Archive for August, 2008:
Taking a Staycation
I’m off on a staycation for a while. Since I’ll be at home, there’s a good chance it may turn into a workcation.
I know it sounds weird, but the temptation to work is always there when you work from home. Sounds even crazier out loud. I’m sure the wife will box my ears if she [...]
The Art of Estimation
If you’ve worked in product management or consulting for any amount of time, you’re familiar with the estimation gremlin.
I’ve always hated managing projects. For me, it’s too much whip-cracking and tattletaling, but it’s an unfortunate chore that I’ve been unable to avoid. If you worked on a project I managed, I’m really sorry. I was [...]
Geeking out with Ubiquity
Big news today was the very-early (0.1!) release of Mozilla Labs’ Ubiquity.
What is it? That’s a really good question. It took me several passes to fix on the awesomesauce that is Ubiquity. I scanned the Techmeme coverage, thinking it was some translation tool, then speed read Scoble’s post on it. Sounded more interesting, but still [...]
Something Cool
I wanted to share some eyecandy from my Ubuntu box. I found this phenomenal desktop image (hat tip Lifehacker), and when combined with the terminal app’s transparency setting, it creates a pretty cool effect, especially when you drag the terminal window around the desktop and the background changes.
Another cool effect is opening the terminal over [...]
Social Observations, OraTweet Edition
I’ve spent a bit of quality time with Noel’s OraTweet this week, mostly because of Ed’s OpenSocial app development adventures.
Noel really has done a lot with OraTweet since June, when he first showed it to me. It’s got all the Twitter features you’d expect, and it has “groups”. Don’t get too excited, it’s more like [...]
Deploy OpenSocial Locally with a Sample Network
Browsing through Rich’s Google Reader Shared Items, I found we had both shared this post from the OpenSocial API Blog:
Let’s get this Partuza started!
Recently, as people have started to realize the utility of Connect as an OpenSocial container, we’ve been getting more requests for access to our development sandboxes. Developer rockstars inside the company like [...]
Unconference is for You
I took a look at the Unconference schedule yesterday, apropos of Ontario Emperor’s post on his own foray into Unconference territory.
Have you looked lately?
There are a lot of interesting sessions. These stuck out for me:
Monday at 1 PM: Enterprise 2.0: What is is, and how you’ll fail. (by Brian “Bex” Huff)
Tuesday at 2 PM: How [...]
Copy and Paste for the iPhone? Sort of . . .
This feed item on Techmeme got me all excited earlier in the week.
Copy and Paste for iPhone
Digging more deeply, it turns out not to be copy and paste, but rather an open source solution called OpenClip that iPhone app developers can use to accomplish copy and paste.
Because Apple forbids third party apps from running in [...]
Want to Help Socialize OpenWorld?
OpenWorld is quickly approaching; it’s September 21-25, in case you don’t already know that.
You’ll recall that last year, we used Twitter quite a lot to socialize, meetup and broadcast the sessions. We used Craig Cmehil’s eventtrack side project to consolidate the tweets and other social clutter (videos, photos, etc.) into a single stream of OpenWorld [...]
Mix Gets a Makeover
If you use Mix, you probably noticed something new today. Lost weight? Tan? Haircut?
Yes to all of the above, applied to a web app. Mix got a branding makeover last night, among other things, to reflect more closely its siblings in the *.oracle.com family.
You may have noticed less chatter on this channel about Mix. That’s [...]
Why OpenSocial Matters and How it’s Good for You
I’ve been drilling OpenSocial for most of the year, talking about why our platforms (Mix and Connect) will be containers, explaining how it’s good for users and even better for developers.
Now, I have a couple examples that should stick.
Ed commented on my last mockups post:
OpenSocial is now officially my new latest favourite thing!
Two questions;
1) When’s [...]
What’s Your GPS Do?
Yesterday, I quipped:
Processing “I’m at the Green Dragon” is far easier than processing “I’m at 928 SE 9th Avenue, Portland, OR”. Unless you’re a GPS device. In which case, you and your friends should have no trouble finding each other.
And lo, today via Mashable, I read about Garmin and uLocate teaming up to link [...]
3 x Location
A couple news items from last week have me thinking about location-based services again.
First, a location-based social networking tool called Shizzow launched a private beta. Similarly to other services (Brightkite, most notably), Shizzow helps you stay in touch with people IRL, but the secret sauce is that you don’t have to know the address of [...]
What Are Your Five Feeds?
Paul asked me a while back which feeds I would keep if I could only have five. Or something like that, the exercise was basically, pick five and only five.
If you’re like me, you cull your feeds every so often. Every three to six months, I get overwhelmed with unread items and cut out stuff [...]
More Connect Mockups
Rich has finished a few more mockups of the changes we’re making to support OpenSocial.
Since our last episode, he’s finished the Profile page. Take a look.
One thing (other than location data, which will return soon, promise) people have been missing since we upgraded Connect to the Mix JRuby code line is status. More people than [...]
More iPhone Nuggets
I’m embracing this blog’s role as a source of iPhone things.
So, I figured I’d share some tips and tricks, a.k.a. stuff that might be in the manual you and I didn’t read.
If you have an iPhone, bookmark this post immediately. Rather than regurgitate them as my own, I’ll run the headline versions:
Tap to scroll to [...]
Do You Take Workcations?
So, I took a long weekend with my wife up in Seattle, and as I normally do, I took my personal laptop.
Before you laugh, it actually does make sense to take it on vacation. I can watch movies on it, look up local attractions, get directions, etc. Plus, I keep up with news and personal [...]
Garfield Minus Garfield = Win
I’ll be stepping away for a few days to reboot my sanity (fingers crossed). I’ll leave you with this sweet nugget.
I added Garfield Minus Garfield to my Reader way back in January due to someone’s tweet.
If you’re not familiar, here’s the about:
Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic [...]
I Am (Not) Rich
First off, everyone knows I’m not Rich.
I wonder if Rich (and people who share his name) get this app for free or at least for a discount.
I’ll back up; so by now, you’ve probably heard about the “I Am Rich” iPhone app that popped up briefly a couple days ago in the App Store. The [...]
AppsLab FAQ: How Do I Get People to Adopt?
It’s been a while since I posted an FAQ entry. All the recent activity around iPhone information has reminded me of another one.
Adoption.
So, this FAQ installment is targeted at enterprise communities.
Now that Connect has groups, people are using it more frequently for centralized collaboration, which is exactly what we hoped. Generally, the person spearheading the [...]
