I didn’t actually expect my “Death of the App” trend to move this quickly, but seems like Google is determined to prove me right. 🙂 Google says “we don’t need an app” to Apple, and provides nearly exactly the same functionality via HTML5.
I just realized that I had yet to post my Trends from Midwinter 2010. I will say that I was incredibly pleased with being on the panel with such a great set of librarians, and was overly nervous about the whole thing right up until we started talking. I know it’s silly, but Top Tech Trends is the event that I’ve been attending since my first ALA, and it immediately became a personal career goal to someday be a Trendster. The fact that I actually got to do it still hasn’t really sunk in, especially so early in my career.
I was planning on linking out to a ton of stuff, but this amazing page of links collects pretty much everything that anyone talked about…awesome job putting that together!
Without further ado: My trends, exactly as written before the panel started. I went off the tracks a bit once I started talking, needless to say.
The Year of the App
2009 was the year of the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch App Store….over 1 Billion Apps were downloaded in the first nine months of the App Store, the second billion only 5 months later, and only 3 months from that for Apple to announce 3 billion downloads. 2010 is the year that Apps show up everywhere…small, specialized programs that do one thing in a standalone way are going to be everywhere: every phone, printers, nearly every gadget is going to try and leverage an App Store of some type. Libraries have started down this road with the OCLC Worldcat iPhone App, the DCPL iPhone App, and more coming.
The Death of the App
2010 is also the year of the Death of the App. Many developers are using Apps because they allow functions that were non-existent in other ways. Many of the reasons to program stand-alone Apps disappear when the HTML5 and CSS3 standards become widespread. HTML5 allows for many things that were previously only available by using secondary programming languages or frameworks, like offline storage support, native video tags, svg support for natively scalable graphics, and much, much more. As an increasing number of web developers become familiar with the power of HTML5, we’ll see a burgeoning of amazing websites that rival the AJAX revolution of the last 2-3 years. No less a web powerhouse than Google has said that they won’t develop native apps in the future, and will instead concentrate on web development.
The Year of the eReader
This year will see the release of no less than a dozen different eReader devices, based around the eInk screen made popular by the Amazon Kindle. While Sony and Barnes and Noble launched new readers in 2009, the choices available in 2010 are going to be dizzying. How libraries handle this shift to electronic texts remains to be seen. New and exciting eBook technologies like Blio and Copia are going to revolutionize electronic texts.
The Death of the eReader
Early 2010 is going to be the height of the eReader, and late 2010 will see their decline, as the long-awaited Tablet computing form factor is perfected. The heavy hitters of computing are all producing a form of Tablet system this year, and with a wide variety of customized User Interfaces. With the rise of the Tablet form factor, we’ll see a slow decline of the stand-alone electronic reader, especially as display technology and battery life extend the usability of the Tablets.
I didn’t want New Year’s Day to slip by without some looking back on the year that was 2009, and here I am with about 20 minutes left in the day. So what did 2009 bring me? Some awesome things: a daughter that is the best thing ever, professional successes beyond my wildest dreams, and a spouse that keeps me centered on both things in turn. It also brought some sadness: the death of my grandfather, and other extended family troubles.
But overall, I think 2009 treated me pretty well, and 2010 is shaping up to be even more exciting already. So many amazing things coming this year: new book coming in March/April, a new still-secret-but-almost-ready-to-launch project, some fun travel, and hopefully positive news on both mine and Betsy’s tenure decisions.
Thanks for everything, 2009, but 2010 is gonna kick your ass.
I just wanted to call some attention to one of my all-time favorite posts here on Pattern Recognition, which honors a holiday tradition from one of my favorite areas of the world, the Catalan region of Spain. I posted this last Holiday season, but in reading it, it just never gets old.
Catalan families go into the woods and find a Christmas Log (Tió de Nadal) to bring into their home. It’s painted or otherwise decorated with a face, and wrapped in a blanket. Over the weeks before Christmas, the Caga Tió is fed sweets and other treats, in order to get him ready for the command performance on Christmas. After weeks of being fed, the Caga Tió is ready. He is then beaten with sticks by the children of the family until he poops out treats for the children, usually in the form of the Catalan treat called turron. Yes…the log poops out the children’s treats, which they then consume. Caga Tió literally translates into “Pooping Logâ€.
Go read the rest of the post. Really. There’s even a video…it’s worth it, I promise.
Sometime in the last few days, evidently my newest book hit the data streams, because it now shows up on Amazon, in LibraryThing, and on the publisher’s website! It won’t be out until March or so, but it’s still exciting to see.
On this blog, I don’t often wax poetic about my family. On Twitter and over on Brand New World, sure, but I usually keep this area for stuff about some aspect of my life outside of my wonderful wife and amazing daughter…professional, if you will. But today, Eliza turns two, and I thought I should pause for just a moment and just make sure that everyone knows:
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She is fucking awesome. |
I hope that someday she’ll be able to look at the things that I’ve written and the photos I’ve taken and that she can feel even some of the love that I have for her. She’s my monkey, that daughter of mine, and she gets more amazing every day.
Daddy loves you, Eliza Rhea.
So for the last week or so I’ve been playing with feeding various content into this blog, testing some new tools, and trying to find a way to integrate a new Tumblr blog with Pattern Recognition in a way that I liked.
I’ve failed completely.
I’m just not happy with any of it, as non of the WordPress plugins that I’ve tried (FeedWordPress, Wp-o-matic) treat my Tumblr blog RSS properly, and after hacking away at custom post setups, I’ve just decided that I like the idea of having two “blogs” on the net for now.
And so, here’s my plan: PatRec is staying the same…I like it as my occasional posting ground, and it’s going to remain my main blog headquarters. But there’s a ton of other stuff (personal, funny, or other) that just doesn’t fit in here. So for now, that other content is going to live over at Tumblr: griffey.tumblr.com, RSS available here http://feeds.feedburner.com/Griffeylog. I wanted to call it Apophenia, but someone already has all the Google Juice for that. Pareidolia is close enough. If you have any interest in the minutia of my sense of humor or just want to see another side of me, that’s where you’ll see it. Expect lots of silly pictures, youtube videos, and short bits of personal reflection.
It may take me a few days to work out the information flow (what goes to Twitter, what goes to Friendfeed, etc). I’m still using Friendfeed as a “master feed” for my stuff online, so everything I do gets there eventually. One of these days I should post about my digital ecology….the flows and connections between all the stuff I have online. I’ll save that for my Top Secret new writing experiment, coming in January. 🙂
Here’s my presentation from this morning on the Realtime web for the San Diego Law Library Fall conference. First time I’ve done this one, and I’m really happy with the way it came together.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks monkeying with different looks and feels for a homepage update. For a long while, I’ve had my homepage set as a lifestream, running SweetCron, but decided awhile back that with my tenure dossier coming due that I would like to rework it into something more polished. Also, the lifestream presented me as what I’m doing, and didn’t adequately represent either what I’ve done, nor what I’d like to do in the future.
So: redesign!
I wanted something clean, without a ton of design overhead, but also something that was flexible enough to take whatever I thought to throw at it. I also decided that I wanted to try using a pre-existing framework, specifically as CSS framework, and then tweak it to my needs. After looking around a bit, I decided to use Blueprint, a lovely CSS framework that allowed me to not worry about positioning, other than to figure out how Blueprint does it. Blueprint is extensible, and I wanted tabs, so off I went to the Blueprint Tab plugin.
The basic icons for my “social” tab were found here, and I took the look/feel and created a handful that they didn’t have using Photoshop. I also created the “rollover” images for everything using photoshop, and am using a clever little javascript simpleswap to handle that bit. I also had to install jquery for the first time, for the tab fade effect.
Other tools used in putting this together include: Blip.tv and slideshare for the presentations and videos, scribd for my CV, FriendFeed for my Lifestream, and Meebo and Google Voice for the Contact page.
After getting all the pieces in place, it took some time to work out the bugs. My wife convinced me to stick with the black/green scheme that I’ve been using for years…I’ve used it since graduate school, and I like it because it reminds me of the good old days with the green phosphor CRT terminals.
See what you think, and I’d love to have any feedback, especially if it’s broken in some way. 🙂
From the LITA listserv, and because I’m doing a preconference that should be a lot of fun:
The early bird registration deadline has been extended for the 2009 LITA National Forum, October 1-4, 2009 in Salt Lake City. Now is your opportunity to realize excellent savings on registration for the forum. Registration rates are $50 lower through August 31– Register Now: http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/registration.cfm
Keynote Sessions Feature Dynamic Speakers:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/keynote.cfm
On Friday Joan Lippincott of Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) will kick off the Forum with her talk Mobile Technologies, Mobile Users: Will Libraries Mobilize? Lippincott will discuss what roles libraries can and should play in delivering content for mobile devices, developing services for mobile device users and configuring physical spaces to respond to their needs.
Saturday, David Weinberger will present Knowledge in the Age of Abundance. Weinberger will examine how our new connected age is one of abundant and ready access to knowledge and how this is bringing a change in the nature, shape, value and role of knowledge itself.
Liz Lawley of the Lab for Social Computing at the Rochester Institute of Technology will close the Forum on Sunday with Technical/Tangible/Social. Lawley’s talk will cover the growing importance of “social objects†in technology implementation, and how those objects serve as a focal point for cohesive social interactions.
Preconferences Offer In-Depth Examination of Topics:
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/precon.cfm
Choose between two full-day workshops, spanning Thursday afternoon and Friday morning:
Jason Griffey of University of Tennessee, Chattanooga will present The Future of Mobile. The workshop will examine the future of mobile technologies and their impact on libraries, including how service models in libraries change with ubiquitous computing and how content delivery becomes different. Attendees will look at specific tools that are currently available that model the direction that mobile is moving.
Accessibility Update: Section 508 and WCAG in a Library 2.0 World, presented by Nina McHale of the University of Colorado, Denver will provide an introduction to Section 508 and WCAG Web accessibility guidelines and how they relate to online library tools. The workshop will include demonstrations of popular assistive technologies and guidelines for optimizing library resources to comply with Section 508 and WCAG.
Visit the LITA Web site for more information on the Forum including concurrent and poster sessions, travel and lodging, and complete Forum schedule.
http://www.lita.org/ala/mgrps/divs/lita/litaevents/forum2009/index.cfm
Be sure to Connect with Forum participants on Facebook and the Forum wiki:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php??eid=34666759559#/event.php
http://wikis.ala.org/lita/index.php/2009_LITA_National_Forum