Last night was the annual AIIA iAwards (for Innovation in the ICT industry).
GoDo, part of the RedBalloon group, walked away with 2 awards:

• Winner - Tourism and Hospitality Innovation Award
• Winner - Local Industry Award

Check out www.godo.com.au/go/news for more

While doing my morning Research I discovered a great article that was a review of a number of services that are available to developers to be more efficient and work collaboratively.

One of the links in this article was the service http://ready.mobi/ which the author described as...

I would highly recommend checking out the original article: Roundup for Developers over a solutionwatch and also this Mobile Phone evaluation servicethat has a very interesting service of providing you emulation of your site. certainly worth checking out.

As you can see labs kinda didn't go that well..

The new beta pretty much takes the coding out of creating a widget (however the ability to get into the code is still there). So in the first 10 minutes of playing we were able to deploy a SVN widget from our websvn feed and a live cricket widget that utilizes the cricinfo live feed.

I have attached the live cricket widget as an example and the link to a more complete tutorial.

• Dashcode Beta
• How to make your own Dashboard widgets

However one site I still had to visit everyday, the office favorite Zazz.com.au. Zazz has a new tech product everyday that is not a necessity for living however something always makes one person in the office go 'I want that' and out pops the credit card...

Well today they finally hooked us up with RSS Blog Entry About it

Zazz Product RSS Feed

And yes the homer was one of those purchases and no it hasn't enriched my life nor did i need it......

This release say Nov 4th 2006 and is on the official site for the plugin. If you have subversion and on a mac and sometimes you just want to commit or do an update without going into the terminal well this is a handy plugin.

The binary can be accessed here:

http://scplugin.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectDocumentList

• SubEthaEdit - To edit html/css on the fly and to have long winded bounjor discussion however the latter is kinda irrelevant now I work in a smaller office with fewer macs
• Pico - To edit httpd config files and other config files that is was just easier to access via the command line.

Even though the two did the job very well I was always kinda looking for a better solution that would allow me to edit multi-docs while being organized as well as being able to access it via the command line. However the most important feature of all the interface had to look slick and be easy to use.

So i discovered Smultron and I have been happy ever since. Some days when eclipse is deciding its too-cool-for-school I hang out with my little but slick Smultron text editor and I find its quite capable of the task (obviously subversion integration would be tops!)...

However integration between terminal and smultron really neat, editing httpd config files and the sort is such a breeze.

If you own a mac check it out... and if you don't ROCK ON NOTEPAD!http://smultron.sourceforge.net/index.html

I am currently working on changing our Voucher Emails from a 'text based email' to a choice of a couple 'html styled emails'. While this is an exciting project for marketing and our customers as a developer this makes me think browser capability testing times a thousands..

I know personally I access my mail in 7 different forms via 3 different email accounts a day... Not to mention the recent competition and modification of web clients such as Yahoo's beta mail vs Hotmail Live..

How can i ensure our customers get a good experience?

Can i use CSS?

What are the accessibility guidelines when it comes to peoples inbox?

Well after googling "help me" i discovered a very resource centre that answered these questions extensively with real data that I can present to marketing regarding how our Customers will be treated with examples like this:

So without further ado I would like to point you to the following resources

• Email Guideline for 2006
• Should I code with tables or css
• Optimizing CSS in Email Templates

Update Another great link Another great resource CSS in Emails

The deep sleep widgetallows you to put your macbook into a hibernation mode instead of of the <strong>slam the lid down sleep mode </strong>which mac users are used to. This is great for travel and times when you want your machine off but you dont want to spend 20 mins getting everything open again.

I'm sad to say that this is my last day at RedBalloon. I've had an absolutely great time at RedBalloon and have had the pleasure of working with so many passionate, intelligent and fun people.

One of the reasons that I'm sad to be leaving is that we've done most of the hard work over the last 18 months and are really at the point where we are beginning to break new ground with our websites. E.g. integration of Google Maps into GoDo, Creation of the GoDo SOAP API, Gift Certs on RedBalloon and the ability to "Bring a Friend" when you are redeeming a voucher.

Some of the things I've been particularly proud of or happy with are: (in no particular order)

• Re-architecting the redballoon website to create a solid and maintainable platform
• Creation of GoDo using similar architecture to RedBalloon
• Success of the GoDo distributors model
• Creation of the RedBalloon Labs blog
• Creation of the API sites (RedBalloon and GoDo) and the upcoming GoDo SOAP API.
• Moved servers - we've had less downtime in the 18 months since we moved servers than the month before.
• Moving offices with just minor pain
• Introduction of the Wiki and Blogs to RedBalloon
• Supporting the amazing growth rate of the company
• Decision to kill a partially complete "new" version of the RedBalloon site (a couple of weeks after I started)

I'm confident that RedBalloon will continue to achieve great things and I am very happy to have been able to contribute to the success of a great company.

If anybody needs me I'll be looking after my lovely kids and continuing to write blog entries and doing a bit of contracting.

Cheers, Mark

However i found this version of FireFox that has been specially complied for the Intel Mac. After running it for 3 days of full-time development I have to say I am very impressed.

Even my extensions like google sync have improved.

Specially compiled version of firefox for Macs