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1. new getanewbrowser redesign
- layout and design complete
- need to hack archives in wordpress to do what we want
- migrate and lunch

2. product / service launch (a small building block to additional ideas)

3. case studies and analysis
- design studies from TJ
- reviews from both of us
- business analysis from andy

4. we’ve been getting a lot of beta invites that we may now have time to catch up on after the new ganb release.
- i am most excited about an offer we received to beta test Gmail for domains
- also on deck are reviews for wufooo and more

5. we got ideas brewing. stay tuned for good stuff

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In a post in middle November on 37Signals’ blog Signals vs Noise, Jason Fried asked “Have we jumped the shark?”. Jumping the shark is a term to describe something that has passed its peak.

Well it’s safe to say that, at least, 37Signals has yet to jump the referred to shark. Before reading the post in which Jason explains their Business Week debut, I happened upon it while flipping through the recent delivery Monday evening (See for yourself in the March 17, 2006 issue — page 72-73). In an article describing the ‘Speed Demons’ of business, Steve Hamm writes about “How smart companies are creating new products - and whole new business - almost overnight.” Overall it was a pretty good article that spans varying industries and evident examples of how these processes are used in the real world.

The lesson from 37Signals - be simple. If you want more read Getting Real, or at least the post that started it all.

Additionally as interesting is a feature in the latest Wired mag (Wired, 04|2006, page 26) about David Heinemeier Hansson. He’s a partner at 37Signals who is mainly in charge of development and is the brains behind Ruby on Rails, an increasingly popular web development framework. Anyway, Wired claims David as “The hottest hacker on Earth”.

After seeing the second article about them in two days I flipped through my freshly delivered Business 2.0 mag. Unfortunately they did not make it in “Best-Kept Secrets of the world’s best companies”. There’s always next year.

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I just wanted to tell anyone who was interested and/or as fed up with flash as we are about Flashblock. “It is an extension for the Mozilla, Firefox, and Netscape browsers that takes a pessimistic approach to dealing with Macromedia Flash content on a webpage and blocks ALL Flash content from loading. It then leaves placeholders on the webpage that allow you to click to download and then view the Flash content.”

You decide when flash loads or doesn’t.

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Q: When does building websites with standards just become too much?…

A: When the ‘quitters’ have learning curves.

…But isn’t this the case with everything new that you have to learn? I’m sure tackling the browser quirks alone can be one gigantic stopper and self-esteem crusher especially when time is money.

So do we just give up on building sites using standards/css, even though it will be the standard in (x amount) years to come? Are we quitters?

Working for a design firm, I personally have a very busy schedule and not much allowed time to be learning. This must be done outside of work. Which is fine with me, because I enjoy it and am excited to be apart of the beginning of standards based design. (Well, not the beginning, but to everyone else out there that will never read this, it’s practically BEFORE the beginning. HA)

But for others, who live and breathe table based design and development, outside learning isn’t usually an option, especially when particular designers have families, other obligations, and are frankly just too stuborn. (not to generalize, but we all know this type) I can see how someone wouldn’t want to change/better themselves if they aren’t forced to by their employer or someone else, especially when standards based designing ISN’T the standard. Therefore seems foriegn anyway.

I still don’t agree with this way of thinking at all, but I guess I can understand. But if you are a designer, and haven’t heard about css and standards, and haven’t even tried to work through them and learn, then you have no business calling yourself a designer. That basically makes you seem as if you live under a log (your old!).

(In my personal experience) Many programmers/developers are in similar place as vertran designers when it comes to seeing DIVs all over the screen. They are basically lost at sea in a stuborn, ricket, old boat.

How will we ever overcome the gobs and gobs of nasty code produced by table based websites (and all the other pitfalls that caused from tables), if we don’t embrace new things and stop thinking, money money money! ‘Build it in tables, it will be much faster.’ Which inturn saves tons of money.

This is only true in the present. Building sites with standards would earn company ‘x’ more money in the end especially when it saves time on changes and digging through insane amounts of code. Saves time on development/coding. Accessible sites are also a great selling point. The list goes on and on.

I sadly don’t have an answer for any of this, but I will keep admiring the useage of CSS and continue to build my sites with it. That is the least I can do.

What this comes down to is something my mother used to say all the time: “If your not going to do it right the first time, then don’t do it at all. You will just have to spend double the amount of time when you have to go back and fix what you’ve already done.”

Good words of wisdom. Thanks mom.

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Well I had this whole post written yesterday but thanks to Blogger it was lost. It was good too, most likely the best post ever written. Obviously this one is not going to be as good. But we will be without Blogger by the end of the weekend as we launch a completely redesigned getanewbrowser with wordpress as our platform.

Moving on, I stumbled on an excellently written documentation of one person’s migration to a web service only productivity software model. In essence he no longer uses desktop applications such as Microsoft Office for productivity but rather web based, often web 2.0, services. He calls it Office 2.0 (i know, i hate the name too).

“A new programming model for web-based user interfaces called AJAX and a killer application for it, “Gmail? are now bringing new life to this concept. The idea is pretty simple: use a generic web browser and a set of online services to provide all the functionality needed by a computer user, removing the need for any application to be installed on the computer itself. I call it Office 2.0.”

He goes on in a series of posts explaining his move form singular desktop applications, such as Micorosoft Word, to their web service alternative, such as Writely. This is a wonderful resource for anyone getting acquainted with web 2.0, or more naturally ’software as a service’.

As I have said before the ‘Web 2.0′ is not about fancy Javascript, AJAX, and bright Fisher-Price colors. The Web 2.0, much like AJAX, are old ideas coming into fruition.

In an introduction to his Office 2.0 posts on IT Redux, Ismael Ghalimi recognizes this fact.

“Office 2.0 is the Network Computer Redux.

In its original incarnation circa 1996, the concept for a Network Computer (NC) did not really make sense. It offered a fraction of the functionality provided by a regular Personal Computer (PC), at a similar purchase price. But most importantly, nobody really cared. The web was just starting and the promoters of this new platform (Oracle and Sun Microsystems) found it difficult to make a case for it beyond their common distaste for anything Microsoft.”

I finally got around to reading the latest issue of CIO Insight last night and noticed they had just published a very similar article to the one I am writing now, except targeted to CIO’s. You can read the article ‘The Internet Reloaded - Web 2.0 Reality Check‘ online and I recommend it even if you are not a CIO.

This article discusses the adoption of Web 2.0 (software as service) on an enterprise scale and the hurdles it has to overtake to get to that point. They point that enterprise level systems of Web 2.0 nature are nearly three years out. What’s the biggest hurdle? Data Security. The other major hurdle is getting existing systems, such as ERP systems, to integrate with web based services. Without a solid integration plan enterprises will be far less willing to migrate to a service based architecture. Why is this such a big jump? Data Integrity sans integration and migration.

CIO Insight has been having excellent coverage of Web 2.0 with rare content. They don’t care about the latest AJAX calendar app or classified systems. Sure these applications are important as Web 2.0 grows into a mainstream ‘platform’. But it won’t ever be as important as it will when it is adopted on an enterprise level. When this occurs the IT culture inside large organizations will go through a dramatic change just as the development of these technologies has done.

If you are interested in following Ismael’s lead, he offers an excellent list of services he uses, their alternatives, and reviews of each. Check out his Office 2.0 Setup.

IT|Redux ? Office 2.0

CIO Insight | The Internet Reloaded

tags: internet, web 2.0, software, technology

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