techno.blog("Dion")

I was at the US Open in Queens last night. A random surprise was the style of advertising at the event. There was a lot of “if you were a cool kid you could get THIS” style ads.

For example, things started in the parking lot. Which, if I can digress, was the most poorly marked parking I have ever seen. In fact, the “directions” to the event were awful. The website differed from the signs, which different from other signs. When you got to some parking it looked totally unofficial and you had no idea how far away you were, and if you could get to anything else.

Back to the advertising. There was a huge sign that said “If you drive a Lexus, parking is on us”. READ: “If you were cool and had a Lexus we would be taking care of you”.

In the stadium there was more evidence at hand. There were many American Express booths that would give you a free radio…. if you showed your Amex.

It made me wonder if this was smart advertising. Is it better to say:

“If you had X you would get Y”

or:

“You don’t have X so you don’t get Y”

It only seemed to bug me!

CouchDb is the Next Hot Thing in databases, created by Damien Katz of Lotus Notes infamy, and now MySQL hacker.

CouchDb is a distributed document database system with bi-directional replication. It makes it simple to build collaborative applications that can be replicated offline by users, with full interactivity (query, add, update, delete), and later “synced up” with everyone else’s changes when back online.

There have been some exciting updates which now mean that JSON is the data representation of choice, and for views, you can simply use JavaScript functions:

CouchDb now internally uses the JSON representation to handle documents. We got rid of a whole lot of XML-related boilerplate code in the process

As I JetBlue’d for the first time today (not bad at all!) across the country, I kept seeing a TV ad for Vista that made me smile.

It was showing Minority Report amazing interfaces and such, all that had nothing to do with Vista. In small print at the bottom it said “simulation”. Right after this ad, the latest Apple iMac ads would come on…. which just showed the product.

All Apple has to really do in its ads is show their work, as it is naturally compelling. Microsoft has to make up some bizarre show that has nothing to do with the real product.

This ties into a conversation I was having with someone recently about how Apple is a leader. They build top notch apps on their platform, inspiring the developer community.

Microsoft builds Notepad ;) (This is of course a touch unfair… TextEdit is only a bit better?).

You could say the same thing with languages and APIs. What do your APIs inspire? java.util.Date inspired pain. Many other Java libs inspired over engineering. PHP inspires throwing every practical need in as a function.

It is definitely a good rule to think about who your users/developers are…. and ask yourself how you are inspiring to work with you.