Tag: Trends

The demise of the squirrel

Posted by Neil – January 25, 2010

If you’ve ended up here from Google, expecting to see some sort of blog post on ColdFusion, Flash or Flex, the site you were expecting to see is no longer around, so you’re best off heading back to Google and trying another link.  Even better, stick around and have a browse, you never know, you might just like it.

After three years, and quite a few aggregated posts (over 100K at time of writing), I’ve decided finally to turn off feed-squirrel.com.  I’m not going to go into any nitty gritty of why, when and how, but basically just list out a few reasons in case anyone is bothered:

1.  Feed-Squirrel.com was largely a fully autonomous application, it sat there day in day out grabbing posts of various blogs out there, and turning them into a website.  Essentially the blog authors built it, I just supplied it with electricity.  Saying that though, one element wasn’t automated, which was adding new feeds and culling the old ones.  As I don’t really have the time to do this (or the inclination), I thought it best to stop.  There’s plenty of other aggregators out there (AXNA being one), or better yet, grab an RSS reader and make your own.

2.  Whilst, in 2006, ColdFusion was one of my main interests development wise, I now have moved on and no longer hold the same interest in the content.  I still use ColdFusion from time to time in a professional context when clients require it, but these days I much prefer to work with tools such as Ruby on Rails, jQuery and co.

3. Not having the site means not having to worry about uptime, backups, updates etc etc.  This blog is all I want to worry about.

If anyone really wants a copy of the database I’ll happily let them grab a copy, but don’t ask for the code, it’s too embarrassing.

So long, and thanks for all the nuts.

Users don’t want rich

Posted by Neil – September 30, 2009

For many years now, software developers around the world have been releasing quicker and more capable software on an almost constant basis. Each year, we tend so see new releases of existing products that make the products better in every apparent way, shape and form, and we, the computing public, lap it up.

For instance, Microsoft Word is currently at it’s 11th(-ish) version and still going strong as one of, if not the, most successful word processing packages of all time.  Each year or two Microsoft bring out a new and improved version that adds more features and more capabilities to the average person’s arsenal.

Now, for a moment, have a think about the last time you used Word.  Assuming you’re not one of the 10% of people who “power-use” Word, see if you can name five features of Word that you use on a regular basis.

Formatting?  Tables?  Printing?  er….. Word Count?

Let’s for a moment consider Word, with each and every standard toolbar open:

word

There’s a lot there, and there’s a whole load of stuff in there that you’ve never even seen before. Now, think back to the last time you upgraded your installation of Word.  What was the reasoning behind it?  What was the reason that you (may of) reached into your pocket and forked out for the funky new Office installer?

Well, let’s take Word 2008 – the headline features there were the Ribbon UI, and support for Office XML formats… and that’s about it.  Which of those features made you upgrade? Word probably has more functionality than you need… in fact, waaay more functionality than you’ll ever need.  So, why don’t you just use WordPad which comes free and is pre-installed on Windows?  Or TextEdit on the Mac?

Now cast your mind across to the web applications that we, as developers, are creating every day for our clients, be it on a bespoke purely custom basis, or as a product that we roll out to a customer base.  I dare say, that somewhere in your company is a man who works in what some would call ‘Marketing’.  This person wants to sell the product out to as many people as possible, and he also wants all of the current user base to upgrade on a regular basis.  Therefore, you most likely have an army of developers creating new features here and there, and making the existing features more capable in every way you can in order to persuade the customer that WhizzBang Enterprises Widget-o-matic 2009 is the best-est thing since last years version (which is now obviously outdated, insecure, and prone to crashing).

Why do we, as software shops, do this?  Why do we insist on making our software more complex, and more difficult to use for our customers?

bob

Put yourselves in the shoes of your user (let’s call him Bob).  First of all, be aware that Bob is nothing like you.  Bob doesn’t use computers for the fun of it, he uses computers to get something else done, so that he can go home on time and get back to work on his new garden terrace.  Bob doesn’t really get computers, he doesn’t really get the web that much.  Sure he uses Facebook, and emails his chums, and even has his own website (which incidentally is just his twitter stream), but Bob’s interested in other things – Bob just wants to get his shit done and go home.

So, whats the major difference between you and Bob?  Well for starters, for Bob, his computer, and the software on it is a tool – nothing more, nothing less.  He uses his tools to write his documents, send them out to his clients, and ensure that he gets paid at the end of the day.  To Bob his computer is identical to the bag he uses to carry his lunch to work, a tool to achieve a task.

So, thinking about tasks – what do most people want?  Well, it’s simple really.  Simplicity.  People just want to go in, get exactly what they want done with the minimum of fuss, and move on.  Even us developers do it.  We don’t sit down in the morning and think “I’m going to sit down for the next eight hours and write some Ruby…”, we think “I’m going to sit down for the next eight hours, and get this project finished and out the door”.  Our tools are an ends to a means.

So, coming back to our software, why do we make it so complex? Why are we so obsessed with feature richness and whiz bang interactions – the vast majority of people couldn’t care less, they just want to get their work done with the minimum of fuss.

Let’s take a look at richness in applications (the aforementioned whiz-bang element). Recently, there has been a huge movement by Adobe and Microsoft to get developers into using rich platform technologies such as Flash and Silverlight.  Whilst this is all very well, have a quick think about how many applications you use on a day-to-day basis you would consider to be rich (and buzzword bingo favourite “an immersive experience”).  Personally, there’s only one (Balsamiq Mockups if you want to know).  For most, it’s a twitter client.

So, what does this say?  Well for me it’s a sign that while we developers love to see the demo apps that are coming out and what some people are knocking out, but at the end of the day it’s ultimately simplicity and straightforward-ness that we prefer – we just want to get our work done.

In essence, I guess we might be guilty of three things – one, overestimating the users motivation and involvement in using the wonderful creation that you’ve just put out there. Secondly, of overcomplicating what we’re making the users use purely for the marketing aspect, rather than making a genuniely good product, and thirdly, for not really eating our own dog food and actually using this rich applications that we keep telling everyone they need.

Overally, we, as developers, need to keep it focused and keep it simple.  Distractions are aplenty, and we developers are incredilby suspectible to them all which makes us more prone to not keeping it simple…

Brawn GP comes to the iPhone

Posted by Neil – September 10, 2009

Yesterdays F1 post reminded me of a post that I’ve been meaning to write for a long time (although now it’s a little out of date).

A while back, Brawn GP, F1’s fledgling, and championship leading, team have released a game for the iPhone, which, as expected. is a neat little F1 simulation.  When it was initially released, there was only one track available, the home “London” track, but now there’s three more with more on the way.

What’s more interesting about this isn’t the F1 aspect so much, nor the game, but how the iPhone/iPod Touch platform enables companies like this to crack out small games and push them out to a wide audience relatively quickly.  When you consider that the team has only really existed since March of this year, and that they are releasing a 3D racing sim three months later, it’s a pretty impressive feat.

What the means for the future is very interesting.  Assuming that the console manufacturers recognise that there is a large amount of money to make from thr App Store model, as Apple are currently demonstrating, this might lead to a massive movement towards small time development shops/individuals developing lots and lots of small, very inexpensive games.  It’s almost back to the old days where you could go out and buy a game for your C64 for 99p on a cassette tape.

This will hopefully remove us from the current games publishers vice like grip of charging us £50 for a single game, which can only be a good thing.  Admittedly we don’t want to stop getting the mega-budget hollywood-esque games, but we do want more choice for less money.

So, Microsoft,  Sony and Nintendo – take note of the iPhone and pull your f’in finger out.

It’s Enterprise-y Sir…

Posted by Neil – May 23, 2009

One of the many discussions we’ve being having recently at Monochrome towers is that of the Enterprise space. Normally the commentary we have is that of:

“WTF does Enterprise mean?”

Generally, we come back to the same thing.  Big business likes to call itself “Enterprise” because it somehow makes what they’re talking about more important.  By saying you’re building an Enterprise application somehow makes it better, even though the requirements may be identical to that of a smaller non-enterprise company.

Now, let’s slide this back a bit and take a look at software.  There’s a whole raft of stuff out there in the software market that calls itself “Enterprise” with no real definition of what this actually means.  Usually, you’ll see the same thing, i.e. a couple of extra features, slightly better performance, and a MUCH higher price tag.  Just like the wedding market:

So, what do you actually get for your money?  Usually it’s not much, as you can’t really buy real enterprise level services off the shelf.

But this then raises the question – what are enterprise level services?

In my mind, these are the things that don’t necessarily some in the shrink-wrapped box.  Let’s, for a moment, take the example of Snap-on tools.  Whilst they aren’t normally referred to as an enterprise service, I believe they are a good example of one.  Snap-on, on a basic level, manufacture tools for the motor trade.  You go to them and buy one of their socket sets, or whatever else may offer.  Now, this is exactly what you can do at any auto-factor anywhere on the planet. However, Snap-on are more expensive.

So what makes Snap-on a good analogy for the enterprise?

Well, for a minute, put yourself in the shoes of the guy using the tools.  One day, your tool will fail. One day it will break, and you’ll need to either use a workaround, or down tools and try and get hold of a new one.  This could mean lost money, a trip down to the auto-factor’s again for something potentially out of stock, or something worse like an unhappy client.

This is where the enterprise support of Snap-on steps in and justifies it’s extra cost.  Your tool fails, and you’re stuck.  So you give your local Snap-on dealer a call (which are all mobile based), and he comes round and gives you a replacement tool free of charge.  You then carry on with your work and go home happy.

Therefore, in my eyes, Enterprise means that you are buying a service, not a price-tag.  You’re buying something that means you won’t lose out at any point, or that someone else will worry about keeping something functioning.  You’re basically paying an insurance policy against having to worry about anything.

This leads me to believe that we’re suffering from the effects of those f**kwits known as marketing departments who sit there spouting their mar-bollocks trying to peddle their crap.  Unfortunately to a marketer, sticking Enterprise on the name means they can charge five times as much as provide much the same thing.

So, next time you’re buying Enterprise, consider the price hike you’re being nailed with and have a serious think about what you’re actually getting for your money.

Is ColdFusion a dirty word?

Posted by Neil – January 25, 2008

I’ve just got back from London’s installment of the Flex 3 / AIR pre-release tour at the UK Flex user group in Shoreditch. Around 200 people turned up to listen to James Ward and Serge Jespers from Adobe talk about the upcoming Flex 3 and AIR releases. During the two hour session, BlazeDS was also covered for an hour (for some strange reason).

However, something got me (and a few of the other guys there) and that was the way that the Adobe guys talked when referring to the server-side. Only once throughout the entire session did either of the Adobe evangelists mention the C word (i.e. ColdFusion). To add to it, two demos were done of server-side interaction with Flex. One was in PHP, and the other Java. At no point was CF mentioned when in both cases it was an ideal platform (and a sister product).

What’s with this? Adobe had the perfect opportunity, a room of a load of Flex developers, few of which were CF developers, who could have been told that CF was the ideal companion to Flex….or do Adobe not see it that way any more? Would they rather not mention it outside of the CF community?

I was also somewhat surprised afterwards when talking to some of the other Flex developers at the session. When told I was a ColdFusion developer most of the time, the response was generally one of surprise. Some of the comments made implied that these guys (who are surely in the Adobe / MXNA arena quite regularly) were somewhat surprised CF was still actively used.

This got me wondering, why is this? Well, I took a quick look at indeed.com’s job trends graphing system for some sort of ideas as to the usage level with what seemed to be flavour of the night, PHP.


ColdFusion, PHP, ASP.NET Job Trends graph

Here’s a chart showing the mentions of three technologies in job ads in the US over the last three (ish) years, ColdFusion, PHP and ASP.NET. Something for me stands out here, things are on the up for PHP and ASP.NET. Now bear in mind that the market is growing every day, more and more web developers are working worldwide than ever before so I would expect to see a growth. But…CF is a flatline. Surely this means that the number of ColdFusion jobs out there is actually diminishing as a percentage share of the web development market? Surely this means that ColdFusion is going backwards? I would hazard a guess that all those guys in the CF arena are those who have been using it for more than 3 years, and are perfectly happy with it, as they should be. It looks to me like there is no growth in the ColdFusion job market, and after seeing how the evangelists market it outside of the community, I’m not surprised.

Now, I’m not planning on kicking off a whole new “Is CF dead?” thread, they are largely a waste of time, but I do wonder if sometimes Adobe would rather it just went away leaving them to reap the rewards from the Flash Platform (the reason they bought Macromedia) and PDF and the creative tools.

As a footnote, I’m a ColdFusion developer, I have been for years and I like using it. I also have no problem finding new jobs.