Siu Lun

I’ve had the privilege of socialising, and working with some of the more passionate web enthusiast in Hong Kong for the past few months. As being a producer, I’ve had to source vendors whom can deliver exceptionally high quality web productions to match the need of our clients.

In my search for such talents, I’ve come across a lot of individuals whom I would never have found unless I found somebody who knows of them.

Such talents obviously found that it is much more lucrative, and satisfying to work for oneself in a city where web development is poorly understood, appreciated and paid.

The talent is out there, it’s a matter of either they get together to form a bigger group, or, somebody with the money and willingness to snatch them all up. Can you depend on any existing companies in Hong Kong? I doubt it very much, one thing I’ve noticed is that in a 4As environment, you can only get in if you either worked for another 4As before, or a recommendation from a friend.

It’s really quite an ‘inbred’, closed-off group particularly when people in Hong Kong looks out for friend and family even when they have no real talent. No offence intended to those that do.

I recently had to look into mobile application developments and straight away, I thought, iPhone Apps.

iPhone Apps has been gaining ground and becoming ever increasingly popular. In my office, I reckon all the male have an iPhone. 3G, 3GS whatever.

And all of them buys and downloads apps!

Then somebody suggested to me to develop mobile apps as offline web-apps, then I thought straight away, that’s not right, I wanted offline access and web-apps on the iPhone are slow… then I decided to do a search anyway, as with technology, you never know what’s possible and I went and utilised the power of the world…

I found that… though I should’ve remembered as I read it a while back too… that mobile Safari does include offline access support therefore can deploy web-apps on the phone.

And there seems to be a lot of ‘evangelist’ for the mobile web-app ‘camp’. To a degree I think it is just over-hyped.

Still, the pure idea of click through Safari, then through to the mobile address still haunts me.

The art of UI and IA design is to minimise click through. One click more is a click too many.

So I think I’ll stick to my native apps until somebody develop a cross-platform web-app ‘platform’. This should be possible. Though whether Apple allows it, is a different story.

Later.

Well here it is ladies and gentlemen.

The jury’s out and jQuery has won .net’s open source application of the year award.

jQuery without a doubt has transformed a lot of javascript development online and is one of the most straightforward javascript abstraction library available.