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Flashforks & iTorches

eric — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 10:49:33 -0500

After Jobs' open letter, Thoughts on Flash, the Flashforks and iTorches have come out.

I've always experienced issues with Flash running on a multitude of Macs so I'm not heart-broken for Adobe's Flash. I realize Apple isn't perfect, either, but they do have a good model going. Although, many question their moves in regard to the App Store, it's been very lucrative for them and other app developers.

For me, I'm excited to get into mobile app development and mobile web app development. I see myself as starting with one foot in iPhone app development the other foot in mobile web app development and then possibly reaching out to the Android market later on, but the mobile web apps may take care of that.

Regardless, I need something new to learn and am looking forward to working more with HTML5, CSS3, Webkit, Objective-C and bridging the standalone apps and web apps.

The next 6-18 months should be very interesting.

Amazon, I'm still waiting on my books to arrive.

Mobile Web App Tools Wishlist: ActionMethod, TextMate, MacBook Pro

eric — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:34:13 -0500

In order to go the direction I want with mobile web app development, I'm working towards getting these tools so I can produce design/code more efficiently:

ActionMethod

I don't typically refer to a product or service as 'amazing', but I can't help but describe Behance's project management solution as anything short of amazing. The fact that I can use it on my laptop AND my iPhone is tremendously useful. I LOVE the 'Focus'-based thinking that keeps me focused on the top tasks I need to, yes, focus on. It lets me organize tasks into projects and groups and this is a must for me. I've tried using Cultured Code's Things (and others), but for some reason ActionMethod doesn't require as much time to manage for me.

I'm currently using the free account which lets you use up to 50 tasks, but I'm looking to purchase the $99/year account once other life/family items are taken care of.

TextMate

This past October, I plunked down $99 for Panic's Coda to replace the dead-in-the-water Smultron. Now Coda does code editing, FTP, Subversion, command line interfacing, but what I use most is the code editing. It's amazing what it doesn't do with code editing. I can't even auto-complete or auto-close HTML markup when it's inside a PHP file. It also takes forever to render syntax coloring for small CSS files.

Anyway, I should have just gone with TextMate for $55 and used the FTP clients I already have. It's more mature and doesn't have the feature lag and thats-coming-in-a-future-release-itis that Coda currently suffers from.

Apple MacBook Pro 17"

My 17" PowerBook G4 has served me well over the past 5 years, but is showing it's age both in performance and, well, on the screen actually (it has a weird, 2-3 pixel wide vertical line about 3 inches from the right side of the screen). I also can't build things for the iPhone, etc without being able to run from the newer Intel-based Macs. Since I don't have a dedicated office, I need the screen real estate. This will probably come later this year, but it's becoming apparent that this PowerBook needs to retire.

I'm Excited Anyway

I'm excited to get moving on this new area of design and development and, Lord-willing, He'll provide the tools I need at the right time.

Stepping on to the Mobile Web App Field

eric — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:27:13 -0500

I'm excited about moving towards a new direction this year. I'm stepping onto the mobile web app development field! I'm currently nailing down some things for my first flagship product. Outside of the absolute uniqueness of it, the majority of my excitement comes from how useful this flagship app will be to a massive amount of people.

One of the most exciting aspects for me is that the end product has nothing to do with design, development, branding, website creation or social networking.

It'll be a while before I have anything to share on it and this post primarily serves as a reminder and accountability to get it done.

Real Life & Online Data: Something Has to Give

eric — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:25:14 -0600

When furthering convergence of real life with online data something has to give. People will cut back on something. Commenting, for one, has become too noisy on blogs, in my opinion. People will trim the fat and time involved in managing comments which typically are negative or distract entirely from the information presented.

I don't believe that ALL commenting is bad. I just see that more people are seeing how time-consuming it is to manage and need to cut back on offering that as a communication method on their website.

Maybe it's just me, but I can see people starting to utilize Facebook (and maybe Twitter, although it seems more like an announcement channel rather than a great place to have inclusive dialogue) for comments to keep readers from being distracted from the original article.

I can see something more like this at the bottom of some blogs: "Want to discuss this with others? Head to the Facebook fan page to hash it out with others." Then you just have to check it when you want to and get directly involved or distracted from more important things in life.

I may turn off commenting on this blog, I don't know. Hardly anyone reads it, anyway.

It's just a thought on a trend I've noticed. *shrugs*