My First Real Conference

So, tomorrow is the Communitech Tech Leadershipt conference and I’m going! For free! Take that all you people that paid the 300 dollars to go!

See, as a student, I get in for free….. stay in school, eh? Anyway, I’m pretty excited. I’ve never actually been at a conference before so I have no idea what one is like. It starts at 8 am and ends at 4 with breakast and lunch provided…. not bad I think. I’ll be sure to post what it’s like.

Retraction…. of the AJAX kind

Ok, I have to get this out there….

A long time ago, I came up with a back alley when of dynamically adding tabs to a tab container. Well, it turns out I also found a way to actually add tabs WITHOUT actually knowing how many I needed. In short, I was building my entire page dynamically at Init based on some session variables that stored the number of tabs I needed. All in all it was pretty cool but it made me realize something that I think the world should know:

If possible avoid using the AJAX control toolkit, at ALL COSTS. Sure it’s cool and look all the pretty things I can do but it’s slow and very high traffic. If you want to do the cool things it does, I would use the AJAX Extensions class and write the rest myself. It’s sounds like a bad idea and a lot of work and it is. But TRUST ME, it’s well worth it.

I just try to find different ways to provide the same user experience in the end. The big downfall with dynamically generating all the controls at Init was after you added 3 tabs, the site really started to slow down and the user experience is just thrown out the window. I managed to achieve the exact same experience by replacing the tabs with entirely seperate pages and just managing a dynamially created menu control at the top of the page. So now, we have a much better performing site with code that’s WAY easier to manage!

*Removes Cobwebs*

So, it’s been a little while it seems…..

Well, I’m back. Let’s see what’s cooking.

I did it. I made the reverse Mac switch. You know, the one you don’t hear about very often because it’s kept under wraps so well! I used to be a mac guy. A pretty hard-core one at that too.

I used to be the worst kind actually. I was the one that, no matter how awful a mac product was, I would find ways to make it better than whatever else it was competing with and I was good at it. Well, until the iPhone came out… then I really didn’t have much going for me.

So here I am, typing this from my new Vista-loaded PC, reminiscing about the good-ol’-days when Apple made quality products. I’ll admit it, I own two mac laptops: a powerbook G4 and a macbook. The powerbook is 4 years old, has been dropped down s flight of stairs, always kept on (or on standby) and it works the same as the day I got it. My Macbook, however, is pooched at being 1 and half years old. I figured “Why get the warranty since my other mac is so awesome?”. Well, now it’ll cost me $700 to fix the Macbook or I could go and buy a new computer for $800. I think it’s a pretty easy choice.

Unfortunately, I need windows for my development endeavours so a PC seemed to be a better choice.

You can already start to see the decline in quality of Apple products. And by quality, I don’t mean how shiny it is. I mean how functional and stable it is. Look at the iPhone…. I mean, it’s pretty but did you know that it’s not a multi-thread capable device. It only runs one application at a time!! What good is that? And safari 3 was a winner wasn’t it? I had it on my computer for all of 25 seconds before it crashed….. 4 times in a row. Apple is so concerned about getting their innovative products out to the public before their competition that they seem to be forgetting the most important thing about creating a successful business. Write this down if you have to.

No matter how amazing your product is, it’s only has good as it’s support structure. A product is ALWAYS half tangible and half intangible. What happened to you Apple? I’m sorry, but the shine is definitely no longer on you.