It’s finally happened. My tithe to Apple has been paid, and my iPhone has arrived on my desk.

I’m still an Flash Platform developer of course, this isn’t a career change – it’s a broadening of horizons.  I anticipate much cursing and headscratching is in store for the next few months though.  Here we go, should be ‘fun’.

I got a free t-shirt from Adobe (yay me!). As it turns out, Shikha Bhargava – product manager for the AIR Marketplace – posted this article on the Adobe Developer Center at its relaunch. ImageSizer obviously sneaked in there as one of the first 10 new applications to be added, so I got a free t-shirt.  (As well as a free Digital certificate!)

So, have faith – I’m working on something original. For now, I’m afraid – it’s back to the Link: spam.

In the end it was Will Hawkins [blog, twitter] that convinced me to start using Twitter a bit more – even without the ability to tweet from my iPhone (which I don’t have) it still looks like a valuable tool.

I’ve been using a few AIR applications for Twitter, which for me are a big element in it’s success on the desktop.  I dislike twhirl (and not just because it takes me five attempts to spell it), TweetDeck gets a little annoying with too many searches (but I think that’s less the app and more the way Twitter works) and DestroyTwitter looks really nice – except it lacks the search features of TweetDeck.  So I think I’ll be using TweetDeck and DestroyTwitter for a little while together, until I pick a fave.

Why?

Well actually, this micro-blogging thing has merits.  And not really obvious ones – I mean generally, who cares what useless things people ‘Tweet’ about?  Who cares that 44 thousand people have tweeted about the snow falling?  Not me.  What IS good though, is the fact that it’s so quick and irreverant.  Full-on blogging takes ages to string together sentances to post.  Ok, you get more meaning across, but it takes longer.  Tweeting something takes a few seconds, and with a liberal smattering of keywords, lots of people read it.

The TweetDeck search implimentation is a killer feature.  Setup a search on keywords, and moments after it’s posted, it’ll appear on your desktop.  Want to know if anyone’s talked about something, put in a search and you’ll find out.  I’ve been tweeted twice this week, and I never even knew.

Oh and building on the searches, it’s a good way to seek out people interested in the same things as you, network, make friends, etcetera.

Follow me!

Hey, if you want to see what I tweet about, check out: http://twitter.com/psyked_james

http://www.insideria.com/2008/12/google-native-client-a-game-ch.html

You can download the Internet Explorer 8 Beta from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx.  Overall, it’s quite an interesting update – and most noticeably it shows a distinct push on the innovation front.  Since I’m talking about it, I’ll go over a few of the noticeable new features, and then get onto the specifics of the “accelerator” and “web slices” features.

Imitation

Is the sincerest form of flattery, you know.  IE8 maintains a lot of the IE7 layout, but it has a lot of features that look like they’ve been ripped right out of Google Chrome – right down to the naming conventions and feature sets.  They’ve even toned down the shiny ‘Web 2.0′ graphics for more flat graphics, and used colour-coded tabs and warnings.  It’s looking promising for developers too – instead of the development tools being an add-on, they’re built into the application.  There’s a developer panel with the hierarchical information and inheritance patterns like which Firebug gives Firefox, and the system memory profiling that Chrome offers users.  It’s like Christmas come early.

Oh, and there’s ‘InPrivate’ browsing, aka ‘Incognito’, aka ‘porn-mode’.

Innovation

It appears that Microsoft aren’t content to just sit around poaching ideas from other browsers, either.  Some of the new features are called ‘Accelerators‘ and ‘Web Slices‘.  Never heard of them?  Nope, neither had I.  And neither had many other people – presumably because this appears to all be powered by a new Microsoft-invented technology.

What are Accelerators?

Well, it seems like Accelerators are an enhanced form of the OpenSearch microformat – the one that powers that search box in the top right hand of Internet Explorer and Firefox.  Only now, with a bit of browser integration jiggery-pokery, you can have your search results accessible from the right-click menu of the browser.

You can read all about the technology behind Accelerators (imaginatively called OpenService) at the MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304166(VS.85).aspx

What are Web Slices?

It looks like these are an enhanced form of the good old bookmark.  They certainly seem to appear in the same place as the good old bookmark.  What’s different is that they have a preview window associated with them, and presumably from the development side of things you first have to make a stand-alone portion of the page that can be loaded (much like you would an AJAX page I guess) and then add the IE-specific browser integration stuff to your HTML pages.

You can read the Microsoft Developer Network documentation and tutorials at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956158(VS.85).aspx

Demo:

If you’ve got Internet Explorer 8, then you might want to check out the IE8-enabled ebay demo page: http://ie8.ebay.com/

What do I think of them?

I’m a bit wary of these new features, and what they represent for developers.  We bemoan Internet Explorer for not innovating, but when they do start innovating they bring in all kinds of new formats and technologies which they’ve made themselves.  Which then means we have to go making browser-specific scripts and hacks to make everything work… which we’ll moan even more about – after all, we’ve spent years building around the existing differences in browsers, and have only recently managed to lumber into the light of universal, cross platform, technologies.  And then they throw more in the mix!

In addition to that, I find the whole iconised-rollover thing that the Web Slices have going on is a bit over the top, and will likely annoy the hell out of me if I start seeing it pop up everywhere.  Maybe that’s just the Ebay demo page, but I don’t like the idea.  But then, maybe I’m just disliking change because it’s change.

And the Accelerators?  Nice idea, but a little over the top on the right-click menu, if you ask me.

That’s not to say the ideas are bad or not useful, just more that I don’t like them.  Yet.

I got sent this earlier and found it amusing, so what the heck – enjoy!

Or view it on YouTube: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gdAKgJDahzw