Things to entertain us in 2008

Jan 4, 2008 · 3 minute read

This being a blog and it being the start of a new year (2008 for those not following closely) I feel obliged to list of few predictions of sorts. Rather than concrete this will happen things here are a few bits and pieces I think will be interesting over the next year.

Site Specific Browsers

A few people have already waxed lyrical about Site Specific Browsers and after trying out Prism for a few weeks I can say I really like the idea. Their are a couple of teething problems, both with the idea and the current implementations, but all seem solvable with a little focus. Security (sandbox everything), memory footprint (as small as possible) and integration with the desktop (local storage, Google Gears).

I think their are already a couple of extreme examples of this idea in the wild, both of which I’m already pretty interested in. Joost are doing some pretty cool things with their bespoke application and web site backend and Songbird just hit version 0.4 and is looking pretty nice.

Mobile

We’ll see more and more people playing with mobile apps next year I’m thinking. Mobile browsers (special mentions to Opera Mini and Mobile Safari here) are getting better and better and the iPhone (at least in the UK) has hopefully started something with regards fixed cost unlimited data. With some good materials already in print, next years Future of Mobile likely to be bigger and better than before and half the web developers I know pondering how they get to work with mobile I see more cool stuff happening here.

The Backend

Chris has made a call to arms (of sorts) and I’m hoping this comes to pass. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the best teams are agile and multi-disciplinary and both sides of this divide have lots to gain from each other. For starters most front end people could probably do with learning some good old fashioned software engineering stuff; build tools, source control, deployment, testing, etc. As for the backend guys; how about unobtrusive applications, accessibility and the importance of good quality markup? Apologies for the huge generalisations here, but hopefully you know what I’m getting at.

Software as Infrastructure

Simon Wardley and others have been talking about software systems as infrastructure for a good while and I think we’ve seen glimpses of this in the last year. Whether it’s people using Twitter for interesting projects (Foamee for instance) or Amazon and their web service platform (S3, EC2, SimpleDB, DevPay) we have a start. I think we’ll see lots more of this sort of drop in web based software over the next year. The key seems to be thinking about things in a RESTful manner, and throwing in as much publicly exposed JSON, RSS and Microformats as possible. It will also be interesting to see if the Atom Publishing Protocol takes off next year too.

Education

Education is coming up more and more in conversation between people involved in web design and development it seams, both off and online. I had a great conversation with Rachel and Mike after @media and then another good discussion with Dan Dixon, Andy, Tom and others at barcamp and know other smart people are thinking about this too. I’m hoping to get something off the group here in the next month or so but would love to know about any other industry driven initiatives anyone might know about?