Hmm... I wonder what this is all about? ;)

I downloaded the new Google Gadgets for Mac today (finally, a third party gadget engine does it right -- they integrate with Dashboard so you don't have to have two sets of competing gadget paradigms) and tried out the Trends gadget that lets you compare Google search trends.

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(Click the movie and press spacebar to restart the counter if you don't see it.)

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This year I spoke at about ten international conferences and a couple of other meetings, starting with MacWorld in San Francisco in January. At each event, I kept noticing more and more developers on Macs. So much so that sometimes a sea of luminescent apples would greet me when I looked into the audience. And I've probably done my little bit to nudge quite a number of people onto Macs. Not because I own any stock in Apple (*doh*) but rather because switching from Windows to OS X (Tiger) made me love playing with computers again after 23 years on PCs.

My recent upgrade to Leopard, however, has left me with a sour taste in my mouth and I've started questioning whether Apple is truly committed to OS X and the computing business or whether those will take a back seat now to its mobile and devices business.

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Big ups to Seb, Peter and the other volunteers from FlashBrighton who organized FlashBrighton's Big Day Out yesterday: it was a resounding success (and I hope the first of many more). Thanks also to Adobe, Influxis, and the other sponsors.

My favorite bit (apart from surprising Seb with my count-down timer -- more on that later) was the 30 minute snowstorm hackathon by Dom (who got 15 minutes to draw a shivering man) and Seb (who got 15 minutes to make a particle-based 3D snow storm in AS3 -- while writing all his own import statements in the Flash IDE!)

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