It has been a long time since my last post in 2023. It has just been really busy to say the least. I have been looking for a new physical home closer to the office where I work. We never had remote working during Covid. Then there has been travel for business and for pleasure. And the never ending yard work, which I hope to reduce or eliminate when moving to a new home.
In my last post I talked about gen AI and its impact on design. Here we are going on 2.5 years later and things have certainly changed. Many more voices are, if not saying design is dead, that it has been changed dramatically. I continue to dabble in it, but AI has honestly not been a complete game changer like desktop publishing was in the 90s and the Web in the 00s. Yes, you can crank out designs at warp speed, but generally they are mediocre at best. They do not in any way really break new ground or solve problems on their own. Things are just faster… And as I noted would be a probability in my previous post, the costs have been rising.
Category Archives: technology
Static Site Generators
I have been looking into some static site generators as WP new editing approach with the block editor is just a pain. It is taking over control of the page layout and flexibility of the single page view that I would prefer. I am also finding it to be slower to initially load pages and content. Then there is also the increasingly frequent updates needed to keep things secure. I’m sure part of the problem is the code is becoming so much more complicated. I run no plugins at all on my site, because they open up too many doors.
At first I was looking for an alternative CMS built on PHP. However, looking at that landscape there are no real alternatives. I want something simple that keeps the number of DB tables small as why should there be 50 tables for a simple website. Yet, everything I looked at has been ridiculously complicated if not on the front end then also the back end. I’ve custom built PHP CMSs myself and have thought about doing it again, but honestly I am no longer interested in maintaining that either.
So now I am looking at Static Site generators and finding that, there too I feel there is just so much unnecessary complication. Most are targeted towards developers and involve running multiple underlying frameworks and libraries. I have spent some time playing around with various ones that use node and find it still to be overly complicated. Another problem I am realizing is that I will no longer be able to update my site from my tablet/phone as I am doing right now. At this point I am almost thinking about going with straight html and manually updating pages.
Xcode: Apple’s Confusing App Builder
So I have dabbled in building apps for Mac / iOS over the years and it continues to be one of the most confusing and un-Apple like experiences. Now I do not consider myself a good developer or I may not even rise to the level of a bad developer, but I can write code. I have mastered CSS, HTML, and have been able to build custom web apps in PHP, ASP/ASP.net, PERL, and JavaScript. I have also learned how to write queries and manage the basics of MS-SQL, MySQL, Postgres severs.
Yet, every time I start in on Xcode it is just a hodgepodge of UI and code. Sure there are starter bundles, code look-up, and contextual help, but there is nothing intuitive about building an app in Xcode. Compare this to visual studio from Microsoft and it is completely different. Sure Visual Studio (the full app not the VS Code) is also very complex, but I was surprised at how easy it was to add a button to the UI and then the write code for that button.
Upgrade to Big Sur
So I upgraded to Apple’s Mac OS Big Sur. I have to start out by saying that I feel Apple has been slipping in recent years with basic usability. The whole flat UI thing sucks not just in my opinion, but also in usability testing I have done with designs that were “flat”. Also I am not sure who started it, but between Apple, Google, and Microsoft all hiding scroll bars, it’s really a annoying trying to notice when there may be more on the screen. The first thing I look for now when updating OS is the option to force scroll bars to be visible.
Having said all that, I have to say that I generally like the look and feel of Big Sur and also liking some of the new features. The finder windows do feel cleaner and more refined. The new control center is interesting, but I have yet to really use it. There are new privacy and security measures which is good to know that they are improved. Overall though it seems just OK. I am not wowed by anything just yet, but also there have been no major glitches as well. I do really appreciate that Mac OS upgrades are free now. If there is anything else that pops out over the next week, I’ll be sure to make note here.
Wrote some code
It has been a while since I last wrote some code. Not that long, maybe a month or two, but long enough that it felt refreshing. I’ve been writing a lot of reports, and emails of course, and creating a lot of mock-ups in Figma that I have not had time to code. Unlike Axure, Figma does not allow one to add code to a prototype. This is something, I wish I really could do though. It would be great to add both CSS and enhance/customize interactions with Javascript.
Future is coming faster than we think
It’s been said before, the future is coming faster than we think. This is true now more than ever as the advent of “AI” and robotics automation is beginning to seriously take hold. I put AI in quotes because it is still far from true artificial intelligence. It is because of significant increases in computing power and networking that increasingly complex algorithms can be run. Which gives the appearance of “intelligence”, but the reality is this is not true intelligence yet. While a machine can learn, it still has to be cultivated and corrected and ultimately it is not really thinking.
Anyone who has engaged at length with Google Home, Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri knows that there are plenty of limitations. As great as they are for somethings you very quickly run into problems for anything that is not yet factored in their algorithms and resources they pull information from. Having said that, they and other AI driven technologies are gaining traction in business. I know that there are many others predicting the same thing I am here…
Microdata and html5
Spending some of my time off exploring microdata and html5 more in depth. If the semantic web is going to finally gain wide adoption microdata is going to be the catalyst. Unfortunately as easy as it is, it still involves a some effort to add microdata to your code. Still it is a million times easier than XML or other semantic formats.
Unfortunately, I think performance will still be an issue in actual implementations. Microdata is still fairly verbose and also referencing the scope/schema from a third party server may be a problem for some high traffic servers. Adding microdata to your mark-up can easily double or triple the size and there is always the latency issue of referencing a third party server.
These were the sources I was reviewing;
html5
http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
http://diveintohtml5.org/
http://html5demos.com/
microdata
http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=176035
http://html5doctor.com/microdata/