A couple of months ago, Amazon released a web based kindle cloud reader. The app targeted iPad customers. For it to deliver a experience similar to the native app, they used HTML5 markup and API available in mobile safari.

Then, you have Financial Times delivered an HTML5 based app (with great success). This app targeted at their readers that use mobile devices (tables and smartphones) to consume content. One more point for HTML5.

Finally, Slideshare ditched flash and “went HTML5″. As a result, making presentations available in mobile devices and ditching flash overall. It took them 6 months, however presentation now load 30% faster and now web crawlers can read them.

The question is: should you follow Amazon, Financial Times and Slideshare lead ? If you are in the gaming business no (at least until WebGL gets better). However, if you are a provider of content that your customers will consume through reading: Yes. Why? Because you already have web developers that work with your current offering. Your current dev staff already knows the product, customers needs and are up to date with product development. Plus with HTML5 you can target iOS devices, Android phones and tables.

If you go native, you will have to, either hire a new developer or current staff will need to learn a new craft. If you go with new devs they will need to be incorporated in the product development process and will need to do this for each platform you want to target. Having your current web developers learn another craft, will make them neglect their current work in exchange of learning a new craft, and they will never be as good as somebody that has been doing it for years.

For  startups that have a web offering of their product or service is that it enables them to develop a mobile app at lower cost. Using frameworks like jQtouch, Sencha or jQueryMobile you can prototype fast and see what works and not. Then when you have more resources and your customers require it, then you can switch to native.

In summary:

• Apps that require graphics and processing power, have a lot of user interaction or needs to access the camera: go native
• Apps that provide content, have simple forms or provide web: go web
• If most of your visitors use modern web browsers that support HTML5 technologies, then consider what you can implement from HTML5 that will enhance their experience: go web
• If your like netflix: that is another story.

After reading about Go Daddy’s CEO Bob Parsons killing an elephant and Namecheap’s offer as a response to what Parson’s killing a Elephant and posting the video, I decided to consider changing domain registar.

Well, that was back in the end of march and because it seem like a hassle I just put it my backlog, until recently. However, I like to finish stuff that I start. Plus I have grown tired of Go Daddy’s interface, it reminded me bloatware. So, finally I decided to pull the trigger. Well the triggered that I pulled was for a marathon that I will had to run. I have more than 10 domains, but I decided to just start with non critical and that is around 8.

Oh boy, was I right that this was a hassle, and here is how it went.

First, you have to go to your GoDaddy account -> domain manager and unlock your domains. There is no bulk operation, in addition to being a “batch” operation, since it makes the request and you have to wait “some minutes” (1-2 minutes) for your account to update.

Second you have to obtain your EPP code (or Extensible Provisioning Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Provisioning_Protocol), which is a code you have to provide to your new domain registrar. This is needed to protect you from Domain hijacking . To get that code you have to request it one by one and it will be sent by email.

Then you have to wait for it to come.

After you have your codes, you have to got to you new name register, in the case of Namecheap, I could write all the domains at once. This is the only part done by bulk.

Once registered and initiated the process you have to start one by one entering the EPP code.

Then your request is processed.

Is time to start your compiler

After a hour or so, you will receive a email confirming your order.  After that you will receive an email to confirm your request. To do this you need to click on a link, which will take you to a web page. In this page, you will have to click a button to confirm your transfer.

Yeap, there is a lot of clicking here.

So, I did it for eight domains, this is eight emails to open, eight links to click and eight buttons to confirm the transfer. Add to this going back to the email client, selecting another email and repeating the process. Ahh… and don’t forget the other clicks (around 5 per domain) I had to do in Go Daddy to unlock and request the EPP code, for every single domain.

Five days later I received eight emails from Namecheap confirming that transfer was completed. Well that is just the transfer, then you have to Tell Namecheap to transfer the DNS control to Namecheap nameserver (in case you had them with Go Daddy).

The only advantage of this, is that domain Hijacking might be prevented. However I still think that in this age, if somebody wanted to get something from you, they will. At the end is if just to prevent churn and doesn’t show confidence in the service where is easy to get in and easy to get out. Few companies do that, is a common practice to make it hard.

Then, again we can change this thanks to choice… the hard part is enforcing it.

Doesn’t it feel like for every good idea there are many similar bad ones? To illustrate what I mean, here is a text from  “Good in a Room” by Stephanie Palmer:

A year after Legally Blonde was released, a writing team came into my office and pitched me, quite literally, another version of Legally Blonde. Te ideas were the same, beat for beat and character for character, save that instead of going to law school, she went to medical school. It was called Blonde, M.D., I believe. I asked them if they knew that MGM had made Legally Blonde. They did not. I asked them if they knew that I was one of the executives who supervised the movie. They did not. I asked them if they had anything else to pitch. They did. They had a version in which she becomes a spy, title James Blonde.

Although we might think the writers copied the idea of Legally Blonde, there is a bigger chance that they were living in a cave. Sometimes we are delusional and we think we go a “grand idea” out thin air, when is basically something we saw before and we just decided on changing the wrapping (and then forgot where the idea came from). This is not intentional, we are just egocentric beings, which leads to a bad ideation process: developing the first idea we think is brilliant.

By having only one idea, even if we think is original or creative, we  focus on it resulting in our choice, without contemplating if it is really a good. In contrast, brainstorming leads to having many good ideas and bad ones. Since we have to make a choice we need to think and we end up with a short choice paralysis. As a result we have to evaluate which ideas are worth more resources and which not. In other words:

Quantity -> Choice Paralysis -> Thinking -> Quality

My grand mother once told me:

When making a decision, always check with people above you and bellow you

What my grand mother was trying to explain was the value of a individuals perspective on the same matter. Everybody has different experiences that define how they perceive reality. What might be obvious to you is not to others and vice versa.

Brainstorming is not a garantee of us producing great ideas, not even good ones, however we decrease the possibilities of ending executing on a bad one. That is why we always need to test, just by checking with others will be enough. If at the end it was really a bad one, at least we learnt something, not mentioning that we have a pool of more ideas we can prototype and test. If not we will end up with two dumb blondes.

Note: Design thinking is a process that can helps us find those great ideas.

Today was my last day at Yanzi Networks and I’m thankful for the 23 months I spent there. For experiences like this is that I came to Sweden.  It wasn’t always flowers and pink elephants, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I heard people saying that one of the appeals of working in small companies is that you are not just one more, you have a chance to make a difference. However, for me is about the dynamics and strong ties formed when working in a team. And is there where one can acquire vast amounts of knowledge and not just talking about technical skills. I got the chance to learn business dynamics of a start up, management of employees and projects, team work, challenges in a start up and how to be a better person.

Now is time for a change and like I read somewhere: “change is good and good change is better”.  So, on the 4th of July I will start my new at Video Plaza and let me tell you that I’m hyped. I got the opportunity to meet my coworkers and colleges and is going to be fun. Of course it will not just be pink elephants and smiles fun, this is going to be hard work fun (plus the learning experience…). I’ve been passively following the company and it feels a bit surreal that I’m actually going to work there, don’t know with certainty why, but that is how it feels. [For such experiences is why I feel lucky and thankful]. For now, I will charge batteries, clear my mind and be as ready as possible for the new challenges that lie ahead.

Finally, I just like to say that not so long ago, I had times of personal uncertainty. What do I mean by this? Well wasn’t satisfied professionally and at a personal level.  Thanks to dear friends I’ve been blessed with (or depending on your faith, been lucky to have), I was able to deal with it… thank you .

Commits, documentation and cleanup, handshakes, farewells and hugs… is time to go forward and continue growing.

I like JavaScript because of “the malleability” that it provides to the programer. Is not that strict, which may lead apps that are hard to debug if you don’t know what your doing. It feels a bit chaotic and for some reason I think chaos is good, as result I’m becoming fond of JavaScript every time I find out one of this malleable features (yes is not very rational reason, but that is how we are).

Recently I need to keep track of some widgets in a web app, so I was suggested by my Manager to look for a better way tracking this instead of recreating the widgets i.e using a array. A couple of months ago I stumbled on JavaScript Garden:

…a growing collection of documentation about the most quirky parts of the JavaScript programming language.

So, instead of using a Array of objects and looping over it to find the desire object, we can create a empty object and use the properties as a Key and the value of the property as the value. What makes this possible is that properties can be added on run time. See the example bellow:

// here we create a empty object
var mymap = {};

//lets add couple a key/value to our "hashmap"
mymap['widget1Id'] = document.getElementById('widget1Id');

mymap['widget2Id'] = document.getElementById('widget2Id');

//...
//lets say we finish using it and we want to dispose of it, so we can delete it
delete mymap['widget1Id'];

//now lets update the widget2 with a very smart message.
mymap['widget2Id'].innerText = 'Game over, try again later';

Summary:

• If we want to add a property to a object on run time, we use the brackets and a literal of the id of the property (in our case is the key of the map).
• The value can be a literal, number or object.
• We use the delete keyword to delete the entry from the map.

We are getting to a point, where we are seeing recurring elements in the design of mobile applications. Evidence is in two third party resources I found via people I follow in twitter. By third party is meant that they have no official affiliation to Apple or Android (sorry RIM and Microsoft, but we need more apps for you).

The first is  pttrns (only consonants), provides iOS UI patterns in form of screens shots of apps, sorted by category. For Android, we have (as the name states) Android Patterns, which are presented in form of mockups.

Why is this important? Is this a good thing or bad thing? Patterns provide developers and designers with standardized solutions on how to present information and enable interaction in your app. Standardized, is the key word here, because if this is a pattern among apps, then future users and customers have a better chance of not needing to learn new UI, as a result shortening the learning curve of your app.

As a developer or designer, the less you have to worry about, then the more you can focus on:

• functionality – that the app actually works,
• appearance – looks are a important part of the user experience and
• branding – with appearance this will distinguish your app from the rest

Innovations will come, just see what Pulse and Flipboard will did. However, soon they will lay the patterns on how to present news in mobiles and tables.

Do you think what we have now is enough, or there is still room for improvement?

Google just released a publication called Think Quarterly (they called it a book and mashable a magazine), which they publish because:

…we often think that speed is the forgotten ‘killer application’ – the ingredient that can differentiate winners from the rest. We know that the faster we deliver results, the more useful people find our service.

But in a world of accelerating change, we all need time to reflect. Think Quarterly is a breathing space in a busy world. It’s a place to take time out and consider what’s happening and why it matters.

Each publication will be dedicated to one topic (published every quarter) and the first edition is about Data. So, I took ”breath” during lunch, to read the article Executive Insight.

Executive Insight is about Guy Laurence (CEO of Vodafone UK) take on data. It’s presented in a way that is easy to digest and while providing you with food for thought. Is a quick read, the finishes with a session of “20 quick fire questions”. His answers are just fun to read, but the last one is what one of the two things I will take from this article (the other being to not just rely on data, experience counts). Here is what he answered, when ask to tell a joke:

I like simplicity in life. I heard this urban myth a long time ago and it stayed with me. When NASA first started sending astronauts into space, they quickly discovered that ballpoint pens wouldn’t work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on any surface and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300°C. The Russians used a pencil.

Next time that I’m stuck trying to solve a problem, I will imagine a Russian, in space, using a pencil.

I needed to determine if a piece of data that I got was from today or not. that being that is was read after 00:00. So, I decided to create a quick java method to called isToday(). This method will received a the number of milliseconds since January 1, 1970, (better known as Unix Time) and return true if the date is today or false if not. Here is the method I came up:

private boolean isToday(long date){
   final long milliOneDay = 86400000;// milliseconds in one day
   long today = (new Date()).getTime();
   if ((today - date) < milliOneDay){
      return true;
   }
   return false;
}

As you can see that method dosen’t work and I was so ashame of it that I had to blog about it. I came to that conclusion when my boss showed me the one she has done (due to a misunderstanding I thought there wasn’t such method in our lib). Bellow is her method, which include another method from our internal toolkit:

static SimpleDateFormat formatDate = new SimpleDateFormat(DatePattern);
   public static String formatDateString(long t) {
   return formatDate.format(new Date(t));
}

public static boolean isToday(long ts) {
   String a = formatDateString(ts);
   String b = formatDateString(System.currentTimeMillis());
   if (a == null || b == null) {
      return false;
   }
   if (a.equals(b)) {
      return true;
   }
   return false;
}

So, I decided to fix mine out of shame fun:

private boolean isToday(long date){
   Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
   cal.set(Calendar.HOUR, 0);
   cal.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 0);
   cal.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
   cal.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);

   final long milliOneDay = 86400000;// milliseconds in one day
   long today = cal.getTime().getTime();
   if ((today - date) < milliOneDay){
      return true;
   }

   return false;
}

Also, I’ve been playing a bit with python (trying to learn a new one) and I came up with this one, which shows that you can do more with less.

def isToday(today):
   todayObj = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(today)
   d = datetime.date.today()
   todayDateObj = datetime.datetime(d.year, d.month, d.day)
   diff = todayObj-todayDateObj
   if diff <  datetime.timedelta(days=1):
      return 1
   else:
      return 0

These are my favorite commercials aired during Superbowl XLV, between the Packers and the Steelers:

The Force by Volkswagen

Love the body language and determination of the kid. We communicate more than what we are aware, with our bodies (that is why email sometimes sucks). I guess many people feel identified with the kid: we all had our naïve fantasy.

Carma (not Karma) by Bridgestone

The beaver rules (especially at the end). Is like “bro you had my back, I never forget… I know have yours”.

Black Beetle by Volkswagen

Two great commercials by Volkswagen. This time they bring some top notch CGI animation. My favorite spot is when the mantis are fighting and the just stop.

Ozzy and Bieber by Best Buy

“How many bloody Gs are they?” well Ozzy at least here they are G to the Square. But really, the ad shows the push by companies to the market of new technology. Sometimes is just too much and there is some truth to it:some generations just can keep up, then again why should they? Ozzy is hilarious, with the “WTF” is happening here. (Here is the 1 minute version)

Love Hurts by Pepsi

Freaking funny ending and a plus for the cute girl.

Imported From Detroit by Chrysler

Intense, to the point it can get you pumped up and who best than “Lose Yourself” by Eminem… enough said.

While having a discussion about Interfaces, I remembered a episode of Human Target and thought ” hey why not use the example of a tracker to explain the downside with Interfaces”.

In Human Target, Christopher Chance was trying to protect a woman that had swallowed a tracking device. So, the bad guys were following them all over town. However, they manage to buy some time because tracking device was able to tell the bad guys in which building Chance was, but not in what floor. As a result the bad guys had to sweep every floor of the building to find Chance and the woman. Well that is the case when debugging abstractions layers, inheritance and interfaces:

You more or less know where to look for the bug, but you need to sweep the many files two find a bug or figure out where to make a change.

It might have it’s benefits, still I think is overkill. Is similar when you just throw money to a problem, you do that when you can. It’s like “we didn’t foresee that customers will want to use our product in mobile phones. yes lets just add more interfaces”.

For more on the topic, here is a great discussion and explanation of interfaces in Stackoverflow.