...more recent posts
The influence of web applications has made its way into the user experiences of operating systems accelerating the acceptance, by users, of user experiences that can be best developed using web application development stacks (or portable runtimes such as Flash, Slingshot, etc.). This will push the client operating system to a position of irrelevance in time. Yeah, I'll need an OS to run my device, but I won't care which OS because developers are moving up the stack on the edge device just as they've moved up the stack on the server.Interesting.
Fascinating email from 2003 where Alan Kay defines his 1967 coinage of "object oriented" programming.
It is surprising to me how difficult it has been (for me, and I'm sure others as well) to grasp this whole way of thinking. You can hear Kay having this same struggle on a different level when he says "I didn't understand the monster LISP idea of tangible metalanguage then...."
I'm starting to "get it" though. The key to making progress towards understanding is to have the right problem. When my program (which I call Geneva because that's where I had the main idea) was smaller I had no way to grasp what all the fuss was about object orientation. But now that it is much larger, and in some ways unwieldy and even a little bit out of control, I've begun to actually understand (rather than just being able to recite some rote definition of OO.) Having the right problem to carry you through to understanding is key, in the sense that real understanding is similar to discovering the concept for the first time. And you can't discover something if you're not working on a problem.
You learn what you need to know, I guess, and by definition no more. Anyway, back to work.
Looks like Nokia has developed a tactile response on screen keyboard. Basically they put little keys underneath the screen. Interestingly, Nokia concedes that you don't actually type faster than with a traditional on screen keyboard, but they claim it's more satisfying. Apple filed a patent application for something that sounds similar last month.