Saturday, December 04, 2010
Back to the Blogoshere
I've been pretty busy lately. After a couple of years of looking at Eclipse based install technologies, I'm back working in the IDE space on some cool things based on the Eclipse Target Communication Framework. That's taken a lot of my time so I've resorted to Tweeting short ideas rather than spend the effort writing here on my blog. And I miss it and I have accumulated a lot to write about. So look for more in this space.
There are a few things I've been interested in lately. Android is still at the top of my list. I have a couple of phones now and am immersing myself in the experience to learn more about it, especially how apps are different from the now legacy environments we have on our desktops. Meeting the needs of app developers of course is important to us working on Eclipse based tooling and I think it marks a shift in the grassroots. Projects like Wascana which focuses on CDT for Windows dev are becoming less important to me than CDT for Android native so look for new things out of me there.
I'm also becoming maniacally focused on usability. This is a relatively new area for me after years of being a modelling and parser guy. But it is so important to create software that users want to use and it's a challenge. And I'm going to leverage my passion for writing to help. Writing user stories will really help me get inside their head. Not only do you need to understand what they are trying to accomplish, you need to understand why. It'll be cool to see how this works on practice and should be fun.
Well I'll write more later. The software world is going through some major changes thanks to both web technologies and mobile. Android and iOS have a great rivalry going and I expect to see the avalanche of mobile devices and even things like settop boxes that app developers are going to want to target. It certainly is a great time to be in this industry.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Nice to hear you want to blog more often now :)
ReplyDeleteFunny to see, that all this new stuff (iOS, Android) is so stone-aged unix based (at least in terms of time-constants in our business). From my understanding (but I'm too young to really know) the principles of the original unix were engineering principles: simple, efficient, minimalistic, open - so it's now big wonder that it succeeded.
It's true. The unix model is great for embedded systems. It's so easy to create drivers and that's critical with all this new hardware we're working with.
ReplyDeleteAnd at the end of the day, the focus is on the Application layer. Unix provides a strong enough base and finally scales small enough that you don't need really invest in a new OS, just invest in making great app frameworks.