Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to code interactive artworks in a single language and easily deploy them on multiple platforms? Recent developments leave me wondering if this day may come sooner than I’d anticipated.

With the release of Alchemy - a way to compile C and C++ code to run on the ActionScript Virtual Machine - it might just be possible to code in openFrameworks and deploy to both the web (as well as other flash-player enabled platforms) and, with a little additional code to cater for particular interface considerations like multi-touch, also to deploy to the iPhone.

Among those leading the way in terms of successfully porting interactive art originally written in C++ to the iPhone are Andreas Müller and Lee Byron. Müller with his beautiful All Seasons and Byron with a version of Golan Levin’s wonderful Yellow Tail.

I look forward to finding time between client work in 2009 to cut my iPhone App teeth while scaling this small tower of babel.

Timely, helpful and personal responses to email requests for support have always been important but in the past would probably not have affected my choice of application. This is no longer the case. Now that many of my most used applications reside in the cloud rather than on my desktop (along with much of my most valued data) the responses I receive to support request emails will without doubt influence where in the cloud I choose to upload, aggregate and organise my data.

Over the past few weeks I’ve sent a number of support requests / feedback emails to friendfeed and every time I received a quick, polite, and most importantly personal and helpful response. I even saw a quick change to the output of the widget after complaining about having to click to show all the images in a media post!

Positive support exchanges with other companies like Tumblr and Claimid have also been key factors in my decision to stick with them rather than competing services.

In complete contrast, a couple of days ago I sent a support request to delicious. I first received an automated response from Yahoo! Customer Care that my support request had been received and would be dealt with shortly. Twelve hours later I received a further message from Yahoo! Customer Care that despite being signed “Florence - Delicious Customer Support” was every bit as generic, unhelpful, impersonal and probably automated as the initial, explicitly automated response.

My experience requesting support from flickr several months ago (who are also of course owned by Yahoo!) was even worse. But is this a problem of scale? Does personal, helpful support simply not scale? Is it logistically impossible for really large companies to provide truly effective support to their users? Perhaps services like Get Satisfaction are the answer?

What seems clear to me is that for services operating in the cloud, especially as the data we pour into them becomes increasingly portable, good customer support could well become the deciding factor between them and their competitors. Now then, what was my magnolia account login again…?

An update of my folio site is long, long, looooong overdue. Even the most conservative of sites like the BBC or the NYT have changed their site design at least once since I last changed my folio site.

In the time that has elapsed since I last updated my site in 2004 (yes it really has been that long!) I’ve not been completely idle. In fact I’ve been unbelievably busy enjoying life with my growing family and working hard on general client projects, some of which have been more fun (kamvar.og, greyworld.org, distilled) than others.

I did find time for one small personal project late in 2007, but more on that in another post.

Anyway, during the long neglect of my folio site, my good friend Alexander Kohlhofer must have updated his personal site 20 times or more. Over these many iterations Alex has distilled the authoring and updating of a personal site down to a fine art.

This alchemic reduction is best explained by Alex himself in this post. Basically what this means is that thanks to some smart web 2.0 type apps (Tumblr & Friendfeed) I’ve finally been able to find the time to make a new personal site. Yay! And who knows, I may even get round to updating my folio site using similar time saving tricks some time soon?

Here’s hoping I’ll now develope a habit of posting to this shiny new blog of mine a little more frequently than my site update record would suggest!

Until I do manage another post there is of course always an endless supply of noise.