Amazon has the case of twitterism right now and of course I need to buy something for a graduation party tomorrow.  Amazon must be moving to Ruby on Rails.

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I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to enable the forums in the navigation section.  I could clearly see where it was disabled but couldn’t for the life of me figure out where to enable it.

Here is the UI of it:

Clearly it’s disabled, right?  Turns out although the checkbox looks disabled, in reality to turn it on you are suppose to select it anyway’s. Come on guys, things that look disabled are suppose to act disabled. 

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Here is the list of technology they are using to make car sites really nice for once and what other technology they use that I could gleam from their source & site:

• Thickbox - I’m a big fan of this lightbox cousin.
• jQuery - You know I love jQuery goodness.
• Validation - They have their own validation routines that they are able add a <script> tag and plug in an array with fields that need validation.  Not bad but they should look at my javascript generic form validation script which works in a similar way to jQuery.
• Jive Live for the online chat sessions, although I thought Jive Live was defunct now but maybe not.  Either way I’ll give them a pass for using Java
• SEO friendly markup.  Not a lot of of table tags and a nice usage of friendly seo markup on important keywords. Although I think they could do a better job on URL, meta tags, and title tags.
• Icon/Images/Navigation.  They stand out here, text style is pt so it scales to my dpi setting.  Images are clean, navigation is standard (which is good), icons are meaning full and big enough to give a real impression.
• Ext JS - A really nice framework for AJAX grids and other ajax aspects.
• Java - Ah, dang I was so impressed until I found this out :).  Half joking of course.  In a world of dynamics language being the thing, it’s funny how I now feel more comfortable thinking about doing Java then say Ruby or Python.
• MySQL - Another proof that MySQL scales, although they must have some really good DB guys to put their system on it.
• CVS - Hey you guys should be using Surround SCM
• Hibernate - Yes another good choice here.  I’ve never messed with hibernate but ORM is a good thing.
• Flex - No thanks, would prefer Silverlight

So here is a run down on their architecture and my choice if I was the evil mastermind behind the scene:

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Fast

Firefox 3 beta 5 is silly fast, so much so that I was browsing an internal web app today, thinking, "hey who ajaxified this thing?".  Turns out the web app is still doing traditional post backs but FF is so fast you can’t tell, the screen never "refreshes" only by looking at the green loading indicator at the bottom can you tell.

Gmail has become paininfully slow on FF 2.  With FF 3, the thing is blazing fast again.  You know the FF & Google guys must be working on things together like this. Gmail search is still slow though.

Memory

Better then FF 2 which is a memory hog but still not great, it easily got up to 100 mb after an hour of using (2-3 tabs open at once).

Conclusion

I’d be using this thing as my main browser if my extensions would all work, at last I’m back to FF 2 because I’m tied to my extensions.

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I was not disappointed, this was the most educational session I was at.  First of all Android is java based like EJB.  I do not do Java and have no real idea what EJB is.  That being said, this is what I took away from Android.

• UI - XML layout like XUL, striking similarities to Microsoft Silverlight interface design or vice versa if you want.
• Should use Eclipse for your IDE
• Views & Controls terminology is the same i.e. a view is a control and vice versa.
• No intellisense yet on the xml gui, plus xml is case sensitive
• Programs can be created as application or as a service.  Services have a longer life span

Overview

Again, I haven’t done any mobile program so correct me if I’m wrong here, but Android seems to function differently then any other mobile OS.  For one, Android programs (including programs you write for Android) never really die.  So when a user clicks close on an application, it still exists, running in the background.  That’s why when you click on the same application it is instantly there, no startup wait or anything.  I know on my Blackberry 8830, programs take a second or two to start up so they can’t be running in the background like Android does.  This makes things much more fluid to the end user.  Android deals with all these applications running by systematically killing applications that haven’t been used in a while and or "learns" the end users tendencies from what apps they use.  Brilliant.  When an app is killed by the OS, the program can see this event happening and can store its current state, file or on SQL Lite, so that when the end user fires this app back up, no data is lost.  One thing is that programmers must put this logic in their app.  Google isn’t Microsoft, they don’t seem to want to hand hold developers thru this.

Another feature Android is pushing is a new messaging system to replace SMS, although SMS will still be included.  SMS is limited to the number of character able to be sent.  This new protocol will have infinite character length.  The reason is Google wants to be able to push XML to the device, similar to how Blackberrys work.  This XML can have specific commands tied to specific applications that can be fired off.  There is a lot of possibility here.

Although I’m certainly not a Java guy (we do have one in the family), Android is something I have to make room in my schedule to whip something together.

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General Thoughts

Google provides the most coverage of the categories, although typically not the best.  They have some real improvement to be made here.  Yahoo! seems to do the best for coverage and quality.  Microsoft is lacking on a few fronts but their find a business (which is probably the best feature of a mobile service period) feature was clearly the best. Google services are slow, so are Yahoo!.  Microsoft is the fastest.

Rating scale 0-3, 0 if they did not offer the service.

The Winner

I’m a gmail guy so I find myself in Google’s Gmail Mobile most of the time, Google understands mail & map applications.  Yahoo! has the leg up on Google for the other areas besides Find Business.  Microsoft does a really nice job with their category/movies/find a business, it has the most potential.    But still the winner goes to Google Services. 

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Google,

1. The iPhone is no way the market leading smart phone so why are writing specific apps for it?
2. The iPhone is not ready for the enterprise so all the goodness you are putting in for iPhone specific apps doesn’t help us enterprise guys.  You do want to sell your office apps to the enterprise right?
3. Can you update your generic smart phone apps?  They all have a tendency to lock, especially gmail.

Observation: It’s been long rumored that Google was coming out with a smart phone, but with these iPhone specific apps coming out I am starting to doubt anything but maybe a WIFI only cell phone.  Either way, any Google phone would be a direct competitor to the iPhone.  Things would sure get interesting on the relationship between Apple & Google if they started to compete against each other.

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I’m in Gmail today creating an email with an attachment and click the send button and something funny pops up. 

Oh DOH! - I forgot to attach the file.  Gmail is smart enough to remind me?  Kinda of, it looks for the verbiage like “attach” and pops this up if the email doesn’t have an attachment. Sweet! 

I’ve always been a fan of Outlook but I now prefer Gmail to it.

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8/25/2008

Where I live - Cincinnati Ohio, Midwest

Second up New York City, East Coast

And now for the West Coast - San Francisco

So for me ASP.NET makes the most sense by far (almost 4x that of PHP).  A surprise to me is on the West Coast, were it looks like ASP.NET is much smaller then else where.  It seems that Ruby on Rails is very much in the incubator stage still, I guess I’m not turning on RoR anytime soon after all.

Dreamweaver training as well as
Acrobat training in our Chicago location or we will come to you.

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