I am flying out to Seattle for a week of training and internal meetings.  Here are some things that I have run into during the trip so far (and I am typing this at 38,000 feet not having even got to Seattle yet):

• Air travel is extremely safe.  The danger that was caused by my 3.4 oz toothpaste has caught by the TSA screener and the offending item was disposed of.  Question for Colgate: how come your travel size toothpaste does not meet the TSA rules?  I will say that despite my frustration with the process, I was very courteous to the TSA people.  They have a very important job and they don't get paid enough to listen to me complain about an extra .4 oz of toothpaste.
• There is no good airport food.  Enough said.
• Huge book stores at the airport are a great idea.  The guy that opened the used book store at Milwaukee's General Mitchell Airport is a genius.  I spent the 1/2 hour delay just combing through the stacks and picked up a copy of the book "Illusions" by Richard Bach (A great book that I first read 25 years ago).  There had to have been 10,000 books available in the store.  Contrast that to the typical airport newsstand that carries about 100 titles, and half of those are written by Grisham, Clancy or Crichton. 
• Late Connections.  How come when I am on the plane waiting for take off it seems like we are always waiting for a couple of passengers that have a "late connection".  The one time that I have the late connection they say "we are not holding the plane for you", take a later flight.  I did make it to the plane, but I had to run across 3 concourses and literally had to scream at the gate agent as she was about to close the boarding door.
• Harry Potter is bigger than the iPod.  Just based on my observations and not a statistical sampling I see 4 times as many people carrying the latest book around than listening to iPods.  The teenage girl sitting next to me is over 1/2 way through the book.

There are going to be several great opportunities to get a look at the latest in web technologies over the next couple of months.

Web414 Meeting with Silverlight and more

I am going to give a short overview of Silverlight at the next Web414 meeting in Milwaukee, WI.  Because Web414 is a group that includes designers, developers and general enthusiasts this will be different than any of the Silverlight demos I have given in the past.  For instance, I don't think I am going to show any code (or Visual Studio).  The group will also have a discussion around some upcoming events like a second Barcamp Milwaukee.

When: Tuesday July 17th at 7:00 PM
Where: MSOE Brady Conference Room
More Information: http://www.web414.com

RIA Showcase at the Stateline Adobe Users Group

Zach Stepek of Crave Media and the Stateline Adobe User Group in Rockford, IL and I are putting together a presentation that will give an overview of the technologies to build Rich Internet Applications available from Microsoft and Adobe.  So we will be talking about Silverlight and Flash/Flex/Air.  Dave Bost is going to co-present Silverlight with me.  It promises to be a fun and interesting evening.  We might be doing a short Pub Club afterwards, so please join us!

When: August 9th at 6:30 PM
Where: Crave Media in Rockford, IL
More Information: http://statelinemmug.com/

Centare Lunch and Learn on Visual Studio 2008

The Centare Group sponsors a quarterly lunch and learn series at the Friday's at Miller Park.  This quarter they have asked me to co-present with them on what's new with Visual Studio 2008.  We will spend a lot of time talking about the many enhancements for web development in the next version.

When: August 22nd at noon
Where: TGI Friday's at Miller Park
More Information: http://www.centare.com

Devcares on Silverlight

The August Devcares event will focus on 3 important aspects of Silverlight:  The programming model, the interaction with ASP.NET and AJAX and the media enhancements.

When: Various dates
Where: Various cities
More Information: http://www.devcares.com

Note: Wisconsin dates are not listed on the web site (Illinois and Indiana are), they will be added shortly.  Check back!

ArcReady on Web 2.0 and beyond

Jon Rauschenberger, the CTO for Clarity Consulting, will be joining myself and the some of the other Microsoft architects in our ArcReady program in August and September.  Jon will be discussing how to properly architect Web 2.0 applications for the Internet and the Enterprise environments.  He will then be demonstrating how to to apply these architectural concepts using tools like AJAX and Silverlight.

When and Where:
September 12th in Chicago (downtown)
September 13th in Milwaukee
September 18th in Indianapolis
More Information and additional cities: http://www.arcready.com

iPhone
Originally uploaded by jodieandlarry.

The iPhone had been out 2 weeks and 2 hours before I actually saw one in person.  I was just talking to Tom over at 80/20 Coding about this on Thursday.  Tom lives in San Francisco and he said that you can't walk down the street without seeing someone with an iPhone.  I was on vacation last week visiting my parents in suburban St Louis and I spent most of this week in Milwaukee and had not seen one.  Are cities in the Midwest just less likely to jump on this hot new technology?  Or could it be that I was just not looking closely enough?

I ran into one at the Rockies @ Brewers game at Miller Park on Friday night.  Bill from broadlock technologies was sitting behind me and had the device.  We struck up a conversation about the device and he even let me check it out.  Despite a few quirks that he described (some of which sound like they could be fixed with firmware), it seems like a great device.  It was fun talking to Bill and I am thankful that he let me check it out, I do have to admit that I spent most of the time turning it on its side and then back again to see the browser turn from portrait to landscape.

As I have talked about previously I hate the concept of phishing.  It is a problem that we need to address as an industry (technology) and as society using every means available (legal, user education and technology).  Over the last couple of days I have gotten more phishing e-mails than ever (okay so I have gotten 3 in the last week and I have only ever gotten 1 before this - but it is an alarming trend).  Thus far I have spotted them coming from a mile away: 

• One of them wound up in the junk e-mail folder (thank you Outlook!)
• 2 of them were account alerts from places where I did not have account
• The last one actually had the link with an IP Address instead of a server name

In each of these cases I carefully went to the phishing link to see what I could see (be very careful if you do this).  It is very refreshing what I saw when I went to one of these sites; I got a very stern warning from IE that this site was indeed a phishing site:

And just so that I don't seem like I am the Microsoft guy patting the IE team on the back, Firefox gave me a similar warning:

I love the use of color and symbols in both of these implementations.  IE uses a little more RED than Firefox does, but the Firefox symbol has a slight edge over the IE one in that it would be more universally understood than the shield type symbol.  All and all they are both good implementations of warnings, but they still allow the user to accept the risk and continue onto the website.

Are the warnings enough?

At some of our recent ArcReady programs we asked how many people in the audience had purchased something from a website with a "red" address bar in Internet Explorer (that is a general purpose warning and could mean things other than a phishing attack, but in general it is never good!).  I was surprised that in every audience we got a few hands raised.  Josh made a point of telling those people to call their bank and cancel that credit card.  I think there is a natural tendency to "click away" warnings as soon as they appear, especially when we have an emotional desire to get to our destination (and phishing e-mails feed on those emotional desires). 

From a User Experience (UX) standpoint there are are several things that we could try to do in this situation:

• Redesign the interface to make the message even more clear (There is some tweaking we could do, but we are pretty much at the point of diminishing returns)
• Annoy the user my asking them "are you really sure?" (yeah - that would suck)
• Take the drastic step to say that out of social responsibility we should not let the user access the site (that is pretty hard core decision to make)
• Some variation of the above (like by default it will not allow you to go to the site, but you could configure it to allow it)

I don't have the answer here, just thought I would ask the question "What stops a user from clicking?"

I have been browsing the Internet on my mobile phone a lot lately for a variety of reasons.  95% of the time browsing the Internet on a Mobile device can be a frustrating experience.  You find yourself scrolling "down" a lot to get through huge mastheads and menus just to get to the content.  Even more annoying is when you have to scroll "right" to get to the content to get past ads and even more menu items that are on the page.  But every once in a while you stumble on a website that has a version designed for mobile phones (it is even better when they detect that you are on a mobile browser and redirect you to the optimized version of the website).  I was pleased as punch a few weeks ago when I stumbled on the optimized version of the ESPN.com site.  I found it after spending several minutes scrolling "down" and "right" on a different site looking for the score of the baseball game.

The site is wonderful with the navigation designed around the small screen.  They have optimized download speeds for the networks connections that you typically see on a mobile device (although I have the 3G network which is very fast).  What really got me was the "headline" on the site.  It is a small, tightly cropped image and a headline that is a hyperlink to the story.  There is about 1 headline per day, and it changes at different times of the day, but I have never seen one "up" for more than a day.  Here is an image of what the site looks like on a mobile phone (captured with the mobile device emulator, not Photoshop):

I went to college to study journalism, specifically photojournalism (how I wound up with a couple of degrees in Information Systems is a story best told over a beer).  One of the lectures in my journalism 101 class that I remember to this day was about the art of writing a headline.  There are a number of rules of thumb involved in writing headlines (length, placement, punctuation, etc), but the overriding goal of the headline is to get someone interested enough to buy the paper (or in the case of a website, click the hyperlink to read the full story).  It is nice to see that ESPN.com's mobile site has recaptured some of that lost art.

I was working on another blog post when I stumbled on some interesting data about the use of javascript on the Internet.  I was looking at the data on browser statistics on www.w3schools.com and noticed that the percentage of users browsing the Internet with javascript turned on has increased quite substantially in the last year (from 90% to 94%).  Before you call me out on it: 4% is a small percentage, but think about how many computers that is (it is about the same percentage of people who are browsing with a Mac).  Check out this chart (based on the data located here):

I have to put a very important note about the data: W3Schools data is not perfect because it is based on the data collected by people that visit their site, not necessarily the Internet as a whole.  They even state this fact on the browser statistics page "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user" (they are referring to the fact that Firefox is usually reported higher on the w3schools.com than the Internet as a whole).  We still can infer some trends with the data.

What is causing this?

There are several things that can be causing the trend:

• It could be that older browsers that do not support javascript are being replaced by newer browsers that do support javascript. 
• It could be that the ways they are monitoring javascript on or off has changed or improved.
• It could be that people who have previously turned off javascript are turning it back on in the face of Web 2.0 AJAX applications.

Things to consider

Have you ever browsed the Internet with javascript turned off?  Give it a try sometime, it can be a very unpleasant experience.  Many sites (including big eCommerce ones) do not properly account for javascript being disabled.  There are some sites that do it quite well with content that is specifically targeted at the browsers with javascript turned off.

Should we build our sites as Web 1.0 and then implement them as Web 2.0 on top of it?  We had this discussion at Barcamp Madison in March.  I think the consensus of the group was that if you wanted to broadest reach appeal in your application that it should work as both a classic web application and one that uses AJAX and DOM effects.  There is always going to be a trade off on the reach of your application and the cost to get that reach.

Corporate security policies may quickly change the percentages.  In the past year security researchers such as SpiDynamics have demonstrated "proof of concept" hacks to attack private networks from Internet web sites using only javascript.  It one of these attacks goes from "proof of concept" to actual implementation you could see a dramatic shift in the availability of javascript on the client's web browser.  This would initially effect browsers that are managed by corporate IT, but a lot of people browse the Internet from work.

Microsoft is one of the companies that has a fiscal year that is different from the calendar year, so 2007 ended yesterday for Microsoft.  The 4th Quarter is a busy time for everyone as you have to finish up a lot of the stuff that you are working on and you have to do a lot of reporting (most everything is electronic and not paper based - but you still have to do stuff even though you are not killing trees).  Just like the actual New Year's Eve it leaves you with a bit of a hang over that makes you want to unplug for a few days and get ready for the next year (I plan on taking a few days off next week myself).  Since today is the first day of the New Year, I thought I would make a few resolutions for FY2008 and share them with you.

1. Make my blog suck less.  Fortunately Scott Hanselman recently created a roadmap for doing this in 32 east steps.
2. Post a relevant blog article at least twice a week. Some of the post on this blog are to let people know what I am up to (speaking at a user group, going to a conference, telling you about something that is neat).  I will still continue to post those here, but I want to make sure there is at least 2 compelling posts per week that will make you want to keep burning my feed.
3. Spend at least one hour a day working on a project.  I have some neat ideas for some applications that I want to create and share (at least 3 right now).  I want to start working on them and not just leave them in the "someday" stage.  I want to work on these projects right out in the open so you can see what I am doing every step of the way.  If they are interesting enough, some of you might even want to help me out. 
4. Attend more community activities.  Last year I started reaching out to some of the groups in the community.  I attended barcamp,  Web414 and the Adobe User Group.  I have met some great people and have learned a lot from them.  I also don't want to just "Suit up and show up", I want to get actively involved in these groups.
5. Do more creative things.  I tend to get bogged down in the bits and bytes of technology and not use it to explore more creative outlets.  I want to use technology to create beautiful as well as useful things.  For example I would like to do something creative with these photos:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/jodieandlarry/sets/72157600274802190/ (please let me know if you have any ideas).