Author Archives: Brett

Talking at a seminar on New Media

Hello to all those who saw me talk at CID’s seminar today. Here’s the slides and my notes for the talk I made:

“The New Internet: Communicating on Today’s Web” Slides

I had a great time sharing about the exciting new ways to get your audience involved, and the feedback I got from you all was really great — feel free to ask questions in the comments here — cheers!

People, you don’t need to play to Big Media’s rules anymore — the rules are changing, and if your audience is discerning, they’ll follow you as long as you’ve got the goods.  But with great power comes great responsibility: use the tools wisely 🙂

Twitterlex 1.2

Yup, it’s patch time — Twitter.com announced that they were going to standardise on 140 characters maximum for everyone, so I changed Twitterlex to reflect that change. I also made a few minor cosmetic tweaks, and have now released Twitterlex 1.2. Enjoy 🙂

Firebug goes 1.0 and out of beta!

Congratulations to Joe Hewitt, developer of Firebug, the best of breed “console / inspector / debugger / monitor for HTTP / JavaScript / DOM / CSS / AJAX“.

The extension for Firefox just went 1.0 final (heh, a Web 2.0 tool coming out of beta), and that’s a big deal. Joe has been working on Firebug for just over a year, and it has become a tool more indispensible than even Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension!

What? You don’t have either of these?! You call yourself a web developer? Let me guess, you still think IE is the only browser worth developing for, and heck, you probably believe that developing to Web Standards is just elitist acadamia… get with the program. Why leave the interpretation of your code to tag-souped chance?

… Eh-erm. Sorry about that monkey I had to get off my back. I heard a rumor yesterday and my anger has found its vent.

But seriously, all those IE die-hards that are still out there today should be amazed at what tools our industry-standard (as opposed to the de-facto-standard) web browser we call Firefox makes available, let alone makes possible.

Since Mozilla 0.7, I’ve found it’s more time-efficient to develop in a Gecko-based browser, then bug-fix for everything else — because it’s much harder and stressy to start in IE and bugfix to Gecko. I’ve found this true for all the technologies: CSS, JavaScript, XSL, AJAX, and now SVG

Viva la revolución! Viva la web standards!

Twitterlex v1.0 beta

After my friend Chris introduced me to Twitter, and I discovered that many big names in the web industry are using it regularly, I’ve embraced the Twitter lifestyle. If you’ve not used Twitter yet, it’s a service that you can use to do ‘nano-blogging’ — updates shorter than ~140 characters — from nearly anywhere for free. You can update from the web, from your IM client, or from your phone via SMS text message. But the best part is when you find your friends or people you admire using the system, and receiving their update back through one of those methods mentioned. I’ve got several interesting people on my Twitter friends list — it’s always interesting receiving a text message from them!

Twitterlex 1.0beta Screenshot Front

You can now update from your Mac OS X Dashboard, with my first ever Dashboard Widget Twitterlex. It displays the latest status messages from your friends, and provides a quick access way for you to update your own status easily!

Download Twitterlex dashboard widget