Sorry it's been so long

Sorry it's been so long since I posted on this blog. But I'm back and better than ever. This week I wanted to talk about my plans for the future I'm going to do a comparison of some back-end languages (ruby on rails, smalltalk, and php) by doing a tutorial in each of them. Also I'm going to do a podcast that will be released bi-weekly it will have some of the latest tech news and I'll have a subject that I'll talk about. I hope you'll enjoy it.

What can we learn from the mobile market?

We all know that the mobile market is making tons of money but how and what can we learn from them. Well for starters you can pick up just about any mobile phone and make a call you don't have to learn a new interface or anything just pick up the phone, dial, and push the send button. In the PC world if I just wanted to browse the Internet I may have to learn a new interface or do something totally different than what I'm used to. Ok now say you want to get a new ring tone for your mobile it's really simple to do all you have to do is to subscribe to a service and download your ring tone which is automatically put on your bill you don't have to provide your credit card number or anything and if you didn't find what you wanted you can just subscribe to another ring tone service. Then again on a PC if we wanted to download a song to put on our ipod we'd first have to install itunes then fill a out lengthy form to give away all of your private information, then if you didn't find what you was looking for you would have to find another download service and fill out another huge form and give away vast amount of your personal info to another company. It's no wonder why the mobile phone market is doing so good it's because mobile's are easy and fun to use there's no hassle to get the latest browser or download the newest software. Mobiles just work and they work well under all conditions. We need to take this into account when buliding a web site our sites need to be fun and easy to use and require as little personal info as possible.

The Death of Web 2.0

I though the title might get your attention but what I really want to talk about is the death of web apps like Google's spreadsheet app and word processor and the other web apps like them that try to emulate the desktop environment on a web page. Lets go back to the beginning of computers. We really didn't have a personal computer instead we had a computer and a mainframe and the mainframe contained all the apps and code that you needed if it wasn't in the mainframe you didn't need it (or so some people say). If the mainframe was to ever go down then your computer was down and you couldn't do anything until the main frame was back up and running. We experienced a small taste of this a few days ago when YouTube went down and was down for 6 hours. Say that I was a business man and I used google spreadsheet because I was tight and couldn't afford it, what would happen to my spreadsheets and customer info? I wouldn't have access anything for 6 hours I could lose tons of business. For this reason I think most web 2.0 apps are going to prove to be just toys that people play with. I think that the web 2.0 should concentrate more on collaboration and people being able to talk to you and user generated content. Don't get me wrong these apps are great but I don't really see this going any where but just as a toy and a convenience not as a real viable substitute for Open Office or Excel.

Hey Everyone

Hey everyone my name is Chris Maness and I hope that this blog will be helpful to you I'm going to try and keep this site web developer centered (all though the ocasional design tip might be sliped in here and there). I hope you all enjoy this and most of all I hope it helps you in some way. I hope to discuss several different programing languages and may be we might all learn something.