Articles by Dylan Schiemann

iPhone DevCamp

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:00:00 EDT

The iPhone DevCamp begins Friday night. I won't be able to attend, though we'll be sending Jason Cline to the event to represent SitePen. We've been blogging quite a bit about the iPhone on the SitePen blog, and running a lot of tests to find out all of the various things that don't work on the current Safari version found on the iPhone. The event is being hosted by Adobe, which is a bit ironic given their interest in Flash and the absence of Flash on the iPhone.

iWork Numbers and the iPhone

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 08:45:00 EDT

Apple's new application, Numbers, is a really nice refreshing blend of Excel and a general diagramming tool. It is surprisingly feature-rich, making actually somewhat more complex to use than a typical Apple app. It's interesting that the new iWork suite has the Leopard theme or skin. Because of the Leopard delays, Apple seems to be in this weird hybrid states where many of their new applications have the new Apple style, but the operating system itself does not. It's a very different model than Microsoft where apps take on the theme and UI guidelines of the version of the Windows.

Announcing the Dojo Grid

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:45:00 EDT

After many months of working out the details, we?ve just announced the Dojo Grid! It took a significant amount of effort to make this happen, but we've managed to come together with a bunch of people in the community to bring an excellent grid widget to Dojo in time for the 1.0 release. SitePen, Mozilla, Nexaweb, Redfin, Snaplogic, and TurboAjax Group (prior to and after their acquisition by ActiveGrid) have come together to make this happen. Thanks to everyone involved for adding something great to the open web!

iPhone Bar Camp

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:15:00 EDT

I usually skip BarCamp and other hackathon coding events because they consume a lot of time and I don't usually get as much accomplished as I do at my desk. That said, when a major new platform like the iPhone gets released, an event such as the iPhone Dev Camp seems like a great idea to collaborate and get up to speed as quickly as possible. If Apple's WWDC from last week is any indication, this will be the most in demand BarCamp event ever, and should be a great event to build iPhone apps.

Facebook Has Completely Replaced MySpace

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:30:00 EDT

In my annual informal review of social networks among our cousins and other people under 21 that are still fickle, Facebook has completely replaced MySpace in their lives. In fact, the only people I hear talking regularly about MySpace are a bit older and just learning about social networking. I know, I know, small sample size, but why are social networks so fleeting?

Proliferation of Web App Platforms

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 16:30:00 EDT

After writing a recent post about thinking outside the (browser) box, I started thinking about the rapid rate by which things are changing. A year ago, most web developers had to think about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and perhaps WAP for mobile devices and widget development for one of more platforms. Today, we are afforded more possibility, but sometimes at the cost of more complexity, or at least more to learn and test:

Fast Scalable AJAX Apps

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 16:00:00 EDT

Successful AJAX-based applications provide a better end-user experience than traditional Web sites. Fast performance is absolutely essential to deliver on this potential. The large number of technologies and the additional complexity that AJAX adds to the mix creates significant headaches in tracking down performance bottlenecks and related issues.

Engaging Interfaces with AJAX and Comet

Mon, 05 Jun 2006 16:00:00 EDT

Ajax and comet are great techniques for getting data to and from the server, But they do little to address the requirements of sophisticated web application user interfaces.