Google Docs Drawing isn’t as powerful as Visio, so it may not suit all users, but for what I need – drawing diagrams showing the overviews of system designs, it does the job. I can draw shapes, link them and the links will move as shapes are moved. It also has the benefit of being a hosted document that I can share with the client. They, or I can modify it without having to manage versions.

The number one good thing is that it isn’t any slower than the previous version and once you’ve done things for the first time (which probably initialises some application settings) it seems a little quicker than Gingerbread. Other than that, screenshots are a feature that every application developer I know has been waiting for, so good to see that’s included.

Mobile operating systems on smartphones have changed quite considerably, but Ice Cream Sandwich marks a point where Android is mature, where the improvements make it better than the previous version, but not to a point that most people will hand over money to upgrade.

My wife has a Kindle. For novels, I think they work very well – it’s text, it’s linear, but I tried it out for technical books and I don’t think I’m so keen, because often I’m checking back on a previous page, or having to refer to a diagram or earlier chapter. In a book, I can just turn over a page and flip back.

For now, I think I’ll just have to build another shelf and keep with the paper.

Take one example: In 1800, a candle providing one hour’s light cost six hours’ work. In the 1880s, the same light from a kerosene lamp took 15 minutes’ work to pay for. In 1950, it was eight seconds. Today, it’s half a second. In these terms, we are 43,200 times better off than in 1800.

There’s one I can think of that’s gone even faster: in 1984 I bought a 32K memory upgrade that cost £30. In today’s money, that’s about £67. You get 12GB of memory for that today. If you’re buying memory, you’re 375,000 times better off that in 1984.

We face the same questions with “the cloud”. Try and travel from Bristol to Exeter on a train, across the Somerset levels and see how much 3G connectivity you get. Have someone put a spade through a cable and what happens to your internet?

This doesn’t mean that the cloud isn’t sometimes acceptable, but if you’re building a system, it’s important to consider what happens if your business loses connectivity. If your invoicing is done using an online system, can you accept a few days of downtime? Do you need a backup plan (like sending a paper invoice and adding it to the system later)?

So, I really liked Brian Hogan’s book HTML5 and CSS3: Develop with Tomorrow’s Standards Today. It gives a very good overview of two subjects that are creeping up on web developers (many of us aren’t there yet because of the levels of browser support), gives examples of how to use HTML5, CSS3 and also other technologies that have been lumped in like geolocation. It’s also a good pragmatic book in that it covers fallback strategies for browsers that don’t support these technologies yet.

If you’re not sure what it’s all about and want to know, I would get this book.

I started thinking about software and how the job of analysing business processes, or even designing software is about tapping into people’s subconscious and rendering it in a conscious form. A human might do something naturally, often evolving a process quite naturally, and to do what that human does, we have to take it apart and rebuild it. So, perhaps as software developers and application creators, we need to explore and understand the subconscious more than we do and from that, gain a greater insight into the software that people need?

This raises an interesting point about websites according to the different devices, and that I think the rule applies everywhere. If I’m in my home or on the train, I’d like to get something in 5 seconds.  that we use, and the speed at which we can get data. When you hit the return button to get a website, there are two things that affect how quickly someone is going to receive your website: the speed at which your website processes the request, and the speed at which the network transfers the data to the browser.

The speed at which your website processes a request is down to how much you can process on your hosting. If it’s slow, you might need to optimise how your applications work, or to get more servers.

Delivery of the website is rarely a problem to desktop users, but it is a consideration for cellphone users. In rural Faringdon, I get a snail-like 24kbps on my cellphone. That’s slower than even dial-up. While users in that situation will struggle to even get a page in 5 seconds there’s a number of things that you can do for mobile users:-

1. remove all unnecessary content. It might be fine to show an image of your head office or your Twitter feed on your desktop, but they are just slowing things down on a phone.
2. have different images for mobile users. This means that if viewed on a small screen, the user receives an image that’s already reduced, so will be delivered quicker
3. take advantage of modern features that browsers support. For instance, most mobile browsers support rounded corners in CSS, so you don’t need to deliver fake images for rounded corners, just deliver the CSS to do so.
4. optimise your code. If there’s a CSS class that you’re not using then get rid of it.
5. make use of AJAX for page loading. If it’s going to take a long time to fetch one part of the page then do it in AJAX and at least get the rest of it to show to the users.
6. If you’re using jquery features then it might be worth taking advantage of CDN delivery of libraries from Google or Yahoo. Not just because Google and Yahoo are fast, but because many other sites use them, so it may already be cached in the browser.

There’s a load of other tricks for squeezing a little performance out, but those are the most.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z959x58c.aspx

So, one of the positive things I’m now doing to improve my skills is to use them even when there’s a simpler way to do it, just to keep practising. So, in the Notepad++ editor, rather than doing something in two or three steps that I know, I’m forcing myself to try to find a regex solution. It’s slightly longer, but it does have the benefits of practicing regular expressions, and I noticed that I’m getting quicker at it.