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As another year draws to a close, its perhaps time to take a look back at what has been happening and of course, expectations for the coming year. Plus, now that I've finished my last big social engagement before new years, it seems as though I have some time on my hands!

2007, a look back

One of the big things that has happened this year was of course the announcement and launch of the iPhone. If you have managed to miss that one, then I can only imagine the amount of beer you must have been drinking to dull the outside world!

The iPhone

I have one, its a sexy phone, and in many ways I think has got people thinking about different ways we can interact with our technology, rather than relying on old conventions. The iPhone has also, I think, started to really drive a shift in how network operators look at data. In the US it has let to mobile operators taking the first steps towards embracing the concept of 'unlimited' data; whilst in more advanced European markets we are seeing greater competition between operators and also a push towards creating ubiquitous wifi access plans for customers. Its not the best phone in the world, with no support for things I have been used to, such as MMS. Plus, it has a really rubbish camera compared to my previous Sony Ericsson Cybershot, but its sheer usability would make me hard to take that step back.Hopefully, this will be the catalyst for more cool and innovative devices over the next year.

Operating System Wars

February marked the release of Windows Vista, which no-one seemed to notice. With many early adopters going back to XP, it seems as though Microsoft tried to bite off a bit too much with this one, ending up delivering an operating system which sucks resources and alienates existing users with its new features. October marked the release of OS X Leopard from Apple, which a few more people seemed to notice. With many early adopters going back to Tiger, it seems as though Apple perhaps let this cat out of the page a bit too early, delivering an operating system that adds many fantastic incremental enhancements but at the sometime has managed to alienate existing users with a slew of annoying bugs.

The Social Geek

One of my personal highlights has been the explosion of geek events over the past year - from the usual skillswaps and networking sessions to wine and cider tastings. I'm not sure if this has just been a Brighton thing, but it is fantastic to be working in an industry with so many diverse, skilled and interesting people.

Another Bubble?

Its been like the late nineties all over again, with massive investments in technology and innovative web applications springing up left right and center. Too be honest, I think its a serious problem as soon there will be no domain names left! We already have web applications dropping vowels ll vr th plc, Shakespr would turn in his grave! One thing I've noticed is that innovation still seems to be in place, but this time around many of the business models seem to be a lot more conservative. Hopefully because of this, we are not on the brink of another crash.

Micro-whats?

Last year, one of my predictions was that microformats would be one of the next big things to hit us this year. Looking back, I seem to have got that one a bit wrong. Whilst many sites have implemented them into their markup, I think various community issues and the lack of any decent applications which consume them; has really hit hard. Although they serve a worthy purpose, putting a semantic structure around complex data types and this making them easier to parse and detect, I don't think they are going to be the next big thing. For a start there is very little consensus around many of the specifications in development, hindering their adoption and leaving developers to go and mark up their data in their own way. Instead, the next big thing I think is going to be data detection at the OS level. One of the cool things about Leopard is how you can hover over an e-mail signature and automatically import a person into your address book, with excellent accuracy. No strings or hCards involved! Rather than relying of developers to standardize on a markup sub-format, lets put more energy into recognizing data. I would expect Apple's data detection technology to work its way into Safari and other applications soon enough.

2008, the year ahead

So what about 2008, lets have a look.

Browser Wars

The recent legal challenge to Microsoft, by Opera Software, over Internet Explorer's poor standards compliance is an interesting one. I think ultimately it is a bit pointless, but we should also realize that Microsoft are in a position to do something substantial with their browser. For a start, IE8 has a new rendering engine which passes the Acid2 test - that in itself is an big win for web developers everywhere. What could really be game changing is if that engine was in fact Webkit - lets stop it with proprietary rendering engines each with their own quirks and embrace common platforms, giving web developers of the future a few less things to worry about!

AIR Heads

Q1 will see the release of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which I have been excited about for a while. Mainly because it offers a viable and straightforward route for web developers to create widgets and applications for the desktop. With the ubiquity of the Flash player, and the many exciting developments this year and on the board for the Flash Platform, I can see AIR doing well.What makes me so positive about this is the open relationship Adobe are forging with the development community. Proactively seeking input and critique of their software and strategies, and at the same time releasing things such as Flex and AMF as open source. Things have definitely changed for the better.

Personal Stuff

On a personal note, 2008 should be interested for two reasons. The first being that I have recently accepted a new role, one which should open the door for some interesting projects and technology work. Sadly, it does also mean I will be leaving Brighton (I'll be back!) for the shiny lights and hustle of New York City - a nice adventure! The second item has been on the cards for most of the past year, I have a book coming out later in the year dedicated to Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR which I have been writing with my good friends David and John. Quite exciting, though Amazon continually seem to be discounting it, which may not be a good sign! Get your pre-orders in today! Also on the drawing board is a blog redesign, which I have been working on for a while... watch this space!

Often we look at the world from a single perspective, assuming that it is the only perspective which exists. Its very easy to fall into this trap, and a lot more difficult to get out of it. Yet if we begin to look at things from a different perspective then it can open up many new doors to us - wether that be creatively or professionally. It can push you towards trying new things, improve relationships and collaboration.

Now before everyone thinks that I have decided to become a management consultant, let me explain... I have just spent the past few days at Flash on the Beach learning new things, meeting interesting people, crashing speaker parties and generally being inspired. It was really a tremendous conference and a big thanks to all the organizers and speakers for making it what it was.

One of the speakers who inspired me in particular was Chris Orwig who wowed us with some amazing photography and some inspirational advice. He used the example of two photo's, both of the same object - a person and a car set against the backdrop of a beach. The difference was that one photo was taken at eye level, and the other whilst kneeling on the ground. This brought a totally different perspective to the scene, a different feel, and a sense of scale. Whereas previously the man appeared larger than the car, now he was dwarfed by it.

Such a small thing made a huge difference, and I think especially in my field of interactive design and development this is especially true. Lets face it, these days it is easy to build a web app, but it is increasingly difficult to build an amazing web app.

If we look at some of the more special sites, we can see what makes them special - they have been built considering a different perspective - the developers have knelt down and look at it from a different angle, which ultimately feeds and defines the user experience.

From now on, I am going to make a concerted effort to kneel and I would encourage everyone reading this to do the same.

I have a bit of an adrenaline rush at the moment following Adobe's fantastic PokerCoder event which was held in London last night. It was a fantastic chance to network... whilst playing poker. A big thank you to Sean McSharry and everyone from Adobe who organized the event and made the whole thing possible, it was a refreshing twist on the usual geek event and hopefully will be the first of many!

I didn't do too badly, making it onto the final table through a strategy which weaved elements of strategy, cunning and sheer luck! Unfortunately losing to a pair of three's in a slightly misguided assumption that the other guy was bluffing, and simply leveraging his huge pile of chips to intimidate! I was also slightly intimidated when someone else pointed out that one of my fellow finalists was actually a professional poker player and not a Flash developer as I had previously assumed. Oh well, on the bright side, at least I didn't get knocked out on one of the early rounds with a pair of aces. I like to think I brought some glory to the Brighton contingents valiant efforts.

Well... Leopard arrived this morning, and I have to admit it felt a bit like Christmas had came early! Having absolutely no self control, I just had to install it straight away.

The install process was totally painless, taking around half an hour to upgrade the existing installation of Tiger on my MacBook. Once complete, the machine rebooted and that was it. Totally painless, no problems whatsoever, and I was left on my new desktop.

Now my new desktop was very much the same as my old desktop, with a few notable differences - the menu bar no longer had rounded corners and was now semi-transparent and my dock was now a bit more 3D, with a few extra icons. Nothing too major.

In fact, one can be forgiven for being a bit underwhelmed by the upgrade - unlike upgrading versions of Windows, things still looked and functioned in what appeared to be the same way. Its not until I started poking around that I began to see the extent of the changes within Leopard.

than anything large, it is the little things which make Leopard worthwhile - Stacks in the dock make it easier to keep your desktop tidy, the many enhancements to Finder (notably CoverFlow and QuickLook) greatly enhance the experience of browsing and managing files and Spaces helps you to manage virtual desktops. You can now also create ad-hoc widgets from within Safari - which is quite neat, and which I will be blogging about later this week.

As of yet, I haven't had a chance to try out the Time Machine, though I am hoping it will get me into the habit of backing up files.

Other enhancements seem a bit more superficial - stationary in Mail, for when you have that urge to send HTML emails, and visual effects in iChat - probably not the kind of features I will find myself using.

So, is there anything which annoys me? I will probably add to this list over the next few days, but at the moment the main annoyances seem to be visual for me - the new window chrome seems a tad dark, and I'm not too keen on the ridiculously huge drop shadows and translucent menu's - wether they will grow on my still remains to be seen.

Is there anything which is incompatible? So far I have only found a single application which doesn't seem to work - Aventail Connect VPN Client - which is slightly annoying. If anyone has a solution, please leave a comment!

Worthwhile? For all of the UI/UX experiences, probably. As many reviewers have said, Leopard is not revolutionary, however it is evolutionary and provides some welcome new features - most of which may not be immediately obvious, but which hopefully make the day to day experience of using a Mac more enjoyable.

Thanks to everyone who sent me an email or left a comment following my earlier post on Social Finance. It turns out there are several applications out there which offer some kind of social financial management functionality, notably Wesabe and Mint (No, not the Web analytics package.. or the credit card!

Wesabe tries to build a community around finance, offering financial tips and groups where members can exchange stories and advice. It also provides a Firefox extension which can screen-scrape your transactional data from a given bank's internet banking interface for upload into the system - from there you get a greater degree of analytics functionality. In theory, all banks are supported, suggesting some clever data analysis things going on.

Mint is entirely analytics driven, without the groups aspect, and with a much slicker "Web 2.0 style" interface. Rather than using a plug-in to gather data, you hand over your user-name and password, and the web app goes off and imports your data, one would assume using a similar method of screen-scraping, however currently only supporting US-based institutions.

Both of these applications pose an interesting question - would you trust them with not only your financial information, but your login credentials for these institutions?

From a financial institutions perspective, I can't see any support for these applications. The fact that a customer's security is being compromised takes a back seat to the fact that said institution can no longer cross-sell products and services whilst a customer is managing their account. In fact, Mint actually analyzes a user's data and recommends the best credit cards and savings accounts, which may be from a totally different financial institution.

From a marketing perspective, this is a major blow, and nullifies one of the main advantages a financial services institution when it comes to marketing to their customers - the knowledge of spending habits which allows for sophisticated targeting of content and offers. All of this information is now in the hands of the third party and may be being used to sell competing products.

If we look from the customer's perspective, its great - they are often getting a better financial management experience than the systems provided by their banks and credit card companies, especially when it comes to spend analysis; in addition there is independent financial advice on savings and investments.

The big question however is trust.Mint is not a bank, neither is Wesabe - they are start-ups and they are also not governed by the industry regulation and financial guidelines of the financial provided - would you trust them with your credentials?

I think it is something which I would be somewhat cautious about, considering my credentials would likely be stored in less-secure environment than my financial data, held by my bank.Also, assuming I give my credentials, I wouldn't really want such a company storing copies of my data. Again, I think its all about accountability in the event of data loss. If say HSBC, Barclays or American Express get hacked and my data is compromised, I would likely have a greater degree of recourse than if, say, cached copies of all my transactions were swiped off the servers of a start-up, whom really I shouldn't have gave my details too in the first place. My financial providers would probably be sympathetic, but also remind me that I should not be sharing my login credentials - something which could affect liability in the case of fraud.

So, what is the solution?

As a consumer, I want access to my data and the ability to slice and dice it however I wish. If this is provided by the financial institution or a third party, I'm not too concerned, provided that it is both secure and adds value.

I think financial institutions need to be aware of this, and also realize that often outfits such as Mint are in a better position to add the value - be it due to technological competence or because its cheaper to let someone else spend the time developing these capabilities. In addition, if a bank goes of and developers their own version of Mint, it makes the social aspect more difficult to develop, not to mention the fact that we would be looking at silos of data rather than open data - can you imagine American Express allowing Citibank and Bank of America customers to import their account data?

To enable this, the solution is simple - Open API's to banking platforms. Something which third party developers can use in order to retrieve data in a consistent manner with a well-thought out security model. As well as providing token-based authentication, a Flickr-like model could be adopted, requiring users to log in and authorize specific applications which request access to data. This could be controlled through the standard e-banking interface, adding an extra layer of security and also ensuring that customers know what they could potentially be getting into when they allow their data to be exposed in this manner.Now all we need is for one bank to stick their head out and implement something like this... In fact, there is a great opportunity to establish a standard here , which can be adopted across the industry. Also, an Open API also makes it a lot easier for a financial institution to make data available throughout its website or in other applications such as desktop widgets.We aren't going to solve the marketing loss quite so easily. This could either mean one of two things - either I need to think some more, or perhaps we are approaching the online channel in the wrong way when we consider cross-sell, especially since we are dealing with a web of data. I would welcome thoughts here.

Social software is the current 'big thing' on the web, with many companies developing products and services around the concept of social interaction. There are dedicated social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook, for both business and pleasure. Applications such as Flickr, LastFM and Dopplr are adding the social aspect to photography, music and travel - bringing people together and encouraging participation and sharing. We have virtual worlds forming in the shape of Second Life, with people coming together for social and economic gain.

Beyond this, many data owners and providers are opening their services, allowing 3rd parties easy and secure access to data stored.Finally, we have data aggregators such as MeeCard, and to some extent applications built on top of many of these social platforms such as Facebook. These pull together data from all of these sources, social or not, and make it available in a single place. Perhaps for slicing and dicing, perhaps for publishing.

But, in the midst of this informational and social revolution, there is still one industry which is actively avoiding any steps in this direction - I do of course speak of financial services.Now, before you think I am suggesting that people begin publishing their financial history on the web, I'd like to clarify that this is not what I am alluding to - privacy and security will always be a major concern whenever we consider personal data, but these requirements do not exclude openness and social attributes if carefully thought out.

Social Finance

Social Finance could be the next revolution in an industry which has traditionally been closed. In the language of Flickr, I see massive potential in Massively Multiplayer Financial Management. People, coming together, making the management of your finances easier and simplifying the classification of your data.

The Game

One of the things I liked most about LinkedIn was the way the system gave you feedback in order to encourage and actively solicit participation. Statements such as "Your Profile is 45% complete, try adding more contacts to increase completeness" really played on my competitive side, encouraging me to update my profile and use various functions of the site. It gave me a challenge, something to play for.

Why not the same with my finances? "67% of people with a similar spending profile to you are saving more each month. Why not start a savings account?". Here we are incorporating social data, whilst keeping the specifics of that data totally confidential. I'm surprised why no banks have really caught onto this - its fantastically useful as I can rank myself against my demographic, and hopefully better manage my finances. In addition, its a fantastic way to cross-sell relevant products.

Tagging Transactions

Tagging is another aspect of Social Finance which immediately comes to mind; I spend some time each month looking at my statement, yet its hard for me to get a birds eye view of the kind of things I am spending my money on.

Although many merchants on my statement are categorized, these categories are often not as specific as I would like, and also are categories which makes more sense to the financial provider than they do to me! Lets use the power of user's to tag merchants into categories, that can be fed as tag bundles into visualization utilities - letting me slice and dice my data so that it is more valuable to me.

These are just two possibilities which spring to mind, I am sure there are many more.

Why has this not happened already?

Its not hard to see the value in these ideas - they work well towards the goals of promoting customer loyalty, adding value to products and services; they can help cross-sell complimentary products and implemented well can provide a compelling user experience.From my perspective, working within the financial sector, I would say the primary reason is fear of risk.

Its an interesting situation, where every company wants to be the market leader, but very few financial service providers want to take risks when it comes to technology - they instead wish to be fast followers.

The risks are obvious - if a new technology endeavor goes wrong, then it means a lot of bad press. Especially if it goes wrong in such a way that it compromises the privacy and security of the end consumer. Cost is not so much an issue, with the budget of many a start-up being freely spent on managerial off-sites.

The benefits are also obvious as we have seen. Its about time someone stepped up to the table and embraced the idea of Social (and secure) Finance.I had planned to write a bit more around Open Data in finance, but its getting late - I shall continue this another time. Good night!

Following on from Barcamp a few weeks ago, I have finally gotten around to tidying up my slides, so here they are in all their glory..

• High Performance RIA's (3.5mb PDF)

As the title suggests, I presented on various performance tips for developing Rich Internet Applications, which I have blogged about here previously. The session itself seemed to go quite well, with some good audience participation and feedback - I would definitely recommend the whole barcamp experience, it was a fantastic weekend.

This week I discovered a fantastic Firefox plug-in called MeeTimer by Andy Mitchell, which actually helps me be more productive. Well.. I say this week, I have actually had it installed for a while, but have just found the motivation to configure and use it.

How it works is simple, it tracks the amount of time that you spend on individual websites, and allows you to group them by category. So, the company intranet may be classed as work, whereas hours whittled away on Facebook fall under the category of procrastination. All of this data is captured, and is available for your scrutiny. I'm also told that the next version will have lots of new features for slicing and dicing this data - including a quick slick Flex-based dashboard for visually exploring your data.

In addition to simple tracking, MeeTimer takes a pro-active role in making you productive, blacking out pages and adding pop-up's to links - "Warning! You have already spent 4.4% of your working week poking your friend's on Facebook, perhaps you should be working?".

Its really quite cool, and its active deterrents really set it apart from other pieces of software which attempt to track the time spent in-front of the web browser.

For me I think that was the key to its usefulness, as it is far too easy to get carried away either on the likes of Facebook or even on geeky sites such as Ajaxian, which I often visit to keep up with the latest goings on in the JavaScript world. This is definitely a plug in which I will be keeping installed as I attempt to organize my life!

As I write this post, I am feeling totally knackered after having just finished with dConstruct and Barcamp Brighton. What can I say? It has been a fantastic five days, starting with Leisa Reichelt's Collaboration, Creativity and Concensus workshop on Wednesday and ending with powerpoint karaoke on Sunday evening.

This year's conference continued the excellence of the year before, and done an excellent job at reinventing itself - focussing this time around on user experience, rather than just simply the world of Web 2.0 and API's. Another fantastic chance to network and meet other people in the industry, and of course, another opportunity to demonstrate how much I hate my liver at the pre and after parties. (Fortunately, this time around I did not end up paddling around on the sea during the wee hours of the morning!).

Barcamp swiftly followed. Being a Barcamp virgin, I was not really sure what to expect, but ended up enjoying the experience - stay tuned for my presentation slides as soon as I have tidied them up a bit. It was great to chat to interesting people and learn about diverse topics - from Scuba Diving to Mac OS X server.

So, a good time all around.I could go on and write about each presentation and session in detail, but too be honest I don't see the value in that - most speaker slides are available elsewhere online, and many other people have already blogged about them. Instead, I'm going to talk about what the experience meant to me, what I got out of it and where I am going to take it.

What do I do?

As a web designer/developer and general geek, I've often had a lot of ambiguity in my job title - it certainly doesn't describe what I do in any adequate way, and often I end up almost muddling about doing bits and pieces of everything, not totally sure what I do, or where I want to go.

Organization size plays a part in this, and this ambiguity is definitely more common larger organizations, where there are generally a handful of generic roles which mainly exist for Human Resource purposes. In addition, definitely in organizations where web is not the core competency, you tend to end up with teams disproportional to the overall company size or customer base, who end up almost 'muddling' their way through and doing bits and pieces of everything.

In smaller organizations, roles are often much more well defined, however also maintaining the multi-disciplined balance. You have Information Architects, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers and so on, but you find that many team members have a much broader range of skills.

For me, I want to reduce this ambiguity, and really want to focus more on interaction and experience design; rather than 'muddling' and fighting fires. How I am going to do this yet, I'm not sure, but I certainly want to narrow my focus a bit (whilst still continuing much of the casual geeking!).

How do I do it?

Process has been a major focus of my attention over the past year - looking at ways we can improve communication, collaboration and partnership; how we can change our core processes in order to be more iterative, agile, adaptable and delivering better quality at reduced cost and with a quicker time to market. Looking back on it all, I'm quite surprised that I haven't either pulled all my hair out in despair or ran away screaming yet!

During one of the Barcamp sessions, the Clearleft guys provided a fascinating insight into how they work and their internal development processes. In addition, Leisa's brainstorming and collaboration techniques were inspiring. For me, its so eye opening to see how other organizations who perform so well in the industry actually go about things. In other ways, its a bit depressing to see how much better they do things compared to how my company works, but its always good to have a challenge!

Andy Budd brought up an excellent point, which is the importance of engaging with your client on a business level. So rather than talking in design or development terms, you should be talking about the core business needs and how they are met in a particular design. This is something which I totally agree with, and have had great success with, and is one of the more important things you need to remember when dealing with clients - the fundamental why you are doing something the way that you are. If you begin talking in specific design jargon, then you lose the common language which you can use with your business partners, and things get diluted. Client facing developers and designers need to be able to understand the business domain in order to develop the most effective solutions.

One of the things I will be thinking around is this whole process aspect - especially with regard to how they can be applied within a larger organization, with global teams and often less specialized expertise when it comes to the web. Where I can, I will also be blogging about this about particular experiences and tips.

On a personal level, I also want to spend more time actually thinking about the audience for whom I am designing and developing for - developing persona's, brainstorming, collaboratively working with clients and just spending more time in general on the 'discovery' phase of a particular project.

Ryan Carson also had some interesting things to say on how it is completely possible, and often a good idea, to compress five days into four - leaving you with a four day working week. Thats quite interesting, though I can't help feeling that due to the global nature of what I do, it would never work. However, it has got me thinking about how I can work more effectively and manage my time so that I actually have more time for exploring my own interests, discovering new technologies and skills, and also doing everything else I have set out to do!

I'm actually quite looking forward to this next week, what with dConstruct and BarCamp, it promises to be an eventful few days here in Brighton!

Last year dConstruct inspired me on many different ways, and also gave the opportunity to meet lots of new and interesting people working in the web design industry. It definitely encouraged me to do more writing and blogging, as well as actual software development. This time around, i am hoping for more of the same, though hopefully less of a hangover the next day, as I need ti be fresh for BarCamp!

I'm looking forward to speaking at BarCamp, ever since Skillswap I have been looking at opportunities to share my thoughts/rantings with the general community - its just a shame I cannot talk about some of the really cool things I have been doing at work!

In terms of presentation, I am torn between talking about iPhone web development or RIA performance... We shall see how I feel next week - see you at dConstruct!