With this week’s headline of “Microsoft ‘worked with Apple’ for Silverlight on iPhone”, we’re once more reminded of the grim reality that is video on the internet. In the article, Microsoft proudly boasts how they use standardized H264-encoded video and a HTML5 video element to serve up video to the iPhone, which would otherwise refuse to play its proprietary content due to lack of a browser plugin.

Since the ages of the first images in web browsers, we’ve been eager to see full-motion video on the web. While it was first normal to let people download video files, often heavily compressed and only playable on specific systems, in the late 1990s, the increase of broadband adoption and standardization of internet protocols allowed streaming video to become commonplace. Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media and Realplayer emerged as proprietary solutions for internet video streaming.

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We’re entering a very exciting age of web design. I’ve never hidden my opinion on Flash on this blog or on any other online outlet — I think it’s an abomination that should be used solely for cross-platform games and other niche cases — but without an alternative, I’m also using it for video on my blog.

With ‘demos’ like Snow Stack, however, this will soon change. If you’re running Snow Leopard and Safari right now, you can check it out right here. Otherwise, just check out the video. Snow Stack is similar to CoolIris, which I like, but it’s made with pure HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I love it.

On that note, I’ll soon start using the <video> element for all video on my blog. To support Opera and Firefox, all media will be available in H264 and OGG formats. I’ll be very happy when I can say I’ve banished the scourge of Flash from all my websites.

Hat tip to Wolfgang Bartelme for sharing Snow Stack on Twitter.

It’s often said that there is great value in having a distinct shirt at WWDC, and while I’m not very preoccupied with that notion myself, I do have great fun in designing shirts. I first wanted to print a larger version of my twitter user picture, but I was curious if I could design something that was a bit more relevant to my work.

And I settled on this design. Hey, doesn’t everyone love exploded items on shirts these days? A nice large version of the shirt design is up on my flickr.

I’m printing 6 of these shirts today, and one of them will be sent off to a happy owner in a new giveaway post that’s coming up soon. Let me know if you’d like one of these shirts; with enough demand, I might print a few more.

It’s a first for me; I’ll be in town June 3rd – June 14th. I’m a bit too poor to actually go to the Moscone and check out sessions that are focused on developers, so I’ll just be going across town meeting people and working.

I got quite a few emails already from people and companies that would like to meet up; as the schedule is quickly filling up, if you’d like to connect, let me know early!

I intend to visit Japantown and North Beach more this time around. It’s my fourth time going to San Francisco, so I haven’t nearly seen enough of the awesome city that is San Francisco yet.

Are you going to WWDC? I’m taking suggestions on toy shops and great restaurants for the time that I’m over. Now that I’m 21, I can also check out more of the night life. Some sweet places I found in the past are shops like Double Punch in North Beach and Cesario’s, a pretty good Italian restaurant near Union Square.

My Billings license giveaway had a great reception. A big shout out to all of you who participated on twitter, the blog, or on their own blogs; I hope you will also enjoy the set of giveaways that are coming up this year, including at least one with some actual, physical, sent-to-your-doorstep hardware!

The winners of the two licenses are Ben Jacob and Matt Farrugia. In an interesting stroke of events, the first random draw selected two Marketcircle employees as winners, but I have taken the liberty to assume that other people were more in need of a license then them :).

I also want to thank the guys at Marketcircle for lending themselves to a great interview and giving out these licenses, and I am eager to see what they’ll have in store for us in the future with improvements to Billings and iPhone applications.

Congrats to Ben and Matt, and thanks for participating!

A lot of people ask me about the ‘boring’ part of running a freelance shop, like time tracking, billing, and invoicing. My workflow is very simple, and for the last few years it has depended almost completely on one solid-as-a-rock app: Billings by Marketcircle.

As a nice extra, Marketcircle’s Ryan Cash and Alykhan Jetha were kind enough to allow an interview about Billings to supplement this look at my personal workflow and share some background on the application and great upcoming things for users.

You guys can also win a Billings license – details on that at the end of this article!

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