I went to Macworld San Francisco 2005 today, and saw several really cool new things, including the iPod Shuffle, the Mac Mini, iWork ’05 and iLife ’05. I also bumped into Phil Schiller, VP of Product Marketing at Apple. Here are some photos from the exhibition floor, but you can see the rest in the Macworld 2005 photo gallery.
In the US, when people ask me what I do, and I tell them, it often doesn’t impress upon them how people in other parts of the world use mobile phones in a completely different way. For about a year now, I’ve had the privilege of building the graphics and UI in one of the web browsers and messaging clients in Vodafone’s new Live! 3G service. Recently, Vodafone Live! 3G launched in Europe, and here are their launch adverts: Vodafone Live! Powered by 3G Adverts. (‘Mimic’ is one of my favorites)
I’ve also helped build other stuff for some of the world’s largest carrier services, Here’s a partial list:
So when you see Hello Kitty animating on one of those services, there’s a fair chance that I helped build that. Nifty :-).
Today, Laszlo released their Rich Internet Applications platform as open source. David Temkin can better describe the importance of this event. LZX fills a big gap in the web applications space, bringing the User Experience bar for web applications (and hell, desktop applications) up to what I consider the right level. Consumer targetted applications should work like their TV and video game counterparts… Macromedia sort of got that, but Macromedia’s application framework support just isn’t quite there yet. (read: it can be done, but it’s painful…)
Downloads are available from Laszlo. In my book, this is a Big Deal<tm>.
