techno.blog("Dion")

Is it me, or does email feel like it hasn’t evolved in quite some time, bar Gmail.

I was interested to see that David Ascher is joining a new Moz Corp sister:

So, what exactly is the job? It

I just saw a job posting on our new jobboard from Apple. The position is Worldwide Developer Relations Partnership Manager and what is exciting to me is how Apple seems to really be betting on the web:

Dynamic individual who is responsible for maintaining relationships with new and existing developers to promote web application development techniques and technologies enabling delivery of world-class web-based solutions and content on Apple devices.

Sounds like the iPhone as well as WebKit partners.

What you would do:

• Work with cross-functional teams to identify and transition strategic web-based products, solutions, and developers to Mac OS X.
• Maintain current knowledge of the
  

I got to meet Anders Nor

Ben and I are talking Ajax at JavaZone in Norway. The jetlag hasn’t been much of an issue this time around thanks to a bit of a doze on the flight (after watching the slightly painful Mr. Bean).

I did enjoy seeing Ben’s face as he opened the door to his hotel room, which is definitely euro-style (read: absolutely tiny). You couldn’t lay down across the room.

Oslo is a beautiful town, and I hope that we get to see some of it. Last night was the speaker dinner, and some of the usual suspects were there.

This morning though, the conference started with a jolt. I have never been to a conference (Java or other) that had a cover band to a “famous” German heavy metal group playing. At 8am. Screaming BITTEEEE. You also had to enter the conference arena via a space shuttle. This show is definitely similar to JavaPolis in many ways. You can tell that the conference committee has a lot of fun with it and the show is huge. I think these beat JavaOne hands down.

I couldn’t help but take a little video:

Ever since tools such as Pipes came on the scene, many techies, and VC’s went on the sniff for some money. “Hmm, enterprises will get jealous, and will want to do mashups themselves”. Of course, doing a mashup behind the intranet is a lot tricker. There you can about service level agreements, roles and authorization, and all of the “boring” things that do not concern the graffiti folk of the mashup world. IBM has its research-y Damia product. Others have new editors in the works, and then there are the Dappers and Kapows that straddle the fence.

Today’s release of Serena Mashup Composer was discussed recently by Darryl Taft where he said:

The tool has a Mashup Explorer

JavaLobby has a post titled And The Fastest Growing Web Framework Is… which discusses Rich Hightowers blog on the subject.

Of course, I can play with numbers like the best of them.

If we start with “Java JSF”, “Java Spring”, Ajax, and Rails, we tell a story that JSF is beating Rails, Spring is above both, and Ajax is doing better than them all (as it is general).

Then we change the game by adding PHP, and it is right up there with Ajax.

Then we use “Java” and “JSF” by themselves (same for Spring), and we see Java way up in the lead.

Finally, we change the scale to be relative, and we see hyper growth for Ajax compared to relative flat growth of the others.

The moral of the story? The good old truth about lies, lies, and statistics. Don’t even get me started about what job numbers means, and how good Indeed’s data may or may not be. How about we focus on just solving business problems? :)

Seeing Joe’s Facebook app at an Apple keynote was very cool.

I talked about ipodtouch.ajaxian.com over on that other blog, and how we will be seeing a lot of Mobile Safari browsers hitting us come Christmas.

What about the other news?

• iPod nano: Eh. I am not in the market for that kind of device
• iPod classic: ditto
• iPod Touch: Nicely done. It was obvious to go ahead and do this, and they are executing
• Starbucks: Seems so niche that I hardly care at all. Now, if it starts to work at Peet’s ;)
• iPhone: The price drop is great. Bitter? actually not really. This is what you get for being an early adopter. Steve is being generous in my opinion. Don’t tell me that when you bought v1 right away you didn’t think it would a) go down in price and b) v2 would be a lot better. I quickly came up with a plan:

  v2.onrelease = function() {
  v1.send_to_wife();
  v2.buy();
  };
  

All in all, nothing amazing to see here, but nice incremental execution. I still want 3G. I still want over the wire syncing for everything. And, I still rich app dev platform option. That will be v2.

Business Week shows that journalists love to talk about the death of something and the rising of the other. This time, in The Desktop Takes Center Stage Again they say things like:

And companies such as Adobe (ADBE) and Google (GOOG) have released or are testing products that let Web developers build desktop versions of online services and sites. Google launched a group of Web-to-desktop developer tools known as Gears in May (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/30/07, “Google Gears Up to Take Web Services Beyond the Web”). “Everybody wants to be on the desktop,” says Martin Kay, chief executive of online music site Finetune, which recently introduced a way to make the company’s music-streaming and recommendation service available on the desktop. “People tend to forget about Web sites.”

Gears isn’t about helping “Web developers build desktop versions of online services and sites”. The whole point is that Gears gives the browser new powers!

It adds a small set of key functionality that developers can build upon, just as they did on XMLHttpRequest.

This isn’t about having people developer desktop apps as different apps. It is about making the Web a better place….. and one that can work to some extent offline.

Gears and AIR are not the same thing. They suit very different needs, and can complement more than compete. I hope that over time this becomes more obvious.

One thing is for sure…. neither the desktop, nor the Web, are close to being “dead”.

Nicholas Jitkoff normally hides in the shadows a little, as alcor. They finally persuaded him to come out and speak about Quicksilver.

Quicksilver is the FIRST application that I will install on a new Mac, and it was great to here about it from the horses mouth:

Quicksilver hides almost unbounded power beneath the interface of a keyboard-driven … all

As time has gone on, I have gotten less and less excited about Leopard the operating system. A 3D dock and more transparency doesn’t do that much for me. Having “Spaces” instead of Virtue will be nice to have.

As a developer, having Objective C 2.0, and new APIs such as Core Animation is going to be good.

This is where my excitement peaks. It’s all about the apps. Most of my favourite apps haven’t seen a release for a bloody year! All of the developers are working on wicked cool Leapard stuff, and they can’t get it out of the door until Leopard ships. I have recently seen a few sneak peaks, and WOW, we are in for some great updates, and new applications all coming out on Leopard day.

So, a bit of a “eh” for the OS, but an “Oh yeah” for the new apps!