The Viamentis Blog

Hi folks, I know I haven’t updated this blog in for quite some weeks, and I apologize. Things have been really hectic, with a lot of behind-the-scenes meetings, interviews, and client work.

First of all, I have an announcement to make: I have a new colleague. I have hired employee #2 for Viamentis (me being the first :D) - ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Divya, who will be working with me to take up my considerable amount of work load.

She is a fresh engineering grad, who is interested in Ruby, Rails and Lisp (now you know why I hired her ;). You will become familiar her anyways here, as she will be blogging about stuff that catches her interest and might have some smaller announcements to make herself.

Second, we have some new office space - I am sharing office with another cool startup, BloggingSaurus. Currently I and Divya are working out of this office, but we are hoping to get some more people soon. That means, you will see lots more activity on the blog and the main site. Stay tuned!

I normally don’t post comics on this blog (that’s game for my personal blog, though - if you have to know where it is, ask me). But this one happens to be very relevant for my last post. So why not?

I was doing my regular rounds of the inter-pipes today, and I find this gem. Who would have thought of all the exciting new products he could announce, Steve Jobs chose to unveil a simple browser - and the media/blog coverage is decidedly low-key.

But I think it’s a master-stroke. Steve seems to be very much aware that the web is becoming the new platform - and instead of fearing it and it’s effect on the Mac (admittedly, he need not bother that much - Apple has other breadwinners like iPod and iTunes, probably iPhone too - so who cares if the Mac market isn’t so great?), he’s using some of his weapons to take the fight to Apple’s archrival, Microsoft.

Well, safari obviously looks much better than IE, rather a bit un-windows, but pretty nevertheless. But I think what will follow the browser is important - probably all sorts of iTunes shortcuts, tweaks, etc, and probably even iPhone connectivity apps. So effectively, Apple released a trojan horse that could seriously hurt MS where it hurts most - on the web. The irony hopefully is not lost on MS, because it’s bundling with IE with Windows that killed Netscape, and it’s interesting to see a competitor choosing precisely the same route to launch a direct attack.

Or, perhaps, I could be wrong here, probably Apple is just making sure that if enough cross-platform browsers get a substantial install base on windows, there is much lesser motivation for MS to break the web with incompatible formats. But then, Firefox is already doing a good job at that. And, since the Apple site quotes directly that it’s 1.6 times faster than Firefox, there must be more to it than protecting interoperability. Interesting times ahead!

I was reading through Reddit, and I found this surprising news. I think open sourcing Flex is a master stroke by Adobe to promote its rapid adoption. Now, I think Rails and its other brethren have serious competition. Flex brings an entirely new level of UI sophistication to webapps. Of course, I am not qualified to comment upon how good it is as a framework, but I generally like Adobe products, and I’m guessing they have a good product on their hands again.

That brings the question if they will open source the Apollo platform too. If they do, they have a double-whammy competitor to Rails - Flex takes on Rails itself, and Apollo would take on Joyent Slingshot. Of course, I am aware of the fact that I am talking as if Slingshot is already successful - it’s not, but I have to admit latching on to Rails platform is a smart idea, and it would be interesting to see how the this competiton between web frameworks plays out. Fun times ahead