Expecting Rain

Ryan Stewart, among other things, a blogger for ZDNet has posted an article called Rich Internet application predictions for 2008 which makes 10 (really 11) predictions for the upcoming year. It is an excellent post and I tend to side with the majority of his forecast.

The three points he made that stood out to me were:

• 2. AIR changes how people think of the web.


• 7. The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered.


• 9. Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs.

AIR changes how people think of the web.
I don't want to sound like I'm gushing about AIR, but I think Adobe has the pieces coming together to do something great. I am especially impressed with their dedication to the platform and the people using it. Shortly after the initial release that included SQLite there was some complaint that they only exposed asynchronous methods for working with databases. The very next release of AIR had synchronous methods. They didn't wait for 1.0 to come out or put it somewhere in the future on their roadmap, they did it immediately. Very impressive.

The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered.
I've spent sometime, not much mind you, working with OpenLaszlo, I even created a proof of concept application that I still have sitting on my local test server. I just don't have the passion for it that I do for Flex. There just isn't much of a buzz around it in my opinion. However, one thing to watch is that they can compile the application into either Flash or DHTML. I've never yet needed to do that, but it is an interesting feature.

I can't really comment on Curl. I know what it is generally, but have never really done anything with it.

Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs.
This stood out to me, not because I have a strong opinion either way, but feel I need to develop an opinion. In my line of work, I've not really needed real time data. Let me rephrase that, in my line of work I've not noticed a need for real time data. I do very little "polling" from servers. I don't know if that is because my applications don't need it or I have limited vision of what they could become. Either way, I'm going to spend a bit more time checking it out.

I'm very excited about the way things are developing on the web. I think it is a great time to be involved with any of these technologies. Comparing what is available now to what we had a few short years ago is truly amazing. It gives great hope for the future.

I really look forward to seeing how the year progresses and reading Ryan's score card for his 2008 predictions.

Someone asked to see the new chair, so here it is!

I've listened to Finetune for the past 2 months enjoying their Finetune Desktop. Prior to this I've listened to Pandora using PandoraBoy.

Over the past couple weeks I've become a bit unsatisfied with Finetune's selection. Today I switched back to Pandora. I've realized that Pandora is better able to match the music it plays to my taste. I've wondered if they do a better job recognizing similar music or if they just have me pegged. Either way, I'm pretty pleased with the change.

Both services are wonderful, and both are different. I plan on using them together, but imagine I'll primarily have Pandora running. If only they had the same design team that Finetune has...

It has been since 2005 since I've attended EclipseCon. I leave Monday morning at 5:30am to catch a flight and head down. I'm pretty excited. I plan on attending Google's Web Tools tutorial on Monday, then hitting various talks during the conference.

I've added a few new links to my right hand links and blogs sections. Check them out. I'll try to keep it updated with sites I go to often or resources I find particularly useful.

Well, this is old news, but I thought I'd better update my blog about it as well. I'm a very big fan of Jon Udell's writing. I think his topics and entries are well written, well thought out, and relevant to me and my thinking. He used to be employed by InfoWorld, but is switching to Microsoft. While I'm not thrilled by this change, I wish him the best and hope his articles remain true to what he has became.

I'm updating my sidebar on this blog to show his old blog archive as well as this new one.

Here is a link to his new blog: http://blog.jonudell.net/

Wow, it is very difficult to come back from vacation. I've been off for 13 days. The hardest part is filtering through all of my email. I must admit, it was a nice vacation, however, it is good to get into a schedule again.

Great idea, not too original, but extremely convenient and great implementation. They've combined two things which logically go together, but added a few things that make it nice such as the currently popular tagging notation. I like it and I'm using it.

Source: Better together: Docs & Spreadsheets

I've spent the better part of the day recovering from my backups. I lost my hard-drive on my work computer over the weekend. Fortunately, I'm rather meticulous about backing up my data. I'm restoring from a backup that was successfully ran at 2am Saturday morning.

Although I'm rather picky about what I backup and how often, I've ran into a few scenarios that have me rethinking my backup process. I'll blog about those issues and possible solutions once I figure out my ideal situation.