PhaultLines

Watching the Web evolve at Fluent 2014

I attended O’Reilly’s Fluent conference in San Francisco earlier this month. The annual event covers various aspects of the Web platform, particularly topics that relate to frontend development. The talks that I attended covered a wide range of topics, spanning from JavaScript performance improvements to unconventional uses for the CSS border-radius property. Fluent gave me an opportunity to reflect on the manner in which the Web is evolving and the opportunities that will arise as it continues to mature.

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Slide deck syntax highlighting made easy with Alfred

I’ve spent a lot of time lately creating slide decks for my MontageJS presentations. When I include source code in a slide, I like to have syntax highlighting to help make it easier for the audience to read. Unfortunately, syntax highlighting isn’t a built-in feature in Powerpoint or Keynote. There are some great browser-based presentation frameworks like reveal.js that offer native syntax highlighting, but I currently need to use a standard tool so that other people can easily edit and consume my decks.

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My experience at Xamarin Evolve 2013

Earlier this month, Xamarin hosted its first-ever developer conference. The event, called Xamarin Evolve 2013, exceeded all expectations. It offered a great mix of high-quality technical content, fun social activities, good networking opportunities, and plenty of time for the usual hallway banter that tends to create the most valuable discussions at technical conferences. Xamarin Evolve 2013 ran for four days, including two days of training and two days of conference sessions.

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My first workflows for the Alfred v2 Beta

The marvelous Alfred.app is one of my favorite tools for Mac OS X. At its core, Alfred is a simple and effective app launcher. When used to its full potential, it does much more. Among many other things, Alfred lets you find and manage files, control music playback, manage and search clipboard history, and search the web. It exposes that incredibly rich set of features through a fantastic, keyboard-friendly user interface.

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Xamarin and MonoGame at BUILD 2012

I represented Xamarin at Microsoft’s BUILD conference last month. I attended the event, which took place at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, with my coworker Craig Dunn. We had a booth on the second floor of building 92, in the section dedicated to Visual Studio partners. BUILD offered us a great opportunity to spread the word about Xamarin and meet lots of .NET developers. Our booth, where we handed out t-shirts and plush Xamarin monkeys, was very popular.

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