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! (more…)

I see the solution to this problem comprising of three steps - detecting a currency, performing the conversion, and defining the new user interaction model. Being the result-centric person that I am, lets start by taking a look at how this could work in practice.

Designing the Interaction

Skype is an excellent services, and also is the maker of one of the browser plug-ins which I find the most useful. Often when browsing the web, you may be looking for the contact details of a particular person or organization. In fact, you may want to specifically phone them. Skype offers the ability to make phone calls from your PC, wouldn’t it be great if you could click on a phone number on a web page and have it function exactly like a normal hyperlink but instead of loading a new page, it starts dialing.Thats exactly what the Skype browser plugin does, highlighting numbers on a page and adding additional menu options, allowing you to start a Skype conversation directly from within the browser. Why not do the exact same thing for currencies?We are talking about an interface which is very action orientated, exposing the key functionality which most uses want to access. Like Skype, I think selective highlighting and a context menu would do the job quite nicely. I’m envisioning something like this…In addition to highlighing and context menu’s, on a global level, a user should also be able to setup their local currencies and other preferences. If we want to get more advanced, we could also add the ability to automatically perform currency conversions or a mechanism to convert all the currencies on a page in a single swoop.

Performing a Conversion

This is probably the easier of the three problems to solve, or at least, so it seems. Simply make a call to a Web service which performs currency conversion. Does one of these exist? Good question, and one which I think warrants some further investigation.Implications to consider are that any solution would be dependent on this service in order to perform conversions, so it may be prudent to consider service abstraction and redundancy. Perhaps configure the solution to use several different services which provide similar functionality, so if one is down, you have a choice of fallbacks.

Detecting Different Currencies

This is an area where Skype has it easy, there are only a finite number of ways to represent a phone number. Granted they may look slightly different, but they are still easy to find through use of regular expressions. Currencies add many more complexities, one of them being that the same symbol may be used to represent different currencies. For an example, we only need to look as far as the dollar, be it American, Canadian, Australian or from even further afield. What we need here is a microformat.If we look at the microformats wiki, we can see that there are a handful of different proposals for a currency microformat. We can also see that there has been little recent activity, which brings up a pet peeve of mine - there is a lot of focus on hCard, hEvent and other microformats which too be honest are better described as macroformats, and less focus on some of the more basic formats which have the potential to be even more useful, solving issues of parsing.Anyway, this aside, a currency microformat would solve the problem of detection. But in turn introduces a new problem - adoption.Without widespread adoption by web developers, microformats are essentially useless. In the context of currency conversion, this is indeed true as the detection model I’m proposing is dependent on e-commerce sites adopting the microformat. Something which is probably not going to happen. Actually, that may be a bit pessimistic, I can see the likes of Amazon, Yahoo and Google getting onboard but thats it. Even if microformat love explodes this valentines day, you are still dependent on the vendors of e-commerce software sharing this love, and the users of said software upgrading to the microformat loving versions. Perhaps sometime in 2012 then we can depend on microformats alone, but for now we need other options.For detection of currencies I propose three methods:

• Keep an eye out for whatever becomes the officially recognized currency microformat.
• Keep an eye out for all the proposed currency microformats until an official format is decided upon (unless one of the proposals would impair parser performance).
• Keep an eye out for currency symbols and values, making an assumption based on the website URL. So, for example on a .ca site, assume any dollar symbol is referring to a Canadian Dollar amount.

So, where do we go from here?

Good question! I’d love to see these ideas made into a Firefox plugin, and I might even take up the challenge if I ever get some time to work on it! If anyone out there is inspired and wants to help me, then drop me an email. (more…)

2006 was the year we finally had a proper update to Internet Explorer - I’m sure everyone would agree that it has been long overdue. Internet Explorer 7 has fixed a number of the more irritating bugs faced by developers, such as the CSS box-model implementation and transparent PNG support. Its just a shame that most of us still have to support earlier versions on their websites! For the users, features such as tabbed browsing and RSS have finally been made available.Firefox 2.0 was also released in November, I’d love to have been more excited by this, but too be honest I see 2.0 as more of a merging of some of the more popular features which were previously available as standalone extensions.So, what do we have to look forward to in 2007? Good question. Firefox 3.0 is on the horizon, though the only thing which excites me is the promise of improved OS X integration and much better font rendering. There will microformat support, probably derived from Operator, though hopefully with a touch of WebCards! I think on the browser side of things, there isn’t really much scope left for innovation - its more polishing the features we all know and love. Any comments? (more…)