Rob Allen's DevNotes

Today was a good day in photography for me as for the first time in absolutely ages, I took some time out to take photos for the sake of taking the picture. My son was at a birthday party and I had about an hour free, so I went down by the river Severn in Worcester.

Worcester has a cathedral and I was lucky enough to have some lowish sun shining on it:

I don't often take photos of the cathedral as I find it hard to compose a nice picture of it. Also, it's been done to death by photographers with a better eye than me. However, I really like this one. The composition is nice and the colour of the brickwork is pleasing.

As I had a mostly empty memory card, I went down to the river to try and take a photo of a bird in flight. This isn't easy and I took just under 80 shots and had 3 in focus:

I'm pleased with all three as getting a shot of a bird in flight where the bird's eye isn't blurred takes lots and lots of practice. As I haven't practiced, clearly I got lucky! I set my D80 to use the centre auto-focus point, as it's the most sensitive in the camera, then told it to continually focus and I just pressed the button whilst trying to pan with the moving bird. It's remarkably difficult to keep the bird in the view finder, let alone keeping the focus point on the eye!

I think I did okay and I'm keen to try again sometime.

There's a recent post by Peter-Paul Koch called The iPhone obsession about how Mobile Safari is being treated by web developers as the only web browser to develop for. PPK likens this to how we all used to only develop for IE6. Unfortunately, the article has lots of hyperbole and iPhone hate which significantly detracts from the actual message.

The fundamental point is that Mobile Safari is not the only web browser available on phones and if you are serious about providing mobile web to your users, then developing for the other 85% should be part of your modus operandi.

However (and there's always a however!) it's not easy. It's trivial for me to have multiple web browsers and multiple operating systems on one computer for testing. It is not trivial for me to have 10 phones with different browsers and screen sizes. We don't do enough mobile work to justify the costs.

What actually annoyed me was Rentzch's response. Rentzch started by saying that Koch's argument was "stupid/lazy/undisciplined" and then goes on to say:

I see a quiet revolution of mobile developers waiting for other phones to catch up to the iPhone.

and

I think mobile developers intuitively grasp that accommodating the insufficient software+hardware of non-iPhones out there will only prolong the status quo, extending needless suffering for developers and users alike.

That's exactly what we all said when we wanted Netscape 4 to die because IE was so much better. Rentzch has made Koch's point for for him whilst trying to disagree.

For what it's worth, I think that any mobile device manufacturer who wants web developers to develop for their device's browser, should provide hardware that doesn't need a plan. It doesn't even need to be a phone. Mobile Safari is the easiest mobile browser to test against as it's available in the iPod Touch.

Like last year, my wrap up is mostly an excuse to show off some of the photos I took in 2009!

January

Other than the snow, The big thing that happened in January was that an article I wrote was published in php|architect.

February

We had daffodils in snow at the start of this month and then towards the end, the PHPUK conference took place.

March

Spring arrived in March. The Severn Valley Railway had its Festival of Steam gala, and I took a day off so that I could photograph it.

April

A month of punctures. I went to a Microsoft community event in London too.

May

This is birthday month in our household. It was also our first trip away camping this year.

June

What little good weather we had this year, was in June. I popped up to Manchester for a PHPNW meet. DPC 09 was also held in June and I spoke on caching.

July

We finished decorating the living room in July. We also had a week's holiday in Wales.

August

I started using a Wacom tablet in August as I was getting a pain in my wrist. August is school holiday month, so we went away for another week, to Cumbria.

September

We sold our Pathfinder in September and didn't do much else. I took the kids to visit to the Gloucestershire Warwickshire Railway during the month too.

October

PHP Conference season started again for me with PHPNW 09. I spoke on project management.

November

Another month, two conferences! ZendCon 09 where I gave a tutorial on the Zend Framework certification and spoke on project management. I also visited Alcatraz. IPC 09 was also held in November, where I spoke on caching and deployment.

December

The final month of the year saw me working way too hard. We did take the kids to see Santa though.

Here's to 2010!

Three years ago today, I published my first Getting Started with Zend Framework tutorial. This was the announcement. Back then, Zend Framework was at version 0.1.5 and a considerably smaller download than now :)

Three years later and I haven't lost my enthusiasm for Zend Framework as you can tell since the latest version of the tutorial supports ZF 1.8 and 1.9 and uses the new features like Zend_Application and the command line Zend_Tool scripts. And I wrote a Zend Framework book!

I wonder what will happen in the next three years?!

Just a heads up, I am currently transferring the registrar for akrabat.com, so there may be an interruption of service here if I mess up :)