Air

In short I think Douglas Engelbart would be pretty proud of his legacy. He was an academic that probably had the one of the most profound contributions to mankind. His ideas were snicked at in the beginning at SAIL. Most people believed the future of computing at that time wouldbe in the field of AI of course AI has proved to be a little difficult. In the beginning pretty much all of the code was open source. Douglas Engelbart’s group was responsible for the creation of the first mouse and graphical user interface. Many of the people he taught and worked with eventually worked at Xerox (Like Alan Kay). Xerox created a personal computer before anyone else was able to but their board executives didn’t understand at the time the overall impact of what they were looking at so they gave it all away to Steve Jobs and the rest is of course history.

In the beginning most of the technology was open source. Most of the computing technology we use today was at one point open source. One of the biggest problems today in development is picking a platform. Because of proprietary formats etc.. you can’t develop for just one platform you have to develop for multiple platforms depending on the technology you want to utilize. It is always good to see new technologies open their formats. Adobe Systems recently opened up their SWF (ShockWave Format) under their Open Screen Project! This is wonderful for developers because developers have the power now to do just about anything they want with it now! I believe you will see flash in lots of places you never thought you would see flash. Adobe recently came out with AIR (adobe integrated runtime) Air can run on any machine! I recently upgraded my Ubuntu to the Hardy Heron (which went real smoothly) and Air runs quickly on it! You can even build Air applications quickly on open source IDE like eclipse or aptana. One benefit of Adobe opening their platform is the fact developers will modify it to run on machines that wouldn’t normally run Flash. I believe in the next few years there will be money to be made in small customizable Linux devices. Moore’s Law has not let us down yet. The tech sector is still strong even in the face of recession probably has something to do with Moore’s Law and I really don’t think the internet is going to go away anytime soon the inventor of the Internet (not AlGore) did inform us it was still in its infancy. For those of us in the tech sector we know (not think) things will only improve and the web is the platform. Check out Air it is realtively easy to build an application and it will work on any machine. I have also been studying up on Silverlight. I recently ordered a few books on silverlight from Amazon.com. One of the nice things the microsoft has done with their RIA(Rich Internet Application) project silverlight is support open source projects like moonlight.

Aptana on Air!

Douglas Engelbart Mother of All Demos:

Side note: I have been pondering switching this blog to utilize wordpress I have used drupal for years but wordpress supports more plugins and is less of a pain to configure. I do have a copy of this blog running locally on drupal six but it lacks support for other programs I have integrated into the current i-create. So in short I may be changing this soon to wordpress. I will also be supporting ads on this blog soon.