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How many of you program for fun these days? I realised that I hardly ever do when my workload in my job is high, but when things are going a bit better I just have the urge to code random stuff.

But it made me think – with programming becoming an ever more complicated activity, how many of you still code for fun in your spare time? If you do, what do you code. If you don’t, why not!?

I am really wondering about this since a lot of great open source projects originated with coding in people’s spare time, and if that age is lost then how will the OSS model change in the future? Your thoughts please!

By now you’ve probably noticed that Apple’s supposedly world-changing announcement turned out to be little more than a super-sized version of the iPhone (well, without the phone, so its more of an iPod Touch). While this will be all well and good for those who wanted a jumbo iPhone, for the rest of us who were waiting for the ‘next big thing’, even Steve Jobs’ egotistical confidence in his baby can’t cover up the massive disappointment.

The reason I’m disappointed is that it has taken the concept of a tablet and relegated it to a media player and web browser. Media players come in all shapes and sizes already, and web browsing is a pretty singular task to end up forking $500+ out for.

What it could have been? Why, the biggest productivity boon ever. Imagine a fully-fledged OS on there, capable of running any number of existing productivity apps. Multi-tasking would have added to this immeasurably.

My idea for the perfect tablet would be one which seamlessly links to your workstation PC or Mac. Imagine just dragging a window over to the tablet, getting up and walking to that meeting. Flicking between your presentation notes, organiser and e-mails with a flick of the wrist would make this a truly awesome system.

Something struck me today whilst reading a tweet from a developer I consider to be on top of their game. They had an issue with a framework doing something unexpected and annoying, and after hours of trying to get around it, eventually they had to get a solution. They posted a tweet asking if anyone knew the solution as they suspected it would just be something really simple which they didn’t know.

Helpfully someone responded and pointed them in the right direction, but only then did this developer actually bother to look at the documentation themselves. The solution was simple and was fully documented – so why not check it out first to alleviate all that bother?

While this is a good example of the value of Twitter, I can’t help but feel that the documentation should always be your first port of call. I don’t ask someone until I’ve checked out the documentation for myself. Chances are the docs will have the answer, along with a whole lot of other info which could really help you out. At least that is what I find!

So, next time you have a problem – look it up! Chances are you’ll get more than you asked for.

jQuery 1.4 has been released, and it has brought with it what I think of as the second coming in terms of web scripting. We’ve had JavaScript for years. Ever since Netscape. However, it has taken a long time for people to do really interesting stuff with it, beyond your usual run-of-the-mill price calculators and so on.

JavaScript frameworks began popping up over the last few years with the aim of making it easier to make cool stuff with the added bonus of cross-compatibility, but there were still niggles. jQuery has become my framework of choice and it had the odd issue which annoyed me, in particular the slow-as-hell documentation site and certain speed issues in certain browsers (read: IE6-7).

However, jQuery is now getting ever more backing from major software companies and is being used across the web. The upshot of all of this? The new version has made certain functions up to 10x faster than in jQuery 1.3, which is damn impressive. Coupled with this, they have replaced the dog-slow Mediawiki based documentation site with a speedy Wordpress installation, with complete documentation for every function, packed with examples and tracking of the changes throughout jQuery’s history, way back to 1.0 from 2006.

So you can now see why I think jQuery 1.4 is the second coming – of scripting.