When you’re learning to program the variety can be very distracting, it’s hard to choose what to program with when there isn’t any real project. It’s just you and some spare time.
I first learnt to program in VB.Net - in some ways it’s a good place to start. You can easily create programs that look ‘real’, you can run them on most Windows boxes and they are basically good fun.
Still, you can’t run them everywhere and the idea that it’s hard to show everyone your creation has always bothered me somewhat. I had never really thought about web applications until recently when I covered them on my course and they appear to be the answer to my sharing problem.
If they taught this kind of programming/development at school and equipped pupils with a free web host then I think there would be a great deal more interest. Parents would be able to see what there kids were creating and I think this would lead to a greater interest in computing as a subject.
So on that note I think web, and web applications, is where I’m headed - I think it’s the answer to my long standing cross platform development problem.
I’ve bought a really nice app called Espresso from MacRabbit on special offer that does lots of the boring stuff for me.
I’ll be spending my spare time over the next few months learning more about web related things.