Dylan Schiemann

Facebook recently acquired Parakey. Congrats to Joe and Blake, two of the original co-conspirators behind the skunkworks project now known as Firefox. Joe is also known for Firebug, and for his recent work on iUI, a lightweight tool for building simple iPhone apps. While the Facebook platform has become wildly popular for launching web apps based on HTML and Flash, perhaps this announcement will lead to real JavaScript/Ajax support within the Facebook platform.

Once or twice a year, I post to the Dojo interest list encouraging people to not just make noise. In other words, only respond if you actually have something useful to add. Thousands of people read the list (or try to at least), and it’s really frustrating when people respond in a only to hear themselves talk, or speak without thinking about what the person is both asking and actually trying to do.

Today, Joel on software has a post Leaning from Dave Winer. While I rarely agree with Dave, his and Joel’s comments about less noise from useless comments really resonates with me:

The important thing to notice here is that Dave does not see blog comments as productive to the free exchange of ideas. They are a part of the problem, not the solution. You don’t have a right to post your thoughts at the bottom of someone else’s thoughts. That’s not freedom of expression, that’s an infringement on their freedom of expression. Get your own space, write compelling things, and if your ideas are smart, they’ll be linked to, and Google will notice, and you’ll move up in PageRank, and you’ll have influence and your ideas will have power.

We see constant useless drivel on ajaxian, techcrunch, etc., to the point where I rarely read comments any more. A rare exception to this was the set of comments on an article I wrote last year about corss browser vector graphics, where the bulk of the comments were quite useful and engaging. Sadly, this is the exception, not the rule it seems.

Every time I post a comment, or to a mailing list or forum, I try to ask myself the question, “Would I feel my time is being wasted if I was reading this, or am I truly adding value to the discussion?”

Articles that blame poor consumer spending on high gas prices have always been a bit confusing to me, because they seem to ignore basic math. Assuming that an average American drives 12,000 miles per year, and gas costs $2/gallon more than it did a few years ago, and that an average car gets 20 miles per gallon in that driving, then we are looking at an increase of only $1200, or $100 per month.

I think a strong argument could be made that the higher cost of gas has led to higher prices for everything from airline tickets to consumer products. That said, the government reports low inflation currently, which I find a bit difficult to believe given the rising cost of consumer goods.

My feeling is that consumers are perhaps spending less because their mortgages are getting more expensive if they are stuck in an ARM, the value of the dollar has dropped significantly against foreign currencies this decade, and prices are rising for everything non-tech due to increased demand as the economy has recovered from the tech bust. Tech products continue to decrease in price due to cutthroat pricing of Asian manufacturers, and China’s persistence in keeping the Yuan exchange rate based on the price of the dollar.

As a result of the fallout from Enron and the tech bust, we are seeing many public companies acquired by private equity funds, and substantially fewer companies having an IPO. As a result, small investors have less risk, but also substantially less to gain. If you cannot easily invest in companies with potential to grow, you are locked out in much the same way you were prior to the popularity of discount and online brokers.

I noticed tonight that my bank, US Bank, had upgraded their Bill Pay interface to add some nice Ajax interactions. Looking at the source, I found that they are using a custom build of Dojo!

Steven Levithan has put together by far the most extensive analysis of JavaScript and trim I have seen (thanks for the tip Dean). We’ll certainly make use of this knowledge in Dojo 0.9 and beyond, and I look forward to reading more great regexp and JavaScript analysis from Steven.

The iPhone DevCamp begins Friday night. I won’t be able to attend, though we’ll be sending Jason Cline to the event to represent SitePen. We’ve been blogging quite a bit about the iPhone on the SitePen blog, and running a lot of tests to find out all of the various things that don’t work on the current Safari version found on the iPhone.

The event is being hosted by Adobe, which is a bit ironic given their interest in Flash and the absence of Flash on the iPhone. Today there was a rumor that Flash would be coming soon for the iPhone, but this seems like a rather surprising development if it is true for the following reasons:

• YouTube has spent significant effort converting videos to H.264 in its partnership with Apple
• Flash Lite (pronounced flashlight 😉 ), found on the Nokia Series 60 phones that run WebCore (a subset of WebKit/Safari), is not exactly the full-featured flash that is common on the desktop web
• Flash is relatively slow on OS X on the desktop relative to Windows

I’m not saying we’ll never see Flash on the iPhone, just that those saying it is coming very soon are rather wishful in their thinking. I’m certainly in no hurry for Flash to invade my iPhone.

After writing a recent post about thinking outside the (browser) box, I started thinking about the rapid rate by which things are changing. A year ago, most web developers had to think about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and perhaps WAP for mobile devices and widget development for one of more platforms.

Today, we are afforded more possibility, but sometimes at the cost of more complexity, or at least more to learn and test:

• Mobile WebKit/Safari: The iPhone and Nokia S60 phones provide the real web on a mobile device
• Alternative browsing devices: Nintendo Wii, Nokia Internet Tablet.
• Offline web apps: Browser extensions now support offline development with Dojo Offline, Google Gears, Firefox 3, and other options on the market making it possible to take your web app with you on an airplane.
• Desktop apps with web technologies: Apple’s WebKit Cocoa bindings, Adobe’s AIR, and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
• Social app platforms: Embed part or all of your app inside Facebook or on top of Ning, build widgets for use inside MySpace (APIs are rumored later this year for MySpace and LinkedIn)
• Scalability: Use Amazon’s S3 for distributed hosting of static resources
• Signle-purpose widgets: Apple’s Dashboard, Google’s Gadgets, Yahoo Widgets, and many other widget development platforms.

There are certainly no shortage of options available for building great web applications!

Because of the iPhone’s amazingly convenient mechanism for syncing with OS X’s Sync Services, I’m impatiently waiting for the non-Apple apps that I use to adopt sync services. For example, Daylite currently offers sync with the address book service, and the iPhone makes it surprisingly not painful to manage hundreds of contacts. The Verizon UI on my old LG phone, by contrast, was painful for managing just 20 contacts. Daylite is still working on calendar syncing which is going to be hugely useful for us.

On the email side of things, I use Thunderbird because I prefer the way Enigmail handles GPG over the extension for Mail.app, so email sync between the desktop and iPhone is currently a no-op, though IMAP is still an option (and probably a better one except perhaps for speed over a mobile network). On the browser side of things, getting Firefox’s bookmarks synced with Safari’s bookmarks collection would be highly useful because typing in urls on the iPhone is a lot more painful than using a traditional keyboard… though still less painful than with a normal cell phone or smart phone!

One of the Leopard development tools that Apple is already talking about openly is dashcode, a really simple way to create your own dashboard widgets. In Tiger, Dashboard’s UI really feels like an afterthought, but the approach they are taking with Leopard (and perhaps with the iPhone, though we don’t know if that is the plan yet) should make dashboard apps a lot more useful. I wonder what is possible for app development if we can combine dashcode with JavaScript Cocoa bindings and Dojo?

Alex has just announced that 0.9 beta is ready for download. It’s been an amazing effort by the team to get to this point: a much lighter, faster, easier to use Dojo. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions for improvements for the final 0.9 and towards 1.0 later this year.