Cocoa Geek

Google has developed a web browser. Lets face it no one is really surprised, there have been rumours of this for months and with the impending release of Android i don’t suppose that an increased level of web integration on mobile devices and the desktop from google is any shock either.

I do however find it very interesting that they have chosen to use webkit as the back end for the browser as opposed to gecko. Google has long funded mozilla and therefore the gecko platform, webkit however was a fork of the knoqueror browsers KHTML by apple. Apple prefers open source projects it works on and with to be under a BSD style license in order that the code can be used in close source applications, this is a possibility for using webkit over gecko.

Ultimately googles choice of rendering engine has little impact on the success of their browser, the usability and compliance with the web-applicatios that people use will be far and away more important in the success or faliure of Chrome.

Web development has always had similar goals as development across other platforms. Essentially what we are trying to do in both is deliver information to a user. Both require a large amount of creativity however this is different is each area of development, this is particularly interesting with regards to web development.

For web development this creative process is essentially split into two: The graphic design process, and the back-end process. For me at least this graphic design process has always been a problem and something that simple logic and programing won’t solve the choice of colours and position of an image on a page or how the end-users browser displays the final result.

In the design of this website this has been a problem, for any developer without these graphic design skills is it possible to entirely produce your own website. With the influx of tools such as Joomla! or Rapid Weaver how do we as developers, particularly the hobbyist, develop unique site to sell ourselves and give ourselves a unique presence on the web? Especially when all we want to use is Text Mate.

Developing the back-end is not the problem there are enough web frameworks and web enabled languages available for all of us to work with and create great information that we can show to the world, the problem is displaying all of this great stuff to everybody. How do we keep up aesthetically with everyone else? Do we have the time to write that great looking site on our own?

I am sure that you will all have figured out my own answers to these questions by noticing that i am using Word Press at the moment. As much as i want my whole site to be mine from scratch that dream is going to have to wait and be a work in progress. I think ultimately the answers to these questions are all if you can dedicate the time to testing and development then you can come up with these great looking sites, but don’t we all have some coding to do?