Month: June 2010

Sorry for the lame title.  This is just a quick note about Swype, the much hyped slide-your-finger-to-type keyboard that got a lot of buzz in 2008 at the TC50. Since I saw the demo a few years ago, I’ve always been intrigued by how awesome it would be to be able to type fast on… Read More

On the heels of our bookmarklet for sharing to WebCenter, today we were designing another other way to help people interact with WebCenter from the browser without interrupting their workflow. We’re building browser extensions, first for Firefox, then for Chrome and possibly the newly released Safari 5. If you read here, you’ll know we’re an… Read More

Getting tired of all the EVO/Android/iPhone love Jake’s been spewing lately? How about something a bit more dry and developery?  As promised in a prior post, here’s a more technical writeup of how I built the WebCenter sharing bookmarklet.  I was hesitant to write about this because it’s not like writing a bookmarklet is new… Read More

At the end of a call with the team today, Paul (@ppedrazzi), Rich (@rmanalan) and Anthony (@anthonyslai) were talking about phone cases. As the red-headed stepchild on the phone, I might not have it exactly right, but it sounded like Anthony is still rocking the plastic overlay on his HTC EVO. You know that sticky,… Read More

So, this is interesting. Justin (@oracletechnet) reported last week that the Black Eyed Peas will be headlining the OpenWorld appreciation event, which is held on Treasure Island and always includes a live concert. This is definitely a departure in musical guests from the previous appreciation event headliners. See if you can find a pattern. 2009:… Read More

By now, you should know I’m a huge Clay Shirky (@cshirky) fanboi. He’s published in weird places sometimes, like earlier this week in the WSJ Online edition. Check out his essay called “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?” before Murdoch (not the one with a k from the A-Team, the other one) slaps a paywall in… Read More

One feature of Android I haven’t seen hyped much is voice input, which was introduced in 2.1. This was mentioned at Google IO during one of the keynotes, and I remember thinking “that’s pretty freaking cool.” Maybe I don’t read the right coverage, or maybe it’s totally yesterday’s news (not literally, but kind of funny… Read More

I finally caught up on the particulars from yesterday’s WWDC keynote, and I’m feeling better about this post. I have a couple takeaways up front. First, Google’s surprise freebie of HTC EVOs at Google IO this year was incredibly smart, even if the 5,000 odd units they commandeered hurt the overall stock, in turn dominoing… Read More

As part of our ongoing work with the internal instance of WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter), Rich (@rmanalan) has released a bookmarklet that allows for quick and easy sharing of a link to WebCenter, no need to copy the link and navigate to WebCenter. The bookmarklet creates a message board entry in your personal space (if you select… Read More

So many questions. How does it stay balanced? How much power does it take to rotate that tire? Where are the brakes? Riding this monster has to burn your legs. I’m thinking you don’t need brakes, just let friction do the work. Anyway, enjoy the video, from LikeCOOL h/t Gizmodo.

I’m fired up this morning. The email account we use for this blog is a target for spam, which is expected when you include an address on your site. I totally get that. I routinely see 1-5 spam emails a day and occasionally, a phishing one. I’m really not sure why the PayPal phishing email I… Read More

I found this post fascinating, “How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit.” It’s about a news item you might have seen, namely the lawsuit a woman filed against Google after she followed Google Maps’ walking directions and was struck by a car on the route. Attribution is a sticky subject online. Over… Read More

So, the iPhone OS has had the ability to take a screenshot since 2.0, simply hold down the sleep and home buttons for a couple seconds, and click, you’ve got a screenshot. This is a great feature, and one lacking from Android’s base OS, i.e. there’s no button combination or included app that takes screenshots.… Read More

Lately, the content here has been all about Android and my new HTC EVO, but don’t despair, it’s not over yet. Today, I test drove two of the sweet features that Froyo (Android 2.2) has promised, tethering and wifi hotspot. I see these each as a jump forward, since I’ve been tied to AT&T’s Edge… Read More