C++ and Beyond 2010 (October 24-27) is filling up quickly. As of this writing, nearly 40 of the 60 places have been taken since registration opened last month.

If you’re thinking of registering, it would probably be good to do it soon. 60 attendees is a hard limit; as I’ve written before, we want to have lots of face time with individual attendees. So once we hit 60, registration will close, although we’ll probably set up a waiting list for those of you that don’t quite make it into the first 60 so that you’ll get dibs if there are any cancellations.

I’m looking forward to seeing many of you in beautiful Snoqualmie, WA, USA this fall.

The Inquirer isn’t normally this silly, and it isn’t even April 1. Nick Farrell writes:

Why Apple might regret the Ipad [sic]

THE IPAD HAS DOOMED Apple, according to market anlaysts [sic] that are expecting the tablet to spell trouble for its maker. … Rather than killing off the netbook, the Ipad [sic] is harming sales of the Ipod [sic] and Macbooks… if the analysts are right the Ipad [sic] has killed the Ipod [sic] Touch.

This is just silly, for four reasons. Three are obvious:

• The iPod Touch fits in your pocket and can be easily with you all the time. Nothing bigger can ever kill it, but only replace it for a subset of users who don’t need in-pocket portability. (Besides, even if all iPod Touch buyers bought an iPad instead, the latter is more expensive and so the correct term would be not “kill” but “upsell”.)
• The laptop has a real keyboard and full applications. Nothing not full-featured can ever kill it, but only replace it for a subset of users who don’t need the richer experience and applications.
• Even if it was killing the other business outright, which it isn’t, it’s always better to eat your own lunch than wait for a competitor to do it.

And the fourth reason it’s silly? Let’s be very clear: The iPad has sold 1 million units in its first 28 days. At $500-700 a pop, that means the iPad is becoming a new billion-dollar business in two months.

Nick, I don’t think “regret” is the word you’re looking for.

These are the two best links I’ve read in the wake of the Flash and HTML5 brouhaha(s). They discuss other informative points too, but their biggest value lies in discussing three things, to which I’ll offer the answers that make the most sense to me:

• What is the web, really? “The web” is the cross-linked content, regardless of what in-browser/PC-based/phone-based generator/viewer/app is used to produce it and/or consume it.
• Does web == in-browser? No. Native apps can be web apps just as much so as in-browser ones, and increasingly many native apps are web apps. Conversely, not everything that runs in a browser is part of the web, even though most of them are for the obvious historical reasons.
• Is it necessary/desirable/possible to make in-browser apps be like native apps? No, maybe, and maybe. The jury is still out, but at the moment developers are still trying while some pundits keep decrying.

Here are the two articles.

Understand the Web (Ben Ward)

This rambly piece needs serious editing, but is nevertheless very informative. Much of the debate about Flash and/or HTML5 conflates two things: the web, and application development platforms. They aren’t the same thing, and in fact are mostly orthogonal. From the article:

Think about that word; ‘web’. Think about why it was so named. It’s nothing to do with rich applications. Everything about web architecture; HTTP, HTML, CSS, is designed to serve and render content, but most importantly the web is formed where all of that content is linked together. That is what makes it amazing, and that is what defines it.

… [in the confused Flash and HTML5 debates] We’re talking about two very different things: The web of information and content, and a desire for a free, cross-platform Cocoa or .NET quality application framework that runs in the browsers people already use.

On a different note, speaking of the desire for super-rich in-browser apps, he adds:

Personally, aside from all of this almost ideological disagreement over what the web is for, and what you can reasonably expect it to be good at, I honestly think that ‘Desktop-class Web Applications’ are a fools folly. Java, Flash, AIR and QT demonstrate right now that cross-platform applications are always inferior to the functionality and operation of the native framework on a host platform. Steve Jobs is right in his comments that third-party frameworks are an obstacle to native functionality.

HTML5 and the Web (Tim Bray)

Again, what “the web” is – and it has nothing specifically to do with HTML. From the article:

The Web is a tripod, depending critically on three architectural principles:

• Pieces of the Web, which we call Resources, are identified by short strings of characters called “URIs”.

• Work is accomplished by exchanging messages, which comprise metadata and representations of Resources.

• The representations are expressed in a number of well-defined data formats; you can count on the message data to tell you which one is in use. It is essential that some of the representation formats be capable of containing URIs. The “Web” in WWW is that composed by the universe of Resources linked by the URIs in their representations.

That’s all. You notice that there’s nothing there that depends crucially on any flavor of HTML. Speaking only for myself, an increasingly large proportion of my Web experience arrives in the form of feed entries and Twitter posts; not HTML at all, but 100% part of the Web.

On Flash · This may be a side-trip, but anyhow: I entirely loathe Flash but by any definition it’s part of the Web. It works just fine as a resource representation and it can contain URI hyperlinks.

… Native Applications · A large proportion of the native applications on iPhone, and on Android, and on Windows, and on Mac, and on Linux, are Web applications. They depend in a fundamental way on being able to recognize and make intelligent use of hyperlinks and traverse the great big wonderful Web.

… So whatever you may think of native applications, please don’t try to pretend that they are (or are not) necessarily good citizens of the Web. Being native (or not) has nothing to do with it.

Good stuff.

I’m happy to report that registration is now open for C++ and Beyond 2010 with me, Scott Meyers, and Andrei Alexandrescu. The event will start on the evening of Sunday October 24 with a reception, to be followed by three solid breakfast-to-bedtime days full of structured and unstructured technical content and learning opportunities in what is designed to be a C++-and-more immersion retreat.

Over the past few days, Scott has written up three nice informational pieces on the C&B blog:

• C++ and Beyond event structure: How it’s not a conference, runs from morning till late night daily for in-depth technical immersion, and more.
• The venue for C&B: A description of the event location and surroundings, focusing on what makes it a perfect fit for our kind of up-close-and-personal event.
• Registration is now open! Quoting most of today’s announcement:

Groups of 3 or more get 10% off, and individual or group registration during the Early Bird period (now until July 24) knocks another 10% off the price.  Attendance is limited to 60, so if you’re interested in being part of C&B, I suggest you register as soon as you can.

Click here to register.

We hope to see you atop Snoqualmie Falls in October!

I’m looking forward to this information-packed and not-boring-conference event, and spending time with many of you one-on-one.

If you like reading just about anything on the web, including my articles, in a pretty nicely rendered plain format with no ads or other distractions, you might want to try out arc90’s Readability.

All you do is drag a bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, and then on any article-like web page you can click on the bookmarklet to turn this:

into this (with a few choices each for font, size, and margin):

This lets you gain a lot in readability when all you want to do is read the article itself with basic text and graphics rendered fairly nicely. You do lose a little formatting, such as colored text which I sometimes use in my articles’ code examples, but the overall effect is pretty nice.

I’ll keep trying Readability out, especially on smaller-than-desktop screens, to see if it’s a keeper. So far the overall effect is pretty nice. Thanks to James P. Hogan for the tip, even if the link his page gives is broken.

 

Note: If you’re using Mobile Safari (i.e., iPhone or iPad) you’ll need to do a little bit more work because that software doesn’t currently support dragging the bookmarklet to its bookmark bar. Fortunately, there’s a workaround:

• Find the Javascript code. I just made the bookmarklet on a desktop browser and copied the code from there to an email to myself (some things are faster with a keyboard and mouse). Alternatively you can inspect the HTML using HTML Viewer right on the same device as Mobile Safari and cut-and-paste from that.
• In Mobile Safari, make a new bookmarklet.
• Edit it, and paste the Javascript code as the URL.

As has been true since the early Mac days in the 1980s, Apple products and SDKs make every piece of functionality either super easy if it’s supported, or super painful if it’s not. :-)

Pre-emptive snarky comment: Yes, I know some people will retort that Microsoft and Linux products are better, because at least they consistently make everything super painful all of the time… but I think that’s only half true.