By all accounts, WP7 devices aren’t flying off shelves.  I am personally not too surprised by this.  The mobile market is saturated.   WP7 does a lot of things better than both Android, iOS, and Blackberry.  But, it has yet to garner the same caché as the other devices.  Android really made its mark when the Droid commercials painted the device (and related OS) as being diametrically opposed to the iPhone.  It eschewed the fancifulness of iOS for a fast, productivity-based device.  While the “save us from our phones” campaign for WP7 is funny, I really don’t think it does much to differentiate WP7 from the pack.  Maybe this is just a long play to introduce the phone in Q4 of this year, and really hammer on it after the Q1 update.  But, I really don’t see this working in the long term.  If I were in charge over there, I would have spent my money focusing on its really unique features such as its XBOX integration or Zune pass.  I think you would have gotten a whole lot more early adopters if the general public saw it as a phone+gaming+music platform versus just a productivity platform.

Regardless, I have never purchased a device for its sales numbers.  But, I am worried that if Microsoft doesn’t get its act together a really cool platform might get discontinued because a couple of execs didn’t see the true value of the platform.

I just got my Samsung Focus in the mail yesterday, so it has been well under 24 hours using the device.  But, so far I am extremely happy with it. The main reason I chose WP7 was the UI.  After regular use, I am still blown away by how good it is.  It is just so damn interactive.  There is really nothing like it on the market today.  The big difference is that rather than focusing on transitioning from one static screen to the next, WP7 transitions the entire UI.  When you click on a tile, you don’t get a traditional pop or fade, the tile literally flies off the screen.  And, the app just does not just appear on the screen, the text of the app pivots from some invisible horizon to come into view.  It is ridiculous and completely awesome at the same time.  And it doesn’t just stop at transitions, you get these subtle animations throughout the experience.  My favorite so far is that when you read an email and return back to the list, the subject and body exert from the email you were on flies back to its place in the email list.  Overall, it feels like someone at Microsoft channeled a UI from ten years in the future and configured it to work on today’s devices.  It is that good.

So today we finally got to see what Apple is cooking up for its next gen OS and laptop line.  With the air, Apple has continued its leadership in bringing awesome hardware to the laptop segment.  The new Air is impossibly thin, albeit a bit underpowered.  In terms of OSX, I really didn’t see anything announced that would have me running back to the platform.  Multi-tasking  still seems a bit of a mess.  Mission control just seems to add to the confusing UI.

Fan of Halo/Windows 7? Check out the Halo Reach theme.  I installed it last night.  It includes pictures and sounds from the game.  It is dorky, but pretty cool at the same time.  My favorite is the sound of a (plasma?) grenade when you empty the trash.

Strange Loop starts tomorrow.  I will be there.  You can get the program and venue map on their blog.

I always wondered when games/movies/etc. were coming out.  Now I can just go to When it drops.

So, I just got done with a redesign of my blog.   I am now on revision 3.  I always get sick of the design after a couple months, so this time I decided to go ultra-minimal.  I literally just got rid of all the styles on the site and went with just the basics.  The one “bell” for the site is that I added a bounded fluid layout, so it should work really well on both your desktop and a mobile phone.  I will be making some minor updates over the next week, so if that kind of stuff interests you, check back.

After about a year and a half of  using a Macbook as my primary development machine at home, I finally decided to go out and get my own computer.   After a lot of research, I decided to go with the HP Envy 14.  I was primarily looking for a machine with the hardware prowess of the Macbook and the awesomeness that is Windows 7.  Did the Envy live up to my expectations?   Hell yeah.  My favorite part of the Macbook was its hardware.  It had a beautiful screen, an awesome keyboard, and a fairly good touch pad.  While I don’t think the touch pad of the Envy lives up to the Macbook, the screen and keyboard more than make up for its deficiencies.  The monitor on the Envy is the best I have ever seen.  Windows 7 looks absolutely stunning on the device.  And, the keyboard seems to have a nice balance of clicky-ness and softness.  The only complaint I have had after a weekend of use, is that the two finger scrolling does not work very well.  I have not found a fix, so I just have went back to the scrollable regions as a work around.  While not perfect, it certainly is effective and I really don’t miss the multi-touch at all.  Of course, the best part of having the Envy is that it runs Windows 7 by default. After using XP at work and OSX at home, Windows 7 is quite refreshing.  And, this machine powers through it.  Out of the box, I have a WEI of 5.9 with the limiting factors being the RAM and the disk speed.  Everything else (graphics, gaming, and processor) are all around 6.7.  I have been running Aptana, XAMPP, Zune, Seesmic, and a browser without a problem.  Overall, I think that the Envy has been a great purchase.  I would highly recommend the machine to someone looking for a premium laptop running Windows 7.

After a bit of research, I came across a post on the notebook review forums that fixes the 2 finger scroll issues I was having.  Now, it works almost exactly like my Macbook.  Too bad it doesn’t come installed out of the box.

I had extremely high expectations for the Windows Phone 7 launch after they initially announced the platform a few months back.  I am a big fan of Windows 7,  Xbox and Zune UIs.  So, a device that combined all of these into a portable form factor sounded to good to be true.  But, after taking in the announcement today and watching videos of my future phone (the Samsung Focus), I was completely blown away.  The new platform met my expectations and then some.  For what it lacks in season, it really makes up for in style and cohesion.  I am not sure how the rest of the market will react.  And, frankly I don’t care.  This looks like an awesome platform.  And, I am pretty pumped about its prospects.

Galen Gruman epitomizes what is wrong with tech journalism today. We see it with the iPhone reception debacle and now with Windows Phone 7. Tech reporting is dead.  No one takes the time to test or actually use anything anymore.  They just look for what is wrong, harp on it for 2000 words, and then hope their crap hits the first page of techmeme.   And then when it does, a bunch of no-name traffic scabs repeat what the first idiot says and it becomes a popular meme.  It is getting to the point where the only places to get  “real” reviews of a device are engadget and cnet.  Lets hope these two bastions of actual tech reporting don’t fall.

Update:  For a point of comparison, compare Gruman’s drivel with someone that actually has used and develops for the device.

About a year and a half ago, I had to make a decision on which platform to build my personal projects on. At the time, I had a pretty deep knowledge of .NET, a decent knowledge of Java, and a very minimal knowledge of PHP. I immediately threw Java out the window because of my horrible experiences trying to build large Java projects at University and at my 9-5. I then did POCs of both .NET and PHP. I really liked .NET but hosting was more expensive. PHP was a bit awkward at first, but after a couple weeks I grew to love it. So, I decided to go with PHP as my platform of choice. After a year and a half, I couldn’t be more happy about the decision. I have not run into any platform limitations and best of all, I no longer have to compile. Removing this restriction has really sped up my workflow and removed a completely unnecessary distraction. If I had the choice, I would not ever go back to compiled development environments.

I have been thinking a lot about the current state of web development. And, I think that with the next generation of web browsers we are going to see a turning point for how front-end developers approach the problem of building a website or web application. In the past, there were really two major problems that complicated front-end development. The first was the need for cross-browser compatibility. Legacy browsers and evolving standards really made it a chore for a front-end developer to develop a site that worked well across all browsers. I use to joke that my job as a front-end developer existed solely to support buggy IE browsers. And, honestly, this joke wasn’t far from the truth. To complicate things, there was an opposing force that said that not only should sites work well across browsers but they should be as rich and interactive as native applications. This was the RIA (Rich Interactive Application) movement. I was recently in a meeting where someone lauded the use of a simple table in favor of interactive data-grid because it was something that we used 10 years ago. This attitude characterized RIA, in that the coolness or the richness of the widget was more important than the problem it was trying to solve. RIA applications really epitomized the virtue of using something because we could, not because we should.

But, as the title mentions, I think we are at a turning point for web development. With the emergence of HTML5 and an increased emphasis on standard support in the next generation of browsers, gone are the days of worrying about browser compatibility. Sure, it will be in the back of our minds, but it will never reach the frustration level of having to build an IE6 compatible site. With that said, I don’t think it will be all hammocks and Mai Tais for front-end developers. I think the problem of browser compatibility will quickly be replaced with the new problem of platform compatibility. Brought on by mobile devices and touch input, platform compatibility is the new major problem facing web development. It introduces a slew of new problems such as scaling to mobile resolutions (typically 320-480px), handling new input events (swipe, long tap, etc.), making touch friendly widgets, etc, etc. This will have a major effect on how we build sites. I speculate that we will see more fluid layouts, less data-grids, and whole lot less RIA widgets. We will do a lot more with standard HTML5 and CSS3, because it will be more feature-rich and work better across emerging platforms.

Personally, this turning point has changed how I approach web development. On my personal projects, I have shifted focus toward HTML5 development and now approach UI design with an emphasis on touch-friendly elements and flexible layouts. I have discontinued the use of hover based input, and have gone away from using grids to display data as they scale poorly horizontally. I will be introducing a new version of matthewsmith.com in the next couple months that follows this new focus, and am actively making changes to projects I have in development.