Safari for Windows, and for the iPhone

Steve Jobs’s keynote today at WWDC is the sound of the other shoe dropping. All that griping about whether the iPhone would be opened to third party apps just went out the window. There is a third-party platform in the iPhone, and it’s called Safari. Which, incidentally, will now be available for Windows.

As a product manager, this sounds like my supported platform matrix breaking wide open. As a Windows user at work, this sounds like trumpets from heaven.

As a Mac user, it sounds like it did when iTunes and the iPod first came to Windows. New audiences for technologies on the Mac are a good thing because they tend to drive attention, and resources, to those technologies.

Back to the iPhone thing: this sounds strongly like Apple is making a bet on web application development being the future, at least for phones. Based on the explosion in Dashboard widget development, I’d say they may have a point. Being able to code in HTML+CSS+JavaScript has its advantages for a large number of tasks. Interestingly, games are not among the tasks that the AJAX stack has historically excelled at. I wonder if that means that the iPhone will be a games free platform, or if the partnership that Apple announced today with EA will bring further developments in that direction?

Music articles for June 11, 2007

Nice crop of reviews and other music related pieces today:

Blogaversary VI

Six years ago today, I sat at a computer in the Seattle suburbs and updated this site, thinking I would manage to update it again only under extreme duress; hence the optimistic title Quarterly Update (I). A funny thing happened shortly thereafter, and I got the blogging bug. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

Oh, this blog and I have had our ups and downs: three redesigns in the first three years; periods of six posts a day and periods of a post every six days; posts about my family, technology, music, and beer; and our dogs and our house. And occasionally I might have written something worth linking to.

I’ve been through periods where I watched my hit counts and my referrers several times a day. Where I despaired if my month over month readership fell. Where I treasured reciprocal links like signs of friendship.

These days? Well, last year I was a little bummed over the fact that my frequency of posting was falling off. In retrospect that was an inevitable fallout of the Sony Boycott blog period, when I was updating two blogs several times a day. But I also think it was a year ago that I first decided that the important thing wasn’t post frequency or readership, blogrolls or PageRank. It was the writing.

So from here on out I think I’ll just keep writing. One post at a time.

After all, this blog isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. (For one thing, no one’s kissing the writer in Wellesley.) It’s more like breathing.