Danger Will Robinson……Danger Will Robinson!

Microsoft has recently released a new development environment for creating robotic control software that can be used on multiple hardware platforms. The robotics development and runtime platform is available for download and here’s where we get to the interesting bits (ahem).

Hobbyists, students and academics are offered a license free of charge. Commercial robot developers who use the platform for product development will have to pay a few hundred dollars for each seat.

Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience, has been touting a Microsoft developed technology as the next big thing. Garrett says, “The gap between the experiences we can provide on the desktop and the experiences users can get online is closing, thanks to a new Web application framework we call Ajax.” For those interested, you can find the quote in this article. Ajax, which stands for ‘asynchronous Java and XML’, enables the development of better web applications. Using Ajax, communication between the server & client is no longer dependant upon the User. Information is updated without the generally required User mouse-click. The cost associated with implementing AJAX is relatively small when there is relatively little data-flow between client and server. As the amount of data-flow increases, the complexity increases disproportionately.

While the word ‘Ajax’ might carry with it a sense of shiny sparkly cleanliness, one finds that it’s been around for a while. Ajax will not result in vastly improved web applications. When compared with HTML, Ajax’s advantage can be distilled to a single trait, resolution. Because information can be transmitted asynchronously, software designers may develop and implement more complex models of various processes and objects. In essence however, such an approach saddles designers and coders with complexity that quickly demonstrates the law of diminishing returns. One will find that developers use Ajax to improve data transfer or aggregation and to provide flourishes to websites.

Notice that “People Network” is not positioned at the center of the Microsoft “Live” Platform. Since the inception of the personal computer, people have been positioned to the side, expected to find a way into the world of the comptuer. While there is a move on to simplify applications and serve them over the web, efforts at personalization have materialized litttle in the way of software that feels personalized.
Going forward, I’ll be pointing to articles that provide clues as to how one might develop such a model.  I’ll also be sharing insights I’ve had over the past two and a half years, during which time I’ve been developing just such a model.