Who You Calling A Jesse?

The first of January always seems to require a post or two about the past year and what to expect in the upcoming one. So here is mine ;) Looking at my post from last January I kept my predictions and goals pretty simple.

I can’t say I actually met all those goals – organizing myself better is something I still need to do – but CPA’s content is coming around, podcasts are finally starting to appear across campus (Faculty of Arts will have 7 profs podcasting in the Winter 2007 term), and the search has been improved. On December 22nd some new code appeared behind the home page, code that would allow for an elastic width or a zoom layout, and mobile version is a work in progress.

For 2007 I dare not try and predict the overall movement of the web but I do see two technology trends that will certainly influence what I do for this year:

• Mobile phones will start to be used for more than just phoning people in Canada. Even with the poor state of data services in North America I think we will see larger demand for mobile friendly web services (but not all content, just for specific tasks).
• Ajax will develop into something more commonly accessible although I do think the adaptive technology developers need to do their thing as well. Adobe could have done something cool with Spry like make a really cool Flash/JavaScript hybrid framework—but they haven’t. I still think Flash could be part of the solution for accessible Ajax-like apps, just not sure how.

What are my goals for 2007?

• Learn as much as I can about Ruby on Rails
• Make UW Events a top notch event system that integrates nicely with popular API’s and Oracle Calendar (used by staff on campus)
• Customizable UW home page
• Make Kiwi a simple and effective single sign-on tool for web apps
• …finish my Masters, think about more grad work

Simple enough? We shall see. Looking forward to the next year, I am sure it will be one heck of an interesting one.