As a developer, if I choose to use Google Apps as my platform it means I don’t have to do anything about:
- Hosting
- Global Access
- Disaster Recovery
- Scalability
- User Authentication
- and now with the creation of the marketplace my sales and marketing efforts are less, or at the very least easier, and within the next few months I won’t have to bother setting up an online store either.
And I can use the Google development environment for free, my developers can be anywhere, and by doing all of the above my maintenance work and subsequent deployments are extremely simple. In other words my on-going costs are far less versus traditional development approaches.
Interesting. Give up control, or at least a sense of control, in return for total concentration on the thing that your application should do better than anyone else and be able to lower your costs while providing increased value – by focussing exclusively on the thing that your app thingy should do better than anyone else. But I said that already.
Total control versus complete focus on what you do best with lower costs.
Decisions, decisions, decisions…
Interesting situation yesterday. We had been debating at length how to present a simple user interface to quite a complex function and have lost a fair bit of time to it.
We felt we had two choices. Leave it as is, which is sub-standard at best, or continue to try and improve it and spend considerable time on it. Our perspective had us stuck there. We thought we only had two choices.
Then Alex came along and echoed the rules that we are supposed to live by. Simplify it! Take it out. A light bulb came on. We took it out.
We actually had three choices but didn’t see it; leave something that doesn’t work that well as is, continue to invest in it, or don’t do it all as it isn’t worth the trouble of making anyone use it or anyone improve it.
This was a software situation but I think these rules apply to everything in all walks of life.
“Firefox hit a new milestone today, as version 3.5 overtook Internet Explorer 7.0 with nearly 22% of the browser market, according to statistics from web analytics service StatCounter.”
via Firefox 3.5 Takes the Top Spot Worldwide.
So clean, so simple and a wonderful message to explain it all. Highly recommend you watch the video.
http://teuxdeux.com/
This has got be one of my favorite Seth posts to date. I’m sure it won’t be my last. Highly recommend the read!
Simplify the problem relentlessly, and be prepared to accept an elegant solution that satisfies the simplest problem you can describe.
…
Demand thrashing early in the process. Force innovations and decisions to be made near the beginning of the project, not in a crazy charrette at the end.
via Seth’s Blog: How to be a great client.
Which browser are you using? Which browser are you targeting as the base for your web apps?
“By Net Application’s tally, IE6 has lost 3.2 percentage points in the last three months, and IE7 has fallen 4.2 points; IE8, however, has gained only 4.2 percentage points in the same period.
… Last month, Firefox added about 0.7 of a percentage point to its share, finishing November with 24.7 percent. Chrome grew by 0.4 of a percentage point and Opera increased by 0.1 of a percentage point, to end the month at 3.9 and 2.3 percent, respectively. All three browser’s shares were records.
Most notable were the gains by Firefox and Chrome. Firefox neared the 25 percent milestone, which it should pass this month, and Google’s browser closed in on Apple’s Safari, which lost market share for the first time since last April. If the trend from the past three months continues, Chrome will pass Safari and take the No. 3 browser spot in January 2010.
Chrome’ss growth is impressive, in part because it’s been fueled almost exclusively by the Windows version, the only edition that has made it out of developer and beta testing. Google plans to issue a beta of the Mac version this month, which could add even more to its momentum going into the new year.”
via IE8 can’t stop decline in Microsoft’s browser market share | Applications – InfoWorld.
If you believe in open sourced systems that are extensible and leverage the content of a non-proprietary internet then this announcement is in some ways a short term setback but in the long run everyone, consumers and developers, are going to be so much better off. Bring on HTML5. We can’t wait!
As one Google rep told the L.A. Times, “We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites.”
Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are.”
via Google Dumps Gears for HTML5.
Best thoughts I have read on the hiring process, written from a programming perspective but I think it applies to any type of hire made with a little modification.
So when I hire people, I just try to answer the three questions. To find out if they can get stuff done, I just ask what they’ve done. …
To find out whether someone’s smart, I just have a casual conversation with them. … Ask them what they’ve been thinking about and probe them about it….
Finally, I figure out whether I can work with someone just by hanging out with them for a bit. Many brilliant people can seem delightful in a one-hour conversation, but their eccentricities become grating after a couple hours. …
via How I Hire Programmers Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought.
Also really liked another post that he references from this one on small talk. Recommend you follow the link.
We all run into clients that have data on their side of the firewall but they want to publish it on their digital signage which is provided by a web service – like Rise Display Network. Hence the dilemma, sending this data to the hosted digital signage content management server (on the other side of the firewall) goes against most corporate security policies, but with the latest from Opera it could become allot easier to publish that private data as client side web pages that the hosted digital signage shows. Displays within the network display the data no problem whereas a display outside of the network would not be able to get at anything. Digital signage content people happy, IT happy, and everyone keeps the costs to a minimum by fully leveraging cloud computing for their displays. Check it out:
With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars – but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user’s computer.
via Your Browser is Now a Web Server: Opera Includes Opera Unite in Opera 10.10.
