Missing the boat

Yes, life has been just a bit busier since Eliza arrived. I'm finally starting to call her Eliza more than Emma.

What finally prompted me to post again has nothing to do with Eliza, but it really grabbed my attention. I've read before that what makes blogs work is passion. Since I'm overdue for an update, the place to begin is with something I can't get off my mind.

I've written about Joel Spolsky before... or at least I've thought about it many times. Joel is one of those shining stars in the commercial programming business. His recent book "Smart and Gets Things Done" is highly relevant these days, as I'm interviewing people for a new web developer position.

Just recently, Joel wrote a short piece about Lotus Symphony. No, not the classic failure from the DOS days, but a new package Lotus is releasing soon, and, according to Joel, with probably the same end result. Specifically, he talks about the three stages of desktop software development that arrived at where we are today with Windows, and compares this with a revolution happening on the web with technologies like AJAX.

The trouble with the second stage was that there were no clear UI standards... the programmers almost had too much flexibility, so everybody did things in different ways, which made it hard, if you knew how to use program X, to also use program Y. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 had completely different menu systems, keyboard interfaces, and command structures. And copying data between them was out of the question.

And that’s exactly where we are with Ajax development today. Sure, yeah, the usability is much better than the first generation DOS apps, because we’ve learned some things since then. But Ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one Ajax app to another, for example, so I’m not sure how you get a picture from Gmail to Flickr. Come on guys, Cut and Paste was invented 25 years ago.

Update: Problems on the server where I host my website caused this post to be even more delayed than expected.