George Zafirovski

How many times, every day, you see this word in front of you (read the title of this post again!)? This is if you use English of course. It might be different in other languages: Cargando, تحميل, 加載, Chargement …

Sometimes, this word is coming with a faithful companion, named like “loading indicator”, “Ajax loader”, “circle ball“… Sometimes this “ball” is showing alone, without label. Once the data is available, this two disappear, and then appear again on your next click or content request. You can see more and more of this on the latest web apps, web mail clients, social networking websites and many more.

Most of you will know that in this world of APIs, Web Services and sharable data, we have to tell the user that the computer is working hard for him/her, doing something while the requested data is loading and ready for use. So instead the old hourglass for the desktop, remember that one, you rarely see it nowadays because the CPU is so fast, we have the web “hourglass” in another shape and form. In the past simple browser opening will stuck on the hourglass for a while.

“Loading…” was used previously extensively in the early days of Flash, where after waiting three, four or more MINUTES for something to load, usually stupid logo animation, for which at the time clients we paying good sum of money, you will get to few paragraphs of copy. And now, in the AJAX era, here it is again. We are “Loading..”, but this time for more meaningful and useful data. Latest one is the good news. The bad news is that it’s going to be with us for a while.

I think the current state of the web is “Loading…” .

Long time ago, in a country where Internet access was still not available as commercial service, but you had to know someone in the telecommunications services to “borrow” his dial-up access number and log-in details… there was a graphic designer sitting in his studio, shaking from excitement while launching IE3 and getting “Successfully connected” message from the dial-up screen. First thing he typed in the address bar was “http://www.adobe.com“. This is a true story.

15 years later, I still type “adobe.com” with great, great respect. Since my first DTP efforts, before the Internet was available, most of the hours spend in front of the computer screen were while learning, exploring and working with Photoshop. Even nowadays, in certain phase of my web projects, I spend most of my hours in Photoshop. It’s my companion almost every day of my working life nearly 18 years.

This gave me an idea to dig around for some history for probably one of the greatest software ever invented and developed.

I think me and Photoshop are going to stay together for a long, long time.

I couldn’t agree more with Bill Thompson.

Very good post on the BBC web site:

Who will write tomorrow’s code?

and I would add that this post not only applies to UK. I wish all countries in development and transitional worlds to start thinking about how the technology can help to achieve better life, not by being just ‘User’, but if they actively think how to use computers to do more.

Programmers deficit is global. But also, the world is full of bad programmers too. By bad I don’t mean evil.