dirtystylus

Native vs Web-based Apps

Luke Wroblewski shared some notes from a presentation by Josh Clarke. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

• If you can do it with the Web – do it with the Web. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier. The user experience gap is going to close but not all the way. Native will always have a user experience edge.
• Think Flagship apps: create a mobile Web experience. Then create a flagship app on one or two platforms. Align with the mobile cultures & populations that match your demographics.
• Start with thinking about your interface as an API: a smart back-end that encompasses what you do. Different front-ends can then be plugged into your core APIs

Just minutes after I posted this, my boss forwarded me a good piece covering the same ground: The Future of Mobile (Is the Web) by Christopher Butler at Newfangled.

An Event Apart Boston 2011

I’ve written up some of my thoughts on the recently-concluded An Event Apart Boston over at the 160over90 blog. There’s a ton of material still rattling in my brain, so I might work on a few follow-up posts in this space.

TextMate 2 May Never Come

John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to this particular post by Watts Martin on the choices facing current TextMate users. John Gruber quoted the humorous first paragraph which asks users to face the reality of abandonment, but it’s this paragraph that sums it up for me:

First off: if you are a Mac user and compatibility with TextMate is an absolute must-have, let me ask you two questions. Is TextMate 1.5 still working for you? Can you keep living with its limitations? If you answered both those questions “yes,” our work is done here. Go in peace.

At the recently-concluded An Event Apart conference in Boston I saw TextMate windows on a lot of laptop screens, (including the presentations by Jeremy Keith). That tells me that lots of people are still finding TextMate 1.5 to be an effective tool, despite its shortcomings. TextMate 2 may never come, but for many people (myself included) TextMate 1.5 continues to work just fine.

For the rest who can’t/won’t use any of the alternatives suggested by Martin, you can keep checking the TextMate 2 status page.

Kyle Neath on URL Design

This is a particularly good post from late last year, on taking the time to craft your URLs. This is something that is so easy to overlook, especially if you’re using a framework that has defaults for generating URLs. This paragraph in particular stood out to me:

URLs are universal. They work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, cURL, wget, your iPhone, Android and even written down on sticky notes. They are the one universal syntax of the web. Don’t take that for granted.

SVN Rollback (reverse merge)

Because I keep forgetting this:

Cornerstone, of course, allows you to merge two different revisions.