The View is Great

I live in the sticks of Arizona, but come to Silicon Valley once a month. I come for a few days at a time. The original reason was to run my Montage Meetup. Then I started thinking, “Well, why I don’t come up a little earlier. This way I can meet up with people in the Valley.” It’s been a few months now and I have to say, I LOVE it.

I’m a Silicon Valley fanboy. I admit it. I’m a geek, so it’s really hard not to be. It’s a magical place to me, but not for all the reasons that most people think. Silicon Valley is home to a lot of great companies. Companies that have generated massive amounts of wealth for their founders and those that fund them. This is one of the few places where you can come in with an idea and get the funding to build it. That’s what most people think about when they hear “Silicon Valley”. However, that’s not why I like this place. If anything, those are the reasons why I left.

The thing I like about the Valley is the rare moments of originality and ingenuity. It’s the proverbial guys in the garage. It’s the guys hacking all night til they drop. It’s all the “Ah ha!” moments that happen in this tiny patch of land.

I visit places of nerd interest here, like eBay, Google, Computer History Museum, etc. This last time, I hit up Mozilla and Xerox PARC. If there’s one thing that the Valley understands is a great setting. Check out these picts.

Bye Twitter

“Twitter, you’re dead to me.”

I have another post in draft that I’m working on, but I needed to get this out of the way pronto.

I was with twitter for quite sometime, but realized that they’re not really here for me. They’re here to make money off of selling my data to advertisers. That’s cool. That’s their biz and I can’t blame them for trying to make a buck. I run my own business, I know how that goes.

However, I don’t like it nor the way they treat 3rd party developers. Therefore, I signed up for App.Net, which is an alternative to twitter that you pay for. The purpose of paying is so App.net knows who its serving: you – the user, not them – the advertisers. I like the idea, so I paid for it awhile back while it was prelaunching. Thing is, I never gave up the twitter.

Shame on me.

3 Things I Live For

Sidenote: Faith and family come before the three things below. That should go without saying, but figured I should say it regardless. You can read up the details on faith and family in this post over on my spiritual blog, if you’re into that sorta thing.

My biz card with a quote I wrote

Our Time Is Short, So Have Fun

I’m not sure what got me thinking on this tangent. It could’ve been my daily analysis of life. It could’ve been me contemplating what to do professionally. Regardless, for some reason, I started to boil down what makes me happy as a person.

For those of you that have met me in person, and hopefully for those of you that just met me via this blog, it’s probably obvious that I’m a simple person with simple pleasures. While I often cloud my life with drama, stress and desires for false happiness (via some new gadget), there’s basically just 3 things that make me happy:

1. Sharing a good meal
2. Getting lost in the written word
3. Learning to solve a new problem

Montage: A Proven HTML5 Framework for App Development

Today, I’ll explain why Montage is great for app development. I’ll also touch briefly on Ninja, the HTML5 Authoring tool, and Screening, the automated testing tool. It’s the existence of these two tools that allow me to throw up the word “Proven” in this post’s title. (Also, if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to read yesterday’s post about why Montage is a great solution for Flex developers looking to join the HTML5 world.)

A year ago, I was given a preview by the Motorola Mobility team behind all this great stuff. During that meeting, many things struck my core:

1. Caliber of the dev team working at Motorola Mobility
2. Thought process that went into the framework design
3. Amount of effort/support put into the project
4. Supporting tools to aid the app developer
5. Experience from building those tools in Montage

As you’ll see, it was the combination of all these things that softened my hardened heart against the HTML5 technology I was wary of. I was completely surprised at that meeting. I expected something different and thought I’d walk away thinking Motorola didn’t get it. Instead, my experience was quite the opposite.

Montage: What Flex Developers Need in a HTML5 Solution

HTML5 Framework by Motorola Mobility

Just like Flex, only HTML5

Montage is a HTML5 application framework released by Motorola-Mobility. It is released under the BSD license and the source is available on github. I first encountered Montage almost a year ago, but was sworn to secrecy at that time. Now, recall, this was before Adobe announced the end of Flex. Once Adobe announced they were giving up on Flex, I wanted to shout from the rooftops about Montage. I even asked the Montage team for permission to hint at something to help calm the Flex Dev masses, but was asked not to, so I didn’t. Well, Montage was finally released publicly today, so now it’s time to share my thoughts and impressions.

Conference Time

I don’t get to travel to many conferences much these days. When I was helping run 360Conferences, we were always going to them because we were running them. However, I find myself traveling less nowadays. April will be the exception though, I’ll be going to 3 conferences that I’m sure will be great!

First off, there is DevConnect, a conference dedicated to the future of the web: video and mobile. This one day show will take place on April 2 in NYC. I’m slowly becoming a pure mobile convert. Other than programming and blogging, everything I do on a computer I do on my iPhone. My iPhone is not only my primary internet connection, but it’s also my primary camera (for stills and videos). All of this points me to the fact that mobile is the future and desktop will be for the few heavy lifting tasks we rarely do. I’ll even go out on a limb and say someday, I’ll probably blog and program on my mobile device even.