Sean Reichle

San Francisco wine bars are so much more than just the slickest place to hang and enjoy the fine wines of California and enjoy the delicious cheese and cracker platters littered with sweet jam’s and marmalade’s. They were also the epicenter of Web 2.0 conversation back in the day and maybe the cause of all that Web 2.0 buzz with new user experiences and faster interaction just a few short years ago. To ask just about any average person what all the Web 2.0 buzz is all about, few could ever explain very much, but in my opinion and that of many others I know it was all about the AJAX. Yes there have been many improvements over web technologies over the years most of which have become possible with AJAX. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the acronym it stands for Asynchronous JavaScript. And what it means is a web page a user is looking at can literally fetch data from a web server without having to re-load the page. You see re-loading the page takes a lot of time, having to do so means any interface a website has, whether it be email or an inventory management interface, it has to reload all the data + html formatting + css style sheets and yes the JavaScript too, or at least request it all and hopefully you’ve cashed most of it to build the page. Ajax support meant all browsers had the ability to just request the data that needs to change and update the page(view). It’s simply a faster and more enjoyable experience that turns nearly any browser into an application interface as we’ve seen it’s opened up whole new industries of online project management, sales support and just about any other business application you can think of. I’ll be honest, bandwidth has helped with that a great deal but it certainly hasn’t kept up with the rest of the world. I bring this up because it reminds me of how the government functions in this modern technological age. I mean, it takes me four hours to renew my license but I can sell my car on ebay in less time. So the powers that be and some very awesome people and developers are heading up this fantastic project called “Code for America.” It’s a long awaited blessing in my opinion as I’m a real proponent of efficiency in government especially around April. It seems this fantastic and bold plan is to modernize government services to web based services in a number of branches of government, who wouldn’t like that? I encourage you to read more about it here. Especially if your a fellow web developer because the deadline for applications is nearing soon.

As I sit on my sun chair by the pool writing this article on my Mac Book, while watching WWDC conference on my ipad, I get a fantastic tweet on my iphone from my twitter stream telling me that Apple has just released a software update that fixes the notorious iphone 4 death grip problem. You know, that supposedly serious flaw in their design that has caused some people to speculate if there will be an iPhone 4 recall or if free bumpers and cases are in our future. All this will be announced at tomorrow mornings press conference, which now seems more like a simple announcement that it is fixed. Well played Apple. It’s gotten to be such an over hyped issue that Apple’s stock has felt the impact earlier this week. I can only imagine the racing pulses of brokers and traders as they watch all this unfold behind the ticker tape. So why such a big hubbub about this anyway? I find it amazing that a company like Apple, who puts out such fantastic products gets such a high degree of scrutiny over some of smallest details while other technology companies like Microsoft, HP, or Dell just to name a few, can have software that constantly crashes and hardware that fails in blaze of glory, and all the while it seems nobody really cares? Is this perhaps an end user phenomenon? Might we see better products from other gadget companies if all end users held those product manufactures to higher standards of user interface and performance? I think so, but we don’t see that in very many markets. I might even go so far as to say that the success or failure of the modern technology company rests in the demand for quality in their products by that target market. One could say it pays to have picky consumers with unrealistic expectations, they’ll almost ensure your success, if you can rise those expectations.

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