Blogs

As some of you might be aware, English isn’t my native language. Although I pretty much prefer English over German (no matter what or where: movies, books, recipes, podcasts, …) not everyone in Germany can read/speak it as fluently as I can, if at all. So, naturally almost all my sites are available both in German and English, although most of the content is either/or.

This, of course, is not as trivial as it may sound. Even with blogging/site engines and CMSs such as Wordpress, having the same site and the same content is a hassle at best and damn near impossible at worst. Especially Wordpress, as powerful and well maintained as it may be, does a really terrible job when it comes to maintaining content and pages in more than one language. It’s a hack, and you feel it.

To be honest, one of the reasons for migrating to Jekyll was the fact, that its simplicity makes it easier for me (as a developer) to create the site I want. Instead of hacking around in the huge pile of junk that is Wordpress to get it barely working the way I’d like it to work, I can focus on creating content.
Still, even with Jekyll being as awesome as it is, it’s nowhere easy to get a multilingual site going. In fact, Jekyll itself doesn’t even support it and that’s fine: most people don’t need this advanced feature, anyway.
Further, the existing Jekyll plugins that promise to enable you to post in more than one language barely work at all or do things in a very weird way.

Looking back to last week’s WWDC keynote and also my last blog post (as well as the pre-WWDC TUAW Talkcast), the one thing that struck me besides being completely and utterly blown away was the fact that almost all predictions and wishes were totally wrong. Mine almost certainly were!
Granted, I didn’t expect to be right, but even the things I really, really thought would happen, didn’t happen after all. And even our wildest guesses, things we thought very likely wouldn’t happen, were just minor bullet-points on the long list of really amazing announcements.

All of this is really exciting to me.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking on multiple occasions about what I expect to be announced during WWDC next week. And as those predictions are all spread over different podcasts and chats, I thought I’d document them here so people can point fingers after the announcements and laugh about how wrong I’ve been.
Yes, I expect to be wrong. I have no real insight into Apple, no secret sources other than a few hints here and there from people who are better connected than me. Nothing more than my own understanding of how Apple works based on what I know and how the company has behaved in the past. Plus maybe a little bit of wishful thinking.

So, here we go. I’m ready to be ridiculed.

I really love App.net. There, I said it. Just wanted to make that perfectly clear before I dive into this topic.

App.net, or ADN as many like to call it, has been around since August 2012. Initially Mixed Media Labs, the company behind ADN, had launched the service as a Twitter competitor using a Kickstarter campaign to gain traction and collect much needed funds . Their idea: to create a service where the user pays a small fee each month to use the service and with that becomes the real owner of his data. The service doesn’t need to sell its user base to advertisers to keep the lights on (unlike Twitter, Facebook and so many of social networks).

Recently, those initial users/supporters were up for subscription renewal.

A few years back, I saw someone in a professional radio studio working on a standing desk. This was way before my time as a web radio host and even before I started thinking about my career (I was still in school). Back then, the ease of moving around in the studio fascinated me.
Years later, when I was producing/reading the news for a smaller web radio station, I got the chance to experience the advantages of working on a standing desk myself. A desk I had also built. It wasn’t the fancy, motorized version I had seen before, but a mere raised counter top version. Still, I loved it! With its faults and everything.
Then I moved, switching universities, quitting the web radio “job” and leaving the desk behind. For years I worked on “normal” desks, sitting all day long.
Every now and then I would hear about standing desks (or treadmill desks), or see one on the internet somewhere. And every time I would think about either buying one or somehow changing my workflow so that I wouldn’t sit as much. Then I would dismiss the idea for one reason or another.

Until I build my own version of a standing desk last weekend.