for web browsing, IE and Firefox, it’s becomes pretty clear that a viable path for the web browser is a container… All Firefox is is a nice frame around Gecko… A frame that is extensible through their hundreds and hundreds of add-ons.

…So why couldn’t Microsoft Internet Explorer do the same? No reason, they just don’t right now. But in the future, IE could easily just be a container that wraps around MSHTML, WebKit or Gecko. If anyone could do it, it might as well be Microsoft since by sheer numbers they’ve got enough developers to come up with a  enough wrapper that actually co-operates with all three engines.

Really it’s not such a stretch. If you’re a Firefox user, do a quick survey of your add-ons. How many of them alter the chrome around the web page and how many of them alter the web page itself—and Greasemonkey scripts only count as ONE add-on. That’s right, a lot of them only interact with the edges around your web page so they have nothing to do with the rendering engine itself.

So we’re nearing a point where we can imagine configuring your web-browsing experience as: a) which rendering engine do you want; and b) which web browser frame do you want.

Of course, even if all the web browsers were 100% standards compliant in the exact same way then this still matters, each frame around your web browsing experience would be significant as it is the container for your extensions and add-ons as well and the quality of your frame would be a deciding factor between IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera.

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Ok, just a couple of small issues I want on the record…

Twitter has stopped posting my SMS updates. I think after sending a couple while I was overseas in Ireland and the UK they decided to cut me off. Could they must have been dinged for receiving out-of-country SMS messages from me? Really, I’d prefer them to tell me.

On the upside, I resorted to ping.fm for my posting updates. They don’t do SMS, but they do post a custom email for you to send stuff to. They even clipped the “This message was sent from my BlackBerry” footer from the posting. So I lost SMS, gained email and since unlimited email is included in my plan I actually come out ahead.

I still would like to have been told I was going to lose SMS. I think I’ll ask Twitter customer service about it and see what they come back with.

The other issue is slightly more frustrating. Each time I post from Windows’ Live Writer I get a double-post. I looked around and this is not an uncommon issue. Funny thing is, I think this only happens when I post on my laptop. That is, I remember making posts from my desktop ‘puter and not noticing a double-post. This posting is on my desktop now, so it’s part of a grand experiment… I’m suspicious it’s either a bad plugin, somehow I’ve got doubled settings in my laptop or drafts I save to an offline folder are breaking things somehow. Stay tuned for more riveting developments.

So there you are. Blogging is hell—when the tools don’t work. The Twitter issue balanced out to a net-zero in the end, but  I’ll have a tough time giving up on Live Writer if I can’t get around this double-post thing.

Update: There it is. Plain as the nose on your face, TWO postings of the same article. Even the permalink IDs are the same. Now my suspicion moves me to believe this is a BlogEngine.net issue... I wonder if it's because I posted to two categories. Instead of littering the blog with test posts, I'm going to try a posting tomorrow. At least theissue isn't a laptop-vs-desktop installation thing, both posting locations suck the same, so I can look elesewhere for a solution!

 Update 2: A solution, kind of. It seems this is a BlogEngine bug. To cut it short, there seems to be two instances of the same post in memory. There is actually only one post recorded so it's not worth it to delete the extra post. The trcik to erasing the double post is to reset your web app-- the easiest way is to edit your Web.Config file... add/remove a carriage return from the endo of the file and save it. This forces a reload and poof, the double post is gone. I bet they're caching the post and the trigger is firing twice... why is an issue for another day.

Tags: blogging, blogengine.net, web.config, double-posts

I’ve been in Dublin since Monday at the request of one of our clients. At first I thought it this was just one of those things where people just don’t like our software because too much of the configuration is left up to them. How wrong I was.

It turns out we’ve sent people over to the client multiple times, yet little or none of the business requirements were relayed to people like me who deploy their software. We just didn’t send the right people to do the job.

It’s amazing the difference a few days with a client can do to fill in the whole picture.  If we’re going to customize our software I really prefer getting to meet the client myself and really hash out the issues myself. It’s way better than getting a non-technical person to guess what the software would look like if it really fulfilled the client’s needs.

I think that’s really the thrust of it. Software development, certainly when you’re doing application services like I do, is more than coding, it’s really business fulfilment. I think that’s what we lose track of, or never get to realize when we’re so insulated from the client.

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I open Windows’ Live Writer, I type, I press “Publish” and I’m done.

For all those who dispute Microsoft’s ability to make something simple that works well—well, I wouldn’t need to argue with them. Just knowing Live Writer is out there tells me people who make these spurious statements have the wool pulled over their eyes or aren’t looking in the right direction.

Sure, there’s more to do in Writer than my description in the first paragraph but that’s just added value. You don’t need to use the extras if you don’t want to. This is a fundamental to good application design. No, it’s the highest principal of all, an axiom:

Extra features are nice, but they shouldn’t stand in the way of getting the job done.

Axioms are all well and good, but how do we make those that have influence on our apps understand this principal? Honestly I often go home feeling like I’ve spent the entire day talking to a brick wall. And those walls are impossible to get around. This frustrates me like only fellow developers can understand. Shabby applications are not all our fault. They are often the sum of many decisions and arguments: good, bad and unfortunate.

Tags: axioms, good design, simplicity, creativity