On today's Smalltalk Daily, James Savidge conducts a walkthrough of the ObjectSTudio Designer (GUI building) tool. It's an introduction; he'll be following up with more. To watch, click on the image below:
Mathew Ingram points out what a lot of people in the newspaper business are continuing to miss:
As Mark Potts at Recovering Journalist points out (along with a few others), this entire argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the industry. Newspapers have *never* been paid directly by readers for the news. When readers pay for a paper at the box or at the store or by subscription, they are paying for a small fraction of the content in the newspaper — maybe the first half a dozen pages or so, for a large metropolitan daily. Everything else is paid for by advertising.
I think there's one thing lost in a lot of the analysis though: the entire consumption model for news is changing. Not just the flip from paper to net, either. Newspapers - like broadcast news - are trying to do broad coverage of "everything". The NY TImes, for instance, has a metro section, a sports section, an editorial page, style (etc, etc).
Compare that to what you read on the net. Gadget news? Engadget,Gizmodo. Politics? Opinions from various political bloggers. Tech news? Again, subdivided down by segment. What you're seeing is a vast creation of niche news reporting, and the existing media giants are stuck in the old "everything" model. Jeff Jarvis is only partly correct when he says that newspapers have to go hyper-local; they also need to find a specific niche.
Even aggregators tend to focus - Techmeme doesn't aggregate non-tech news, for instance. That's the big change hitting the media right now. Most of the people in media are focused on the decline of paper - they should be paying attention to the decline of generalism.
This company should charge online visitors a small fee, maybe $5 a month, for our content - which is copyrighted, then sue the pants off anyone stealing it.
Should Google "pick up" (steal) our stuff, if we successfully sued them for $1 billion, two good things happen: 1) Our money problems are solved; 2) everyone else will stop stealing our content.
Left unexamined by Mr. Byofsky: If Google (et. al.) aren't allowed to "pick up" (link to) the content, then pray tell: how would any of the potential readers know it exists? This isn't 1978, and people looking for news don't have to rely on the local news outlet for it. If your links don't show up in searches, you simply don't exist.
While I was in Cincinnati, Parallels had trouble suspending, and just hung. I killed it, and now it won't start back up - it's saved in the hung state. Anyone have any idea what to do? The menu options for restoring a snapshot are all disabled...
Update: I called Parallels support, and they were helpful. There was a silly request to reboot the Mac, but the basic problem was two files that made Parallels believe it was still backing up:
bigUglyName.mem
config.sav
The .mem file had a large hex looking name in curly braces - deleting that and the .sav file made everything work again.
I saw a message flash by on Twitter earlier today:
What's the best desktop scripting language for woking with http, REST and XML?
The conventional wisdom is that something like Perl, Python, or Ruby would be simplest, and that Smalltalk is "too big". But is it really? I've just fired up a base Smalltalk image, and loaded in the network client code. It's consuming 16.5 MB.... and my MacBook Pro has 4 GB.
So is that really heavy? Which is going to be more productive - writing some scripting code in a text file and trying to run it until it works, or writing Smalltalk in a workspace and using the debugger and inspector to help make it work?
Heck, if you're truly against having the environment running to do "simple" tasks, just write some Smalltalk code in a text file and do this:
F-Script offers a new way to create and interact with Cocoa objects using a simple scripting language and a Smalltalk-like development environment. Recently, the F-Script shell went beta , providing a new way to interactively build Cocoa.
Thinking about that for a second or two, that's most projects :) Want to be more productive and get done faster? Try it now.
One thing I don't like about the top answer there is this:
"You spend much time correcting errors that other (typed) languages detect at compile time. This means you have to test more and spend more time with trivial syntax problems than in other languages"
Having sent a good deal of time on two decent sized projects - BottomFeeder and Silt - I can say with a fair bit of assurance that it's simply not the case. People without much Smalltalk experience are always convinced of this; to their way of thinking, how could it be otherwise? The reality is, the trivial kinds of type errors being talked about almost never happen in Smalltalk. Heck, they happened to me a lot more in "C" due to the brain dead type system being combined with static checks. Bottom line - that's something most people simply have to experience themselves before they believe it.
Perhaps this is why OO as done in Smalltalk differs so much from OO done in languages like Java, C#, and C++:
Smalltalk is a language that makes true OO programming so cheap that you're more often than not benefitting from a pure-OO (possibly with patterns) approach to coding for pretty much everything. The syntax is negligable, so you're not really adding keystrokes to your task. There are no files in an image-based operating environment, so you are free to just add classes at will. Duck-typing is everywhere, so types are determined by structural conformance, rather than rigid class hierarchy organization, etc.
However, Java is a totally different beast. Adding a new class to a program in Java is one of the most intensely heavy-weight things you can do in Java! Even defining a new interface, arguably one of the cheapest things to do at the file-level in Java, implies you now need to adjust a number of other classes so that they statically "implement" that interface. Also, there is a strong distinction between internal and user-defined types (int vs. Integer, et. al.). There is no uniform access in Java (myField versus getMyField()), which means you no longer have the cheap syntax to avoid writing getters and setters, which means that you always incur a small performance hit when accessing attributes.
In Smalltalk, it doesn't incur any cost to do OO; in the mainstream languages, it does. This leads to lots of people talking past each other - most Smalltalkers have slogged away in a mainstream language; most of the rest have never seen Smalltalk, much less developed in it.
The article is well worth reading in full - don't just take the quoted snippet as enough :) One small caveat - Smalltalk may be unheard of in many development shops, but it's not dead. Smalltalk is very profitable at Cincom, and was the best performer for Cincom last year :)
What's important is that it surfaces an interesting perspective that I've always wanted to talk about with regards to marketing. One of the reasons that marketing isn't trusted (and there are at least five others) is that it's motives are not pure. Far too often, we spend money on things that fall into this general category of 'awareness of the brand'. Hard to argue with the need but it creates an opening for programs that are ego-driven, notoriety-driven, personal fulfillment-driven, and creativity-driven.
The problem is deeper though - it has to do with an often complete communications gap between the marketing people and the people who create the product/service being sold. That's often not solely marketing's fault, either - too often the product groups don't talk to marketing, on the grounds that "they won't understand anyway". Thus you get a self fulfilling prophecy, and no one ends up happy. You can have all the authenticity and purity of motive possible, but if you don't understand your company's products, you're still not going to get anywhere.
What are people looking for when they come to your website, or look at some of your marketing collateral? Information. What problem(s) do you solve with your product/service, and how do you solve them? Why is your solution better than the next guy's? How can people make use of your product/service? If that kind of information is hard to find, then whatever you do have available is irrelevant.
Authenticity matters, but only if it's connected to real information.
This week we talked to Dave Buck about two things - software (especially Smalltalk) training, and some of his recent experiences in consulting assignments - that's the "war stories" part of the title. It was a fun talk that covered a lot of ground, and we think you'll enjoy it.
To listen to Dave's entire "Design Minute" archive, go here. To get the podcast, go here.
If you have feedback, send it to smalltalkpodcasts@cincom.com - or visit us on Facebook or Ning - you can vote for the Podcast Alley, and subscribe on iTunes. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
We have been piling up episodes of "Lost" on our DVR - we weren't entirely pleased by the last season of the show, so we've been putting it off. Well, we finally decided to catch up, and - surprisingly - it's been pretty good. We should be all caught up in an hour or so, and we're pretty pleased. If you gave up on the show, you might want to re-engage.
Somewhat obscured in the hubbub about Google announcing Thursday a mobile version of its public-domain book library was a separate announcement that may be much bigger: an Amazon spokesman told the New York Times that the company is working on a way to make books formatted for its Kindle e-book reader available "on a range on mobile phones."
The iPhone is an obvious candidate, but there are others (the Storm, the various Android models). THat would be really cool - I'm not at all sure I want to buy a Kindle (I don't really travel enough to justify one) - but I'm about to get an iPhone...
One of the few glitches I've had with the Mac is the on again, off again nature of my Windows shares. We have a few Windows machines (and a network drive that uses SMB), so it's useful to have my Macs set up to use SMB. Lately (after the last update, but who knows whether that had anything to do with it), the Windows shares have disappeared from the "Shared" sidebar in Finder. I can still mount any share, but I have to recall the name (which is a pain the neck). I found this via Google, but it didn't seem to have any impact. If anyone has ideas, I'd love to hear them.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at charts in ObjectStudio, and how you build them in the GUI Design tool. To watch, click on the image below:
I was driving around the area today, and no complaints about local coverage - we'll see how it goes on the road. I do like the touchscreen interaction.
I love the responses that say, "It's great. But only use it with good developers that do unit testing." Why would you use anything with any other kind of developer? And is the claim there is a tool that actually _works_ in those situations?
On today's Smalltalk Daily, I answer a question that came to me via the talkback widget on my blog - how to deactivate a parent window when you pop up a child (without using a dialog). To watch, click on the image below:
At ESUG 2008, Julian Fitzell gave a presentation on Seaside - where it's been, where it's going, and how he's been involved in its evolution. You can download his slides here - click on the image below to watch:
I've posted a few photos of our bathroom remodel job; I really didn't think that priming and painting it would be a full day job. I should have remembered from past painting tasks that bare drywall just sucks up primer like a herd of drought stricken animals presented with an oasis :)
At least the painting is basically done - we'll have to put ceiling white on the ceiling, and touch up whatever gets scuffed during the rest of the project, but that's small stuff.
People want to do business with people. We're human, and we crave interaction with people who know us. When you build content especially for your buyer personas, you build a relationship with people before you ve even met them.
How about the opposite case? Have you recently visited a company Web site or blog and said, "Wow! These guys understand me!" Didn't it make you feel different from how those boring old sites you usually see do?
When online content seems created by some nameless, faceless corporate entity, it doesn't entice us. And we're just not interested in doing business with that company. A corporate-brochure site will never start a World Wide Rave.
That's why we keep the Smalltalk website updated on a daily basis, and why we try to keep things real on the blogs. It's also why there's a TalkBack widget right there on the left side of the blog - I'm chatting with someone now, as it happens :)
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we use a code example in ObjectStudio to demonstrate an immutability problem - and then show how to work around that problem (as opposed to fixing it - on some projects, a work-around may be an appropriate short term solution). To watch, click on the image below:
Nicholas Carr reports a big cloud computing move by IBM:
Today, as a new era in computing dawns, IBM announced another deal, this time with Amazon Web Services, a pipsqueak in the IT business but an early leader in cloud computing. Under the deal, corporations and software developers will be able to run IBM's commercial software in Amazon's cloud. As the Register's Timothy Prickett Morgan reports, "IBM announced that it would be deploying a big piece of its database and middleware software stack on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service. The software that IBM is moving out to EC2 includes the company's DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server relational databases, its WebSphere Portal and sMash mashup tools, and its Lotus Web Content Management program ... The interesting twist on the Amazon-IBM deal is that Big Blue is going to let companies that have already bought software licenses run that software out on the EC2 cloud, once the offering is generally available."
This is going to have a pretty big impact on how software like this gets sold and licensed.
Yet another update that requires restart, but Apple - like Microsoft before them - is slowly numbing me to that. No, the irritation is with Safari. I had to drive my wife to work today, because one of the cars is in the shop. I set the Mac to reboot and took off. I came home to see Safari prompting me "do you really want to quit?", and restart timed out on that.
Sigh. Who died and made Safari god? When I tell my system to reboot, why does a browser get to veto that with a useless dialog box?
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we take a look at the ListBox widget in ObjectStudio - how to use the basic properties in a UI. To watch, click on the image below:
Google has added an interesting option to GMail - you can opt in to have your signature appended with your location. As Wired notes, this might not always be desirable, so you want to be careful about opting in:
The obvious argument is centered around privacy. Sometimes it's trivial, like when you send a note to your boss saying you're sick, only to have your e-mail signature rat you out by announcing that you're sitting behind home plate at the ballpark. More seriously, there's e-stalking and the open invitation to unwanted guests. Also, letting everyone know where you are all the time is just creepy. As a society, we're not ready for that yet.
They note that Latitude (Google's new location awareness for phones) has the ability to broadcast a fake location. Yahoo has similar faking capabilities in their location awareness apps. In the meantime, there are some amusing aspects to this. They determine your location via your IP address. So, if you tie into the network via a VPN, you could get some funny results. I could make it look like I'm located at Cincom corporate HQ pretty easily, for instance :)
I'll be putting together a video demo tomorrow - one of the Web Velocity engineers created a Photo Browser demo script, and I think it should make a decent demo. Stay tuned.
I'm sitting in my office, which looks out on the street. Last night and this morning, we have had a pretty stiff breeze blowing. Fortunately, we haven't lost power - our lines here are underground. Unfortunately, this morning is when the county collects recycling.
Why do I say unfortunately? Well, a lot of the recycling bins got knocked over in the wind, either overnight or this morning. The various items - papers, plastic and metal containers, etc - are just loose in these bins. When they fall over in a stiff breeze, the result is windblown garbage everywhere.
The irony? If this stuff were all put in the trash, it would be bagged and weighed down - and pretty much immune to the wind. The attempt to be more thoughtful by recycling is having the net effect of spreading trash all over my neighborhood (this is hardly the first time that lots of wind has coincided with recycling day).
So the irony is - at least in my neighborhood - recycling efforts have led to more trash being blown into the woods and ponds in the neighborhood.
On today's Smalltalk Daily, we continue with yesterday's ListBox example - and cover multiple selections, and how to get the current selection(s) from the listbox. To watch, click on the image below:
It looks like Microsoft is getting ready to take the retail plunge:
Without detailing the plans, Microsoft said it has hired David Porter, a 25-year Wal-Mart veteran, to lead the effort. Sources say that Porter's mission will be to develop the company's retail plans and that the effort is likely to start small with just a few locations.
In general, this sounds like a good idea - especially given the success Apple has had with it. However, Apple has one huge advantage: they own the entire hardware ecosystem, and that makes their stores much more of a destination - the genius bar being the obvious example.
I'm not at all sure what Microsoft can do there. They could focus on the consumer end (Zunes, XBoxes) - the success of the XBox might make it easier to make a real effort on Zune promotion, for instance. The obvious question to me though, is this: would Microsoft consider entering the Windows OEM market themselves?
If you exist in the public eye at all - as a reporter, as a marcom type, as a product representative (etc, etc, etc) - nothing you say in public is private anymore. Nothing. If you talk in a public place, assume it will be broadcast. If you use Twitter - even with protected tweets - assume it will get pushed out. If you have a blog, assume lots of people will read it.
