Opinion
So, I've gotten more than one email that says "wish i'd found this sooner". Me too!
I get listed on Ajaxian fairly frequently, but I have to pull a new trick out of my hat each time. Marketing is not my game, and other than Google, that's about it for my major traffic sources. Would anyone like to suggest some sites/blogs/indexes that might list or write about the libraries and tools I have put together here at LivePipe?
If you don't feel like posting a comment, email me at ryan@livepipe.net Any feedback or suggestions would be most appreciated!
7 Replies, Posted June 28th, 2007 at 12:46 pm by Ryan
So far the talk on the web about the WWDC keynote today is about Safari for windows (I think it's great, but not all that surprising). The big news today for me is that essentially that Ajax is the iPhone SDK. I interpreted this in two opposing ways:
- Apple isn't ready to support an iPhone SDK in Cocoa
- Apple fully believes rich internet applications == "way of the future"
I'd really like to believe the latter.
On a side note note, I am trying out the Safari 3 beta and holy shit is it fast. The JavaScript engine implementation is really every bit as good as advertised.
So what I'm stuck wondering is if we'll get some sort of "real" multi touch API to work with. This view point makes some sense to me (summary: they won't provide anything extra for simplicities sake), but that's definitely not my hope.
When looking at patterns of serious innovation in the industry (and let's consider a mass market multi touch device "serious innovation"), nobody bothers to check with a standards body to make sure there is consensus (I'm thinking W3C here, not FCC). So until multi touch devices are a completely common place thing (3 - 5 years), and there are well agreed upon cross browser standards, I hope that apple goes ahead and gives us something to play with even if it's completely proprietary and not standards compliant in any way, because as far as I can see there are no standards for multi touch devices of any type.
Perhaps my main hope is just that I don't have to learn Objective-C. But I do think that if the only available option (for a time) for developing multi touch interfaces for the masses was via HTML/JavaScript/CSS, that it would not only cause web development to be taken more seriously, but it would also make that technology stack more viable for more desktop / device programming in the future.
Dave Hyatt said "I'll have much more to say about this in the coming months." back in january. So hopefully in a few weeks he can start talking.
1 Reply, Posted June 11th, 2007 at 3:51 pm by Ryan
This is based purely on emotion and frustration, but of all of the evil black magic in Rails, RJS is the grand daddy ruling overload of all lesser magic. There are many crimes, but the big ones are:
- Since it auto generates code, you can't search for the JS method names in your source tree.
- Since it's the reply to an AJAX request, you can't view source to see what it has generated.
- So far I've seen a lot of people use it for visual effects, and style logic, and since it's declared in your views often, it thoroughly contaminates the nice separation of concern Rails otherwise has going for it.
Rails kicks all sorts ass in a dozen different departments, but debugging other people's code that uses RJS has been consistently perplexing, difficult, frustrating and very time consuming.
It takes extra time to structure your HTML and CSS to allow you to write an entirely separate JS behavior layer. But once you do, your app will be cleaner, easier to debug, and a lot more maintainable.
6 Replies, Posted May 18th, 2007 at 1:44 pm by Ryan
This post reveals how little I know about internet marketing, but I'm only saying I'm only trying to be a programmer, so hopefully it won't hurt too much.
In early March the Control.Tabs script was posted to Ajaxian which was in a way the birth of this site. I got a decent traffic spike off of that, and just as it was dying down someone posted it to Digg. I got about 900 diggs in the next 24 hours and (to me anyway) a fairly impressive number of visitors.
Naively, when I released the Control.Modal script, I assumed by submitting to Digg I assumed I could get a similar response. Only 32 diggs to date. What was baffling to me was that the Control.Modal script generated far more emails, use cases and positive responses. What amazes me, and triggered me to jot this all down was that to date, despite many other releases and many many links from sites large and small I still get more traffic to the Control.Tabs page than every other page combined.
I've read a few articles on the theory behind internet marketing and popularity, but unfortunately none are even worth citing. From everything I can gather there is this a not so mysterious, but hard to explain critical mass effect in the blogosphere that isn't terribly predictable.
Anybody got some good reading on this?
3 Replies, Posted May 15th, 2007 at 12:38 pm by Ryan