My first mobile blog from my new wordpress iphone app, very sick and very slick. I like phones that make me productive, but I definitely am enjoying using this gadget. Hopefully I’ll start blogging a little more now…
I think I need this. It can help detect when a person’s mind wanders, and I’m the guiltier than Hitler when it comes to staying on topic. But when the mind wanders it seems that there is an indirectly very positive effect of coming upon other topics that when combined with the original might lead much more interesting ideas then the first or another tangential topics on their own. Yet another tangent. Point in case…
Maybe its just most useful when you really need to focus, like flying an airplane, driving a bus, driving a semi, drinking alcohol, etc..
http://www.engadget.com/2008/04/22/fancy-brain-scans-can-detect-when-the-mind-wanders/
I typically just post by going to the web interface in the wordpress admin section. But I have just started playing with Flock, which is a pretty sweet social browser built on top of the same engine Firefox uses. It is simply an aggregator of all of your social sites (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, delicious, etc…) and it pulls all the data from each of these sites directly into your browser. Very cool as well is the fact that it greatly simplifies sharing, bookmarking, and tagging content that you find while surfing the web. Problem is, Flock is a little too much for me. I still appreciate having some simplicity in my web browsing.
Point of all this is, I setup their built in blogging client to hookup to my custom blog on khadiwala.com. So, that got me to looking for other solutions to blog from Firefox, a browser that I can handle. Thats when I came upon ScribeFire. Hopefully its not a piece of crap, but I will report back shortly if I am pleased with it.
It definitely is a look into the future though: APIs that expose content and services that make it possbile for integrating local and remote applications. Bottom line: making content more accessible and life a little more simple. Definitely important as I am quickly getting burnt out with my current crazy life.
Immediate Update: So that picture up top was submitted from my computer to my site via API. So that was pretty freakin sweet.
Did you know that item is a freakin’ reserved word in IE? Me either, but the last well spent 45 minutes helped me learn that fantastic piece of information. Yeah, I probably should be using something more descriptive than item, or prepending it with a single character to describe its data type (sItem), or a million other possibilities. But getting an untelligible error, and a script debugger that looks at the right line in the wrong file just seems a little asinine to me. Why would I ever go back to using IE?
By the way, I do greatly appreciate the fact that thanks to Scriptaculous the rest of my code works perfectly in IE7, which was forcefully installed on my computer.
As Microsoft has always had painful products to work with, Apple is starting to become evil in the name of the bottom line, Ubuntu or any other flavor of UNIX is starting to seem much more appealing.
I’m about to buy a new laptop and I’m going to keep Windows so I can DJ, but I likely will do a majority of my dev work in Ubuntu so I’ll just have a 2 OSs on there so I can do something of use, like have a local development server that isn’t a pain in the ass to install, configure, and maintain. And does not at all represent the final host of the application. Unless there is an extremely good reason, I won’t be using any Windows boxes as web servers ever again.
Rant is complete, I feel better.
Brilliant! This is a clever little idea. Micro-payments that people are likely willing to leave. I would imagine a person is much more likely to leave $0.10 to $0.20, then $1.00 for something they downloaded, a piece of code, or a blog entry. Or sick little bootleg MP3 track that you plan on playing at the club over the weekend, hypothetically.
I typically have like 10 tabs open in Firefox as my attention quickly takes me from topic to topic. Problem is that Firefox quickly racks up the amount of memory it uses to the point to where it runs frustratingly slow. Its so exciting to know that they have fixed supposedly 300 memory fixes:
Memory use reduced. Firefox 3 is more memory efficient than ever, with over 300 memory “leak” bugs fixed and new features to help automatically locate and dispose of leaked memory blocks.
I hope its true…
Here is a link for all the updates and new features: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Firefox_3_for_developers
Wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where your picture was taken along with when it was taken? I have mentioned this to a handful of friends, and its not that its an entirely novel idea, but I would love a camera with built-in GPS. It seems that they can make cell phones and all sorts of other GPS enabled devices, but why aren’t more cameras GPS enabled?
There are a number of useful applications that can come from this small amount of captured data, but here are a few that come to my mind:
But imagine publicly sharing your pictures that were geotagged from a party at your house and for some total stranger to figure view them and find out where you live… Not as much fun in that light.
Here is a story that provides some info on GPS and digital cameras.
One really cool thing that is a good immediately accessible solution is a GPS device that will capture your GPS position at an interval. You just carry this around with you and then later you can use software provided with the GPS device associate your photos with where you have been. That would most definitely do the trick. And the gps tracking device is only 2oz. Unfortunately, the battery life of this device is between 10-14 hours… But it should do the trick. Here is the device: http://www.dpreview.com/news/0608/06080202sonygpscs1.asp
Due to my minimal interaction with web programmers and technology people from birth till now, even though I’ve been doing development for 5 years, I am just learning about incredibly cool Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (http://aws.amazon.com/s3). You can store unlimited amounts of data for $.15 a GB. Ridonculous. You pay $1.80 for 1 year of storing 1 GB of your files in their storage system. The cool thing is all the great apps you could build on top of this. Imagine being able to hook up to this via DAV or Samba… You could easily have a plugin to store all of your My Documents into this thing and never have to worry about your computer dying and you losing all your data. Though you could always setup a RAID and have 2 x 320GB drives with an effective one-time-cost of about $.53 a GB. But thats only if you have 300GB of music, but most everyone just has 3GB of files and photos.
It looks like this has been out for nearly a year now, but I’m interested to see if they adapt this and promote other easy ways of storing and accessing your data. Like I said in one of my recent posts, the easier something is for a person to do, the more likely it is they will do it.
So I signed up for Twitter today because I saw my that my new boss (Alex King) had his Twitter status on his blog (http://alexking.org). So I decided to try it out. Twitter is basically a tool you can use to share what you are doing or thinking at any given instant with your friends. You are limited to 140 characters, so its great because you have to be concise.
Now, Alex has this whole list of Twitter updates on his site which is really cool, because he can effectively share things very easily via his blog without ever touching a computer. All you have to do is send an SMS to 40404. Then it got me to thinking how this could be turned into an application for a cell phone where you can post directly to twitter via a net connection, not via an intermediary like a SMS message that takes a few hops to get to Twitter.
I easily take tangents, hence the short paragraphs that each break into new directions, but these thoughts lead me to think about how you might be able to write a cell phone app to perform this simple task. But you can’t really, because how the hell are you going to make it compatible with all these hundreds of mobile operating systems? Thats when I got really excited about Android.
Android is Google’s open source mobile phone operating system that they have going as a new initiative. The exciting thing is that anyone can contribute either code or ideas to help develop what is likely going to be one of the most useful things since the cotton mill, with arguably as much controversy.
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I have an idea that should be an entirely different blog post, and really is something that is commonly understood, but often disregarded: More people will do something if it is easy. Applicable in any variety of places, but in this context the perfect example: Ruby on Rails. Its so much easier to develop in Ruby on Rails, so people can still be lazy, but build quality applications that they wouldn’t otherwise pursue due it typically being much more time consuming and complicated in other frameworks or languages. As well, ROR is extremely well thought out / strategized, and forces users to follow (and subsequently learn) important and good coding conventions to successfully build their applications. Furthermore, you can easily integrate (with one command at the console and a few lines of code) a lot of plug-ins that have a lot of easily reusable functionality (like GeoKit for incredibly easy Geocoding, or File Column for file and image handling). The outcome has been really great applications that people that are a little or very lazy would not have otherwise built.
So, imagine that if Android is that easy too, a large number developers will put effort into building solid applications.
The more thought there is that goes into designing a solid framework, the easier it will be to develop applications that are inherently good quality, and as it would be easy to develop applications, a greater number of people will build interesting applications.
This follows through to another idea: the more accessible a powerful tool is, the more innovation there is. Ruby on Rails is definitely powerful, but an even better example is what Apple has done with things like Final Cut & Logic. It lets people like my friend Greg Hydle develop amazing “studio” quality movies out of their own garage. And Logic lets any enthusiast or professional create amazing music on their home $2000 laptop. Its $1300 for Final Cut Studio and $500 for Logic. Both are what major movie houses use to create $100 million movies. I will have a separate blog post for this bad boy too.
I have steered far away from what my original point was: imagine all the cool and useful stuff that you could create for your mobile phone if Android is developed intuitively…
We’ll see what Apple has to show come February when they are supposed to release their SDK for the iPhone. I love how the iPhone has pushed everyone to develop much cooler products, so lets see if Google’s response is as well conceptualized as the iPhone is.
