Thank you for 2008 – Happy New Year!

The end of 2008 is near, and I felt it was time to summarize the passed year.

As with every year, lots of things happened, so I’ve struggled a bit with the things I’d like to mention and which ones I think will follow (or haunt?) us in 2009. Prepare for some very varying topics as well as a link-o-rama. πŸ™‚

Interesting events

Google releasing Google Chrome

In september, Google outed their contribution to the web browser world: Google Chrome. It has some interesting features with separate processes and very fast rendering, and even though it was officially released in December, I think it still has a far way to go with extensibility, cross-platform support etc.

A screenshot of Google Chrome

Spotify

In October, one of the most interesting services out there, Spotify, launched and I wrote a little about it
and gave away some invites (and attended a lovely Spotify party). And, to today’s date I’ve shared a total of about 150 Spotify invites – oh my, ain’t I generous? πŸ™‚

Anyway, if you get the chance, you should really try it out!

Microsoft bidding on Yahoo!

As I’m sure everyone knows, Microsoft put a bid on Yahoo!, and after that it was a circus with speculations and opinions. Currently, as far as I know, Yahoo!’s value has sunk far below the initial biddding, and Microsoft claim they’re no longer interested. I guess we just have to wait and see…

Adobe launched Photoshop online

I must say that I never ever thought Photoshop would be an application available online, and for free at that! But lo and behold, with the launch of Adobe Photoshop Express, that’s just what we got.

Barack Obama

At the time it happened, I really wanted to write a blog post about Barack Obama being elected. I mean, an eloquent and colored president of the United States? For real? I think I, and lots of others with me, still have a problem to fathom what has actually happened.

“Stop going on about his color”, some people say, but that’s just the thing here: he being able to get elected just shows that we finally have passed the line where race doesn’t matter anymore, and with the history of US and the slavery, I’m very very happy that this happened! And his victory speech: oh my God, that’s talent!

Everyone keep mentioning at what a tough time he will come to the presidency and how hard it will be, but look at it like this instead: with the state George W. Bush has left the country, whatever Obama does, it can only go uphill, right?

My brother getting married!

In September my kid brother got married! Congratulations Martin & Karolina!

A picture of my brother Martin getting married

Happenings, reflections and change of paths

Some reflections and mentioning a few decisions I made:

Geek Meet

December 4th, Geek Meet had a staggering amount of 150 people attending Geek Meet with Chris Heilmann – I’m really happy and proud to see how the event has taken off!

I also had the opportunity to show Stockholm to Chris and get to know him a little better – I think we had a special moment, but I’ll let you judge for yourselves πŸ™‚ :

A picture of me and Chris

For some unknown reason, Tim and Chris got into some groin-touching fixation, so I just helped documenting it… πŸ™‚

Leaving DOMAssistant

This year, I decided to leave the DOMAssistant project. It was extremely good and helped me evolve to create and run something like that, but it was time to move on to other challenges, and so far I haven’t regretted it.

Number of readers

Since some time during the fall, I have steadily had over 3000 readers to my RSS feed. As long as the number of followers increase, I must be doing something right, right? πŸ™‚

MVB for DZone

In November, I was asked to become an MVB for DZone, which I was proud for. Also, getting the possibility to reach out to even more readers should never be overlooked. πŸ™‚

Owning an iPhone

After bitching and moaning, I eventually got an iPhone, and I have to say that it has drastically improved my cell phone/device usage. And when one’s past all the flashy fish ponds, guitar and flute playing etc, it’s actually very easy to get dramatically more productive with it.

So yeah, I love it, although it hasn’t improved my sex life (just yet, at least)… πŸ™‚

Funny songs

I might be partial here, but I was very satisfied with my song rewrites in Behind Blue Es and A CSS class hero. πŸ™‚

Most interesting blog posts

Let’s start the link listing frenzy with the posts I think shaped and/or helped me, my development style or opinions, and hopefully made the largest impact with you as well. I strongly recommend reading these, and shaping your opinion and takes on these topics:

JavaScript articles

I must say that this year was my most productive in writing JavaScript articles, which would help both me and people struggling with getting the concept of some parts of JavaScript. Here’s the list of the most useful ones:

General JavaScript posts

JavaScript inheritance, scope, closures and namespacing

Released code

Looking back at 2008, I was pretty productive in terms of releasing code for you. Here’s a list of the most interesting things I brought you:

Firefox extensions

This fall I finally started developing Firefox extensions, and overall it has been a very pleasurable experience (I’ll try and write a post about soon). Trying to help myself as well as a lot of other developers out, I put a lot of effort into Inline Code Finder (Inline Code Finder release post), and released it at the end of the year. Available downloads are:

A picture of the Inline Code Finder panel for Firebug

So far, to my happiness, it has been very popular, and I’m proud to see it worthy of being listed amongst other great Firebug extensionsJavaScript badges

Some time during the summer, I got into a badge-developing mode, and came up with two useful scripts:

When I develop things for other services, it is always interesting to see how they handle that. The nice Tumblr people liked, told me so and kindly listed it amongst the Tumblr Developer Resources. The FriendFeed people? Never heard from them…

JavaScript code

Naturally, I also had a few releases with some good ol’ regular JavaScript code as well πŸ™‚ :

Adobe AIR applications

During spring, I played around with the Adobe AIR framework, and produced a few applications. At the moment, I feel too restrained by some of its shortcomings (perhaps I’ll go into that another day), so currently I don’t do any further development with it.

The interest in GMDesk, though, has been overwhelming (which also resulted in a visitor record), so I hope people who downloaded it have use for it, and at the same time I feel a bit saddened that I couldn’t make it out to be all that I wanted.

People who died in 2008

Perhaps a bit morbid, but I have a strange fascination with knowing which well-known people passed away in the year that went. Some noteworthy names for 2008 are:

  • Heath Ledger
  • Roy Scheider
  • Charlton Heston
  • Isaac Hayes
  • Paul Newman
  • Arthur C. Clarke
  • Eartha Kitt
  • Sir Edmund Hillary
  • Sydney Pollack
  • Yves Saint-Laurent
  • Bo Diddley
  • Michael Crichton
  • Robert Prosky

On a personal level

In the spring of 2008, I lost my grandfather. I would just like to express my sadness for him leaving us, and for anyone else who have lost a loved one – life can be extremely cruel.

Thank you!

Thank you everyone for reading, for being there for me, for helping me out when I constantly harass you! I love writing, and I hope you love reading!

Thank you for 2008 and Happy New Year!

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