I’m setting off on a fairly major trip, firstly to Lotusphere in Orlando (20-24 Jan) where I’ll be facilitating a BOF session (BOF112) titled “Mashup Web 2.0 with Web Content Management”. Sadly it’s been scheduled for 7am Thursday, 24 Jan which seems like a rather silly time to expect people to be up, out of bed and ready for intelligent discussion. So if you’re around I’d really appreciate you getting out of bed early and coming along to make sure it’s not an empty room. Ephox will have a booth on the show room floor and cosponsor a couple of parties as well (details here). I’m really looking forward to actually getting to meet some of our clients and partners – they don’t tend to drop by Australia very often and pretty much never come as far north as Brisbane.

Tim Bray’s second, very short notice, prediction for 2008 is that Windows is going to “look bad”. It’s probably a good prediction – Vista simply didn’t do enough to make Windows competitive for the next 3 years or so they’ll take to get the next release out. Obviously Windows isn’t going to disappear but there is already a strong trend towards alternate platforms, mostly OS X, which is very likely to increase over the next 12 months. Even my wife has become an Apple evangelist (more so than me) ever since she got my old powerbook to use in front of the couch. It seems the in-laws will be making the switch in the next year as well.

Michael Krigsman sticks it to Nick Carr and includes an interesting assertion: that how good software is can be decided by how much revenue it drives:

Nick, please let the market decide whether enterprise software is “good” or not. There’s a simple metric for measuring this: it’s called revenue. Just for kicks, compare the revenue of enterprise companies, such SAP or Oracle, to consumer-oriented firms such as Twitter (click to follow me).

The conversation around enterprise software goes on, with a couple of good responses to my last post that I want to highlight. Firstly, ddoctor (aka Dylan Just who recently started working here at Ephox) in the comments:

I’m thinking of making this one of my career goals – making enterprise software not suck.

Then you’re very much in the right place – that’s what we do…. He goes on to give some very good advice on designing good UIs, but it misses a key point that I was trying to make in my last post:

I original skipped over Robert Scoble’s post, Why Enterprise Software Isn’t Sexy, it just seemed too obvious to be worth reading in much detail. I’ve been working on software that sells to enterprise customers for the past 6 years or so and no one cares about it, but release a poor version of that software for the consumer space and everyone goes ga-ga over it. EditLive! and eWebEdit Pro have been bringing WYSIWYG editing to the browser for years and no one cared because they were sold to the enterprise, but when Google put out Google Docs everyone went crazy about it, even though it has half the functionality and twice the bugs.

A huge amount of the items that flow through my news reader come from Robert Scoble’s shared items feed. Most I skip, but there’s enough good stuff in there that makes it well worth reading. It keeps me abreast of a much wider range of topics than I would normally read.

The trouble is, Robert doesn’t seem to have as low a tolerance level for crap in feeds that I do. Generally I’ll unsubscribe from a feed if it has:

Technology is a funny thing – we spend so much time and effort trying to make things as simple and efficient as possible for our users that we sometimes lose track of the big picture and wind up making things worse. This is particularly a problem when developing components for other’s to intgrate, rather than a product that ships directly to end users. When another developer is between you and the end user a few fairly unique dynamics come into play:

I’ve been keeping an eye on OpenSocial since it’s initial annoucement with some interest but also a healthy dose of skepticism. I’m still wondering why anyone would want to support open social. It doesn’t give you any integration between systems – all it provides is potential access to the OpenSocial widgets that 3rd party developers make.

Now, if we look at the 3rd party widgets from FaceBook you’d be doing your users a great favor by not supporting OpenSocial. I’m yet to find any FaceBook “application” (I use the term with great disdain) that doesn’t do whatever it takes to sign up new users, usability and user experience be damned.

Maybe I’m just a spoil sport but I think project code names are the most ridiculous concept. I’ve never seen a code name help clarify things – they only ever cause confusion. Compare:

Hey Joe, how’s the schedule looking for futzbist?

with:

Hey Joe, how’s the schedule looking for the next EditLive! release?

The argument is of course that everyone gets to know the project code name so it’s a nice shorthand for the project – but for how long do they remember them? How far back can you name Java, Ubuntu, Debian or even OS X releases? Did Puma come before or after Cheetah? What was the Tiger release? And what’s in the stray alley cat release?

Is it just me (quite possible) or is the standard JSON validator for JavaScript unable to handle quotes (") in strings? Specifically, shouldn’t the JSON below be considered valid?

{“name”:"""}

It throws a parseJSON error when run through the validator but executes perfectly as JavaScript and seems to match the specification for strings in JSON. It’s frustrating because even though the data is coming straight from the server so it’s as trustworthy as it can get, I still think it’s incredibly poor form to execute data without first validating it.

With all the complaining about Apple not having shipped JDK 6 with Leopard it’s nice that someone has actually stopped whining and started coding. So kudos to Landon Fuller for actually doing something useful. Of course, he hasn’t really gotten anywhere because porting Java is an awful lot of work, but if nothing else he’ll understand why it takes Apple so long.

It also means we can start the timer to see if the open source model can actually bring Java 6 to OS X faster than Apple can.

For those who both use EditLive! and were very quick to upgrade to Leopard, you might want to grab the latest early access build of EditLive! With old builds on Tiger, our toolbar didn’t respond well to the darker background color:

(Click for full size version)

Fortunately, Apple introduced some new rendering styles for buttons with Leopard that we could leverage to get a much nicer, much more OS X look: