When all the furor hit the net about the iPhone not really being open to developers I had this little niggling something of a thought at the back of my mind. It took a few days for it to come to the front but what I finally realized is that the iPhone is, at least initially, a thin client. It’s a phone, a networked device. It may run some version of OS X but it isn’t being offered as a stand alone computer.

The lack of open APIs may disappoint programmers but may not mean much to the average consumer as more and more desktop capabilities migrate to the web as services.

iPhone’s web display capabilities offer a terrific opportunity for small to medium sized businesses to provide services to non-office employees via the web. The average Cocoa programmer may not get to make his game run on an iPhone but everyday productivity capabilites like networked addresses, time billing, shopping (America’s favorite passtime), to do lists, and basic word processing are already available for us. This iPhone positioning makes a lot of sense. (standard disclaimer – remember that I am a web designer)

Yes, Steve Jobs did try some slight of hand in trying to pass web apps off as an API. And, yes, telling traditional developers that their development platform of choice wasn’t being opened up on the iPhone now should cause a stir, but the end result for the consumer is still an extremely flexible tool. The future is networked. iPhone fits right into that future.

According to Wikipedia, Ruby is a reflective, dynamic, object-oriented programming language. It combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like object-oriented features, and also shares some features with Python, Lisp, Dylan, and CLU. Ruby is a single-pass interpreted language. Its official implementation is free software written in C.

That may mean something to a real programmer but to me it is about as useful as a kick in the head. Let’s go a bit farther. Again from Wikipedia:

Philosophy

The language’s creator has said that Ruby is designed for programmer productivity and fun, following the principles of good user interface design.[1] He stresses that systems design needs to emphasize human, rather than computer, needs

“Often people, especially computer engineers, focus on the machines. They think, “By doing this, the machine will run faster. By doing this, the machine will run more effectively. By doing this, the machine will something something something.” They are focusing on machines. But in fact we need to focus on humans, on how humans care about doing programming or operating the application of the machines. We are the masters. They are the slaves.”

Translating to designer speak

That makes a bit more sense. Productivity and fun sound good. Emphasizing human needs over those of the computer sounds even better. All these factors should make Ruby easier to learn than older languages and more or less equivalent to Python.

So, put into terms that may not be totally accurate but that reflect my level of understanding, Ruby is a modern programming language that borrows the better parts from its predecessors. It shares certain features with other modern languages that make it a more productive programming environment. And as a programming language is a set of formalized instructions that make a computer do useful and interesting things. Read the rest of this entry »»

My Reasoning

Web design is getting more and more complicated and client’s expectations are getting more and more sophisticated. People want both more flashier presentation and more interactivity for their sites. The presentation component calls for Flash or JavaScript effects. The interactivity calls for server side programming. Keeping current is a lot of work if not totally impossible. What’s a fella to do?

The simple answer is learn to program. Even Flash requires programming if you want to build any kind of interactivity into your movies. Great idea but I’m a designer and don’t really know how to program anything. Oh, I can do some simple PHP and JavaScript tricks and more or less know where to look in somebody else’s program to find the HTML part to tweak but that’s about it. If Dreamweaver doesn’t handle my PHP needs I’m basically SOL.

Where to start? As a middle aged HTML jockey I’m not going to go back to college for a computer science degree, so it’s pretty much learn as you go. Obvious, but where to start? Read the rest of this entry »»

Way back in the stone age when I began my bachelor’s degree in computer science, computers were impressive things, taking up whole buildings though having less actual computing power than a modern cell phone. Yes, we powered the things by steam and entered data with stone tablets. It seems like it anyway. Punch cards were not much better. We also walked uphill five miles to class each way in the snow in our bare feet, too.

Where am I going with this? What happened was that I changed my major from CS to geology and pretty much forgot about computers for years. The whole process was just too much hard work.

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One of the main problems with the concept of simplicity is that it is misunderstood. A simple website is not sparest or one without features. Google aside, it is not one with the least complicated interface. It’s one that is straightforward to use. Google’s home page is simple. Google’s website is anything but.

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Read the professional web design online magazines like A List Apart and Digital Web Magazine and you might think that the absolute best site is the simplest one possible. For usability, that may be true. But that thinking ignores some elements of marketing psychology. Vital as that concept is there are other factors that come into play when considering how simple and clean to make a site.

Stop for a second and consider the king of low cost merchandising, WalMart. How simple is their store layout? Did that get a laugh? A WalMart store offers an almost overwhelming display of so many products that I wouldn’t even dare guess at the number. WalMart stores are not simple, yet they are outstandingly successful.

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Great. You want to take control of your marketing efforts, or maybe inform the members of your non-profit, or simple express yourself. A website is a great tool for those needs. Others too. But you already knew that. You just want to know where to start. Here’s the distilled knowledge I’ve gained from 8 years of professional design and by teaching five years of web design and Photoshop community education classes through our local college.

What do I do first?

Figure out who your audience will be. This is the single most important step you can take and the one you will most likely skip. If you don’t do this, your website will not be as effective as it should be.

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