Stand back, I'm going to try prognostication...

[blufive]

If you work in the business of generating web pages to display to users, you need to know: there's going to be some major changes in the browser landscape over the next year or three

Comments

[the_magician]

You are definitely correct with your price/performance predictions ... Nokia is running a little late, but should have a sub $100 Symbian smartphone in the US this year (subject to the current reshuffle which is losing me my job there). Last time I checked Symbian still had the edge on performance/price at the mid to cheaper end (and S40 touchscreen phones for under $100 have been out for months now) ... Android and iPhones have the 1Ghz processors, while Nokia can run the top of the line Symbian phones on something like a 650Mhz CPU (and there are some developments coming there too).

I certainly use my iPhone (1st edition!) for web browsing and media playing a lot, and the web experience is good enough already for most things.

[davidwake]

I really must get sorted with something that allows me to program on the web. Any advice?

My recent virus attack scuppered my Delphi, so I can't actually program at the moment (or find anywhere that sells early Delphi versions).

[stsquad]

If you want a Free as in Freedom Delphi you could look at Lazarus. My Dad is a old-school Pascal man and has been using it happily for his hacking.

[davidwake]

Ah, I'm an old-school Pascal man. It's downloading now in the background and I shall have a play tomorrow.

Many thanks. (It's mostly to get my replacement for Vista's cack-handed copy function working again.)

What about simple programming on the web?

[stsquad]

There are essentially two sides to web-programming these days. All the fancy form-filling and whizzy effects are done by JavaScript (and numerous JavasScript libraries such as jQuery). For that all you need is a developer friendly browser. I'd suggest one of:

* Firefox - with the FireBug extension
* Google Chrome/Chromium - with there developer tools

On the server side if your doing anything with the data you'll need something more than static HTML files. Pretty much anything can create web-pages on the fly using CGI. The web server passes the request to program and the program spits out some HTML to stdout which the web-server dutifully sends back

[davidwake]

Also, my way of working has been changing. All my files are on a datastick, which I plug into the desktop computer because I want to use a big screen and a proper keyboard. Really I want to plug a big screen and keyboard into my phone when at home, while using the phones screen on the move.

[stsquad]

Hopefully it's not a repeat of the browser wars as any decent web-designer should have learnt the lessons to code to standards which all the browsers support (or use libraries like jQuery which mask the differences from you). We should never see a repeat of the near monopoly that IE reached the first time around.

I agree with you main analysis though. Computers really take off when people stop regarding them as such and smart phones are going to drive the mass-adoption of always on-line and connected life-styles. If Star Trek TOS predicted the rise of the mobile phone TNG predicts the data-pad that everyone will be using as their primary interface into the cloud.

You can still be pixel perfect

[thefalken]

You can still be pixel perfect; everything apart from Apple kit runs Flash these days, so a single cross-platform GUI is trivial.
You can then convert that to a native iPhone/iPad/iClokc app using CS5.

The hard part is a finger friendly GUI that supports 'glance-ability'. I think we're a way off people using a smart phone as their primary day-to-day compute device.

Re: You can still be pixel perfect

[blufive]

...if you're willing to sell your soul to Adobe. [shivers