Jack of All Trades Web Development

The Future of the Web and Things Like That

m@marcgrabanski.com (Marc Grabanski) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 12:52:40 -0800

Category: Tips & Random Tags: HTML5, Future, 3D

After watching Jesse Schell's presentation on the future of gaming:

I'll summarize from memory in case you don't have time to watch it:

Farm Ville, Guitar Hero, Wii, Wii Fit.. etc all made TONS of money. They seem to hit the gaming industry out of nowhere.
They have one thing in common - they bring gaming to the real world.
When technology gets better, more types of devices emerge. "all in one" is a fallacy.
Companies are using points systems to get consumers to buy certain products.
He says point systems *gaming* should be brought into all areas of reality.

So, this video in combined with my presentations on HTML5 has really got me thinking. What is the future of the web?

More Devices and Faster Internet

The two things we can count: more devices and faster internet. I'm sure iPad is just the start of new types of devices and innovation in that space. Google is gearing up to release 1GB internet, 100 times what most people have in their homes now.

So how are all these devices connected? The internet.

What is the language of the internet? HTML. (xml and json too for data transfer)

Interpreters

Web browsers are interpreters of this hodge-podge data format we have, HTML. Even CSS and JavaScript are interpreted. This is why web developers will never have perfect standards because everything is based on interpretation. Browsers can agree to interpret things in roughly the same ways, but the law of humanity combined with innovation mean nothing will be interpreted 100% the same.

New Interpretations of HTML

Take the video tag, for instance. The entire world's internet eyes and brain (browsers) have to now interpret a new piece of data, the video tag. A single browser could decide to interpret a "frog" tag, but that wouldn't serve us much good - so there will always be some commonality behind new tags and innovation. HTML will continue to add new pieces of data that will be interpreted in different ways. We will always have browser plugins and JavaScript to add new functionality to browsers before the browsers implement their own interpretations.

Apple did a smart move by open sourcing webkit. Now as more and more browsers use their rendering engine, apple (and whomever works on webkit) can set the standards, forcing other browsers to start implementing what they are. We've seen some of this taken place. HTML is a world where people basically make up new words and the whole world will eventually learn how to interpret that word.

The Brave New Internet

What I'm really looking forward to is 3D and sensor APIs.

Sensor APIs will detect if the device has a certain sensor, just like the geolocation API does now in HTML5, and then fall back if it doesn't have it. This will be great to be able to gather all new types of data through JavaScript. We could record audio and video natively or even detect air pollution levels if hardware devices start to have new types of sensors.

3D is certainly the area I'm most excited for. A world where today's games like Half Life 2 can download streaming into your web browser in real time. Gigabit internet will provide that ability. O3D and WebGL are starting to pave the way for 3D in the browser. And I fully intend to leverage browser's new 3D abilities when it comes out.

If you haven't seen it, check out Google's O3D beach demo. O3D is a plugin, but we know that plugins are trailblazers to new browser functionality.

Safari and Firefox are implementing WebGL and this can be seen in their nightly builds. Pay attention to the Learning WebGL blog to see what has been happening in the world of WebGL.

I can't wait to start using it. Web + 3D is the world I pictured and wanted to be a part of since back in 2001 when I went to DigiPen, Nintendo's school, for 3D Animation.

So come on, let's create a 3D web together!

HTML5 Essentials Presentation

m@marcgrabanski.com (Marc Grabanski) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:42:00 -0800

Category: Conferences Tags: development, html5

I gave my HTML5 Essentials presentation in Israel Internet Association and in Evening of jQuery and HTML5 these last few weeks. Here are the slides.

HTML5 Essentials

View more presentations from Marc Grabanski.

One very memorable moment from Israel was riding a camel in Jerusalem so I have to share the picture with you!

Making Web Products is Tough

m@marcgrabanski.com (Marc Grabanski) — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:30:30 -0800

Category: Business & Management Tags: My Work, Business

Despite putting the last two years into building products and clientele, I am still living in a cold basement of a house that I don't own. I am not giving up, though. Here, I will document the main struggles I've had in each step of building products on the web.

Planning

Nothing goes as planned. You can have a well thought-out and orchestrated plan, but it won't happen that way unless you are copy-catting other people or have built something really similar in the past. All of the products I am building are breaking new ground, so I can never estimate the time I'm going to need. We all have ideas, but I am convinced that the people who are successful are the ones that are able to build and get their products and ideas out the door. I am constantly working on my process and performance to be stronger and turn ideas into real, tangible products more efficiently.

Technology

You have to choose the framework and language you are going to build on. While building, what if you want to try something new, or different? Well, each change along the way takes more time. The software engineer part of me wants to rebuild everything in fifteen technologies and ways, but the businessman says to never change anything. So, I'm left in a weird position where sometimes I follow the software engineer inside me and improve myself, but then it take a lot longer and am happier with things. Sometimes I plow through it business-style and am unhappy with the underlying technology.

Partners

One of my companies has a board of five people and it gets to be political, where the others don't have any politics to deal with. Politics can be fine sometimes because it is good to discuss and approve things, but I prefer the latter. Keeping the amount of partners minimal is a good idea to make sure the communication and direction is clear and focused.

Resources

You need finances to buy time. Because I run my consulting company to pay the bills, I don't always have free time to build the products I want to build. When I do make enough money to buy my time to build products, I often need help to pay people the rest of my money. I am pretty much always, "broke", even though I make a good amount of money consulting. This has been a far better environment for building products than being a full time employee ever was because I got burnt out, but it still will continue to be a major challenge until one of these products becomes successful.

Moving On

I am continuing to change and become far better at building products, but this journey is proving to be long and arduous.

To be a good employee or consultant (something I'm good at) is a completely different skill than being able to pull product ideas from thin air and turn them into working reality. I tip my hat to Shaun Inman and the others who have been successful at doing this.

2009 in Retrospect

m@marcgrabanski.com (Marc Grabanski) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:59:28 -0800

Category: Marc Grabanski's Work Tags: My Work

Since this website is dedicated to documenting my career, I figure I'd better take a look at the last 11 months which have been quite inspiring.

The company I started now has a strong team and we are ready to swing for the fence next year. We have gained 20+ clients, with 30+ projects which all have been delivered on time and on budget. Sick! Way better than I thought.

MarcGrabanski.com

Although my blogging and open source work has slowed down while trying to boost my company, that has not stopped website readership from growing. We are up to 119,065 visitors last month with 62,946 being unique.

Version 3 is Coming, Built From Scratch

I am gearing up to release version 3 of this website, which will hopefully re-surge my energy and motivation to bring you fresh content. It is yet another custom system built entirely from scratch. I dumped ALL my current code and design in order to rethink the whole blogging paradigm from the bottom-up.

More Speaking

I spoke at more events this year. I especially enjoyed the short-notice trip to Dublin, Ireland.

- jQuery Summit 2009
- jQuery Conference 2009 in Boston, MA
- Epicenter 2009 in Dublin, Ireland
- MinneWeb Con 2009 in Minneapolis, MN
- Twin Cities Web Design 2009 in Bloomington, MN

Technical Editor

I technical reviewed Dan Wellman's book on jQuery UI 1.7.

jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery

Startup Companies

Aside from my consulting company, I own shares in two startup companies. One of them launched a few months back, it is a rental listing and search engine called Rent Update. Another one is a firefox extension that talks to a web service I built.

Spring of LIfe

I used to be so addicted to things I could not possibly be useful to society. I had a life-changing experience back in 2004 and I'm starting to open up to sharing the source of my motivation and strength. The source that has led me to make this website, share with you any knowledge I have, and provide everything I can for my clients.. Jesus.

"but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 14:4

I feel "life" springing up inside me every day and even the most simple things in life take on extraordinary meaning.

Engaged!

I got engaged to Candy! She's been there beside me for the last three years and we are excited to tie the knot.

Happy Holidays!

jQuery Enlightenment is a Worthy Purchase

m@marcgrabanski.com (Marc Grabanski) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:58:10 -0700

Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, Books

If you haven't heard of or read jQuery Enlightenment, then you probably should go subscribe to more jQuery blogs, this one has been posted everywhere. Simply because this book is an excellent read with excellent examples, worth the $15 purchase. It has live links to code examples you might need down the road.

And no, I wasn't paid to do this post. All the dough goes straight to Cody Lindley on this self-published e-book, and he deserves every penny. Go Cody go! *cheers*