It's finally here! The first Eclipse DemoCamp in Tel Aviv will take place this Thursday, thanks to my good friends at Zend Technologies.
We have a packed agenda and over 40 people signed up for the DemoCamp. We will do our best to make this meeting informative and set up the foundations for a true Eclipse community in Israel. We also have some fun surprises, so... if you are an Eclipse fan in Israel, you don't want to miss this.
That's always a tough question. Java or C#? Ruby or Django? Flex or Silverlight? Drupal or Joomla? In some cases, you need to implement and use the technology. In other cases, you have some spare time and you want to invest in learning a new technology that will prove itself useful. In my case, I need to extend nWire to new languages and frameworks and I simply need to decide which technology has the greatest market potential.
I'm an innovator myself. However, in a world with thousands of options (many of them open source), following the herd means you will get better support and your selected technology will continue to grow and evolve with you. You will find more examples. You will find qualified people familiar with the technology. Needless to say, the features are only a part of the overall score when it comes to picking your winner.
You are reading this article, which means you read blogs. You care about new technologies and you probably get a good sense of what people are discussing. That "sense" is not something you want to trust, because:
The technologies you will encounter could be the latest and greatest. But, having hype around the technology does not make it mainstream.
One of the best tools for measuring trends is Google Trends. It compares search volume and estimated web site visitors. The fact that people are reading and searching for a technology, again, does not make it mainstream. It is much better than tracking the blogosphere, but it still very hype-infected.
Here's an idea: searching for trends in job postings, also known as Job Trends. The results cannot be affected by hype. People who post wanted ads already chose the technology and they are now willing to pay for a person familiar with it. Putting money on the table is one of the strongest indication that people trust the technology. It simply does not lie.
I found two good sites for conducting my research: Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com. Both are simple to use and the results are usually close.
Here are some examples:
Very interesting stuff. Here are some caveats to watch out for:
To stay on the safe side, it is best to go over some of the job ads and make sure you are looking at the right data (for example, here are some GIT jobs and some SVN jobs).
If you have some good examples for technology comparison, let me know in the comments.
Last week, Apple announced that more than 500 million apps were downloaded in the App Store. There are over 15,000 available apps to choose from.
Most articles about this chose to deal with the quality of these applications (like here and here). I want to remind you of something else. When Apple began shipping its' iPhone SDK there was a lot of racket. We are at enlightened times of open source and transparency and along comes Apple with its' closed platform and malicious NDAs. What were they thinking?
The app store is the only way to get apps on to the iPhone (unless you hack your device), but publishing your apps there is not a walk in the park. The process is complex and it undergoes rigorous screening. If you do get there, they share your profits, which are not that big to begin with since the apps are really cheap.
Seems like they had all the reasons to fail. Yet, they didn't.
You know what? It's obvious to me why. From the same reason the iPod is such a huge success to begin with. Sexy UI with a complete, end-to-end amazingly simple user experience.
But that's not the reason I wrote this post. I wrote this post because there's a lesson here. Even in these enlightened times closed, proprietary platforms will succeed. Because the end user doesn't care. The developer cares. But she cares more about getting paid.
I recently started advertising my product with Google Adwords. Advertising is Google's main source of income, so it is not taken lightly. It's a very complex operation which is immensely flexible and powerful. When I started using it, I noticed that they provide a desktop application for controlling your Adwords campaign, which works alongside the web interface.
I wonder why? If you look at their FAQ, you'll see that it provides greater functionality. Functions such as copying/moving ads, changing multiple items at once and working off-line are a breeze in the desktop editor.
What's up, Google? On one hand, you do your best to announce the death of desktop applications. On the other hand, when it comes to your most important business, you admit that the web interface is just not rich enough.
About two weeks ago, I attended the first Israeli Google Developers Day. It was fun, well organized, highly technical and overall an interesting event. I recall that all the presenters were using Microsoft PowerPoint for their presentations (most guests had Macs, but that's a different story). Why not Google Docs?
Microsoft just announced that it's going to compete with Google Docs and produce an online version of Microsoft Office. I'm saying: it's a great for PR. Practically speaking, they can continue to bask in the desktop office glory.
My site is finally up and running. It was a lot of hard work and I'm very proud of the results. Sure, it is far from being the most polished site you've seen, but it's aesthetic, it looks professional enough and it delivers the message. I had a lot of fun working on the site and it really developed my appetite for doing more web hacking. I will blog about it in the near future: although I'm not an expert on the subject, I did travel a beaten path and I want to share my experience and choices.
Tomorrow I'm going to launch my site in this blog. Some of my friends already got the link and I got some very useful initial feedback. So, expect a post tomorrow with a link to my site. As a teaser, I'm providing this screenshot which is intentionally blurry... :-)
Another important launch tomorrow is my first beta site. It is a local site with friendly users. It is the first time my software gets tested outside and that's also a big event.
This is truly a time of "Succeed or Explain".
Recent Comments