Posts by Pastey

Is it the degree or the education

Firstly, I don't have a degree in computing of any sort. Secondly, I've got about 12 years experience at all levels.

Over the years I've employed developers with and without degrees, and to be honest the ones without degrees tend to be better. Their skill set tends to be more up to date, they tend to be able to think their way around problems. Graduates tended to be only able to do things in one particular way, and that way often two or three years out of date.

This is changing now though. We're seeing graduates who've got themselves some work experience in a real company, learning that a developers job isn't always just sitting down and typing away in your preferred language, coding what you decide you want to code. There's a whole lot more to making yourself employable than just getting a degree. We've had graduates in the past that turn up late, leave early, dress poorly, refuse to answer phones or doors, talk loudly and wonder why they don't last through their trial periods. We've also had bedroom coders with the same problems, but they tend to not think that the job should be theirs because they've got a bit of paper.

But it is changing, some Universities are realising that the degrees they were offering weren't making their students employable so they've started working with companies to give their students "real world" experience.

For me personally though, do I wish I'd gone to uni and got a degree? No. Back then there were no degrees in what I now do. What I could have done would have been a waste of time. IT moves fast, and thankfully the unis are starting to catch up to working at that speed.

Do I think that students deciding whether or not to go to University should go? Yes, but choose *very* carefully which University, and which course you go to. If you can, talk to the people at the sorts of companies you want to work for and find out what *they* think of the degrees. And if you do go, get involved in as much of the social aspect of the computing courses as you can. I still think you learn just as much from talking to other developers as you do from text books.

Sounds Familiar

Putting a lick of corporate paint across it's offerings and dumping those that don't fit. Did they nick that idea of the BBC? Earlier this year they did the same thing.

Admittedly the two corporations are completely different, but is this a trend we're likely to see across over parts of the web?

App vs Web

I've been using the mentioned PhoneGap for over a year now and it does gives the best, and possibly the worst of both worlds. It basically instantiates a chromeless browser and loads html/js/css in. It then also has a set of js library apis that allow the code to interact with the hardware. So, in effect you have a native app.

The issues raise about inconsistancy of design I've not come across. Or rather, I've seen them in apps but there's no real reason for them to be there. It's not that difficult in a web app to mimic the user interface of a native app. JQTouch does it *very* well for instance. But I think this stems from the problems we used to have back in the dial up days of the net. You could either program, and your site worked very well but looked like a pile of dung, or you could design and the site looked lovely but took half an hour to load. Since then web developers have had to understand and work with designers, and designers have had to learn how the web works. This will come to app. A lot of apps being built are by single person companies, or people giving it a go for the first, second or third time. Once it settles down the good design and consistency will come back.

Another point raised was that apps clog up resources compared to just visiting a website. This is true. You visit a website and the resources are put into your cache, you download the app and they're saved on your memory card. Lots of apps, lots of graphics, sounds, etc and you soon fill that card up. The app doesn't have to be running to use up resources.

There are occasions to use an app (web or native) over a website though, when you want access to the local hardware such as the camera, file system, accelerometer, etc, or when you want to be able to guarantee you can use the app when there's no signal. Try accessing the web on a phone inside an old museum, it's not going to happen.

It all comes down to what you actually want to achieve. If you're not wanting to access the device's hardware and your not needing it to be always available, then the reasons to build an app from a technical perspective diminish. From a users perspective though, there will always be the presence icon reminding them it's there. There will be occasional updates reminding them it's there (and I know that some companies schedule minor updates when they see usage drop off) and there always seems to be something in a user's mind that says a packaged app is better than a website. Not sure why, but there does.