I wrote a post back in December of 2008 hypothesizing that iPhone sales would be somewhat driven by the recession. I should have said consumer smart phone sales would be driven, but I must have been too enamored with my iPhone. In any case, I feel that a large portion of the force behind increased consumer smart phone sales is that businesses are reducing costs.

Prior to the recession my company handed out Blackberrys to anyone with the slightest justification. Now, however, we are pulling those back for anyone without stringent justification. These people have become accustomed to having the capabilities of a smart phone in their pocket, and those who can afford the luxury are purchasing their own. My company is also pulling back regular cell phones, and this is putting more consumers in the market for phones in general. And, naturally, a certain percentage of these consumers will opt for a smart phone.

I think that Blackberry is catching more of this segment than Apple for a couple reasons. First, former business users know Blackberry and are comfortable with them. And secondly, Verizon doesn't carry the iPhone. I have spoken to numerous people who will not get an iPhone simply because they would have to switch to AT&T. If they are concerned about not getting a signal in rural America, then they are on to something. My wife had to go to Coshocton Ohio, and I went with her. Nowhere in the area did I have any sort of signal, not even a WiFi hotspot. She was fine on her Verizon phone. We were even able to get directions on her phone.

You will notice that I did not mention RIM as being a reason for it's own late success. The company had a great innovation that helped change the cellular landscape, but I don't think that they have done anything truly innovate since introducing the BlackBerry. They are now introducing phones that appear to just be re-branded copies of other successful products. They have a flip style phone, and of course the click-screen Storm.

In my eyes the Storm is a terrible knock off of the iPhone, it doesn't even have WiFi. No WiFi is a deal breaker for me. In fact, if a phone lacks WLAN capabilities, then I don't consider it a smart phone. It ties a person into using a cellular network. For anyone who has traveled outside of the United States and knows what international usage fees are should immediately understand this. My iPhone is more than a cell phone, it is a home Internet device that works off of my home wireless network. I am not certain that RIM understands my perspective on this, even though they do have some phones that offer WiFi.

Blackberry seems to be turning what they have into a sort of commodity, or they are at least competing with other commodity phones. As an investor I don't like to invest in companies that have a commodity type product, especially in the technology sector where a lot of a company's profits must go into developing the next product. From my perspective, Blackberry is heading for a long tail. Motorola and Nokia were once great cellular innovators, but they became complacent and others took them over in the market. I see a parallel with Blackbery.

So, as some are cheering the recent successes of Blackberry, I see the beginning of a long downward trend. I could be wrong, and that is alright with me, but you won't see me investing in RIM anytime soon.

If only Thomas Edison would have joined forces with George Westinghouse, I think that we would be using electricity more efficiently today. From what I understand, Westinghouse's alternating current (AC) is best over long distances, while Edison's direct current (DC) is best over short distances. Alternating current seems to have won out due to the need to transmit electricity over long distances from the power plants to the consumers. And, when that battle was being fought a hundred years ago, either of the technologies worked to accomplish the goals of lighting homes. Now, with the widespread use of direct current consuming devices such as computers and other home electronics, it would seem that using direct current inside a home could be a better idea.

In the modern home there are so many AC/DC converters, those are the small boxes on the end of the power cables that take up so much room in the outlet and frequently get separated from the device it is meant to power. The conversion of alternating current to direct current is decentralized at each of the devices, and each device wastes energy to operate. It would seem more efficient to transmit power from the electric company using alternating current, and then perform a central conversion to direct current. Alternating current is still required for many household devices, so actually both forms would be required.

To me, the present system just seems very inefficient. Consider the example of a home PC. Electricity is generated and then transmitted all the way down to the outlet as alternating current. (Or, if solar panels are being used for power generation, the power is generated in direct current and then converted to alternating current.) Then, the battery backup converts it to direct current to charge the batter. The battery backup has to convert it back to alternating current since that is what the computer expects. Finally, the computer converts the alternating current back to direct current again because that is what the internal electronics require. Each power converts step wastes energy, if nothing else in the form of heat.

Of course not only are homes not designed for this, but neither are electronic devices. A new standard for home wiring would have to be defined to accommodate some form of direct current, possibly in different voltages (5V, 9V, 12V, 24V). There would have to be some sort of standard outlet or receptacle. And, the device manufacturers would have to use new standard plugs. All of these requirements make me believe that changing the system at this point would be nearly impossible. Which is why I wish that Mr. Westinghouse and Mr. Edison would have enjoined their technologies to define a better overall system.

I recently wrote an article explaining how I made Google Chrome portable so that I could use it for web development testing at work. But, I have come to the conclusion that I cannot really use it in our corporate environment, it just causes frustration.

The second problem appears when I access secure sites on the Internet. We use a proxy and web content filter, and that is configured through a proxy configuration script. Firefox automatically negotiates with the proxy and does not prompt for a username and password to access the internet, but Chrome does. Again, this is not that big of a deal, it's only needed once per session and then I can access the internet. It is interesting to note that Chrome does seem to send NTLM proxy authorization.

I have been using Chrome at home, and I have had some minor issues. On problem that struck me was that Gmail reports errors periodically, but I usually click OK and continue working without problems. In spite of the minor issues I plan on continuing to use Google Chrome at home, though I am not going to remove Firefox anytime soon.

I don't think the enterprise problems I explained are strictly Chrome's fault, but the combination of Chrome and our computing environment appears to be a bad mix. I also had problems in the past with Safari, so it might be the WebKit foundations that they are both built upon. It is also possible that I have caused these problems by making Chrome portable, and I intend to run the same tests from an actual installation when time permits.

I would assume that the enterprise market is not Chrome's target audience a, but I have left the team some feedback on the problems I have experienced.

From my perspective, Firefox is the only viable option for developing web-based applications in the enterprise at this point.

Anytime I make changes to web user interfaces I worry about data validation and the impact on the user experience. We try to catch data entry errors up front and we also check again before posting to the database, but I worry that something will slip through. I have two main concerns with this. First, are we restricting the data that the users enters based on the type and size of the fields in the database. And, second, are we properly cleaning up the data for the database and for proper viewing in the future.

Our intranet applications are developed in a development environment and then migrated into a testing environment before finally being placed into production. Once a new version is available for testing I always solicit the application's owner to test it (each application has an owner from the business). But, they normally focus on the changes that they requested, ensuring that our implementation meets their desires. Because of this we have historically found bugs in the production environment caused by edge cases, and now we do a lot of manually testing for these cases.

I have seen some applications for assisting in the testing of websites, but most of them require some sort of external tools. Many seem to be based on recording and playing back situations. This approach is understandable, but I want something more automated. I don't want to miss a check on a new field because we forgot to add it to the checking macro.

I have been looking for a simple, automated tool with minimal requirements that could assist in test our intranet applications. I was thinking that it would be nice to have a web page that loads up the target application, maybe in an iframe, and then runs some rudimentary tests. Then, I could have a co-op load up this testing web page and run the tests it recommends as the application is navigated from front to back. Instead of containing the page in an iframe, it could somehow load a special JavaScript into each of the pages for the target application. Regardless of the implementation, I want something that proactively checks the current page for possible errors and automatically fills in fields with values that would stress test the submission mechanisms.

I have yet to find a tool that performs in this manner, and am considering writing one if subsequent searching turns up nothing.

When I first switched from MooTools to jQuery for my primary JavaScript framework I made the comment that I liked the MooTools documentation better. It seemed that mootools.net/docs/ provided faster navigation than docs.jquery.com. However, I have since found api.jquery.com, which provides very quick access to relevant API documentation. In light of this discovery I have revised my opinion and now prefer jQuery's documentation.

I wanted to share this new discovery (api.jquery.com) and also mention some other great online web development resources that I use on a regular basis.

The Mozilla developer center has a wealth of information for web developers. There are references on everything from AJAX to XUL. I frequently find myself searching the CSS reference and the JavaScript 1.5 Guide.

I have used this tool for a long time. I am more of a programmer than a graphic designer, so it is not that easy for me to pick out great color combinations, which is where this application comes in. You can save schemes that you design by saving a link to the specific scheme (here is a scheme I like).

Color Scheme Designer Version 3 [Version 2, Version 1]