New Media … And Birthdays

So I went and let the cat out of the bag last night with a Twitter post announcing that it was my birthday. Now, my birthday is no big secret. I’ll answer honestly when someone asks “When is your birthday?”… It’s posted in my Skype profile. It’s up on my facebook page. I just figured [...]

So I went and let the cat out of the bag last night with a Twitter post announcing that it was my birthday. Now, my birthday is no big secret. I’ll answer honestly when someone asks “When is your birthday?”… It’s posted in my Skype profile. It’s up on my facebook page. I just figured I’d beat a few auto-notifiers to the punch and twitter it.

Thank you.

You know, the funny thing about this new media/social media thing is that you’re friends with everyone. Don’t get me wrong - I adore meeting new people and forming new connections with them, but what do friends do when your birthday comes around? Why, they wish you a happy birthday, of course!

Thank you.

And the thing with having the several hundred people who know who I am, and communicate with me through TalkShoe, and having all of my friends that I’ve met at various events such as PAB and PodCamps (Amongst others) and the people who they’ve introduced me to, is that ALL of them want to wish me a happy birthday.

Thank you.

Now, I generally consider myself a pretty polite guy. When someone says ‘Thank you’, I say ‘You’re welcome’. When I order fast food, I often start with “Could I please get”. When the bank machine gives me money, I occasionally thank it. So all of these people … all of the happy birthday wishes… In my book, at least, need to be recognized. They need to be noted and appreciated. And the messenger, the friend who has taken the time out to notice it’s my birthday and pass along well wishes, deserves the feeling of knowing they’ve made me smile.

Thank you.

So I’m thanking each person in the medium they’re choosing to wish me a happy birthday. Some have sent SMS messages, or emails, or Twitter @s or Facebook wall posts, or skype IMs or forum posts… And each gets a thank you. And the best part - is that I’m generally quite happy letting my birthday slip by un-noticed. Though, in this instant-alert world of the web, that seems to be less and less possible.

Attending PAB. And the repercussions of that.

First, the next of my portable office series is being pushed to Saturday of this week. So I skipped a week. It was worth it, and you’ll read all about why … later.
For the readers of mine who have been living under a rock and missed this, I’m attending the Podcasters Across Borders event this [...]

First, the next of my portable office series is being pushed to Saturday of this week. So I skipped a week. It was worth it, and you’ll read all about why … later.

For the readers of mine who have been living under a rock and missed this, I’m attending the Podcasters Across Borders event this weekend in Kingston, Ontario. Hooray for low travel costs.

I’ve got a lot of notes for a lot of posts that will trickle out over the next couple of weeks, but I wanted to take this time to get something up right now.

This event, for me at least, has been the best new media type event I’ve attended. Not necessarily from an information point of view, not that the information (And the dense schedule of sessions) isn’t great, but from a people and community point of view. Being that I have mostly attended American events, and simply listened to shows from the Canadian community, I often felt more like an American podcasting community member, and not so much like a Canadian or global member.

This weekend, for me, has changed that. And it’s been awesome.

As promised, details to follow once it wraps and I return to the “real world”.

Safari on Windows?

[Note: This post was written on June 11th, 2007 but I was playing with settings on it and apparently set it to not appear until June 2008. Here it is now for your reading.]
So today Apple, Inc. announced that it’s browser, Safari, would be making itself available on the Windows platform.In addition, Steve Jobs announced [...]

[Note: This post was written on June 11th, 2007 but I was playing with settings on it and apparently set it to not appear until June 2008. Here it is now for your reading.]

So today Apple, Inc. announced that it’s browser, Safari, would be making itself available on the Windows platform.In addition, Steve Jobs announced that Safari (And more specifically HTML/AJAX technologies) would be the primary development platform for the iPhone.

While I’m not a mac user [yet], both of these announcement excite me from the web development point of view.

Single System Testing

Right now, web developers on Windows have a lot of trouble testing web sites across platforms. Sure, I have various versions of IE at my disposal and multiple versions Firefox (Which spans cross-platform) and I have a handful of Linux lice CDs at my disposal for testing with as well. I also frequently use BrowserCam to do testing on remote machines (Mostly screen captures) but as nice as screenshots are, it’s nothing compared to my Windows and Linux testing which allows me to click around and play with the site as I intended it.

While I don’t see myself using Safari on a day-to-day basis, I’m glad to have it installed as part of my regular routine for testing code I release.

iPhone’s Killer App?

It’s only been about 3 hours since the end of the keynote, but already people are saying that by not making an SDK available for the iPhone, and relying solely on web technologies, Apple has shot themselves in the foot and killed any chance for a Killer app to be established on the iPhone. Perhaps I’m alone here… But it’s my feeling that Safari is iPhone’s killer app.

If all of the development needs to stay within Safari, and more developers (Both Mac and PC now) have access to safari for testing their sites and services on, this means that more Safari/web-based applications will be ready for the launch of the iPhone. As a web developer, I couldn’t be more excited about this. Sure, we all knew Safari would be on the phone and would be rendering pages the same as it does on it’s non-mobile brother, but now we have confirmed that all of the JS effects, features, functions and code will be there awaiting us too. Steve said we could develop today and be ready for final testing on the 29th. Why couldn’t we be ready for the 29th alongside launch.

I don’t think people will need to wait long to discover that a full-blown Safari, with all of the JS and AJAX tools we need is going to sit front and centre on the iPhone, and with Safari on OSX and Windows to speed things along, development will be more seamless across all three platforms. And that will be sweet