The End of Google Wave

Google has decided to pull the plug on Google Wave. After great promise it dies an ignoble death.

Google in their August 4th update states that:

Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.
Update on Google Wave

The failure was primarily due to the business decision to launch the product too soon. This was a robust application whose target audience included non-techies who will have nothing to do with a product that doesn't help them accomplish the tasks at hand. In many ways Google Wave was a time-sink, entertaining and a useful exercise for IAs, developers and other techies, but of little to no use for many business users. The end result we see now - after a rousing introduction - Google Wave is dead barely a year after being introduced to the public.

The Psychology of Users

One thing to factor in when coming up with a strategy with business owners is the psychology of users, both that of the site owners themselves and the site users. Site owners want to have what others have or they feel that they would be lacking in comparison to their competitors.

Then there is the psychology of site consumers who feel that the site is less professional without the gizmos that another site has.

I see this all the time in relation to social media. Some sites are better suited for social media than others. For some sites social media will never be more an unnecessary time sink and money pit.

Bad Day at the Office

This is for all of you who have ever let a typo or a photoshop error go live or to print:

Reliability
... always upholding the highest standards for every detal.

Martin Luther King Day Rally

This product has been x-rated at point of origin.

Oddee.com

Ever Wonder About Excel Dates?

I found a blog post that might answer most of your questions.

WAY BACK in 1991

... Later that day, I had some time, so I started working on figuring out if Basic had enough date and time functions to do all the things you could do in Excel.

In most modern programming environments, dates are stored as real numbers. The integer part of the number is the number of days since some agreed-upon date in the past, called the epoch. In Excel, today's date, June 16, 2006, is stored as 38884, counting days where January 1st, 1900 is 1.

I started working through the various date and time functions in Basic and the date and time functions in Excel, trying things out, when I noticed something strange in the Visual Basic documentation: Basic uses December 31, 1899 as the epoch instead of January 1, 1900, but for some reason, today's date was the same in Excel as it was in Basic.

Huh?

I went to find an Excel developer who was old enough to remember why. Ed Fries seemed to know the answer. ... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

Do The Simplest Thing

I've read the following again and again. I wish I had come across it 10 years ago. From: xProgramming.com

"The most important rule in our development is always to do the simplest thing that could possibly work. Not the most stupid thing, not something that clearly can't work. But simplicity is the most important contributor to the ability to make rapid progress."

We find that we have to remind ourselves of this rule continually. Developers like to develop, and most of us have years of experience in creating a "general solution" to whatever we're asked for. Real progress against the real problem is maximized if we just work on what the problem really is.

On the contrary, if we know we're going to need something we should build it in while we're building the object the first time. It'll save time.

• How can it possibly save time to do more rather than less? The best you can hope for is to break even. A little bad luck, and you'll come out behind.
  
• When you're thinking about "we're going to need this someday", you're not thinking about "we need this today". You just distracted yourself from your goal. Don't compound the error by chasing tomorrow.
  
• Software follows an 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the work. Find that simplest 20 and do it.
  
• Studies show that developers are not really that good at predicting what will be needed. It's better to wait for a real need, and provide for it then.

Smalltalk code is extremely easy to modify. We do not have to design or build for the future. Progress is fastest if we just do what we need to do now: leave the future to the future.

On the contrary, when I'm immersed in a new object, I may see how to do something that will later be more difficult because I won't be up to speed.

• If the object is so complex that it will be hard to modify later, it is just too complex. Simplify it so that adding new capabilities will be easy, but don't make it even more complex by adding them now.
  
• Add commentary describing the key idea. Your mission is to make the fastest progress against what the problem really is, not against what the problem might be or might become.

iPad: The Future or Not?

Like millions of others I’ve been wondering about the impact of iPad on the future of the internet and computers. It appears as if Apple has hit a home run, although there are a few caveats regarding its impact. First the positives. The interface is remarkable and it is the first great eReader on the market. Tablets, and especially the iPad, is ending print media (books, magazines and newspapers). We’re seeing technology come to what many of us have been imagining for the past many years. First Wolfram|Alpha came out last year and now the iPad. Combine the two, wait a few years for incremental improvements, and you will have a computer straight out of Star Trek, Minority Report or Avatar.

Now for the caveats.
Tablets, including the iPad, are not designed for heavy-duty data entry. For it to replace laptops keyboard tasks will have to be improved. I don’t think this is much of a problem as it is a simple incremental step to improve the screen keyboard.

The iPad is a mobile device and will take a beating. How durable is it? Will the screen take the punishment without breaking too often.

It’s still too bulky. It needs to fit easily into a pocket and then expand to the necessary size. This will come in time. And sooner than you think. Laugh if you will. When modem speeds increased from 9600 to 14.4 to 28.8 people laughed when I answered the question “How fast is fast enough to load a webpage?” with the answer “As fast as it takes when you’re changing channels on your TV” or “As fast as it takes from flicking on the light switch until you have light.”

I’ve heard many complaints that the iPad doesn’t use any Microsoft products; that you can’t make phone calls, or use it as a camera. If the iPad catches on, which I think it will, those features will be included soon enough and shortly these complaints will be a thing of the past.

I think this is the first tablet that will capture the imagination. I do think that the lack of an external drive is a problem – for the moment.

Designing for a Blackberry

If you're designing for BlackBerrys keep in mind the computing power of the late 1990s. The CPU's in phones such as the BlackBerry are not up par, being the equivalent to about 500MHz, and cannot properly render javascript-enhanced content.