WhoIsKevin

Just What Are We Developing?

I’ve been thinking about this post for some time and I finally decided I should go ahead and try to express my frustration with current application development.

The root of the problem is that currently the applications that are given the most press and the most “excitement” are useless. We are at a time when there is computing power literally in the hands of users that until now was unprecedented. Yet what are we developing on these new platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry, and G1? Well a quick survey of the popular applications will tell you very quickly that apparently the great achievement of having a “smart” phone is being able to play games. I don’t know about all programmers out there but I’ve never gotten excited about the potential of a game. After all it doesn’t save a company money or make a user more productive or increase safety or anything that a really well designed application might be able to accomplish. If it isn’t a game it is a restaurant finder or something that identifies a song on the radio or pretends to pour a beer. Well there is a great advancement to our society a device that pretends to pour a beer! However, one programmer did connect up a phone to a servo motor to pour a beer once you have loaded up the bottle and the empty glass of course.

Similar problems exist with the “run anywhere” platforms like Adobe AIR. So far I haven’t found many real applications written in Adobe AIR. Sure there are little apps you can download that will show you twitter feeds or pull other RSS feeds to your screen but what about a real application. I actually did find one application called Klok for tracking time that seems to be an actual application and not another glorified RSS reader. But a quick review of the Adobe AIR marketplace will let you decide for yourself.

And what about the great web applications frameworks that are supposed to allow us to put together great applications on the web? Anything out there with meat to it? Rails, Grails, Django and others all claim to speed our development and to some degree they do but what are we developing? Another friend application so I can communicate useless status to people that I probably don’t hang out with but for some reason need to be my friends. I laugh at social media applications that pull together all my RSS feeds from every useless service like facebook, twitter, linkedin and all my other “essential applications” (I apologize to my friends that have worked on these applications since I know the code does take some time but for the “real” aspect no such apology). I want to see really useful tools that people can use to really do something meaningful like save money on groceries, gas or save on heating costs.

All this useless development leads to a lot of dead ends. It causes rates to go down and makes it so that the average business person has about as much respect for programming as they have for what their kids are doing on their smart phones.

So what is the answer? I have a suggestion. Let’s all start to look beyond games and communicating with our virtual friends. Real programmers can certainly make something useful for these platforms. Let’s try to develop things that really matter? Of course this won’t be easy. First we would like to get paid. Free software is for people without families and bills to pay. So that means real work. Not some weekend of coding that produces another RSS feed reader but real work with a long time line and possibly some real use in the future. If you are in college and considering programming as a career learn more about the real world connections to computers like embedded systems and hardware. Don’t just think you can write the next facebook. Ad supported models are not good business plans. I think the future of application development is going to be in understanding how to use real data like temperature and energy use to then make real changes that can benefit users. If you are thinking about writing another game or “social” application then good luck to you. Personally I think that is the reason we will continue to see hard economic times…we can’t focus on anything beyond a day or two and that leads to games and “social media”. Which by the way tells me we are not in hard enough economic times when people are still paying an extra thirty to forty dollars a month for a data plan that allows them to look up restaurants, compare prices of other things to buy or send email.

Electric Scooter Arrives

My electric scooter arrived late yesterday afternoon. It is an R-30 from EVTAmerica. I spent some time last night un-crating, removing plastic wrap, and just a small handle bar adjustment.

I did a quick run late last night and this thing quickly hit 40 mph without any trouble. Very impressive. I can’t wait for the weather to let up a bit so I can ride it to work. Supposed to rain all day today so I’ll skip for now. Photos of my entire assembly process are on picassa web.