22 April 2011
MPICT
I now represent Foothill on the Regional Leadership Council at MPICT, the Mid Pacific Information and Communications Technology Center. MPICT is funded by the NSF to support ICT educators in this region of the country. MPICT holds conferences where we can learn new skills, connects us with industry, and conducts thorough surveys of the California job market for technicians in the ICT field.

In a survey of the job boards for companies hiring ICT workers, MPICT found 2800 jobs postings with 1900 job descriptions. In other words, it is a chaotic system with no clear set of skills that a student could learn in order to get a certain job. Our advisor from IBM actually wants to use Watson to analyze these job postings!

The other piece of interesting information is that statewide, community colleges transfer more students to the University of Phoenix then they do to California State Universities.


26 April 2011
HTML 5 and browsers: Community Night
Hosted by Microsoft in Mountain View

Doris Chen at Microsoft
TEK Systems, Tab Atkins on Google Chrome team

Interesting statistic: 58% of the average user's time spent on their desktop computer is spent in the browser.
WebGL: A graphics library that extends the capability of JavaScript to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics.
Websocket : push/pull without full http requests, but you need a special server for it.
Eventsource: similar to websocket, but doesn't require a special server.
Animations must regularly yield to browser with settimeout(), but
Requestanimationframe() does it for you – better.
Elements can have draggable attributes set to true.
Gradients : CSS feature that currenlty requires prefixes.
Prefixes allows browsers to experiment with a new feature.
Variables and mixins in css coming soon.

Two events for learning HTML5 are coming up next month:
1) sfbayacm.org for HTML 5 workshop
2) web camp 20,21 May at MS. Http://bit.ly/gvpCmA. HTML 5 and web development

Giorgio Sardo from MS IE 9
Microsoft believes HTML5 is the future of the web
"Expression web super preview" renders a page on multiple browsers.
SVG allows you to animate and so interact with video.
HTML 5 is made up by W3C, IETF, Ecmascript.
Html5 spec is at last call!
IndexedDB Instead of SQL
Mediacaptureapi
Video tag doesn't allow you to run it full screen NOW

Websites to check out:
Beautyoftheweb.com.
Xanthir.com/blog
Oreilly.com/go/Ugebook
IeTestdrive.com
html5labs.com
http://sound-weaver.appspot.com
http://soundweaver.info/

1) Douglas Crockford on the future of JavaScript at Yahoo

29 March 2011

The committee is working on EcmaScript 5, of which JavaScript will be a dialect.

They are making JavaScript better, as opposed to making it more like Java.

If you go with strict, your code will be better.

New code in Ecmascript 5:

If (Object.hasOwnProperty('create')){

Object.create = function(). {

A property is a named collection of attributes like readable

Object.preventExtensions(object)

Strict mode Pragma

'use strict'; as first line of a function

2) Sencha Touch bring your own laptop tutorial at Paypal.

31 Mar 2011

Sencha Touch is Ext.js 4 aimed for mobile.

Sencha is heavily object oriented.

JS relies heavily on global variables, so you need your own namespace.

They use "Ext." as their namespace.

JSON P gets around domain name restrictions.

All senchatouch apps start with onready() function or launch().

FireFox doesn't do HTML 5 well yet.

PhoneGap will package your html5/css3 into a binary wrapper that makes it look like an app, so it can be sold in an app store. Then your app can use the camera and specific phone features that you can't use when you are running from the browser.

3) Peter-Paul Koch on the future of Mobile at PayPal/EBay

6 April 2011

Koch is Dutch and writes a useful blog at Quirksmode.org

The blog compares browsers for mobile.

Ebay/PayPal did $2B on mobile devices alone in 2010 and expects that to double to $4B in 2011.

There are 5 x number of mobile devices then desktops.

People in developing countries can't afford desktops.

Design your sites for mobile first, to force you to decide what is important. Then the most important stuff will be featured on the desktop version and readily available on mobile.

There are 20 mobile browsers, 8 are based on webkit, but they are all subtletly different. Opera Mini is highly recommended. I found that the iphone app store has opera mini, but he reviews say it needs to be updated so I didn't download it. Apparently this is just a browser that performs best on mobile devices.

Proxy browser : A specialized server that builds the html page and sends just an image of the page to the browser on the mobile device. This speeds performance, lowers bandwidth reqt's, but any client side interactivity requires a page reload.

Stats for top mobile browsers Globally in Q4 , 2010: Safari, Opera, Blackberry, Nokia, Android (in that order.)

Check your own country's stats.

Play with opera mini, which doesn't do client side interactivity.

Progressive enhancement: the site is enhanced as much as the browser allows. If something doesn't work on a browser, the UI should still be usable on it. Make sure that advanced CSS contains nothing that is vital. Same with JavaScript. Basic JS means dom manipulation, no Ajax, server requests may be slow, since your connectivity may be slow.

Device APIs are in native apps and not in web app. But security issues will prevent your native apps from taking advantage of device API's, unless app stores screen apps for security breaches.

FUTURE:

JS events we need for mobile:

• online, offline
• Orientation change
• Shake
• Camera open
• Device move

Future of mobile apps is in HTML 5 - but native apps have their place, especially in games.

Ideally, store the css and js on the device (local storage).

If you can't do this, then you can still implement your app as a website.

70% of world population has no credit cards, carriers can bill them though.

Peter-Paul told the story of the poor fisherman who needs access to prices in different ports so he knows which port to take his boat into to sell his fish.

No wifi, but probably has weak cell signal.

App dealer can give him an HTML 5 app over Bluetooth - share apps freely.

Data received in json over SMS . SMS is the only way to push data. Data could be sold. So the app will be free and the data will be sold.

There are over 100 app stores right now, maybe 10 will survive: apple, google, specialized ones. Peter-Paul believes that app stores are not useful when they have so many apps in them, because you can't find what you need.

Fisherman must be literate.