Posts

In thinking about the iPhone, it occurs to me that it is more a small handheld computer with a telephony application than it is a traditional mobile phone. In this vein, I have some questions about the iPhone: How easy is it going to be for third party software developers to create applications for the iPhone? Clearly the phone will have some different APIs than the desktop version of OS X, but will developers be able to build applications using their regular development tools? How will software for the iPhone, from Apple or third parties be distributed? Will it be easy to install applications and system updates via the iTunes syncing? If the answer is yes, the iPhone is clearly vastly different from other mobile phones, which most people never update at all. Can you turn off the phone features and still use the music player and other non-communications features? In other words, can I use it on an airplane? Is the IMAP push protocol the phone uses going to be open? Will Gmail be able to offer it as well as Yahoo? Will I be able to deploy some software on my own server that enables IMAP push to an iPhone? If it’s a little computer running a Unix-like operating system, how easy will it be to crash? How long until we see the first iPhone virus? In other news, David Pogue has posted some first impressions after spending an hour playing with an iPhone. ...

I’m not normally a gadget person, and I am almost always a late adopter. I didn’t try out an iPod until the third generation was released. It took me forever to get a mobile phone and a digital camera. I’m always in that group of people who would prefer to feel the smug satisfaction of getting a good deal on something that has been out for awhile rather than being the first person on my block to pay too much for the hot new thing. ...

I admit that I can’t wait to see Apple’s iPhone up close. Update: Gizmodo is rocking the keynote coverage. (Engadget’s coverage is great as well, and really, why not follow them all?)

Scott Rosenberg, in discussing the new version of Microsoft Word, makes the following observation about icons: Maybe I’m unusual, but I have always found the dizzying array of toolbar icons in Office programs profoundly unhelpful. Icons are fine when they are small in number and used constantly (think of the stop, reload, back and forward buttons on your browser). But when you have a multitude of complex tools and features, as in Word, you never really get the hang of what all those little hierogylphs really mean. ...

As I have mentioned many times before, I’m a big adherent of unit testing. If you have a comprehensive suite of unit tests, seeing them all work before you commit a bug fix or feature to an application provides at least basic assurance that you haven’t screwed things up too badly. In the case of Web applications, the utopian goal is to be able to run your unit tests and feel assured that your application works without doing any testing through the browser at all. ...

To remind readers from last year, I’m constraining my predictions to areas where I have some expertise (meaning no political or current events predictions), and avoiding areas where any predictions would be completely speculative, like future product releases from Apple. I expect that in 2007 we’ll continue to be blown away by the progress we make in getting Web applications to work more like desktop applications. I think that more than seeing the state of the art advance in terms of what can be done with JavaScript, we’ll see use of these techniques become significantly more widespread. You can already do most of the things you can do in a desktop application in a Web application, or at least companies like Google can. We’ll see knowledge of these techniques spread to a much wider group of developers, thanks in large part to further integration of the popular AJAX libraries into Web development platforms. Ruby on Rails already provides many shortcuts that make adding AJAX features to your applications, we’ll see similar progress for other frameworks as well. (I think that when you perform a Web search for “jstl ajax” this time next year, the results will be more interesting.) ...

Jim Henley: And it’s also true that the US and its Iraqi allies chose to try Saddam on one of his relatively minor crimes because if they did so they could get him safely hung before they had to try him for the major ones, the gas attacks and massacres that happened during The Years of Playing Footsie with the United States. The Dujail reprisals were a war crime, no doubt about it, a bigger sham of justice than Saddam’s own trial, by two orders of magnitude. They were also the sort of war crime that people like Ralph Peters and a hundred other pundits and parapundits think the United States should be committing. Every time you read a complaint about “politically correct rules of engagement” you are reading someone who would applaud a Dujail-level slaughter if only we were to perpetrate it. ...

I was looking at my 2006 predictions today, and find that they were mostly correct, but that they lacked audacity. The predictions were: The mindshare of Ruby on Rails will grow relative to other Web application platforms, in spite of the efforts of devotees of other platforms to come up with their own Rails alternatives. I have a theory about why this is that I’ll elaborate in another post. Identity theft by way of stealing databases of personal information will continue to grow explosively. I think there’s still plenty of low hanging fruit out there for fraudsters and I think that this year we’ll see the back ends of large Web sites get hacked and see their customer databases stolen by fraudsters. Wikipedia still won’t be accepted by the academic and journalistic mainstream. The way wikis operate is counterintuitive enough that the establishment will reject it even though it’s obvious that it basically works. JavaScript will be bigger than ever. The trend toward pushing functionality back from the server to the client that got rolling in 2005 will continue to grow. Hopefully Internet Explorer 7 will be good enough to fuel this trend. The blog phenomenon continues apace. I don’t have a specific blog-related prediction, but my guess is that we’ll continue to see more big Web sites add blog-like features, and that more people will try to make their living writing blogs. The raw number of blogs will continue to grow explosively. (I guess I’d say that blogging is a trend, not a fad.) Let’s rate them: ...

I was reading about Thrace in an article in National Geographic, and wondered about whether a resource exists that provides a comparative timeline of ancient history for many known civilizations. Or why not all of them? For example, Wikipedia has a timeline of Chinese history. There’s also a timeline of the Persian empire that looks completely different. You can piece together timelines of many other ancient civilizations in a similar fashion using information in Wikipedia and elsewhere. ...

How do I do at avoiding the blog media cliches catalogued by Gawker? Let’s see: Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. Minor violator. I’m totally clean on “evar” but I can’t say the same for a couple of people who’ve left comments. FTW, O RLY, lol, FTL, OMG, FWIW, btw, PWND,ROTFL, etc. Totally clean. [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. Totally clean, but I do occasionally use this one in conversation. ...