So whenever I’m in the living room, looking something up on my phone and I realize there’s a giant screen sitting there in the room and half the time I’m barely paying attention to what it’s showing. I would love to build websites and apps for a 40” screen. I’m not talking about using a tv like it’s a giant monitor, I’m talking about something that’s a combination of the cable or satellite service we’re used to and the internet as we know it. Watch a show in fullscreen mode, see an actor you recognize but can’t remember their name, so you pop up the IMDb app and and it links to that episodes page. Or a commercial comes on, so you split the screen in half and check your RSS feed in Google Reader until your show comes back on.

I don’t know if any of this is even possible, I’ve done zero research on it. I just know what I would like and this is it. I’d love it if I could use a tablet to control the tv, a tablet that displays the controls I need to operate whatever I’m doing at the time. I’m not talking about using Apple TV and an iPad, I really think the world would be a better place if you could use any brand tv and any brand tablet. How about your coffee table has Microsoft’s Surface on it? Then you could be like the MI6 agents in Quantum of Solace!

Is the future of the web mobile? I don’t know. People have been saying to me that the desktop is dead for about 6 years now and I still see them for sale. And for about the last year or so, I’ve seen people say the laptop was dead too, killed by netbooks. Wait, that didn’t happen? Oh, right it was tablets. It’s one of those weird things, in some ways technology only moves as fast as the majority. I consider myself to be some what an early adopter and I know we aren’t the people companies make money off of. For major change to happen, the tech has to be good and affordable, I really believe Blu-ray took off because you could get a player inside your PS3, that’s the reason I have a Blu-ray player. And look at 3D tvs, they’re not taking off because everyone just bought hi-def flatscreens a couple of years ago.

So, what’s going to happen with the web? Will it be tablets? Maybe if the good ones don’t cost $800. But I’ll tell you this, if they make a tv that’s got a computer in it and I only need one cable to get both tv and the internet, that will be the future I want to live. Also, it would be nice if I could jetpack to work.

Imagine this, I’m working along, getting this idea I have to work in Chrome, but the site I saw that inspired my idea only works in Chrome. And then I see that CSS3 3D transforms now work in Firefox 10. So I start messing around and seeing I can get this to work in Firefox. I’m using CSS3 tranforms, but I’m using JavaScript to set the CSS and the first thing I discover is that while the Webkit version makes sense:

The Firefox version does not. You’d think it would be this:

But it’s not. That won’t work, you have to capitalize the m:

I only found this out be Zachary Johnson did some digging and as far as I can tell, this is the only mention out there about how to properly write it. Problem solved now, right? I mean all the demos using CSS3 for Firefox that have translateZ working fine. But my test still wasn’t working and in fact I wasn’t even sure you could use CSS transition on the translateZ property in Firefox. It turns out you can but not if the CSS property is set as an inline style with JavaScript, which is needed for my idea to work properly. So the transition works right if it’s CSS but not if it’s JavaScript powered in Firefox. And in Chrome, it works both ways.

I’m still going to redesign my site because even though the 3D effect will only work in Chrome, at least right now, I’ll still get a fade in and out effect in the other browsers. The main traffic going to my site is web designers and developers and since over 40% of them use Chrome, a decent amount of visitors will site the site the way I intend them to. I’m sure Firefox will add the missing functionality sooner than later, so I’m not too worried about them missing out.

Cutting edge effects are pretty sweet, but you better have the patience to deal with the differences between browsers. Nothing can be more frustrating than when something isn’t working because the browsers use different syntax.

If Apple goes down the road I think they’re going, then iOS users are going to have access to a lesser version of the mobile web. Why? Because with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript, the things that can be made to run natively in the browser is getting closer and closer to apps you could only get in the App Store. If Apple didn’t want that to happen with Flash (I refuse to believe a company like Apple couldn’t get Flash to run well on their hardware if they wanted to), why would they let it happen with the wonder technology that is HTML5? If you can build your app and put it online, you don’t have to get Apple to approve it and you can make it work in most if not every mobile browser. How would Apple stop that? Maybe key APIs or technologies won’t work in mobile Safari. Apple’s already done something like that, with WebGL only being available to iAds developers.

So why isn’t Google going to do something similar? Google wants everything to be on the web, your app working in the Android browser is the best thing for them because 80% of their business is online ads. And if you’re app is online, then they can put ads on it and if an iOS or Windows Phone user visits, it’s good for Google. And Microsoft? They’ve never limited development on Windows and since they’re late to the party with WP7, I can’t see them doing anything the might turn developers away from their platform.

Apple’s going to create their wall garden because they can. Because there are people that don’t can what Apple does, they just want that logo on the back of their laptop or phone. There are people that like the simplicity that Apple gives them. And there are people for who Apple has become a religion and they will tell you for hours why Apple’s way is the best and you should just stop asking questions and buy everything Apple puts out. If I ran a company and I can devoted customers like that, I would probably do the same thing. We’re talking about a company that has bloggers justifying every move they make. Apple knows this and they’re going to take advantage of it. They want you to buy an iPhone, enter the walled garden and then never leave.

The whole thing reminds me of AOL back in the 1990s. I’ve never used AOL but I remember watching the NBA and they always said “Visit our website or use AOL keyword: NBA”. And if you were on AOL, they had their own private Internet where sites for major businesses like the NBA were better than the one on the regular web. This didn’t last too long because those businesses wised up and realized there were a lot more people on the regular web then on AOL. I don’t think it’s going to be as drastic for Apple vs the rest of the world but I don’t believe Apple is going to beat Windows on PCs or Android on mobile because Apple has no intention of trying to reach the most people. Of course, once Steve Jobs permanently leaves the company, who knows what will happen (last time, things didn’t work out so great), but that’s another story.

When I first started at my current employer, they were really against using Flash. This was over three years ago, so it wasn’t a because of the current anti-Flash sentiment that’s out there now, but because their previous experiences with Flash was with developers that didn’t really know what they were doing. I did my best to show them what could be done when you use Flash properly to build your projects and they came around, which lead to a fair amount of Flash work for me.

As I learned more and more about jQuery and JavaScript, I showed the designers I work with the little experiments I was building. I would also find sites featuring cool techniques that I found interesting and after I figured out how it was built or if I had an idea how I would do it, I would send the link to everyone in the office, saying I can do this. I also started to get involved in the design process near the beginning, suggesting effects and things that suited the design that the designer might not have though of. With one design, I happened to be walking by when the designer was working on a site, and I made a suggestion based on what I saw and the following conversation turned the site from a static site to an original looking site that I was proud to work on.

My main point is this, most of the clients you have, in fact a vast majority, aren’t going to be looking for something cutting edge or revolutionary. But that doesn’t mean you can’t add something to make the boring sites more interesting. And if the people you work with know what you’re capable of, then they’re more likely to have that in their mind when they’re pitching a design. If they don’t know what you can do, then they won’t ask you to do it.

One thing I’ve stressed at work is that as long as it’s not something insanely complicated, I’ll figure out how to do it, usually in a day or two. Now the designers I work with come to me with ideas, usually something like, “can you do this?” and if it’s not possible the way they want, I suggest a different way to do it. Together, we come up with the best solution.

If you’re a developer and you don’t think you’re being used to the best of you’re abilities, then just having an open line of communication with the designers is usually the best way to change that. Just shave once and a while and brush the Cheetos off your shirt and the designers shouldn’t be too afraid.

Coming from AS3, which is pretty similar to JavaScript, I found myself thinking,”This is how I’d do it with ActionScript, what do I have to change to make it work with JS?” Some of my first experimenting with JS was with the canvas tag. I also jumped right in doing the more advanced tutorials I found. It’s not like this was a bad thing, but the problem was, I didn’t learn the JS basics from the start. Sometimes, I’d be doing a tutorial and a concept would come up that I hadn’t worked with yet and I’d have to research it on a site like Mozilla’s Developer Network.

I think this is one of the problems with starting with a library like jQuery, it does all the small stuff for you, which is great if you just need simple and quick things build but if you want to build something on your own using pure JS, you won’t know the basics.

So I’m starting at the beginning. I really enjoy working with JavaScript now and I want to know the language through and through. I’ll be honest with you, if you show someone that’s worked primarily with a language like AS3 something like this:

The chances are pretty good that they are going to be like me and have no idea what’s going on. Add in the fact that you can do pretty much anything about three ways, JavaScript can be a pretty hard language to figure out when you’re looking at examples. And, as I’ve mentioned on my blog before, when I went to school, JavaScript was a language you used to create pop-ups and maybe display the date. So, I really didn’t get a great over view of the language. Of course, at the time, Flash was still considered to be awesome and who cared about JS.

So I’m going to break out my JavaScript for Beginners book and start at page 1. Or I’ll probably get the new edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. That’s the book that makes you an expert, right?

Looking back on the web then, it’s amazing how much it’s changed but also how much it hasn’t. Websites are still mainly text. Sites are a bit wider, they look better. Flash and JavaScript make them more fun to interact with. Database driven sites make updating easier and massive sites like Amazon possible. But really, is it that much different? I don’t think so. It’s been at least fifteen years since I first heard someone say that the web was going to kill TV. Video online has come a long way, but I think I spend most of my time on Youtube watching Pepsi commercials from the 80’s and Saturday Night Live Digital Shorts. Sure you can download shows now and you can watch some online. But I have a HD TV and I want to watch the shows I like on there, not on my 14” laptop.

In a lot of ways, I think the web we have now is a lot like television in the 1960’s. Shows in the 50’s were pretty much just plays or stage shows that someone put a camera in front of, but TV in the 60’s was when you could tell they had figured out what TV was all about. And that’s what the web is like right now. We’ve figured out how to sell things on the web, how to use it to communicate and use it to learn. I remember TV commercials saying you could go to university online and while that did happen, I don’t think people can go to Harvard from the comfort of they’re couch like the commercial promised.

That’s all cool, but aren’t I supposed to be talking about the future of the web? Well, if you think about the fact that the basics of the web haven’t changed that much in say, 15 years, then why is it suddenly going to change drastically over the next few years? I’ve done zero research on this, but when I think of all the different opinions of the web’s future I’ve read, I’m pretty sure no one knows what the web’s going to look like 15 years from now. I’ve heard people say the future is the mobile web, but do we really want a future of 4” screens? Or the future is apps. Why would we want to download things and worry about hard drive space, if the same stuff can be done online? The browser has been declared dead before, but the thing that was supposed to kill it, RSS feeds, are being killed by sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Like I said, I don’t know where the web is going and I really don’t believe anyone else does. Are we all going to have whatever the evolution of the smartphone is? Or is Google TV going to take off and computers and TVs merge? Or will we have both, surfing the web on our TV with our phone as the keyboard? As cool as that would be, it won’t happen if you can only use you Samsung phone on a Samsung TV, because nobody wants a Sony phone (or maybe a Sony TV for that matter). Honestly, I hope Google prefects voice recognition, because I would love to be able to ask my phone a question and have it surf the web for the answers.

But whatever the future holds, I’m sure there’s a couple of technologies that haven’t even been thought of yet that will be huge influences on it. I can remember a world before Google and how hard it was to find what you were looking for, now we can’t live without it. I will say this, even if I don’t know what’s coming, I’m excited to find out. And, hopefully, I come up with one of those new technologies.

Eventually I bought Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 3.0 and I worked my way through it from front to back, almost every day. That’s when I made a huge leap from beginner to experienced programmer. Not only because of the information I got from the book, but also from training my brain to think in code. This is how I got to the point where, for the most part, I’m able to start writing the code in my head as soon as I know what I’m going to be building. This is the point I think you can stop considering yourself a beginner, when you don’t have to search Google to figure out where to even start with your code.

This isn’t something that’s ground breaking or just applies to coding. If you want to be a good artist or writer, you have to do it every day. It’s simple and you would think it would be more obvious then it is, but I’m amazed at how many people I talk to that think that you’re either good at coding or you aren’t. That the fact you can’t build an amazing game using ActionScript or JavaScript your first time, then you aren’t ever going to be able to do it. I remember watching Lee Brimelow’s gotoAndLearn tutorials and being amazed at how quickly and simply he was able to code things up. I couldn’t figure out why he was able to do that and I wasn’t. I didn’t realize it was experience and the drive to get better that I needed to get there.

It’s doesn’t have to be something big. Sometimes you can learn more from a quick ten minute coding session then you can from a 6 hour one. Concepts that I’ve struggled to understand, I’ve figured out while messing around on jsbin while watching a baseball game. That’s all you have to do, just pick something you want to learn and mess around for a while. Sometimes I give myself a project, something I haven’t done before, so that I force myself to learn concepts and techniques I haven’t needed yet, but might need in the future.

Code every day. Even if it’s just for 10 minutes. Try something new. Maybe you’re coding at work, but if you’re like me, then you’re not getting the opportunities to do new things as frequently as you would like. And now that I’ve increased my JavaScript and jQuery knowledge on my own time, I’ve been able to suggest things at work to clients because I already have the knowledge to build them.

There’s one thing though, if you download Komodo Edit and start writing jQuery code, there’s not going to be any code hinting. You have to turn it on, but if you don’t know where to look, you might not find it. It’s under Edit > Preferences > Code Intelligence. You’ll see in the API Catalogs section a list of APIs you can use for autocomplete and code hinting. Just check off jQuery and you’re good to go. You’ll also see an HTML5 API there too, which I find crazy useful. There’s a few other JavaScript libraries featured, including Prototype, YUI and Dojo, so if you use any of them regularly, then check them off too.

I get to work in an industry were someone like Paul Irish creates things like Mother effing Text-Shadow and Mother effing HSL, as well as the everything and the kitchen sink HTML5 Boilerplate. Tools that can make every web designer and developer’s life easier and he’s put them out on the web for everyone to use for free. And that’s not counting everything he’s done to help people become better jQuery coders.

And it’s not just individual developers that do this. Both Google and Mozilla are putting a lot of effort into making all the tools and knowledge web designers and developers need to spread a standards based web. Mozilla’s Developer Network is usually my first stop whenever I have a JavaScript or HTML5 question. And their new Web O’ Wonders site is full of great examples to inspire us to take things to the next level. And they’re all open source, so you’re just a right click away from finding out how they did it. Google’s HTML5 Rocks is full of tutorials and code samples. Unlike, with Apple and Microsoft’s HTML5 showcases, these aren’t there to show off what Firefox and Chrome can do, but to show what we as web developers can do now.

I just think it’s amazing that some of the top people in the web design and development community don’t just keep these things to themselves. I love checking Google Reader and Twitter every day because I never know what I’m going to find. And I really hope everyone takes advantage of what’s out there because a web built by better developers is better for everyone.

But I think most, if not all, of us thought that we would put out our shingle and a huge company like GM or Motorola would come calling, asking us to build something awesome for them, while giving us complete free reign creatively. We learn pretty quickly that’s not the case. But if you’re smart, then you make an amazing web site for the client to sell their lawnmower parts, even if the client wants you to use the logo their nephew made 8 years ago.

If all you do is client work, then I have a feeling eventually you lose the passion it takes to do this day in and day out. I’m surprised at how much time I spend learning new languages and experimenting with new web technologies outside of work. And most of the work I’m most proud of and happy with are things that will just sit on my hard drive, but the knowledge I’ve gained help me every day at work.

It’s not just about becoming better at what you do, it’s also about having fun and making things you want to build. Some of the coolest things I’ve seen online were made by designers and developers messing around. These are the things that inspire me to get better and keep trying to bring my ideas to life. A perfect example of this is a video I saw today, Blade Runner revisited is a homage to Ridley Scott’s film. A client might never ask for something like it but it’s the kind of thing that we should all be trying to make on the weekends.

BLADE RUNNER revisited >3.6 gigapixels from françois vautier on Vimeo.