Russell Beattie

My son's class celebrates each birthday by making each child a 'Rock Star' for the week - this includes having a favorite lunch, showing off some favorite items and having a letter from their parents read in front of class.

Yesterday, after reading some rave reviews online, I decided to grab Paper by 53, a new drawing app for the iPad. I've tried lots of drawing apps because both myself and my son like to doodle using the iPad with a stylus (even though I personally suck at drawing). Paper is somehow really different - the smoothing engine is just insanely good.

I joined Yahoo! in 2004, shortly after blowing off Google. Apparently that stupid, stupid mistake surprising post got me noticed enough for Jeremy Zawodny to point out my name to Jerry Yang, then still a Chief Yahoo! and not the CEO, who asked me to come in for an interview. He hired me, and I ended up helping the corporate development team there with mobile strategy (not sure how much was really wanted or needed), giving demos to the C-level execs (e.g.

Since I stopped posting to Twitter and Facebook and start blogging long-form again, I've been 'blogging in the back of my mind' more and more. Do you do that? Actually, I also did it with tweets and status updates as well. Something would be happening in my life or I'd get an idea, and then I'd think of some phrase that I'd use to describe it, and tweak it a bit in my mind if I could feel it was too long or could be said more entertainingly. I was constantly tweeting in my head.

If you have a Windows Mobile 7 phone, and haven't tried out Microsoft Research's TouchDevelop app, you need to stop and go check it out as it's one of the neatest projects I've seen in years. It's a mobile scripting app released last summer that lets you quickly and easily write programs on the handset itself.

So after I watched the Apple keynote today (getting a little more verklempt about the absence of Steve than I'd care to admit), I saw a tweet where someone said that the new Apple TV will run Apps. After frantically searching for more information, I discovered they were mistaken (or I misread) and that the current upgrade is just in the UI and resolution and some nicer chips.

So I grabbed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview last night and installed it on an old laptop to test out. After a surprisingly quick and painless install process, I played around with it for a while trying all the various apps and features. I wasn't on a tablet, so it was just using a normal mouse and keyboard, but I could see how everything worked and/or didn't work. There are definitely some really neat bits to it.

So the fun thing about writing a blog for a decade is that it's sort of like those infinite monkeys in a room with typewriters - eventually you'll get Hamlet. You'll get a lot of garbage as well, but happily you can go back and cherry pick the good stuff out later and say, "Yeah, I thought of that years ago." This is where this post comes in.

As Douglas Adams said: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." I missed my 10th anniversary post... Perusing a decade of my posts and trying to pick good ones from the cruft was entirely too much for me to handle. So after a couple days or so of trying to decide, I trashed my draft, gave up and made a graphic instead. Here's to the next 10! -Russ

A month ago I turned 40. I'm not particularly happy about the fact. I'm penniless, friendless (in the 'someone I can call to bail me out of jail' sense), companionless, and have generally failed to meet any of my personal or professional goals in life - even the downgraded ones after I realized I wasn't going to rule the world sometime in my early 30s.

Amazing, but true - I started my weblog 10 years ago on the 24th of February, 2002. I had my domain and server for a few years before that which I posted handmade HTML pages and at one point used a Wiki, but the actual weblogging started then. For a while it was the biggest thing in my professional life, but that's long since faded away. Still, it's amazing to have had my own spot on the web to write up my thoughts over the years.

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby, "I told you that story to tell you this one." Over the past six months or so, I've been heads down on a couple different web projects which make heavy use of HTML5, and more specifically dynamic, Javascript-templated designs. At first, I have to say I was quite hesitant. It was only a few years ago that I was completely uninterested in Javascript because it wasn't supported by most mobile devices at the time.

Back in 1995, I was working as a junior programmer/consultant for a company called (I kid you not) The Future Now consulting. Having no background in computer programming, I got the job by accident of having previously temped at IBM as a copy writer (befitting my college education in Journalism). Before I left Big Blue, I grabbed some extra Lotus Notes manuals - which were pretty hard to find at the time - and rote-memorized them enough to to find a job as a junior developer.

Apple launched their new iBooks Author and iBooks 2 apps today. After I watched the keynote video, I downloaded everything, and some sample books, to try out and see what they came up with. The new book format is pretty nice and has some interesting features, but honestly, it's nothing that a decent web developer couldn't do with HTML5. That's the point of course - that you don't *need* web developers to create great looking interactive books, and that's great.

To say I'm excited about the rise in popularity of eBooks is probably an understatement. Not that I'm an overly avid reader, I've just been waiting for eBooks to become mainstream for a good decade now. Back in the early 2000s, I was trying to read what eBooks were available on my Palm Pilot and testing out my Mobdex stuff which displayed 800 or so boring old Gutenberg Project text files on a mobile phone.

This post actually started out as a long email to some researchers I work with who study user experience, especially with families (they're the folks that did the fun Nokia/Sesame Street stuff). I thought about the email today and realized there was no reason I couldn't share it here as well, since I think it's truly fascinating.

I just saw this interesting article about Google's new Windows Phone 7 homepage on wpcentral.com where it showed how you can add a custom tile to your home page for their website. I thought that's pretty cool, but wondered how they did it. First, I logged into my server and tailed the web server log, loaded up my website on my WP7 phone, pinned the page to the home screen using the bottom menu and checked the logs to see if it was re-requesting an iPhone like apple-touch-icon. Nope.

I saw this article earlier called "jsdom + jQuery in 5 lines with node.js" and thought it was pretty cool. I tried it out, and it worked like a charm to parse a webpage. I didn't realize how easy it was to use jsdom with an external library like that, and I was pretty impressed with how fast it processed and returned the results.

Years ago while living in Spain I had what I like to call my great epiphany. I was using the first true smartphone - the Nokia 7650 - to chat with a bunch of pals via IRC while shopping for a new laptop. The people I was chatting with (the original Mobitopians) were located literally around the world - in the UK, the US, New Zealand - even Madagascar if I remember correctly.

When the iPad was first announced, back in January of last year, I wrote up some thoughts about it titledWhat we really wanted was a MacPad not an iPad which pretty much explains the post completely. There's not much in that post which was off. I did end up getting an iPad, enjoying it immensely over the past year. Also, the competition was not even a year behind in launching competing tablets based on Android and WebOS (as opposed to the almost three year lead Apple enjoyed with the iPhone).

I'm pretty excited about this - for years now I've been wanting to extract a program I wrote back around 1982 from an old computer cassette tape it was stored on. My son is now getting old enough to take an interest in programming, and it spurred me to take another stab at loading up my first "big" program from when I was about his age. The game is called Letter Defender, and I wrote it in 5th grade (I think) for the TRS-80 Color Computer.

Years ago I had comments on this blog. They're long gone now. When I first added them (and we're talking nearly 8 years ago), the people and the comments they left were great, but that didn't last long. As anyone who's ever used the Internet has seen, the comments quickly started to fill up with idiots and trolls and the quality went to hell.

There's lots of articles out there now reviewing the TouchPad, so I won't cover that stuff. I'll just rant and rave about the things that pissed me off or impressed me. Hardware * The case is chunky, clunky and plasticky. * The volume button isn't set in the slot perfectly, so it rattles. * The case itself isn't sealed perfectly, so it creaks as you hold it and let go of it. * The screen is generally ok, but in the dark you can see 'stage lighting' effects from the side.

So I bought an HP TouchPad. I can't really afford it, but I couldn't resist - WebOS just seems so cool, and I wanted to really get a feel for how it worked in real life. Also, I wanted to see for myself if HP had what it takes to create a viable entry in the Tablet platform wars. It took me a week after launch, but I couldn't deal with the urge any more, so yesterday I took the plunge, dented my credit card even more and got yet another tablet.