Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

So, Steve Jobs gives us web developers a double shot today with “One More Thing” of Safari on 3.0 on Windows and a “One Last Thing” of iPhone application development being ‘web standards’ based — just a another HTML, CSS & Ajax application.

While its absolutely great that Apple is embracing web standards in this way — great on many levels not the least of which is that it allows me as a web developer a few new avenues for work opportunities — I’m still left with a bit of a feeling of unease and anxiety.

Why? Though its great that so much can be done with these same technologies I also worry about deployment and having to target so many different specific platforms and manage different versions of the same site. Desktop browsers, WAP browsers, Ajax enhanced mobiles, Wii.. what’s next?

Now don’t jump all over me and tell me that no one is forcing me to create different targeted versions of a site or application or that the iPhone will read a standard web page just fine — I get that. Its just that in reality the need, requirements or desires to tailor user experiences to the given platform or form factor dictate that this can’t always be the case.

So while we’re deploying all the same technologies, we’re still designing, managing multiple interfaces to the applications we’re asked to build.

P.S. Is there a DOM events documentation floating around yet for the iPhone’s touchscreen gesture based interaction?

...which almost took a spill this afternoon when one of the non-magnetic other cords got caught in the arm of my chair as I rolled away from my desk.

Time to look for a bluetooth USB hub, and wireless ethernet cable. Wish me luck.

For digital photographers, particularly people shooting any sort of volume of RAW files you may find you need a better workflow for ‘development’ and organization of the photographs then simply storing the files on your file system and then opening a few at a time in Adobe Photoshop. Into that gap has come a few new applications including Apple’s Aperture. More recently, Adobe has finished work on its Lightroom application and moved it from a long public period to an official 1.0 release.

With that release two professional photographers and bloggers, Micah Walter and Michael Clark, have committed their time and expertise to putting both Aperture and Lightroom through the paces on a typical week or so of shooting and editing.

• Micah Walter’s shootout intro
• Michael Clark’s intro

Both photographers have started posting their day to day thoughts after working with he applications, and the articles are both interesting and informative. Versions and Stacking, for example. Contrast that with posts like Aperture in Somalia, may be a little light on the details that feed your curiosity about the applications they are rich in story and images.

My own application of choice since the first time I used a beta has been Adobe Lightroom, but I have been planning on looking at both Aperture and Nikons own Capture NX before pulling the trigger on the 1.0 license.

I’m pleased to announce the release of my latest little hack for adding microformats support to NetNewsWire (not lite)—Extract Microformats v0.5.

This little script is actually a combination of theme files (css) and applescript to bring a bookmarklet like option that uses Technorati’s microformat services to save hCard or hCalendar data found in the content of feed items. After installation (just copying some files) saving events or contact data is as easy as 1, 2, 3… er… 4.

1 – Find an item with microformat content. Here I’m using a feed from Eventful with items containing events with embedded contact data.

2 – Activate the script

3 – Select what to do with the data

4 – Copy the saved data to your favorite app