Survey Application Frustrations

OK... the first time my face appeared at a national conference was at CFFrameworks in DC in 2007. My topic was "Collaborative Frameworks". What does that have to do with surveys? Well I want a survey application and this is some of the lemons we have to suck on to try and make lemonaide.

It would be great if we could acquire applications and install them into our web sites like we do with our other devices. (PC/Mac, iPhone, Android, etc.) Why is it we have to go through the pain of hacking applicaitons we add to our sites? Here is a list of different issues we face ( or ignore ) when we mix applicaions written by others into our web sites.

• The UI and the design don't match the rest of the site. If we go into the code and make it look and run closer to the same it breaks vendor updates.
• The authentication doesn't connect to the rest of the site so we end up either running two authentications (or more) to run it as is. The alternative is to go through the entire application and rewrite it to a common model. This means sustainability of updates from the author are now not favorable.
• They wrote the application in a different framework and we may not be familiar with the programming methodology. (This is frustrating because it isn't install and run simple as stated above.)
• Then there is the issue of database conflicts! ( ScReAm !!! )
• I want to start with someone else's work but as I build my own apps I like to program in a different methodology. How can the two co-exist and still overcome the issues above?
• How can I learn to use or update the technology based coding used in the applicaitons I acquire?

Well we have been working on those solutions in the upcomming releases. The last question is what drove us to release the survey in my post earlier. If you would like to share the survey to get answers with us please do. Please go and answer the survey at this link to help us help you. We will also be sharing the results so help us get some good data.

How would you like to learn today?

Please take this survey and we will share the results with the community.

IE6 Is Dead or Close

We have an account with Google Apps and a shocker that delighted me came through my email today. Whoop!

They state that since MS does not even support the IE6 version any longer that by March 1, 2010 they will phase out support for the browser on Google Apps, Google Mail, Google Calendar. Of course that does not mean it will not work but it does mean that they will no longer care if it works. The cost to profit ratio of supporting the old dinasaur that has cause so many development issues over the years is long long overdue.

Three cheers for Google and all the others! Here is a line from the message. "Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above."

Oh, yesterday's post on "Change vs Progress". I did not expect to look in my email and see as shinning an example as this. Fix, patch, got working issues seem to add up. It seems that the changes we make to make IE6 work so our apps can work in global environments are more often about change than progress. This is greatly encouraging to see this progress and we hope others out there will use this as an opportunity to make progress also.