Sarah Allen had a great presentation about writing mobile apps with Ruby at RubyConf 2009 in San Francisco back in November about using the Rhomoble platform. The video page is available here. Her slides are here.

Sarah also spoke more recently at the LA RubyConf and had more comments about mobile development. Her post and slides are here.

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

The Opera browser folks have a curriculum for learning about web development with about 50 articles on specific web development topics sequenced in a reasonable way:

http://opera.com/wsc

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

Mike Monteiro has a great post on the iPad and the observation that people want that tablet thingie they see in the movies.


Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

Back in 1984 when the first Mac was introduced I remember a unix geek dissing potential users by saying,"Are executives are too stupid to remember what commands to type in?" Of course they were not too stupid - it was simply irrelevant to their world. They did not need computer applications enough to learn those things.

The introduction of the Macintosh made computers more approachable. Mac and Windows along with well defined applications like spreadsheets and word processing reduced the learning curve and allowed many more people to get value from direct use of a computer. The Internet and the evolution of the computer as a communications device has made computers even more useful.  What we have not noticed is that complexity has crept back into computing. Partially that is due to the many ways there are to do things like email, viewing video, and partly from protecting yourself from viruses, root kits, and phishing attacks. Net books have not helped - they're just small PC's with all the hastles that entails. Some are even worse. My wife's HP netbook comes with two operating systems!

I like to surf the web on my iPhone except for the screen being too small. I'll keep my larger computers for programming and video editing, my iPhone for calls and simple tasks but I look forward to a right sized web viewer and entertainment device in the iPad.

The time is right again to reset expectations to a simpler and easier experience.

 

 

 

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

From www.platopeople.com:

"Before Microsoft. Apple. The Web. AOL. The Internet. Before everything, there was PLATO: the first online community. The network that time forgot. The birthplace of instant messaging, chat rooms, MUDs (multi-user dungeons), personal publishing, screen savers, flat-panel plasma displays, one of the first spell-checking/answer-judging mechanisms, and countless other innovations. This site offers information regarding a book being researched and written about the PLATO system and the user culture that it spawned in the 1970s. For more details, click the image above, or any of the links at the top."

Brian Dear is writing a book and website. In June there will be a conference.

www.platohistory.org

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

CNBC aired a documentary about iPhone Apps called "Planet of the Apps" which can't be seen on the internet but they have excerpts:

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade

Video as a tool for sharing a future vision is far more common than it used to be. It used to be that speculative videos about what the future holds were made only by big companies like Apple and Microsoft.

Now, smaller companies make videos about what they'd like to see, in some cases hoping to convince the bigger companies to do what they'd like like this video from Coursesmart:

Posted
AuthorMichael Slade