AlexHopmann.com

I’ve got some posts about experiences with Silverlight over on Launch21.com.

The Ponderings of Woodrow writes about the upcoming NetSuite IPO. He points out a couple of interesting down-sides of this offering- Even after the IPO, Larry Ellison will own a majority stake, they have only one data center and no redundancy support for their clients, etc.

I have some experience with NetSuite from the Pure days. Granted this was over a year ago, but NetSuite was a disaster. They sold us a bill of good promising that we could use their service for our ecommerce and that they were providing a flexible platform we could build on. It turned out to be the typical vapor-sale. They had no platform that you could integrate your own apps with in any meaningful way and most of their own infrastructure was immature and not ready for anything but the most narrow scenarios that they had built for. Given the market they are in, hearing things like their lack of any redundancy beyond that one data center is totally consistent with our experiences.

All that I can say is that I’m amazed that a company like that can IPO. Its pretty clear that its only kept afloat on Ellison’s money and name.

Back in 2001-2002 as we were starting out the Avalon (WPF) project, we made several projections about the future course of technology. When you are building a fundamental long-term technology, it makes sense to project out a few years. The last thing you want to do is spend 5 years building something that is already obsolete by the time it ships.

We considered the expected progress of GPUs, CPUs, and many other factors. It was a bit contraversial since many of the things we were building needed my graphic horsepower than was commonly available in 2003. However I’m happy to say that the GPU designers met (and exceeded) our expectations and in 2007 even integrated graphic chipsets have plenty of power to drive rich media experiences.

One area however disappoints me. We expected that LCD screens wouldn’t just increase in size but would also increase in resolution. IBM had a display that was 204dpi, and some laptops were pushing 150dpi. My 30″ LCD at home is great and I love the 2560×1600 resolution, but imagine that same resolution in a 20″ display? Text would be soooo easy to read. Nice high-res photos and art would be beautiful. There are lots of great new huge displays but so far the marketplace has let me down and desktop LCD displays all have pretty much the same DPI, basically in the 100dpi range. Some laptops do better than this, but rarely exceed 150dpi.

Part of the problem is a classic chicken and egg one. Super-high-resolution displays are hard to use unless the applications compensate and use more pixels for basic UI elements. But traditional applications have been crap at doing this right. Its a pretty basic thing they should support since people with accessibility needs often need larger UI elements, but its still very inconsistently done. At one point we hoped tht the Vista desktop composition could automatically scale old applications that didn’t suppor this themselves, but its unclear to me whether that made it into the final release.

In the meantime support for Window management on a large display still sucks in Windows. Its much easier to use 3 displays with different windows maximized on each than doing a clean layout of your desktop on a 30″ monitor.

Twitter is to Blogs as IM is to Email

Blogs, IM, Email, Message Forums, Mailing Lists, Twitter, Blog Rolls, Linked-in, Facebook, Feeds, Photo Sharing, Video Sharing.

So the big question is, how do these all converge?

With the Internet it isn’t clear that they have to converge. The web is after all a bunch of losely linked services and it mostly works just fine. But I suspect some form of convergence will happen sooner or later anyway…

Here is a feature request for Google. How about supporting Aviation maps via Google maps? The government creates these sectional and IFR (low and high altitude) charts. I believe the underlying images are available for free. Make an aviation mode of Google maps where I can see the normal map views + have extra buttons for Sectional, IFR low and IFR high.

This would be killer. There are several sites that show some of this data but the UI is just terrible.

Some iPhone questions I’ve been mulling over. Overall the experience of the thing seems great from all the write-ups, I just don’t care about having one as an actual phone.

When you go to the Apple store and buy an iPhone, you don’t need to sign up for AT&T right there, correct? Can you take it home and use it with wifi and to store photos and music and watch movies with no phone service?

Of course that might also be useful for a developer who wants to play with the iPhone experience but doesn’t need it as an actual phone.

What’s the deal with the unlocked iPhones that are advertised? Is that for real? Could you buy one (apparently $800/$1000 for the two memory sizes) and use it with any carrier?

Mostly I’m likely to wait until generation 2 or 3 and compare how well the competition has caught up.