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.

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.

I flew to Boston last week to attend MonkeySpace, a community-driven event dedicated to open source software projects in the .NET technology ecosystem. The Mono stack is obviously a prominent part of that landscape, but the conference attendees came from a wide range of technical backgrounds—reflecting the diversity of the broader .NET community. I enjoyed many of the talks that were given at the conference, particularly Chris Hardy’s introduction to iOS 6 features, Michael Hutchinson’s MonoDevelop tip walkthrough, Aaron Bockover’s overview of the Vernacular localization system.

After seven fantastic years at Ars Technica, I’ve decided that it’s time for new challenges and new opportunities. I’m really pleased to announce that I’m joining Xamarin’s developer relations team as a technology evangelist. Some of the best and most exciting innovation in the field of software is happening on mobile devices. Tools that accelerate mobile development and boost the portability of existing code can unlock a ton of value. I’ve seen developers build some great things with Xamarin.