Happy belated giblet day friends. A quick update wrt my doings for those who have been asking.
First priority is Harper Sue, who’s now six and a half months old.
I’m on the Board of Directors of Songbird and Xtracycle.
I’ve joined the steering committee of a volunteer community service organization supporting my local city park. We’re called Dolores Park Works. We’re not officially launching until early ‘10, but you may peek at our Web site in development.
And, as usual, I’ve been following + experimenting with developments in Internet digital media. So happy to see Web-scale technical + architectural innovation again. Briefly:
Playdar
Playdar and its ever-expanding family of clients e.g. Playgrub, Playlick, etc. and content resolvers e.g. those in /contrib represent a potential keystone of Internet digital media. Those of you who recall Muse.net (founded by Ian Rogers + me and acquired by Yahoo! in 2003) will be happy to know “location independent digital media” is back with a new tightly scoped focus, adjusting from playing from anywhere to anywhere with any player to simply playing anything referenced in a browser in the browser. Worse is always better for the Web, for better or worse.
Finally, playlist formats xspf and hAudio have resolver complement. But will playdar resolve the (Open) Web’s access problem? Hard to call, but creating consumer demand for legitimate reference to resolution is the most hopeful development in digital media in recent memory.
Silverlight 4
I’m a Microsoft skeptic as much as anyone. Yet, one shouldn’t ignore their platform war fortitude (and concomitant treasure chest) despite the unprecedented and incontrovertible World Web Win. So, let’s look at the facts: XAML is much of what both HTML5 and XHTML want to be when they grow up. While the W3C futzes with XBL2 specifications, Microsoft rolls out VS10 with WYSWIG tooling for XAML templates, an XBLization of CSS.
Microsoft will ship Silverlight 4 in 2010, the fourth major release in approximately two years, as the basis of building apps within the browser (IE, Firefox, Safari or Chrome) or on the desktop (both Windows and OS X) with a panoply of developer requested features. See Miguel de Icaza’s post for details. Be sure to check out the HTML+Flash as a XAML brush rickroll in the PDC video.
Abobe AIR 2
Latest WebKit + JS engine. USM device support. Native code API. Wee!
Browser Wars 2009
Fast Javascript. HTML5 File API. Hardware accelerated 2D. Fullscreen video. Chrome and Safari and Firefox. Oh my!
Upshot: Expect a significant half-life shortening for those developments not geared for these changes. On the flip, expect developments rooted in these developments to exceed currently visible expectations by mid-2010.
Koo. Enough. Put down that pie and get to work people.
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