In case you were wondering if Gizmodo’s fight with Apple over that ill-gotten iPhone prototype might be affecting their reporting, consult this screenshot from Techmeme, taken at 8:45 p.m. EDT, above.
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“I’m Comic Sans, Asshole!”
That most hated of typefaces, Comic Sans, gets anthropomorphized and bad-assified in Mike Lacher’s piece for McSweeney’s titled, (in)appropriately enough, I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
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Best Phone Case Ever
“Truck Nutz” let you communicate to the world that you’re a bold and sassy guy in a way that words just can’t convey, but what if you don’t have a truck? For that Truck Nutz message without truck ownership, this iPhone case might fit the bill:
Cartoonist Chris Onstad came up with this idea back in January 2006 with this surreal and funny Achewood comic in which Ray Smuckles comes up with “ChatSacks”:
If someone will make one for a Windows Phone 7 device, I’ll buy one of those cases.
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It’s One of the Perks of the Job
The best antidote for a day full of meetings in boardrooms in a suburban office park is to finish it in different surroundings. So when my last meeting on Friday ended with a couple of hours of business day to spare, I made a beeline for one of my favourite “field offices” – Cafe Novo, located across the street from High Park, and a very short walk from home.
The photo above was the view from my “workstation” at 4 p.m. on Friday: the bar facing the roll-up front wall which in turn faces the park. Pictured are the tools of my trade – my trusty Dell Latitude XT2 tablet with the memory maxed out at 5 GB and the so-last-century mechanical hard drive replaced with a solid state one, my favourite portable mouse and an iced mocha.
Working in settings like this is one of the perks of the job.
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Windows Phone Workshops
Windows Phone 7 is coming soon, and we’re holding a couple of full-day workshops to show you its underlying architecture, walk you through its development frameworks, show you how to build apps with Visual Studio Express and sell them in the Marketplace, and then hold a codefest – and yes, it’s free-as-in-beer to attend!
We’re holding two of these workshops, which Yours Truly along with Paul Laberge and Jamie Wakeam will be co-hosting:
- In Mississauga, Ontario (at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters) next Wednesday, June 23rd
- In Richmond, British Columbia (at the Microsoft Development Centre) next Friday, June 25th
Here’s the agenda:
| Time | Session |
| 8:30 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | Check-in, registration and refreshments |
| 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. | Session 1 – Introducing Windows Phone 7 and the user experience – Selling your apps in the Marketplace – The Windows Phone 7 architecture |
| 10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. | Break |
| 10:15 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. | Session 2 – Building Windows Phone 7 apps with Silverlight |
| 11:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. | Session 3 – Building Windows Phone 7 games with XNA |
| 11:45 a.m. – 12:00 noon | Q&A |
| 12:00 noon – 5:00 p.m. | Lunch, followed by the Coding Challenge Bring your laptops, form a team and try your hand at building a Windows Phone 7 app or game in an afternoon! |
| 5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. | Coding Challenge Results Teams will present their apps, one will be selected as the Coding Challenge Champ and will a prize, and we’ll wrap up the day. |
Want in on these workshops? As I said earlier, they’re free – just click the links below to sign up:
Earlier this week, I was asked to make a short video that would be shown during a round table discussion on a hot topic: HTML5 vs. proprietary rich internet app technologies, such as Flash and Silverlight. My video was supposed to take the “RIAs complement HTML” side of the debate, while someone else would produce a video taking the “HTML5 trumps RIAs” side.
My own personal belief is that HTML5 – actually the stack of HTML5, CSS3 and Java/ECMAScript – has closed the interactivity gap between the web and desktop apps and will continue to close it. However, for the time being, there are still cases where HTML5 just can’t cut it – for various reasons, such as performance, browser compatibility or designer-friendliness – and that’s where RIAs shine. Hence I found it rather easy to put together an amusing little video titled HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with Benefits (5:47, YouTube).
I did the production work on Tuesday afternoon and evening using the following tools:
- LifeChat LX-3000 headset as my microphone
- Audacity to record and edit the audio
- Fireworks to edit the pictures
- Camtasia Studio to build and produce the video
- Silvetta piano accordion for the music
Enjoy the video!
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