Sunday, July 17th, 2011
Way back in February, I did a quick talk at the Show & Tell event on a new side project of mine (slides over here) and forgot to publish this related blog post, hey ho! Here it is in reduced form:
Finder is simple web app to help parents discover and catalogue local child-friendly businesses, something I’ve built from personal need. It currently residing at finder.newdadsite.com and is in need of some content/contributions love (you can sign in via Twitter!). It makes use of some funky browser geo-location to make it extra useful, with fallback to plain old search.
Finder is a simple enough little app, and it gave me a great opportunity to use Python in anger; Previously I’d only really played about with it. I arrived at using Pylons for a number of reasons. Like most people who want to do some Python web-appery, I’d initially looked at Django, which seems to be the most talked of framework. Something about Django didn’t really mesh with me, it’s got its own way of doing things, and that wasn’t an exact fit somehow – personal taste maybe.
Pylons felt, well, much more toolboxy. You could pull stuff in from all over, pick the modules you liked best. Particularly I like the SqlAlchemy/FormAlchemy combo, I’ve always felt that it should be easy to build a form from an existing model if you’ve used sensible naming conventions. Stuff like this:
class LocationFieldSet(FieldSet):
def __init__(self):
FieldSet.__init__(self, Location, session=Session)
self.configure(exclude=[self.lat,self.long,self.added])
is a really neat way to just turn a model into a form for editing that model’s data. Not part of Pylons, but I can chose to use it cos I like it (and I’m a fan of easy).
One thing I forgot to mention in my talk (well, I only had ten minutes!) was that Pylons in now merging with Repoze to become Pylons Project with a new framework called Pyramid… It’ll be interesting to see what the future holds for it.
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Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Apparently I seem to have lost a decade somewhere… Maybe down the back of the sofa? No? Oh, that’s right, it went mostly on building websites, with occasional sitting in pubs ranting about usability. I thought, given that it’s 2010 and clearly the future, it would be worth distilling some of the wisdom of ten years worth of web shenanigans.
Especially the ranting parts.
Read the rest of Thoughts on a Decade of Professional Web Jobs
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Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Internet Explorer 6 has been a hot topic again of late. At Multipack last week we had the inevitable discussion on just when people will give up on it. We estimated six to nine months. But then we estimated that 6 to 9 months ago…
So now Digg won’t support it for certain activities and Youtube are suggesting heavily you upgrade. Last time round it was 37 Signals and Mobile Me. Same arguments turn up again.
I pretty much agree with Chris Heilmann’s thoughts on the subject. Companies that are still using IE 6 aren’t going to care about Digg or Youtube or hip new work-on-the-web stuff blocking them. They block that stuff anyway.
That last 10% will be painful and slow to get upgraded. With MS wasting money on adverts or Nickelback based promos (warning sound that plays automatically), the elephant in the room is that the majority of that 10% still on IE 6 are there because corporations, governments and SMEs are locked into it and have little intention of upgrading. Be that by IT policy, bloody minded-ness, complex dependencies or shoddy dotcom era, activeX-riddled web software that just won’t work in anything else.
Back when it came out a friend predicted IE 6 would be the Netscape Navigator of its day. Seems he was right. It just refuses to disappear.
All this creates an interesting dynamic on the web. As other browsers move faster towards new and shiny HTML 5 worlds, we’ve got a 2nd class internet of corporately hamstrung web citizens. They can’t access the better tools, or they run slowly on archaic javascript engines, they lack efficient tabbed browsing and generally take longer to do the same tasks…
With more and more commerce web dependent in some way this’ll have more of an impact as time goes by. I’d love to see somebody do a corporate whitepaper analysing relative productivity of IE 6 vs IE8/Safari 4/Firefox 3.5/Opera 10. Sure it’ll only cost you .5 seconds more rendering that Javascript intensive booking system, but over 100,000 employees, 365 days a year, 10 bookings an hour?
That hints at the real danger for the IE 6 laggards. A great opportunity for younger, more agile companies to run rings around them. In the end that’ll be the threat that convinces them to upgrade… Eventually.
Posted in thoughts | 2 Comments on The Browser That Wouldn’t Die and the Two Tier Web
