Technology changes. Software changes. So must we.
- Remember Lotus 1-2-3 ? dBASE? Wordperfect? How about Wordstar?
- What about Turbo Pascal or Turbo C ?
- Remember the fight between a Graphical User Interface – GEM .v. Windows?
- What about Microsoft Test, an early GUI Test automation tool?
I’ve used all of the above software. I learnt a lot from doing so. But don’t they seem ancient and years ago?
Of course, you can still use all of the above. And if you do, that’s just fine. Infact, you can still buy “Visual Cobol” and “Cobol for .NET”. These all have a place in the ever changing history of software and computers. What seemed like the best thing since sliced bread is now a moldy loaf of bread.
My point: we’ve all got to stay current. No matter at what level, we must have a good understanding of the technology, where it is now, and where it is heading. Today AJAX, J2EE, Servlets, Tomcat, Apache, .NET… tomorrow who knows?
One area we need to do way better at is building our applications for mobile access. I had a frustrating time in the airport tonight trying to access my AOL mail on my cell phone. It just didn’t work. I gave up. (gMail worked wonders though). Teenagers and the college grads are more connected than us, and our apps need to work on the devices they use, otherwise we’ll loose them.
Training is important. Getting a book on the latest technology, attending a training class, self paced training, workshops… it’s all needed to make sure you stay current. Take a look at AOLU and look at the classes you can take. Or suggest some that would benefit you.
Comments
Our IM client on that device is great, though, and Danger owes us a big thank-you for, in some ways, selling their device for them. I'm not sure if the mail client will work for those with aim.com email addresses, though. (I ditched my sidekick after finding I couldn't access internal mail.)
It would be an interesting experiment to see if we could embed a link to each buddy's AIMPage in that buddylist, so it would open in the Sidekick's browser (which is Mozilla-based and supports JS). It's certainly the target market for AIMPages.
When I went online to mobile.aol.com, and I ended up on a pigeonmail.aol.com or something like that. That just did not work. It was like the login didn't even try to authenticate -- I just ended up back on the login page every time.
But yeah, gmail worked fine for me too. Even as an SSL connection.