Weary Mappers

In the mashups lab, I teach students about using "View Source" to look for clues to deciphering tech. choices...

If you saw this today from XKCD

and asked 'How'd they do that?', a quick peek would point to PanoJS - a former Googlecode project, now proudly standing out on it's own...

In other dynamic-spatial-not-necessarily-geospatial tech. topics, some of you may have seen one non-traditional (panning/zooming) presentation at GIS Day (I did not)

for which I heard at least one reaction to the software used... from the description I imagine it's the same software I watched my son Sam use to do a collaboratively-edited (simultaneously) slideshow for his Science class the other night - Prezi

I'm as guilty as anyone (falling back on ppt) but maybe we should try out Prezi?

http://prezi.com/

because powerpoints just (still) aren't that impressive.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out for discussion Ron Bruder's article in Eau Claire-based ADC's GeoWire newsletter on "Navigating Shifts in Technology" with reference to their decidedly un-plugged (as in no-plug-in) approach to application development... for discussion.

Yesterday, I found myself in a staff discussion on a similar topic, so I found it timely that this morning, Direction's Magazine delivered a podcast on GIS Goes HTML5 .

In addition, from the comments section - we find AppGeo's Mike Terner delivering a similar food-for-thought presentation this week - with slides provided.

As Adena and Joe point out in the podcast, it's not like we're going to see all the Flash/Flex and Silverlight sites disappear overnight.  And it is true that this discussion has been amplified by recent announcements by Adobe and Microsoft with regard to the future of these plug-in based technologies on mobile devices - leaving the question "If you're starting to develop a brand-new application today - which technology choices will you make and what's the projected lifecycle?"

Some companies are already betting what your choice will be... or better, yet are asking their developers what they want next in packaged tools...