5 Canadian inventions that simplified the User eXperience
In honour of Canada Day, Here are five things invented by Canadians that made everyday living that much easier.
1. Java. Before James Arthur Gosling came up with the language, web sites were mostly static – except for those goofy shockwave pages. Thanks to AJAX, all web sites have to potential to look like a big virtual bowl of Jello.
2. Lightbulb. Hey – I LOVE stumbling around in the dark, but admittedly this isn’t for everybody. And for you Edison freaks out there… Toronto inventors Woodward and Evans patented the bulbous darling in 1874 but then sold it to Edison. Later they also patented the “dumb business decision”.
3. Electric Oven. Still cooking those wild boars over a crackling fire? Tommy Ahearn invented the electric range in 1892 so you don’t have to.
4. 5-Pin Bowling. This brilliant invention by Thomas Ryan in 1908 reduces in HALF the effort required to knock down those pesky ten-pins!!
5. Retractable Beer Carton. Industrial designer Steve Pasjack invented this super beer carton in 1957. Possibly the most significant Canadian invention, it allows you to get those 12 bottles of beer safely home – where you can work on your web site, change a lightbulb, roast a boar, then head out for a few games of 5-pin bowling.
Happy Canada Day!
Tags: canadian-inventions
Java and AJAX have nothing to do with each other… AJAX is Javascript, which was designed by Brendan Eich (from California) at the same time as Java. Besides from the names, they’re not at all related. See Wikipedia:
“The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spinoff of Java, which is not the case; and has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.”
Many database driven dynamic sites are static (the content on the page does not change).
I still use the occasional Java application on the web, but those goofy shockwave pages were the precursor to Flash. Flash is so tightly integrated into sites now that you often don’t know that it’s running. Take Google’s Analytics for instance, all Flash.
AJAX, has certainly improved the fluidity of interacting with web applications because fresh dynamic content can be loaded into a page without reloading the entire page. As pointed out, AJAX, the technique that uses javascript has nothing to do with Java the language. It could also be argued that Microsoft invented the basic concept in 1996 under the term XMLHTTP. However years before that, I used to create shockwave sites which could dynamically pull and display new content on a web page; a variation on the technique.
ok, ok – not the most programmatically correct comment about Java and static sites – but hey – it’s Canada Day! I didn’t link Java And JavaScript though… although Sun has owned the javascript trademark since 1995…
I don’t think you can forget the TELEPHONE!
A contentious one, Kevin! Canada is still fighting that one with the US and Scotland over the invention. That’s even if you actually believe that A.G. Bell invented it in the first place!
How was your European summer?