Well, well. It looks like someone has been neglecting their blog.
It happens, I guess. The problem I ran in to as time wore on without a post was that the longer I went, the more epic the post had to be that finally got me started again. A lot of things have happened, and I wanted to talk about all of them. Obviously, the post that I had in mind kept getting longer and longer.
Well, no more. Partly inspired by Russ Casenhiser (via URN), and partly because I just needed to get going again, I present you with this post: a (mostly incomplete) roundup of most of the things I’ve wanted to touch on. Some of it may be old news, some of it may be new. Either way, after this post I can get back on the blogging horse again.
iPhoneification
I got an iPhone in late September. I love it. It’s one of those purchases where, after a couple weeks, I forgot how I lived without it. I was apprehensive about the keyboard, but it turns out that was completely unfounded. I don’t even have to really try to type correctly, because the iPhone’s auto-correct is so amazing. The EDGE network isn’t as slow as everyone says (it’s slow, but come on, people, it’s not that bad). The integration between Safari, Google Maps, and the actual phone features is so convenient, it’s ridiculous. I haven’t regretted buying one for an instant.
“It’s Sproket, not socket!”
I joined the Sprokets team sometime a few months ago. This experience has been a revelation for me. I’d never worked with more than one other person on a project before, so coming on board with a team like Sprokets was, while a little intimidating at first, ultimately a huge breath of fresh air. It’s allowed me to concentrate on honing my front-end skills, and collaborating with other skilled developers always helps me improve across the board. It also lead me to a new way for me to format my CSS, so watch for a post on that in the future.
Leopardosity
I pre-ordered Leopard, and installed it as soon as I got it. Again, a new Apple product that I love. Leopard gave me Time Machine, Screen Sharing, a new sidebar in Finder, major improvements in Spotlight, and Spaces.
Spaces could use some improvement, especially when you mix Spaces and traditional, cmd-tab application switching, but it’s still awesome. I keep all of my chatting applications in one space, Coda in one space, etc. It’s nice.
The new sideboard just plain old rocks.
I’ve also been using Spotlight for launching applications/documents/websites (a la Quicksilver), which turns out to be surprisingly fast and efficient, even for just-downloaded-and-installed applications. It’s real cool.
Portfoliofy
Finally, I’m in the process of reworking my portfolio. This site has a distinct lack of Javascript, but I figured since that was a large part of my skill set, I should include at least a little bit on my site. The portfolio is now set up slideshow-style. I’ll be working on it more now, and there are some existing issues (it looks a little off in Safari, and I haven’t even begun to test it in legacy browsers), but it’s fun so far.
So, what now?
I’ve got some ideas. I’m going to try to start a once-per-week blogging schedule as far as articles go (I know, I know, there is no try, do or do not, etc…), and I’m going to step up my linking. All in all, I’m feeling good about the whole thing.
We’ll see what happens.
