Monthly Archives: April 2006

The Atlas

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I have been playing and testing the available alpha version of the Microsofts new kid on the Ajax block – The Atlas. Atlas is an add-on for the Visual Studio 2005 and is the response to all those javascript libraries available on the market, to all those Web 2.0123 applications which have appeared on the net in the past years.

There are no doubts, as it is an early version, a lot of the functionality is going to change and starting building important applications on the Atlas at the very moment is not the best decision – we mortals do know what is going to be different in its next version.

After experimenting available for the download examples and playing a little bit around i have decided for me, that as long as i wont see something close to the release candidate of it – i am going to stick to the “usual suspects”.

So, what about the first Atlas coming ? Honestly saying – i am a bit disappointed, as i was expecting a little bit more “robust” product, less quantity (no 100′s of kilobytes) and more quality (less bugs). Also i am a bit surprised by the “xml-script” appearance. I don’t know if we need one more xml translation script language at this very moment. Wasn’t Microsoft developing its own version of the Mozilla’s XUL ? I don’t think it is reasonable to go into the 2 direction at the same time, when everyone else goes the third one, but hey, i know the history of the Microsoft, and their capabilities of changing the things =O)

Today I was thinking a lot about Backbase and their future. From one side Atlas will help them to break into the bigger masses, but from the other side – it will probably sweep away the biggest market share, and i would still prefer a smaller fish to get bigger, instead of the bigger sharks consuming everyone around.

No, the world is still spinning in the very same direction, and the xHTML code produced by Visual Studio + Atlas is still invalid as it shouldn’t be, some exclusive IE things (nothing unexpected here, but still it hurts a bit).

Waiting for the next coming, as there are no doubts, it should be more interesting…

The future of the Flash

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Hello Macromedia Adobe !

Last year, we’ve seen a very interesting move of buying Macromedia with all their big assets like Flash, Fireworks, JRun, ColdFusion and a “foto-realistic” Dreamweaver. =O) Lately i’ve seen a lot of pages, using visual javascript libraries like “Script.Aculo.Us”, “Rico” and so on, which are starting to replace the Flash animation.

One of the designers i know, told me a story that while submitting a work proposal for a client she was referencing to the use of one of those libraries, as a “Flash-kind Animation” and i caught myself thinking that it is probably the most common explanation for their’s use. Today i was visiting Microsoft Visual Studio page and have noticed that they also have moved away from using flash animation into the direction of the javascript libraries. This page from the Blizzard Entertainment represents another example of moving away from the flash solution. I believe that this year will mark a lot of redesigns moving away from the flash animation to the use of the javascript libraries.

Why ? Because they are “lighter” as components, most web-designers and web-developers know how to use javascript, because they do not require the presence of a flash designer and no Adobe fees are required ( for aquiring the Flash solution ).

So what about the future ? Is it going to disappear ? Substituted ? Ignored ?
No way. There are thousands, if not millions flash fans and users. Also, flash has its own market, which i believe, is about to be changed a little bit.
While having no real competition (as at this very moment =O) ), for any rich-client working with some data and creating some visual impact, we are going to see some real changes in the nearest future. Yes, i am talking about pages made with Ajax (XmlHttpRequest) joining with those visual libraries.

Having done one site almost =O) completely with Javascript and Ajax, i have to say, that though without any doubt, it is not the most perfect site on this planet, but still with a nice visual impact, i confess of starting believing more and more in the future of this solution. (Almost, because there was one little thing, which by the design requirements was possible to do only in flash).

Of course, we are facing just the very first generation of those visual javascript libraries, and the solution is far from being perfect or even reaching the Flash level, but i would say, that in the next coupple of years, this solution is going to provide something pretty similar with the flash, if of course Flash is not going to advance.

When is it all going to happend ? Starting from yesterday.

I am excited to see if the Adobe is going to react in some way.

Portwatch Austria

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About 1 month later then expected, here are the results of the research… First of all – seeing Austrian’s pages after the Spanish is not the most pleasant thing which can be done. Having set my expectations extremly high for the Austrian’s municipalities i was quite disappointed with the most of them, though at least one of the pages was quite up to the expectations.

  • Frames in Austria are as good as dead (and its a good thing) – the only site to use them is Burgenland, which represents about 11.1%.
  • The same number of sites (1 – 11.1%) is using a table-less design and its not much, i have to say
  • Carinthia’s site is the only one which does not use any doctype at all, and its pretty much against the vast majority (88.9%) of the rest of Austria
  • Only 1 site (11.1%) has a valid HTML, and its too few. Too few, to be considered something as a tendention in the governmental sites
  • 2 sites (22.2%) have a valid css and once again it is a very low numbers, for such an advanced country as an Austria
  • The screen resolution 1024×768 is something, that should not be required at the governmental sites, and the percentage 44.4% is way to high, thinking about the number of the users with a laptop
  • Just a couple of sites have a fav icon which represents about 44.4%
  • Just a three sites (33.3%) have some other language(english) integrated, and though the number i expected was much higher, its not that bad as it seems from the first sight
  • Web acessability has a relatively small percentage (about 33.3%), though i have to say, that i was very positively surprised with Vienna’s implementation of the priority 2 of the WCAG

The max percentage for the municipality in Austria is about 91.6%, which is very close to the maximum percentage, which one of the finest Spain municipalities has obtained (96.7%). The minimum of the 10.9% is again lower then the spanish(15.8%) but again higher then the portuguese(0%).

As the Portwatch own page is still under construction, i have joined the final result with the Portwatch page.

Results Austria

A long month

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It has been a very long month … With a lot of changes – climate, working place, MMORPG, attitude and even the job.

I would even say that the most changes are for better – as the weather made a big step into the direction of the summer, my new job is going to give me a new oportunity to produce something useful without spending hours, programming “paging” mechanisms and maybe even i will have a right to write the name of the organization where i am going to work =O).

I have to acknowledge the oportunity that the firm where i am still working (for 6 more days). I have learned a lot of good people, i have worked in some interesting projects and i have gained an important experience, but my time has come – and its time to move to the “higher ground”. There are a lot of problems to be battled with this year for them, but there are a lot of solutions around.

Reflecting on the past years of my career, i am starting to understand, that in my work i have went away from the open source to the proprietary solutions, moving from Java to .Net. I cant say that i do not like it, nor that i like it – its just the way it is. Knowing my dislike for the attitudes and polititcs of the Microsoft, i found myself working with their software more and more at the job, and less and less at home (i even dream of buying my first Mac this year). Not only at the programming field i am moving from open to close, as i see my career by now, i have passed from working in a very small firm, to a bigger and bigger ones, by this very moment i am going to move to the biggest informatic solution provider on the portuguese market. With all this things i am starting to ask myself – am i going to end working for microsoft one day ? … hehe =O)