Entries tagged 'history'

In the very near future we may face a turning point, the birth of Web 3.0.
Many people speculate what Web 3.0 could be like. Though, some of these speculations are very interesting for mobile developers.


To start from the very beginning, from the burst of the dot com bubble in the fall of 2001. Many people believed that the web was overhyped. But it wasn't the end of the web. Far from it infact. New and exciting sites and applications started poping up and it were the good web solutions that showed their strenght by surviving and thriving while the pretenders dissapeared.
In the first conferences (source from o'Reilly), Web 2.0 was described as "the web as a platform" and later Web 2.0 meant something about democracy. When speaking of Web 2.0 today we think of Ajax, RSS, user generated content and democracy like blogs and wiki and mashups.


Some speculations for web 3.0 suggest that the web will be everywhere on various devices, anytime, anywhere. Crucial applications such as mobile applications and intuitiveness in usage where a mobile powered web will play a big part in.


imagin walking in a store with your phone and you automatically switch over to the in-house wifi. Now you are online located in the store and browsing the web deliverd catalog and if you want to find a product in a certain department, your phone shows you a map of the store.


Or the search engine of the future where your search results are based on the radius of your location.


Social networking may change drastically aswell. Imagine in the near future where you take out your phone and see several people online near you, you don't have to talk to them yet, you can first see their profile and their hobbies and the other way around. All you have to do is walk to that person and start a conversation.


Seems to me, It's only a matter of time...

What on earth is it anyways ?
A few years ago nobody knew what widgets were. People, who knew, probably thought of it as a small mechanical device or control. And a widget is also a mechanical device or control but if you use the word "widget" today, you usually mean something else.
Today, widgets are to be found everywhere.
Generally speaking a widget contains a little piece of code, multiple widgets can be combined together in 1 place and they are easy to develop.

To run a widget you'll need an environment or engine to run them in. In the history, widgets came a long way. Look at the below screenshot of the widget workshop from the nineties.

But if you think widgets as we know them today are new. You should think twice.
Desktop widgets have been around for a while.

Here below you can see the desktop widget timeline until today (from nail kennedy his blog).

 
click on the image to see full size.

And here below you can see a picture of the Widget Workshop from 1996.

click on the image to see full size.

The next steps in widgets are no doubt mobile widgets. 
Widgets will truly come to their right on mobile devices. Because with mobile devices you have a small screen and widgets are small. You don't want to type in a lot. Widgets are small specific predefined applications. Always with you, not much typing to do to get the functionality you desire. Just one click to get them up and running. Easy and fast. Widgets are popular today on your desktop device, but they will become far more useful on your mobile device.

When creating widgets, what better way is there than having an open language, a language easy to use, a simple way of getting your content on your phone and everybody else their phone.
Thanks to GLOWE, today these things are possible.
Thanks to GLOWE anyone can become a mobile developer and create great widgets.
Best of all, it's free and open to use by everyone.