If you are involved in the creation of software, here’s a short list of things you can do to ensure that your software will sell a bazillion copies of your product, whatever it is.
That’s it. If you can do that, your path to fame, fortune and Ferrari’s is assured.*
Are you a content creator for the Web? If you are then you need to learn HTML, CSS, and maybe some Javascript, too.
I have spent a significant amount of my career implementing Web sites and applications for clients. A decent amount of that time has involved implementing content management systems for businesses of all sizes. And one of the most common requests in such projects is setting up a WYSIWYG editor.
The request for a WYSIWYG editor usually stems from the desire to sheild “non-technical” users from the supposed complexities of creating Web markup while still providing them with the power to produce material that take advantage of the styling and visual design of the site. The assumption is that the content creator will not want to learn the HTML markup and CSS required to make there pages “look nice” but that they still want the flexibility and additional expressiveness of something more than plain text. In fact, a common corrollary request is to provide a “paste from Word” button. “After all”, the reasoning goes, “we already know how to write the content we want in Word.” Oh, boy.
I have managed to spend most of my career as a developer and architect not doing mobile development. I had a brief dalience with Waba back in the early 2000’s. I was looking for a simple way to write apps for my Palm Pilot and at the time I was boycotting C and C++1.
Every time I thought about mobile applicatoin development the thing that ended up turning me off was the devices. No matter how good the development environemnt might be—and most of them are abyssmal so that doesn’t help—I found that I have no desire to cram anything useful into the small screen size and sub-par interface designs found on most such devices.
And then came the iPhone.
And now I’m finding myself interested in branching out. No, interested is too tame. I really want to jump into mobile development with Android. I am even ready to give Blackberry a try again. And with the annoucement of the iPad, things are looking more interesting every day.
It goes beyond mobile. Working on iPhone apps have re-ignited my interest in desktop application development. I have been doing mostly Web development for so long that I had almost forgotten just how much better a native app can be. Sans the enforced framing and quirks of the browser-based world, my imagination of what I want to make do with a computer do is expanding again.
I won’t be giving up Web development any time soon, but I will be spending more of my time working with mobile devices. And I’m grinning from ear to ear about it.
1 For no good reason at all. I just didn’t want to work with low-level languages in those days.