Splash Web Effects

Google, in all it’s well-meaning splendor and ethos of not being evil, has decided to make a change in policy regarding unaccredited pharmacies. Hooray.

Another change Google’s dropped on the table however, is that it’s stance on drugs from accredited pharmacies from our friends to the north has shifted dramatically. New rules state that Canadian pharmacies will no longer be able to target consumers in the US, and that search results will be filtered.

For those of us embroiled in the healthcare debate, either side acknowledges that prescriptions for drugs in the US are often far too costly, and not covered, or not covered very well by current insurance. Even life-saving or medically necessary drugs come at a high cost, and without subsidization by our government, many people do without their medicine, opting to feed their families at the cost of their own health.

Enter Canadian Pharmacies, such as canadianpharmacymeds.com – which is an accredited pharmacy in Canada. Many customers of the pharmacy receive medicine at much lower prices than at non-subsidized us pharmacies, or where generics are unavailable. Due to these new rules however, it could become much harder to comparison-shop, or even find these legitimate pharmacies in order to receive cheaper medication from reputable sources.

The problem that is not currently being solved however, is cutting down on pharmacies that have bad reputations for sending out sugar pills, or are fake/scam sites. These places have little moral or legal obligation to skirt past any rules Google imposes, and so the only people hurt by this are law-abiding, policy-following and generally reputable sources of medication in Canada.

Hopefully, Google will see these issues with the policy change and reverse course, as this is one of the few avenues consumers have of leveling the playing field with regards to healthcare and the rising cost of prescriptions.

Medicine, as a rule, is a very closed-source system. Even as the burgeoning information age claims basic diagnosis with WebMD.com and a host of other medical information sites, real info is locked in tightly controlled mediums. Resistance fighters like Google use tactics like Google Scholar and Google Trends to map information researchers across the scientific spectrum can use to come up with real-time theories about health and security, but a serious tool that has been tapped in the web era has yet to be explored in the medical community.
Anonymous usage statistics are used by Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and a host of other companies we know, and sometimes trust. Why not GlaxoSmithKline? Why not HP’s medical technology department?
Having our medical data available to these companies is a sensitive issue, one HIPPA aims to protect us from- but electing to share information is a hassle that many patients don’t take, or aren’t made aware of- holding hostage gigabytes of real-time data that could be used to report important information about drug side effects, interactions, rates of recovery and symptoms few patients even report.
Having, by default, anonymous usage data stored in a central repository, storing nothing personal along with the data, could lead to a serious boon for researchers. Understanding how different medicines interact with dietary patterns, other drugs, patients with accompanying disorders and genetic histories is too tempting to ignore.
Currently, the Obama administration is pushing to computerize all medical records, some say for this very reason. It’s an environmental, anti-bureaucratic decision that helps people to eliminate the endless shuffle of paper and reclaim many of the costs associated with medical billing- but the move has come under fire from conservatives looking for possible breaches of privacy. While true, the medical story of your life could be taken by ner-do-wells on the world wide web, the uses for such data are limited without your consent. Companies couldn’t use that data to screen you from employment without risking a major lawsuit. Creditors could not use that data for the same reason. The only people at risk to be taken advantage of stand to lose something due to political or business related reasons. While this information could affect the market negatively if say, a CEO’s heart problem surfaced, or an untimely reveal of a mental disorder might affect negotiations- but the lives saved, economic potential of more innovative drugs reaching the market, and genetic patterns being discovered before it’s too late might just be worth it.
Besides, there are ways around it- electing not to have your medical data stored online for instance, or even on the computer in the first place, might eliminate the complaints of all but the most hardcore libertarians.
In the end however, the nation’s medical records will eventually be computerized for one reason or another, and its only a matter of time then before the vast amount of data can be tapped in the name of progress.

I was looking at my iPhone the other day when I was in a particularly bad dead zone, and thought to myself “Wow, I don’t have much to do that’s not Internet-required”. Other than a few games and stanza, it appears most of my apps are simply an interface for a single website.

As I thought about the implications of this, I realized that the line separating webapps and desktop applications has blurred. I use mint.com to manage my finances, and facebook to manage my social circle. I use google docs to deal with my documents and gmail.com to manage my e-mail. All of it, since gmail can check other POP-enabled accounts.

Now, to look at it another way- there are many thousands of apps in the App Store in iTunes, but the Pre and Blackberry have disappointingly low figures. Of course, the iPhone has been around longer than the Pre, and it has a larger, more technically-capable cult of followers than the business-centric Blackberry, but the real reason is that developers simply haven’t had enough time to learn an entirely new SDK, and why would they want to?

The simple solution is to develop an application that is cross-device compatible- a webapp. Something they have only to fire up their browsers to get to, it increases the user base of your application to anyone with a portable connection. The roadblock? Session Management.

The biggest problem with the iPhone, Pre and Blackberry (less so with android phones, but a problem nonetheless) is that it can’t carry data past more than a few webpages. The choice to use a webapp is simple when you don’t have to login- you can store everything in the URL variable scope. When users have to access personal information, or verify their identity (for purchasing things perhaps?) the choice to use cookies, or session variables is one that is difficult to make. When you want your users to spend time using your site- increasing their exposure to your brand and maximizing revenue potential- you need to bite the bullet and write a device-specific application. When you only need to provide data in short bursts (like twitter, or meetways) you can afford to make a smaller, data-optimized version of your website.

Copy.

Copy.

Copy.

The rest involve proper commenting, tabbing, modularization and so on but it really amounts to these three rules; and the exercise thereof.

Which is why Web Frameworks have gotten so big “lately”. Take Mootools or jQuery- these are wildly successful and the writers of such indispensable libraries are lauded the world over as if they had written a new language. In fact, with the advent of the web we have lots of tools like this available, some paid sites and some free, some vendor-suppored and some unofficial. But the fact remains, we must be thankful to have what our forebearers did not: vast libraries of code and examples to learn from. Did Linus Torvolds have a bunch of “How To Write your own Unix Kernel” tutorials to follow? Did Grace Hopper have anything called “Writing your first Object Oriented Language” sitting on his desk?

While we are web pioneers, creating an internet populated by designers and everymen, we must strive to make the web efficient and friendly by giving forth the tools for it’s forging. It’s lifeblood is in the hands of people like Kevin Rose and Jack Dorsey, but its very much in the hands of you, the designer.

I laud Google, Yahoo and yes, sadly, even Microsoft for not only encouraging open source development but for making computer programming accessable to everyone. Giving regular people the tools to give their ideas life was the best idea the internet ever had and is the reason the net has become a useful tool, as well as a social environment. Bringing apps like Facebook, then Twitter and even Yonkly, open up the web to the tech-proletariat to become his own man- his own ideas become those that contend on even footing with giants of the industry. I mean seriously, who the hell was Perez Hilton before the internet?

*Bonus- try to find anyone else in the world who has used the words “proletariat” and “Perez Hilton” in the same paragraph- other than a wikipedia definition.

The trouble with looking for a job in Dallas, Texas is not the amount of jobs availible or really the extreme market penetration of other professionals like you, or with more experience. There are plenty of jobs to go around.

One of the largest problems is out-of-state staffers that do not understand how large Texas is.

I live in Plano, which is just north of Downtown Dallas. This is not anywhere near San Antonio, Austin, Huston, Beaumont, Brownsville or Amarillo. Those are all more than 3 hours one way from my home, in good traffic and no highway patrol on the way down.

A lot of recruiters in India, Missori and even New Zealand want to place me in jobs that are there- asking how far of a drive it would be for me.

They then proceed to tell me they mean Houston, Texas not some other “far away” Houston in another state.

Texas is roughly twice the size of Germany. If you lived in Northern California, would you drive to a job in Southern California? No. You couldn’t do it.

Why do people insist on trying to recruit for these jobs in the wrong areas?

Database design for resume databases and for job hunting sites need to recognize this and divide Texas into distinct regions so one can search DFW and not get anything from San Antonio, and once can search Galveston and not get anything for Amarillo.

Remember, STATE is not a good search parameter, you need to add a REGION field or your results will always be shoddy and low relavance.

I am already tired of this recession. It has caused one company to fall apart under me and now another to restructure their entire business model, leaving me without a position in a few weeks.

I tire of the job hunt- slogging through the thousands of entries posted on job sites like monster and careerbuilder for jobs that require masters degrees in computer science and want 5 years of experience in technologies that are only 5 years old to begin with.

Early adopters are great to hire, but what about the rest of us perfectly capable individuals that didn’t want to hedge our bets too early- who are perfectly capable of writing what you wanting us to write and taking ownership of a large project but who didn’t play in intergal part in the early development of the language?

The other complaint(I shall file this post under “gripes”) I have with many of these postings are the education requirements- how many software programmers do you know that went through 4 years of school?If I entered school to learn software development today, everything I learned in the first two years would be completely useless by the time I graduated, I would have student loans weighing me down causing my initial price tag to be beyond my actual, real-world experience level and my programming technique would be a mirror of what an idiocyncratic professor with very strong opinions about how things should be done (which is why they profess) with flexability that would only come over a great deal of time.

The freshness of new minds entering the programming trade is weakened considerably by these institutions- I don’t see why we should have to fill an arbitrary beurecratic requirement just because we achieve a higher pay grade than an average unskilled worker. We are skilled. VERY skilled. We deserve to be paid as much- regardless of where we learned the trade.

With the release of so many smartphones on the market today that actually encourage web-surfing on the phone or PDA, a viable marketing strategy has emerged.

Launching a website that is not only touch-phone friendly but UI-specific can make your organization stand out as a large, professional, agile institution.

Remember, a globalized marketing strategy is greatly in the details and you are embarking on a venture that is inherently global. (This leads to a whole lot of minimalist design schemes…) Globalization is not only expressed as either segmenting your experience to locals, or creating an effective human-centered global strategy that transcends culture; it is a process that is open to the highest of critique and the biggest problems. You have to take into account taboo in hundreds of locations while continuing to maintain context-neutral messages.

But you back yourself into a corner here. Most people do not have the manpower to maintain either an intracate marketing strategy that maintains the power of globalization or the power to create individual web portals to deal with the entire world. Especially when you are not present in many of the markets you are advertising to(but don’t want to damage them as you hope to expand there one day).

The answer: Cross Device platforming, while maintaining static content. In many markets, your website is to be viewed on a device the size of the user’s hand. Many non-standard browser sizes and device limitations will neuter your ablity to speak to the individuals that may not even have a home computer to view your website on, or simply do not have time to pull up their laptop when they need to find someone nearby with your services.

The time is now, optimise your HTML and server-side languages to use multiple CSS sheets, then condition them to the browser, device type and size appropriate. This creates a manageable website where certain content can be hidden with things like display:none in some devices/locales and can be shown in others.

When designing such an interface: rememeber what your users are trying to do most of the time on mobile devices. They are looking for directions, to buy something and pick it up on the way, they are looking for relavant times or reviews of your services. They aren’t looking to load a lot of copy or any high-definition pictures, remember to K.I.S.S. – Keep It Simple, Stupid.