Tim Mahoney

I was rambling around the internet today, and stumbled across this great talk from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Very inspirational. His speech starts at 6:26 or so.

The showdown started last week, and the only thing I’m really interested in is that fact that when FourSquare came out, it was very cool and people that sign up for it know what they’re getting into. Obviously people that had privacy concerns are staying away from it. When Facebook Places came out, it was automatically enabled for everyone, and all they got was a whole load of flak about disabling it. Does that mean it’s a failure? I don’t think so, but I suppose it would have been smarter to send people a message, telling them about the service, and highlighting privacy concerns. Facebook took a lot of heat over the past year or so regarding privacy, so you’d think they’d want to head that off at the pass before it got to be an issue.

Signed up for a gym down the road, so I’m actually gonna try (really, I am) to get in shape.

CodeIgniter is powerful. In the realm of Model-View-Controller frameworks, I have no idea how it stacks up against, say, the Zend framework, but that doesn’t really matter, because of one simple reason: I don’t have $1195 to spend on a software. Nor do I know how it compares to CakePHP, which is open source. The whole point here is that I’m not interested in comparing MVC frameworks. There’s plenty of posts about that. The idea here is to get into and get used to using the style of programming that is MVC. I don’t anticipate that I’ll build my own framework; more that I anticipate needing to use the style of programming in the coming year or 2.

So learning CodeIgniter. The 2 video tutorials help a bit, and get me into the swing of things, and Object-Oriented Programming is simple, but thinking MVC is tough. Oh I realize how efficient it is, don’t get me wrong, but I’m finding that I’m spending as much time separating and documenting my code as I am writing it; which by all means I need to do more of. All steps in making myself a better programmer, I guess.

I haven’t decided what my first MVC application is going to be yet either, I’m just sort of going through the documentation and learning the various functionalities available to me. So far, I like how the database querying is done.

The template system reminds me a bit of Smarty, but obviously without the overhead. I definitely can see myself extending this for my needs.

Up again at 6am today, last night went to bed around 11 again. Again I feel like I awoke mid-dream, so I’m going to try going to bed around 11:30 this evening I think. However, that might prove difficult because I’m going to a charity event for Lupus tonight, which we might return late from, which will in turn make getting up early tough.

Read some of my INC. magazine that started arriving over breakfast, checked email, (none) and checked my news feeds to get up to date.

It’s really quite wonderful to be up in time to watch the sun rise! I’m looking forward to waking up early over the weekend as well actually; there’s work to be done that I’ve been putting off for a little while.

Got up on time again, but I feel like I woke up in the middle of a dream again; the rhythm is totally wrong for me, and I need to find out what my sleep cycle length is so that I can go to bed at the right time. I don’t toss and turn, ever, so pretty much when I go to bed is when I go to sleep.

Adobe’s been taking quite a beating lately from a lot of folks. Apple won’t support it on it’s mobile devices, everyone is touting HTML5 as a “Flash killer,” and all in all the PR for them has been rather awful.

All that being said, this could be an opportunity for Adobe to turn around and make something excellent for themselves.

Creating HTML5 code using Flash

The HTML5 specification does a lot. It doesn’t enable you to do everything that Flash does, but there’s a lot there, and and it’s coming along quickly. So, how about this? Adobe already has a platform that creates rich web applications well. Adobe even has their own HTML generator, Dreamweaver. I’m sure this is on their mind, but won’t people be able to build HTML5 applications in Dreamweaver? It’s not too much of a stretch to think that Adobe has tasked a bunch of people to basically make an “HTML5 Mode” for Dreamweaver, integrating it (as they normally do) with the rest of their products, so that you can take advantage of everything HTML5 enables you to do. Created a cool animation in Flash? Save it as an .flv file and embed it in an HTML5 video tag with Dreamweaver.

I think they could come out of this with the hottest HTML5 development platform out there. Or, they can sit back and let people ream them. If they keep throwing up the line “Adobe is fundamentally about making it easier for devs to write multiplatform tools” Then obviously they’re going to have to move forward with the rest of us, no? Does anyone really think that Dreamweaver will not support all that HTML5 has to offer? If it doesn’t, an entire segment of Adobe’s customer base will bid them good day – the web designers and developers will move to another HTML generator-type suite.

On Drawbacks, and Timing

Both methods have their issues. Flash’s video playback is now hardware accelerated in Windows, but still lacks that in Mac OS X and Linux. On the other hand, HTML5′s browser support is not all there yet, and won’t be for a while. This means if Adobe can get their act together, they might come out of this smelling like roses.

Apple’s Refusal to Enable Flash on it’s devices

Apple sells closed-source software. It enables developers to make software for their platform, but you can only distribute it through approved channels, that are controlled by Apple. If developers could write a quick Flash application, put it on a website, and point people to it, wouldn’t that enable people to circumvent the App Store? Wouldn’t that “rob” Apple of a significant portion of the profits they made by taking a cut from developers selling software on the App Store?

I’m not here to hate Apple; I can appreciate that Apple’s refusal is business, not personal. But it reeks of a “we want to make more money” decision. It’s easy for a lot of people to

tl;dr

There’s an opportunity inherent in this situation: The user experience on the web is always getting better, and there is a lot of business to be had in building and deploying new and exciting applications all across the internet. Whether Adobe swallows it’s pride and moves forward with an open standard or not, somebody’s going to come out of this on top.

The first day. I’m a little tired, but I was up at 6, went for a run, (what happened to summer? It was 34 degrees out there this morning) ate breakfast, and did some reading. All before leaving for work. The vibrating alarm woke me up fine, and I think I was in the correct 1.5 hour cycle; I went to bed at 12, and woke up at 6. I feel like I woke up in the middle of a dream, however, so I might try and go to bed earlier tonight so that I can avoid that; it leaves me groggy for half the day.

I’ve decided to become an early riser. For me, this means getting up at 6am. I need to get a vibrating alarm clock, because my girlfriend is a very light sleeper and I don’t want to wake her up.

I’ve been hard at work, and I think I have the first iteration of the database schema ready to start building around. I’m planning to start with the administration portion, because without it, I don’t have any content to display on the front end at all. Sort of a Data / Logic / Presentation thing I think.

The administration area needs to be familiar to people. I like both WordPress’ and CMS Made Simple’s, because it splits the different things you need to manage into identifiable categories and you have a very good idea of where to find everything just by looking at the “Admin Home Page.” What I’d like to do a little different is multi-tasking. At the moment, you can only be on one page at a time, something that irks me greatly when I’m trying to put together a site in either system. If I’m trying to edit templates and style sheets at the same time so that I can get a site out the door, at the moment I’m stuck switching between tabs/windows. What I really want is the ability to have separate, what I’m going to call, “Panes,” so that when you click a menu item it opens in the browser window, but if you click another menu item it opens another “Pane,” that’s not an actual new browser window or tab, but a new frame within the same browser tab.

This way, you can open multiple Panes in a window, and be working on different things in the system, all independent of one another, but still in one place where you can see them all.

Of course, this will not be developed right away. I need to put together an Ajax framework for it to happen, and I’m more concerned with being able to manage putting stuff into the database than making it pretty and user-friendly. There will come a time for GUI design, though, and I always like brainstorming how friendly I’d like it to be from an early stage, because it will affect how I build the system .