Facing up to IT

Developers in short supply?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Apple have over 650,000 apps in it’s store, Android over 500,000 and so you would think there are too many developers out there with not enough to do?Whilst many of these apps may be experiments in using mobile development tools,...

What's Microsoft On(x)?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 09:45:40 GMT

Last month Microsoft announced a beta project called ON(x), pronounced “on-ex”. Now apart from the strange naming reminiscent of the famous pop artist Prince changing his name to Symbol, this seems a little strange to say the least.However in case...

The vertical UXP

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Whilst discussing what a UXP is and who the key players are with a customer I was asked an interesting question, “is there a need for industry (banking, retail, government ...) specific UXP ?”. My immediate reaction was that the technologies...

The end of silo architectures

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

From my discussions with customers and prospects it is clear that the final layer in their architectures is being defined by UXP (see my previous posts). So whether you have a Service or Web Oriented architecture most organisations have already...

Programming with soldering irons

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:17:03 GMT

Raspberry Pi will rejuvenate the marriage of electronics and programming The last time I can remember seeing a programmer with a soldering iron was a long time ago in the hay days of micro computing in the late 70’s. A...

Future of Mobile part 3

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:13:10 GMT

Today I have 3 GPS devices, 4 Cameras, 3 Video cameras, 3 movie players, 5 music players and the list goes on. All of these are in a variety of devices that I use in different places for different purposes....

Click, touch, wave and talk: UI of the future

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:01:56 GMT

First there was the Character User Interface (CUI, pronounced cooo-eey) typified by green letters on a black background screen. Then the Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced goo-eey) came along with a mouse and icons. Pen interfaces existed in the era...

Future of Mobile part 3

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:13:10 GMT

Today I have 3 GPS devices, 4 Camera’s, 3 Video camera’s, 3 movie players, 5 music players and the list goes on. All of these are in a variety of devices that I use in different places for different purposes....

Is Apple Siri-ous about Voice?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 09:55:37 GMT

When I first saw the new iPhone ads that featured voice interaction all I thought was WOW, Apple have done it, they have mastered voice interaction. What appeared to be natural voice interaction is the nirvana many people have been...

A dirty IT architecture may not be such a bad thing

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

For some time both CTOs and architects have looked at enterprise architectures and sought to simplify their portfolio of applications. This simplification is driven by the needs to reduce the costs of multiple platforms driven largely through duplication. Duplication often...

Is the dream of re-use outdated?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Since the early days of programming developers have chased the dream of creating code that can be used by other developers so that valuable time can be saved by not re-inventing the wheel. Over time, there have been many methods...

What's your UXP?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 05:00:00 GMT

As I’ve previously discussed Gartner are helping organisations to understand the technologies, processes and skills required to manage and master all their user experiences. For CTO/CIOs sorting out which technologies to use for content management, social, collaboration, search and web/mobile...

What's a UXP?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 05:00:00 GMT

Gartner are defining a category they call UXP to help organisations manage all their user experience requirements.Gartner defines the UXP as "an integrated collection of technologies and methodologies that provides the ability to design and deliver user interface/presentation capabilities for...

Is mobile app growth over-hyped?

Dharmesh Mistry — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

There are numerous statistics on the growth of mobile apps in the various stores, and also about the number of downloads. Apple claims over 500,000 apps in its store and Google claims over 450,000 (this time last year it had...

Mobile apps: When to go native

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 09:33:56 GMT

Let me say from the outset, that there is no right answer for everybody. The battle between cross-platform solutions and native mobile applications is going to continue for years to come; I know I have blogged about this before, and...

Future of the mobile phone (part 2)

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 11:58:25 GMT

Previously we looked at the form factor, what shape phones could be in the future. But what will phones do? Clearly phones are getting smarter and able to do more, so here are some thoughts on the changes that could...

Future of the mobile phone (part 1)

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:59:31 GMT

For a few months now I’ve been having conversations with colleagues, friends and family about the future of phones, sad I know but at heart I am still a geek ;o). I see three possible futures for mobile form factors....

HTML5 will be key to a MAD world

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:37:36 GMT

According to researchers, over 5 billion devices connect to the Internet today and by 2020 over 22 billion devices including 6 billion phones, 2 billion TVs will be connected. By 2014 sales of new internet connected devices excluding PC’s will...

HTML5: The right time right place for mobile?

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:06:18 GMT

Most people by now understand that main challenge for developing mobile applications is creating a solution that runs on as many platforms as possible. This challenge can range from supporting browsers that only support text, up to fully fledged smartphones....

The end of Apple?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:58:34 GMT

We are clearly in the web age an era that has turned everyone into readers and publishers of free content. In this era we have seen the rise of open source, free software and the move to software and services...

HTML 5 makes the browser smarter

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 09:39:14 GMT

The unsung hero of the web has always been Javascript, without which the standards-based web would be completely static. Javascript enables functionality to be executed in the browser, and has been used to create all sorts of effects otherwise not...

HTML5 gets pushy

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:08:04 GMT

In the past there have been a number of clever approaches to get around the limitations of web technologies inability to allow servers to broadcast messages/data to clients. One of the more popular libraries for such capability has been Comet....

Using Polyfill to cover up the cracks in HTML5

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Long gone are the days when Internet Explorer had 95% of the browser market. We have lived in multi-browser world since the start of the web. Whilst this has its plus point, it also has its downsides - none more...

HTML5 The proprietary standard

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The good thing about standards is that they are uniform across different vendor implementation. Well that is at least the primary goal. So how does a vendor make a standard proprietary? Well it’s quite easy really you provide extensions to...

The BBC does a U-turn on HTML 5

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:37:06 GMT

Rewind to August 13th 2010 and Erik Huggers Director of BBC Future and Technology blogged that the the BBC were committed to open standards but "HTML5 is starting to sail off course". At the time I thought this was a...