When I bought my Apple TV I was planning to use it primarily to watch video podcasts on my plasma TV. It turned out not to be such a great plan, I have many devices already connected to it and there where no connections left. Since my wife hasn’t bought into the benefits of ipTV, the device was left virtually unused for several months.

However, since becoming a manager I have been working harder and exercising less. As a result I have been slowly gaining weight. Don’t worry this blog entry is not about fat blogging, I sincerely believe that the whole concept is quite silly. Since I do not want that trend to continue I have decided to take action. Last Saturday I bought a treadmill and a new LCD television set to which I have connected my Apple TV. Now I can exercise early in the morning while watching my favorite TV shows and video podcasts.

Since I have only been exercising for only five days I do not know if this will yield any results, but what I can assure is that exercising while watching TV is really fun. Yesterday I walked just over three miles and if I hadn’t run out of podcasts I would have worked out longer. As a result I have a message for Robert Scoble. I used to hate you and Podtech.net for being so prolific because it was becoming hard to keep the pace with all the shows you produce. Now the situation has changed, I need your help, I need more content to get fit quickly…

Two trips to Brazil, in less than in a month. This is a great way to add up miles and age prematurely. The worse part of the trip was that there were so many sessions in this managers meeting that I did not have the opportunity to work on any of my side projects.

I had hoped to spend some time exploring the new features of iWork and finally complete the sudoku module of my Professional Crossword Designer app. Unfortunately, progress has been slow. It is definitively hard to be a manager and spend time programming. However, I am not throwing the towel. I will find the time to complete this project before the era of personal computers comes to an end.

When Steve Jobs appeared on stage last Tuesday, he finally had some great news for the Mac faithful. We all know that he is a man of vision and that what he is visualizing is a world where portable devices will eventually replace most desktop computers. While this may be true, the Macintosh is still a cornerstone of Apple’s business and perhaps more surprisingly for him, an engine of growth for the company.

That means that even if there is doubt within Apple about the future of the PC, they still have to push the Mac, at least for now. My personal feeling is that those efforts are half-hearted at best. The new iMac is hardly a revolution, although it is still a great machine. The real news was software related. New versions of iLife and iWork were exactly what the Mac crowd was clamoring for. For those who are not familiar with the Mac platform, all this excitement about a new software release may seem strange. However, on the Mac, elegant, easy-to-use software is as important, if not more, than hardware. For Apple die-hard fans, Numbers is probably the most important announcement, as it allows most Mac users finally to work on their computers without having to rely on any products from Microsoft. The general public will probably care more about the major upgrades made to iPhoto and iMovie. Despite all the improvements and new features that will make iLife’08 and iWork’08 an instant success (by Apple software sales standards) I think that Mac users deserved more. My gut feeling, as a developer, is that Apple is not devoting a lot of resources to these products, otherwise we would have seen even more improvements. After all, they had eighteen months since the last release to update the software. Besides, some programs like iWeb or iDVD saw little change. I would love to believe that Apple is listening to their customers and that they have worked as hard as possible to deliver a release well planned years in advance, but it doesn’t seem likely. It looks much more like the work of a couple of passionate (and talented) developers.

The truth is that while I am very happy with all these announcements, as a Mac user I cannot help feel a little worried. This was probably the best keynote delivered by Steve Jobs to the Mac community in years. It deserved to be delivered during a high profile event. Instead, it was delivered to a small group of journalists at the Apple headquarters. Why?

I have just completed updating the template that I use on by my WordPress blog. I have finally eliminated the use of tables and replaced the old template with a new one that relies exclusively on CSS for object positioning.

While this is something that I should have done long ago (and that I still need to propagate the changes to the rest of my site), it was really the release of the iPhone that moved me to update my design. Now that Safari is using CSS design cues to display parts of the content in an optimal way, it is more than likely that Opera, Nokia and others will follow that very same path. Old design techniques, mainly based on the use of tables, which have been obsolete for years but are still used in many sites, are likely to disappear very quickly. We will certainly not miss them.

The adoption of standards by Web Designers has been slow at best. In most cases they have chosen simplicity over openness. Since IE was the dominant browser there was no compelling reason to check for compatibility with other browsers. Thankfully, Microsoft made a terrible mistake by not updating its browser in an attempt to maintain their desktop hegemony. That has allowed Firefox and Safari to slowly chip market share away from IE, but at a painfully slow pace. However, things are changing, by end of 2008 Apple will be selling each quarter more iPhones than Macs. Nokia will have sold millions of cell phones equipped with Web Kit based browsers and let’s not forget about Opera, their mobile browser is also very good. This will accelerate the rate of adoption of alternative browsers, since IE is not as dominant in the cell phone industry as it still is on the desktop.

Beleaguered Web designers like myself (if don’t really know how I dare call my self a web designer) have no choice. We need to adapt. CSS still has a lot of limitations. From my point of view it is an ugly and incomplete standard. However, if everyone understand that no single player can stop the standard from progressing, we will see it improve quickly. Today, companies like Microsoft and Adobe still believe that they can control the Web with products like Flash and initiatives such as AIR (a.k.a. Apollo) or Silverlight. We have a responsibility to show them that this is not what we want. What we need is simply better open standards.