I drank the Kool-Aide. I'm still drinking it. Even while I continue to develop for Apple products I still ask myself why? Why does it have to be like this? Objective-C feels old. XCode is a poor IDE that lacks many features other IDE's have (I miss Eclipse). Interface Builder works only so well and isn't intuitive to use. There is a gestapo feel to the App Store. Apple throw up NDA's for anything and everything. This a lot of negative energy. So why am I still acting like a mindless lemming as I head straight for the cliff?
To Apple's credit they have some of the best software I've ever used. The difference between a Windows application and a Mac application can be small, but the impact is huge. The place I notice it the most is in the UI design and animations. The UI design improvement seems to be a trend that has been consistent to most Mac developers for quite a while. The more aesthetic the application looks the more confidence I have in the product. CoreAnimation can really make an application shine too. Animation plays a bigger part in Mac software than any other platform I've developed for in the past. Microsoft, Sun, and IBM might have better tools, languages, and support, but in terms of advancing the end product they should probably take notes.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Bing?
Bing is picking up users according to the web analytics gurus of the internet. I like the simple interface, with good query results. It's even received good reviews from sites like TechCrunch. So why do I have such a hard time switching to it from Google?
At first I thought it was just muscle memory. Or laziness. Or maybe it was my confidence in old reliable. Or maybe I still had a bad taste in my mouth from using any of Microsofts previous web products. Then it finally dawned on me. Internet Explorer. Being a web developer I've really come to loath IE's wonky standardless rendering. How can I trust Microsoft to do anything correctly on the web if they can't even get their own browser to behave with the rest of the internet? I need development harmony and Microsoft to their credit is doing everything they can to gain that trust back. It's just going to take time.
At first I thought it was just muscle memory. Or laziness. Or maybe it was my confidence in old reliable. Or maybe I still had a bad taste in my mouth from using any of Microsofts previous web products. Then it finally dawned on me. Internet Explorer. Being a web developer I've really come to loath IE's wonky standardless rendering. How can I trust Microsoft to do anything correctly on the web if they can't even get their own browser to behave with the rest of the internet? I need development harmony and Microsoft to their credit is doing everything they can to gain that trust back. It's just going to take time.
Desktop Apps vs. Web Apps
I love rich web applications. I love creating them with frameworks like GWT. Once loaded in the browser they are usually very responsive, reduce load times between server requests, can be loaded from any location using a web browser, and generally reduce the time the user needs to complete a task. There are still serious short falls to this model. Thank goodness for web API's. I have been using Tweetie for the last month and have to admit there is still a place in my heart for desktop applications. Why?
Tweetie really got me thinking why I still like using desktop applications in preference to web applications. From a usability standpoint Tweetie is better than the browser because of it's simple design, quick start up, background updating, auto-login (cookies suck), and presentation of data. This allows me, the user, to get at the data I want more efficiently. I spend less than 20 seconds in Tweetie, which is absolutely brilliant. This involves starting Tweetie and then skimming tweets. Alternatively I can start a browser, hit my bookmark or enter my URL, wait for the login page to load, login, wait for my page to load, skim, close. See the shortfalls of the web model?
Time, time, time. Computers should be moving the human race forward, even when it comes to procrastination with something like Twitter. I don't want to log into a site every time I lose my cookies. I don't even want to type in a URL, which means opening a web browser. I don't want to wait for page refreshes. I don't want 1 MB of javascript or flash to slow down my user experience.
Chrome OS or Gazelle might be the future, but I want to see how it handles the above issues first. I have a lot of data in the cloud, but getting to it shouldn't be so painful. The web is still a primitive place, but it's evolving rather quickly.
Tweetie really got me thinking why I still like using desktop applications in preference to web applications. From a usability standpoint Tweetie is better than the browser because of it's simple design, quick start up, background updating, auto-login (cookies suck), and presentation of data. This allows me, the user, to get at the data I want more efficiently. I spend less than 20 seconds in Tweetie, which is absolutely brilliant. This involves starting Tweetie and then skimming tweets. Alternatively I can start a browser, hit my bookmark or enter my URL, wait for the login page to load, login, wait for my page to load, skim, close. See the shortfalls of the web model?
Time, time, time. Computers should be moving the human race forward, even when it comes to procrastination with something like Twitter. I don't want to log into a site every time I lose my cookies. I don't even want to type in a URL, which means opening a web browser. I don't want to wait for page refreshes. I don't want 1 MB of javascript or flash to slow down my user experience.
Chrome OS or Gazelle might be the future, but I want to see how it handles the above issues first. I have a lot of data in the cloud, but getting to it shouldn't be so painful. The web is still a primitive place, but it's evolving rather quickly.
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