Coffee & Gems

Finally! What took them so long? btw: before you get overly excited - it's fake. btw2: where did I leave that Gameboy?

Ever since WAP came around in 1999 or so I was very interested in mobile (networked) computing. From my perspective the basic ideas around WAP were not so bad - it was an open network, really. But unfortunately, the devices and the networks at the time made the user experience absolutely horrifying. Still, I would call this period the first era in mobile computing (for me, the image that symbolizes this period best is the Nokia 7110, which was Nokia's first real WAP phone, see left). So along came the next era which is best symbolized by Vodafone Life. It is all about operators' walled gardens. Obviously, that approach improved the user experience, especially because content and menus were partly stored on the device. But the big drawback was the closed nature of this approach. It resembled AOL on phones. Since two weeks I do own a shiny new iPhone and I am convinced that this device marks the beginning of a new age in mobile computing. It combines access to the open Internet a...

I cannot remember the last time where I advocated a PC program, but I simply have to say: Tech Smith's Camtasia , the screencast recording and editing program, is incredibly good. It does everything I could think of in a screencast recorder, yet the UI is very easy to use. It's clearly the best desktop application I looked at in a while. The killer feature, of course, is "smart focus". In post recording phase Camtasia automatically figures out what is of interest on the screen and zooms in. See here for a cast I created with Camtasia. It should also be said that it comes at a price (300USD), but there is also a 30 day trial version that does not cripple the produced screencasts in any way (btw: I bought it). Kudos to the Tech Smith.

Mate, looking for a new MacBook Pro? Well, just hack a little JCR-based web app. Day has just announced the JCR Cup 2008 , a JCR development competition. I will not be able to enter (I'm on the jury), but I reckon I'll write some examples just for the fun of it. Subscribe to dev.day.com if you're interested.

One take-away message from the TheServerSide symposium for me was(*): multi-language development is considered to be an important change in the future. In particular, DSL are hip at the moment, but some people think that in the future there will be many languages that we develop in at the same time. I only partly agree with that. Looking back in history there always was a dominant programming language in each of the computing decades we saw so far: Mainframes had Cobol, Client-Server had C/C++, the Internet had Java. Right now, there is all this talk about Ruby, Python, ActionScript, Javascript, Scala, you name it. I think that we are in a post-Java language confusion that exists mainly because the next big decade in computing has not started, yet. Once it starts some new computing language will become the dominant player again. It will dominate because it will be the most versatile language for that computing environment. Probably, it will also have a big company behind it (see histo...