Notebook Marginalia

I have to just say how amazed I am at LaszloSystems.

In the last six months since going open source, they have created a roadmap to follow with a number of stages and met it’s goals, come out with a new major version, made all the source available via Subversion, gotten a wiki into usable form for managing community documentation and contributions and set up really nice bug tracking with Jira. All while doing significant work like LaszloMail. Now IBM has updated it’s eclipse IDE for the 3.0 release. Combined with the fact that the employees are super diligent about communication about important bugs or missing features with it’s community, and the overall quality of the language I’m really in awe at this group. It’s just inspiring.

Yesterday, before coding on a project I was able to just browse the bugbase in Jira and get a heads up on any bugs that I might be encountering. If I figure out and fix one I can just promote it for review, once. Done. Finito. I was struck by how much nicer this is compared to the constant communication required by Flash developers to pass on folk knowledge about bugs and workarounds with certain features. It’s like each one of us has had to be our own personal QA and maintenance group in addition to being a developer. All helping each other out to be sure, but having to replicate each other’s work as well.

The ability for open source projects to centralize and display the dirty laundry so that any passerby can clean it up, without risking some marketing department’s sense of corporate pride and branding really felt significant. I felt so empowered. Here are the bugs! Look at them! Know about them! Here is the source! Fix them!

For a long time I’ve been wanting to do a post on Laszlo for Flash Developers, outlining it’s strengths as a tool to use instead of Flash. With all these recent improvements I think I really need to find time to do so.

Adobe is already in the 50’s 60’s again and apparently has been for months. They sure know how to make ducats. Maybe if I invest in them, it will offset the huge pricetags I expect to come out of this.

That’s too much for me though. I put my mm proceeds into netgear and sacrificed a chicken. We’ll see what happens.

Ironic? Sad? Or a to be expected part of comercial software development? A bit of all.

About 2 years ago I was looking at where to invest my retirement funds and saw that Macromedia’s stock was only 6 and a half dollars a share, where Adobe’s was around 40. Now this didn’t make any sense to me as I knew how many growth possibilities MM had and how few Adobe had. And they were listed as competitors which I thought was a bit odd as very little of their software actually competed. But perception is part of reality and so the definition was worth using since others were using it already. And software is an excellent investment in general because of the fact that at any point you can reign in new development and really start raking in the profits. So for a company with as much decent software as MM to be at 6.5 really made no sense at all. So I decided to put it all in MM and hope to sell it around 40.

It worked out well. Not long ago I started getting the sense that MM was going to start caching in it’s chips. A new CEO, The yahoo toolbar nonsense, David Mendels selling a chunk of his stock(because of his position, it gets added to the public record). I followed suit, figuring that nobody has as firm a grip on the growth potential as he would, even assuming that this was just his conservative “store some just in case” maneuver and not where he finally thought things would go, I decided that I was good with that, especially as it was pretty close to my original hope.

But I’m not a board member. Honestly, I feel that MM could have grown to 80 dollars a share pretty easily over the next three to four years while keeping everyone employed, growing and innovating. And I feel that the board didn’t do the best it could have for it’s employees. We’ll see whether I’m right or not, but it seems to me that they built some new initiatives, a good focus, demonstrated a good curve and that now they are cashing in their chips before bringing those inititives through to completion. Maybe I’m wrong and things weren’t going as well as they looked, but Adobe doesn’t need to follow the plan and they are traditionally not very aggressive. I think they will follow a new plan.

I habitually make predictions as a way of testing whether or not I understand the way things work. It will take a few years to test this one, but within 2 years I expect clear job losses at MM. (Both technical and other) and for Adobe to start using it’s skill to start milking the current stable of mature stuff. That they will leave “new and innovative” to the folk from 2010.

It is a good offer for the investors and board, conservative, but good. But for the employees I think it’s just another case of cashing in the chips at their expense.

Other thoughts

It’s a great deal for Adobe obviously.

It will work ok for both companies on paper, expect Adobe to be 60 in 3 years. If you’re going to start cashing in your chips, Adobe is “THE” proven pro, as they have been able to milk a few decent programs into 15 years of expensive minor upgrades. For those MM employees that weather the storm they can probably get free fancy coffee well into their grey years now.

It will significantly reduce competion and innovation, products like breeze, contribute and flex won’t wither, but they won’t be given the same urgent focus that they could really benefit from either. And we wont see much new issued from the mm marketing firehose after this year. With corel as the only clear competitor left, I expect everything involved to get very stable and dull.

And so it goes in the software industry. It’s much better it happen this way than the way it happened with Fractal Design/Metacreations with a total sell out.

PS The flash player has clearly been preparing to render the significant part of svg already, but the trivia question of the day is this. Will the flash player ever render the “etched glass” effect?

PPS Prove me wrong. Become Macrobe!

Every so often folk want to know how to compare them. This is my simple take on it.

First of all, though xamlon might enter this group as yet another interesting option, I don’t see XAML and it’s official runtime as comparable. Since the above are all cross platform, web-based technologies and and XAML is going to be targeted to windows only. I see XAML currently as a better way for vb developers to work rather than as a better way for internet developers to work and I’d bet money that that’s the group that adopts it. Long ago I gave up on windows only development and I wouldn’t willingly go back, despite all the extra work it has been to go the broad road. Having said that, it’s own niche seems pretty safe with XAML on the horizon, and xamlon will add yet another ripple to the pond of choices.

So what about these other three? Fancy pants internet applications is really just a niche, but I think it’s a huge niche so that even the basic differences between these three technologies make it pretty easy to see how they each have their own territory within the larger space.

As far as basic capabilities goes. Flash is actually still the king. Existing work, knowledge, capabilities, etc.

But outshadowing the basic capabilities for some companies comes things like Maintainability, Colaboration, Version Control. If you are going to spend two or three years creating and improving a real complex system and tying it to other systems Laszlo and Flex become very attractive. Laszlo and Flex also provide a break from the dozen different ways to do things in flash. They simplify style and make things consistent with more elegant programming models.

Yet even between these two there are such distinctions now that depending on the company and the project it’s clear how one would choose one over the other for very similar work.

Flex; performance, features, brady, iteration2 arguments, more interoperable with flash swfs, components and technologies and actionscript libraries.

Laszlo; control, open source, free, serverless mode, eclipse plug-in, simpler more easily extendable components, contraints, the persistentconnection manager, a focus on the high road of standards, but tempered by the reality of what is achievable. A possible exit strategy from relying on swf for everything. If they create a java runtime, it will be pretty nice.

These are very incomplete lists. There are so many differences between these three when one looks at the details that I think choices need to be made on a case by case basis as to which is the move for a given project. I’ve focused a bit less on Flex since Laszlo went open source and started working towards a serverless mode, but I still see it’s value and could see myself at some point using each of the three. I’m certainly focusing on understanding all three as well as possible.

The amazing thing is that with these guys available, Xamlon on the horizon, XAML itself on the horizon, as well as Firefox and a new version of IE and DHTML’s new legs, as well as a host of other options poping up that I’ve yet to look at deeply yet; it seems to me that we are entering a true new wave of the platform wars. Forseen for a long time, but really in sight now. Hopefully this one will be a little less counterproductive than the last one. I think it will be, because the technologies are starting off at a more mature point.

Ok. That css book is awesome. I love the chapter(3) where it shows in a straightforward way the various degrees of fancy abstraction you can choose between with the various specs as a way of relating them. It’s extrordinarily well written. I’m not going to bother redoing my site as an exercise after all, as I feel behind in two or three personal projects now from reading the book, but I do feel way more prepared to encounter the next significant set of content that comes along. At least I won’t screw it up. I’ll feel confident that all I need to do is structure the information properly for navigation and I can transform it into what I need later.

Well, before writing about any other types of fancy pants internet applications, I think I should focus some time on straight html based fancy pants first.

I was always of the mind that you could do a lot with vanilla html, if you couldn’t do enough with it for something like an educational application, I went with Flash and I’ve been pretty happy with that choice(with an occasional caveat like version control), but a few years ago the antenae started picking up signals that the standards oriented html-only generation techniques and tools were getting good enough and reliable enough to consider for the fancy stuff again as well. Probably as a side effect of the prospectors leaving the internet field. Thank the gods for that.

The fact that this Wordpress software is actually enjoyable to use goes a long way to convincing me too. Tasks is encouraging too. Other stuff I’ve been on the lookout for as a litmus test that fancy pants html will do it, has been a really nice webmail client and shared calendar. Gmail isn’t too bad, but my guess is that when Laszlo puts out their webmail client that I’ll prefer it. There was a really nice javascript library for games that I saw once, but it blew up on my parent’s browser which was enough to keep me from looking too much more into it. Not very scientific but no appologies either. What works reliably is priority#1.

So to make a short story long, I looked at a bunch of the css books and in the mass of religious prostletizing, found a book written by Steve Champeon and others that promises to keep #1, what works, in focus. It’s title is “Cascading Style Sheets", separating content from presentation, by Friends of Ed.

So far I’m quite enjoying it. It’s encouraging, well written and informative. And since my site is of no real importance to anyone but myself, I’m going to try to redo it by the book. It’s a simple enough design that it should work as a test. If I redo my site and it still works at the various schools I visit. Perhaps I’ll get a little fancier with html.

As my first post under the “Fancy Pants Internet Applications” category, I want to try and summarize all the requirements that tend to make something truely “Fancy Pants". Most of these things will eventually take full posts to cover. I’ll list them in the order in which I consider their importance. These really need an example of each and some reasons why they are in the order given. The goal is to map real requirements to project examples and have some basis for comparing technologies.

User Oriented
1) Works
2) Usable - accessible a part of this.
3) Easy
4) Responsive
5) Resizable
6) Maintains application state
7) Bookmarkable
8) Maintains session state
9) Trackable
10) Manipulatable
11) Local data storage
12) Local/Server data synch
13) Attractive
14) Share data with others
15) Customizable
16) Audio alowable
17) Realtime audio exchange
18) Video alowable

Creation Oriented
1) Possible
2) Versionable
3) Reasonable
4) Colaborative
5) Easy
6) Reusable
7) Controlable
8) General purpose
9) Standard
10) Enjoyable

And do I have the time and discipline to write?

For a while I’ve resisted a desire to start a weblog, largely because I like to write, but as a way of personal reflection. And I’d like most of my thoughts kept private. I’ll probably only post 1 in 5 things that I do write. Wordpress has a private setting, so I’ll give it a try.

Write to provide focus? Perhaps, but focus needs to change so dynamically in this field that what’s even the point? And my morning mantra does that. (My morning mantra is a text file that I read and edit every morning with my outlook, reminders, priorities and goals for the near and long term. Should I make the morning mantra public? Too affraid to do so at this point)

A professional promotional vehicle? I don’t think I really need that.

So why write a weblog? And how to be clear about what it will be about? And who to write to? Well, there are three categories that I think are worth writing about publically.

1) One is technology and society. In the past dozen years, we’ve had a pretty fun circus to watch.

2) One is a set of game components that I’ve been designing. There are some high level design aspects to them that are interesting.

3) Finally is the ubiquitous reflections on how to best generate fancy pants internet applications. Particularly my thoughts about developing in Flash, Flex, Laszlo and similarly minded tools.

Perhaps not interesting to everybody, but maybe to somebody. We’ll see if I have the discipline to do it. I will try for one post a week.