.mobi and Ajax : They don't mix ...
September 14, 2006 | Comments.mobi and Ajax : They don't mix ...: "First, it is assumed that there is a clear divide between mobile sites and non-mobile sites; there isn’t. I have a mobile web browser on my PDA"
BONG! Sorry Ajit, you're disqualified :)
As a PDA owner, you're a freak. Don't worry about it - you're in the same box as most of the folks working in mobile right now (myself included), in that you care about the devices more than the public do. PDA owners are a tiny slice of the overall market - if you're launching a consumer-facing service, they're not usually economical to bother with. And their needs, expectations and capabilities are completely different from those of the mass market.
".mobi, by contrast, foresees islands where these domains do not mix; at least, they don’t mix a the level of the URI. That’s just not where AJAX and mobile web services are going. What’s more, the mobile web apps that are most likely to be successful and make money are precisely the ones that successfully achieve this data convergence."
I don't see why
http://www.tomhume.mobi/blog/post/1234M
http://www.tomhume.org/blog/post/1234
Shouldn't both work, providing the sort of URI-application-state thing that Ajit is talking about and satisfying the .mobi requirements...
Games about games
September 14, 2006 | CommentsGame about game design: "Tune is a game that teaches game design. Find the perfect combination of jump strength, rotation, or gravity to accomplish each goal. Get under the hood and understand what goes into tuning game mechanics. Experience the satisfaction of tuning a mechanic perfectly. How well can you tune Tune?"
DRM
September 14, 2006 | CommentsThe greatest trick: "In many ways, the recording industry is the biggest dupe in the DRM wars. They have repeatedly been sold, and have repeatedly bought heavily into copy-prevention schemes that don’t work, can’t work, and only give more power to the DRM vendor."
Project risk reduction patterns
September 13, 2006 | CommentsProject risk reduction patterns by Alistair Cockburn: "The top risks are those that will keep you from delivering the system you need. Unless they are addressed, the rest of your work does not matter. The top risks do not arrive in waterfall sequence; they arrive in any sequence, popping up at any time. You will know a project based on risk management, because it will become increasingly clear over time that the system will ship successfully."
The start-up inflection point
September 11, 2006 | CommentsThe start-up inflection point: "No matter how self-directed programmers are, eventually their utility declines as ambiguities in direction, roles, goals and ownership become increasingly distracting and frustrating. The company is changing because of scale effects - but scale effects are hard to recognize, predict or compensate for."
Very true, and something which affects any size of company. This is something I'd experienced twice now - once at Good Technology when we hit around 8 members of staff, and once here at FP.