Last week’s The Economist survey was about making technology more simple to end-users and mastering complexity being the next big thing in the IT business. It analyses the cuases of technological complexity both for firm and for consumers,evaluate the main efforts toward simplication by IT and telecom vendors today, and consider what the growing demands for simplicity mean for thes industries. I underlined a few quotes:

Ethnology and technology
Today, some 70% of the world’s population are “analogues”, who are terrified by tehcnology, Another 15% are “digital immigrants”, typically thirty-somethings whos adopted technology as young adults; and other 15% are “digital navites”, young adults who have never known and cannot imagine life without IM.

The biggest problem is that most of the people who create these artefacts are nerds, I want to see more artists create these things. The geekiness that predominates in the early stages of any nes technology leads to a nastay affliction called “featurits” This violates a crucial principal of design (man is most free when his tools are proportionate to his needs).

Anthropology and technology
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel was especially struck by the differences in how westerners and Asians view their homes. Amercians tended to say things like “my home is my castle” and furnish it as a self-contained playground. Asians were more likely to tell her that “my home is a place of hamrnony”, “grace”, “simplicity” or “huminility”. […] For Americans, adopting technology is an expression of American-ness, part of the story of modernity and progress. For many other people, it may be just a hassle, or downright pretentious.

Complexity and technology
You have to push all the complexity to the back end in order to make the front end very simple (example of the cars and households 100 years ago …).

The way we get rid of complexity is by creating new layers of abstraction and sedimenting what is below.

Safari now supports LiveConnect. The old article How Java to Javascript Communication Works in Java Plug-in explains how to make call to JavaScript within a Java applet. Java, JavaScript and Plug-in Interaction Using Client-Side LiveConnect explains the Applet to JavaScript and JavaScript to Applet communication. Old technology, same old bumpy road of browser implementation, but sometimes, LiveConnect is the only way to go.

The latest release of Java, J2SE 5.0 (codenamed Tiger), adds core support for the Java Management Extensions (JMX) 1.2 into the Java standard libraries. Monitoring Local and Remote Applications Using JMX 1.2 and JConsole walks you through how to use the JMX support in J2SE 5.0, including the new JConsole application, to monitor and manage your own applications both locally and remotely.

QuickJNLP is a utility allows regular Java applications to be deployed with Web Start. It packs all the necessary files for the application into a Jar file and generates a corresponding JNLP file. The original java application does not need to modified in any way for use with Web Start.

I finally found out to create a singletong shared object in Axis. From the Axis User Guide:

Axis supports scoping service objects (the actual Java objects which implement your methods) three ways. “Request” scope, the default, will create a new object each time a SOAP request comes in for your service. “Application” scope will create a singleton shared object to service all requests. “Session” scope will create a new object for each session-enabled client who accesses your service. To specify the scope option, you add a to your service like this (where “value” is request, session, or application):

<service name="MyService"...>

  <parameter name=”scope” value=”value“/>

  …

</service>

UMTS débarque en Suisse pour le grand public à la fin de l’année. Evolution, pas révolution (recyclage des services déjà existants). Les applications potientielles proposées sentent le WAP (visionner en différé la finale du 100m des JO??)

The Mobile Messaging Access Protocol (MMAP) is an XML SOAP protocol for mobile messaging. It provides a generic framework for mobile interactions and defines a full set of functions for short message submission and delivery. These functions are fully equivalent to the SMS Forum’s binary messaging protocol (SMPP). MMAP is compliant with the SOAP 1.2 standard.

Looking for ways to simplify the port of CatchBob! to TabletPC I stumbled on Hessian. The Hessian binary web service protocol makes web services usable without requiring a large framework, and without learning yet another alphabet soup of protocols. Hessian comes from the people of the good Resion servlet and jsp engine.

Since we are thinking to port CatchBob into TablePC with a higher emphasis on the communication means, there is an MSDN Library article Get the Best Results from Tablet PC Handwriting Recognizers on how to develop handwriting recognizers in .NET

Just because I have been mentionned it many times, here we go TouchGraph for Graph Based Interfaces:
- TouchGraph LLC
- TG Development