The Whole Widget

Recently two Edinburgh conferences of interest to me have opened for registration.

The Highland Fling

The Highland Fling is an annual one-day conference aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.

Now in its second year, this years event takes place on Thursday 3rd April at the Symposium Hall, part of the Royal College of Surgeons, and focuses on the topic of "The Browser & Beyond". Here's a summary from the Highland Fling website outlining what will be discussed:

In the world or modern web development we can no longer consider the browser as the end point of our product which is our content. More and more devices and applications are being released that can access our information and more importantly do not even require a browser to do so.

For The Highland Fling 2008 we're bringing into focus how the landscape is changing. API's, desktop apps, ambient devices, mobile and much more are helping us break out of the browser and potentially reaching an entire new audience as a result.

How do we embrace this, how do we take our existing skill set and transpose it into new mediums? How do we expand our skill set? What is our skill set going to be? Where is it all going?

The sessions look quite interesting and I'm particularly looking forward to hearing what Aral Balkan has to say as I saw him at d.Construct in 2006 and was exposed to Flex for the first time.

Scotland on Rails

Coming hot on the heels of The Highland Fling is the inaugural Scottish conference on Ruby on Rails — Scotland On Rails.

This is the first UK-centric Ruby on Rails conference and is a two day event on Friday 4rd and Saturday 5th April. When you consider that this is a regional conference the organisers have pulled off quite a coup with the quality of talent that they have assembled to present.

This will be my first conference I have attended that concentrates more on the back end of developing web applications and I'm looking forward to learning some exciting new things and meeting some interesting people.

If you're attending either of these events don't feel shy about saying hello.

I'm literally stunned by the news that Microsoft has offered $44.6 Billion for Yahoo!I can't say I'm too thrilled with the prospect that popular web apps that I like to use such as Flickr, Upcoming and del.icio.us are going to be owned by Microsoft.Obviously this will have to get approval from the appropriate regulatory body, but if this comes to pass then it looks like Google is going to have some serious competition in the search and web app fields.

Thermo looks like a great tool from Adobe.

"Thermo" is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs.Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

I can't wait to get my hands on it. Watch the videos from Aral Balkan to get an idea as to what it can do.Thermo Sneak Peek at Adobe MAX Day 2 Keynote (Via Aral Balkan)

Interesting times ahead. I may now seriously look into Flex.

Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using “Apollo”.Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

Adobe to Open Source Flex (Via Adobe Labs)

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?

I've just taken the survey. So should you if you work in the web design industry.

Tomorrow marks the inaugural Highland Fling conference in my home town of Edinburgh. The Highland Fling is billing itself as

… an annual one-day conference in Scotland aimed at web developers and businesses with an interest in web standards and accessibility.

and since this checks all the right boxes for me I thought I should really show my face.The theme of the conference is Progressive Enhancement and the list of sessions and speakers looks very impressive. I've seen – or heard – most of these speakers before at d.Construct 2006 and podcasts of various Web Conferences through iTunes so can vouch for the quality of the line-up.As far as I'm aware tickets are still available, so if you think this is of interest to you go register now.

This Friday I'll be attending the d.Construct 2006 Conference in Brighton. d.Construct is best explained by the following quote from this year's website:

d.Construct is an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. The event discusses how new technology is transforming the web from a document delivery system into an application platform.

All the sessions look really interesting but I'm particularly looking forward to Derek Featherstone's session on ‘Accessible Web Applications in a Post Web 1.0 World’ and Thomas Vander Wal's session on ‘Understanding Folksonomy (Tagging that Works)’ as these two sessions are most likely to influence how I go about my day to day work.I noticed on the Backnetwork that I've had my profile pimped by fellow Scot, Gavin Montague. Thanks for the plug Gavin I owe you a pint and obviously, being a true Scot, it will be from the free bar at the after-party. Talking of socialising I'll hopefully be attending the pre-conference get together at Heist if I have time so hope to bump into some of those attending there.

At the start of the week Google accepted my ‘Google Apps for Your Domain’ application and I've finally made the decision to not renew my .Mac account when it expires in a months time. My reasons for this are highlighted below:

Web Presence

Although .Mac allows you to host your site on their servers, they don't allow you to use your own domain name. As I have free server space at my place of work, and full access to the server to configure it how I want, it makes more sense to host my own domain and therefore have a fully featured blog rather than the rather anemic version .Mac offers.

Mail

As much as I love my .Mac mail account I just think the storage quota of 1GB is a bit measly when you consider that you need to share it with your iDisk quota. Added to this is the fact that the other members of my family have e-mail only .Mac accounts and so they only have 50MB of storage. With Gmail each member of my family can have their own user@mydomain.com e-mail address with 2GB of storage each. We can still use Mail.app to access our accounts since Gmail supports POP access and if we are ever on a machine that isn't our own we can use the Gmail web interface to access all of our mail.

Synchronisation

At first I thought that this might have been an area where .Mac would have won hands down, but over the last few months I've found .Mac synchronisation to be flaky at best. I find I can easily keep my computers at work and home synchronised with the information I desire by using Synchronize! Pro X and external firewire drives.Basically, everyday at work I back up files onto portable external firewire drives and take these home with me so that the backups are off site. All I needed to do was create a few new synchronise actions to back up my Address Book database, Calendar files and anything else that I wanted to be available on all of my Macs and then run the same actions periodically at home to update those machines. The only restriction I've found in this process is that it really pays to assign one machine as you master machine and only make changes on that machine.

Photo Hosting

I used to be a big fan of the integration between iPhoto and .Mac, but with the release of the FlickrExport plugin for iPhoto and the purchase of a Pro membership for Flickr I've not used .Mac for photo hosting for a long time. FlickrExport is currently at version 2 and costs £12, but I have been using it since version 1 which was open source and it still serves me well. The source code to version 1 is still available, so if you want to build it yourself and save yourself the cash, you can do so.

Calendars

I've never been a big user of the shared calendars feature of .Mac but by using Google Calendar I can still use this feature. The only restriction to this is that for any shared calendars that I host I must either enter all my data using Google Calendars web interface or periodically upload the iCal calendar file to Google Calendar.

Chat

None of my friends or acquaintances use instant messaging so this isn't a priority for me. All my family can be set up with Google Talk accounts and we can use iChat as our chat client as it supports Jabber. My existing .Mac username will still be valid for AIM chat through iChat once my .Mac account expires.

On-line Backup

One thing that .Mac offers that I can't replicate for free or cheaply is on-line backups of my most important files. However, gDisk does seem to have the potential to allow me to use some of my Gmail storage as a virtual drive and I will be keeping a close eye on this project over the coming months. If truth be told, I barely used iDisk at all because the length of time it took to upload anything to it was prohibitive.

Cost

Finally, this is what it all coms down to. To renew my .Mac membership is going to set me back about £70 for a years membership with all the inherent restrictions and problems that I have mentioned above. Whereas, for the price of a domain name and a Flickr Pro account — about £20 per year — I can have a better and more flexible collection of web applications at my disposal.

So after considering all of the points above it is heavy heart that I must say “Goodbye .Mac”. We had some good times and hopefully if Apple sees fit to give you a much needed upgrade we can be friends again.