I started blogging back in 2005. Blogging was the method of choice to get your message across and to let people know what you were up to. But the past 2 years, things have changed. The growth of social media such as Twitter and Facebook have created new and more efficient ways to communicate. Many blogs, including mine, have become neglected. I've written just a single post in the last year, when I had something to say that didn't fit in a tweet. I lately asked myself; should I pick up blogging? Should I start writing more content? I've seen other people do this and fail: after a short revival they would simply stop writing again. So I figured that reviving the blog would be the wrong approach. Instead I realized I had to change the site, put less emphasis on the blog and embrace the fact that social media IS more efficient for day to day communication. The purpose of the blog is to provide background or opinions that don't fit social media. The purpose of the site as a whole should be to explain to people who I am, and guide them to the social media outlets where most of my communication takes place.
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Those who pay attention to my occasional seemingly random tweets may have noticed this tweet, back in March. It's the first line of the Bob Dylan song "Times they are a'changin", and it marked the start of a long thought process. I had a '10 year itch': I was at Ibuildings since january 2000, back then a 5 person web development shop in the south of the Netherlands, and over the years I had helped Ibuildings grow into a 110+ people PHP service company with 5 offices in 3 countries. Very proud of what Ibuildings had become and my own role in the company, I had a growing feeling of 'what next?'.

In my enterprise PHP book I mentioned 5 major goals I wanted to accomplish in life: one of them is to found and build a company of my own. And although Ibuildings has always felt a bit mine, that's not the same. So I slowly started thinking about starting from scratch and building a new awesome company. Over the course of the next few months I searched for reasons to leave and reasons to stay, but eventually I knew that in my heart I had already made the decision in March, and all I was doing was finding reasons to validate that choice. There's a saying that in the end, you'll only regret the things you DIDN'T do, so finally I made the decision to go for it.
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It's been a while since my last post. My blog pattern these days is that I write a blog post when I have an opinion that doesn't fit in a tweet.

There's been a debate in the PHP community about the use of public, private and protected. Apparently the Symfony project has decided that private is Evil, and should not be used. I don't care much about Symfony as I'm not a user, but it turned to a discussion on OO theory when Stefan defended the position by claiming that you 'should have the right to extend a class's methods if it doesn't support the use case you have'.

On Twitter, things got worse. Marco Tabini mentioned private has no role in open source code insinuating that it's about who can read the code and Travis Swicegood mentioned that protected code indicates code that is in the wrong place and later that it prevents unit testing because it creates un-testable units of code.
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Yesterday Twitter announced it has acquired Tweetie, the popular Twitter client for iPhone (and Mac desktops but the move seems to focus on the iPhone app).

Disclaimer: I love Tweetie; dispite it not being free (it will be free from now on), I liked it much better than the free alternatives.

For Twitter, this is a good move. It will finally give them an 'official' client for phones. They also announced a Blackberry app yesterday, and you can easily see that they needed one by looking at their 'Using twitter with your phone' page. It explains how to use Twitter using SMS, something that never really caught on as a main twitter use. With this move, Twitter fills a hole they had in their product offering. It is very similar to what happened in 2008, when they acquired Summize, which is now search.twitter.com.
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Location Based Services are hot

Ever since phones have been equipped with GPS devices it's been possible to provide applications with information about the user's location. I used to have a Nokia N95. It had a GPS but other than Google Maps, I never did anything useful with it. When I switched to the iPhone a couple of months ago, I started to use more and more apps that are location aware. The main reason why it works for me on the iPhone is that the iPhone just always seems to know where I am, whereas the N95 only knew where I was when I asked for it. How is this different? If I'm inside a building where GPS signal is blocked, the iPhone still knows where I am, because it remembered the last time it had a GPS signal. The N95 on the other hand would only start to read its GPS device when I started an app, which worst case meant I didn't have a location at all and best case meant I had to wait up to a minute before it had a fix. Usability win for the iPhone.

How is the location generally used? The basic premise is that applications now know where you are, so the most common application is to display maps and your location on them. But what is also fun is that games you play can now compare your score against the score of people in your neighborhood, search engines can show more relevant results based on where you are, shop applications know what shop you are near, travel applications know where you are located so you don't need to enter your start address; the possibilities are endless.
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It's been a while since I blogged, but I just ran into another zealot pointing me to NoSmarty.net when I mentioned templating.

I think I've said it before. The tool you use should depend on the job you're trying to do. So to say that Smarty is wrong just because it is, does not feel right.

I agree that in many cases PHP can be used as a template language just fine, but there are situations where a Smarty template (or any other templating engine) is just that more pleasant.

Here's a bit of template code that I encountered yesterday. Its use of php as a template language is hideous. Because it's a template for an xml message and because it needs to cope with systems with short open tags on and off, it looks like this:
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