Tag Archives: technology

FaceBookCampMontreal

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One more! Tonight was FaceBookCampMontreal, an unconference for everyone with an interest in building on the Facebook Platform. Once again, great event, great crowd, very interesting subject.

I’d venture to say that the event was actually a bit late for the developer crowd, since we’ve all drunk the Facebook API Kool-Aid months ago, and most of us have been playing with it publicly or in private sandboxes. On the other hand, the PR crowd was there in full force and was visibly excited by the torrent of opportunities the FB ecosystem truly is.

So if you need a Facebook application and don’t know where to start, a good first step is to call Plank. :o) We’ll hook you up with a strategy that makes sense for both you and your users/audience.

I also have my own pipe dreams, but I’m just too busy to take on yet another project right now. Maybe in December…

BarCampMontreal3

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I spent the afternoon at BarCampMontreal3 yesterday, and let me tell you, it’s good to be in Montreal! Startups, Open Source projects, successful ventures, etc. You name it, we’ve got it. But most of all, it’s the people that really make the difference. And we’ve got that too!

Can’t wait until FaceBookCampMontreal next wednesday, especially in light of what is expected to be launched by Facebook on tuesday. Despite the event’s name, I’m fairly sure OpenSocial won’t be a stranger at this event though. ;o)

Edit: Be sure to check out Heri’s complete report on the event, as well as Sylvain’s notes on the OpenSocial BOF.

Last Day at McGill. Counting the Minutes until Monday.

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Yesterday was my last day as McGill University‘s Web System Architect.

It’s always sad to leave a team you’ve so enjoyed working with for five (long/short) years, but how could I refuse taking on the role of technology director for the dynamic Plank Design?

As Doug, a teammate on the WPhone project, would so elegantly put it: *grin*.

And as Buzz would, since one analogy is never enough (…): to infinity, and beyond!

Release: wpDirAuth 1.1

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Thanks to a lot of help from the support and development groups (special thanks to Richard and Adrian), and despite having focused on my upcoming job switch and WPhone in the last month, I finally found some time to release version 1.1 of wpDirAuth, an LDAP authentication plugin for WordPress I also maintain.

The new version adds support for more directory server configurations and vendors by supporting privileged pre-binding. It also adds a few interface and documentation tweaks, and has been tested under WordPress 2.2.x and 2.3.

Release: WPhone 1.2.0

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Thanks to Warren Wilansky, owner of the excellent Plank Design, who was kind enough to lend me his iPod Touch for the weekend, we were able to finally view and use WPhone on an actual Apple device and hammer out most of the display glitches our original releases had. Well, that and a whole lot of tweaks and new features, such as some fixes in the bundled iUI Javascript library for which I started submitting patches upstream, etc.

Sure feels good to not be flying blind anymore! Though I did have to give the iPod back today, which was about as painful as cutting off one of my own fingers… :p

So, if you had downloaded an earlier version, be sure to try the new 1.2.0 release. Or if you’re into the whole living on the edge thing, checkout the development branch of our Subversion repository, where we’ve already started to add some neat new features after 1.2.0 came out (otherwise known as rapid fire development).

Now, since our core focus is actually full support for the widest possible array of mobile, lightweight and accessibility devices (smart and non-smart mobile phones, PDAs, micro tablets, screen and braille readers, etc) what I really would like for the next step is to somehow gain access to some of the other targeted devices.

So if you happen to be in Montreal, have any of the following devices/environments and are interested in helping us out, please drop me a note (comments or wordpress-AT-tekartist-DOT-org) and maybe we can get together for a bit of geeky fun. :)

  • Nokia devices running the S60WebKit browser or earlier versions (w/ or w/o JS),
  • Blackberry (any xhtml capable generation),
  • Windows Mobile smart phones or PDAs (EDGE and/or WIFI),
  • Symbian-based devices,
  • Opera Mobile and/or Opera Mini capable devices,
  • Jaws or other accessibility device/software,

… or anything else that you would like to use WPhone on really.

Who knows, maybe I’ll luck out at one of the countless tech events organized in Montreal, such as the BarCamps, etc.