the turtle speaks

Should I Flash for a website?

I recently had a coworker ask for articles/rationale for not using Flash for a website. While nothing here is original, the hope is to provide a quick, basic summary of reasons why Flash may not be a good choice for website content. Some issues with Flash:

A few thoughts from Apple’s announcements are underwhelming

NOT EVEN Apple messiah Steve Jobs could be bothered to get out of bed for the fruit-themed company’s announcements at its World Wide Developers Conference yesterday.

(Bias disclosure: I’ve been a Mac user for over 20 years and am an AAPL shareholder. I do not claim to be dispassionate about this :-)

So the iPad has come out, and the questions have begun: Is there a place for it in the average computer user’s life? Isn’t it just a big iPod touch? Why doesn’t it do X?

I was writing a small Rails app for work to allow faculty and students to sign up for various events. So I had a Signup model :has_many timeslots that :has_many people. I needed to retrieve the email addresses for people that had signed up for timeslots after a certain time (i.e. all the people that had registered for a timeslot after Saturday at 10:00). Since the timeslots may not be in chronological order, I couldn’t find timeslots by a timeslot id.

Gustavo Duarte has an excellent article on the joys of programming. He notes “Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.” and he’s right.

Another reason to like the Mac community is this comparison of Safari and Firefox 3 rendering styles. The fact that there are people that care this much about title bar gradients shows why Mac community’s emphasis on look and feel contribute to the overall user experience.

From an article on iPhone inroads into the Enterprise

“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

I’m a relative newcomer to the .NET world (and a reluctant one at that). My initial thoughts are that the framework tries to do too much by trying to merge the lines between desktop and web application development. While there are certainly many ways that the web has benefited from traditional applications (with AJAX and other buzzwords), there are arenas where the two are still distinct.

In looking at my logs, it many people come to this site based on the find_by_name text in the header. If you are such a person, I assume you are new to Rails and are wanting to learn more about it. Here’s a few tips:

mod rails was released recently (I submitted a voice sample to narrate the demo screencast, but they went with the über-helpful Ryan Bates), giving hope to not-big-enough-to-require-a-dedicated-server Rails developers everywhere. Deployment has long been the biggest complaint against Rails, and hopefully this gem will facilitate getting Rails apps up and running on servers everywhere.