The AppsLab

Much to no one’s surprise, Microsoft debuted two tablets yesterday, both called Surface, both running Windows 8 variants. This announcements enters yet another interface into the touch OS pantheon, which already includes iOS, Android and all its flavors, and Windows Phone 7. There are others for sure, but these main flavors will surely comprise the… Read More

The Enterprise 2.0 conference starts today in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts, and Oracle is a gold sponsor. Two of our merry band of WebCenter evangelists will be there, Christian Finn (@cfinn) and Peter Reiser (@peterreiser). Christian has a busy speaking schedule during the show, and I’m sure Peter will be busy covering the happenings via Twitter… Read More

The next couple weeks will be hectic, as I’m attending the GSummit, speaking with Noel (@noelportugal) at Kscope (@odtug, #kscope12) and attending jQCon. Thankfully, I should get a break from travel until the Fall. Here’s the skinny on each event, in case you care. GSummit, June 19-21 The G stands for gamification, which may or may… Read More

Over the past month or so, I’ve been working up a list of projects for the next year to pitch as innovation prototypes that Noel and I would design and build, the ultimate goal being release into core product. You know, that illusive goal that this team has never really been able to achieve, i.e.… Read More

Thanks to longtime Friend of the ‘Lab, Floyd Teter (@fteter) for passing along this urgent bulletin from Steven Chan. If you’re using the E-Business Suite (EBS), you’d better turn off the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) Auto-Update feature, like right now. I’ll wait. But why, you say? Turns out the JRE could be updated from the… Read More

Two odd things today that made me lulz to myself. Twitter, allows you to send direct messages to yourself. I found this out accidentally in the Mac client and confirmed it via the web app. See for yourself. Then later in the day, I got an automated report from our internal telecommunications management system that… Read More

Found Ghostery via Bruce Schneier’s blog. Ghostery is a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that tracks all the tracking cookies set by a set in a handy little pop-up dialog. You can also tell Ghostery to block those cookies, which it calls bugs, funny. Check out what nfl.com tracks, as an example: Semi-related, if… Read More

Friend of the ‘Lab John Brunswick (@johnbrunswick) is on a roll this week. After providing a nice collection of WebCenter Sites resources earlier in the week, he posted a neat tool that will tell you what CMS a site is running, as well as what web analytics and social tools. Check it out on his… Read More

You may have heard this already, maybe from the D10 coverage or Justin’s post or tweets from @oracle. Larry Ellison has joined Twitter; he’s @larryellison. No tweets just yet, but tomorrow he’ll begin tweeting. I hear his first tweets will be about the cloud announcement. I’m told he’ll be doing his own tweeting, at least… Read More

Check out 32 Innovations that will change our future in the NYT Magazine’s Innovation’s Issue: 32 Innovations that Will Change Your Tomorrow There’s some very cool and some very creepy stuff in there. My personal favorite is A New Firefighter; imagine waving a magic wand to extinguish fire. The magazine also has a great piece… Read More

Friend of the ‘Lab, John Brunswick (@johnbrunswick) has collected several WebCenter Sites (the product formerly known as FatWire) resources, 10 to be exact. 10 GREAT WEBCENTER SITES RESOURCES (FATWIRE) Among them is Fatcoders, which I’ve previously covered as well as the official WebCenter (@oraclewebcenter) blog, specifically the content tagged wem. My colleague and ami Noël… Read More

I’m back from the latest leg on my US tour, the Applications UX Gamification Design Jam. If you were following the #gamifyOracle hashtag, you might have seen some of what went on, but for completeness sake, here’s my recap. This was an internal-only meeting held by the Applications UX team, bringing together the entire organization of… Read More

I keep meaning to write this post every time I go to the ATM. Depending on your bank, you may have used a modernized ATM, e.g. one that has no envelopes for deposits, but instead, scans your checks and cash to determine the amount you’re depositing. Pretty good idea, right? Cuts back on the manual… Read More

After a hectic month or so, I’m finally getting around to reading. I’ve been meaning to share this thoughtful piece from Scott Porad, CTO of Cheezburger (squee!), that does an excellent job encapsulating some reasons why software is so difficult. His main points, or rather, those made by his friend are: 1. Software is entirely… Read More

My US tour continues next week with a stop in the Bay Area to attend a design jam hosted by our Applications User Experience team. The topic is gamification. Insert cringe here. While I loathe the term, the results that game mechanics can produce when applied to non-games are undeniable. Take reputation for example. Everyone… Read More

The AppsLab US tour will be making another stop in Seattle this week, as I’m heading to the ICMI-ACCE conference to work the exhibit hall floor. For the uninitiated, like me, ICMI stands for International Customer Management Institute, and ACCE, their annual show, stands for Annual Call Center Exhibition. I’ll be showing Oracle Social Network… Read More

Now that WebCenter Sites 11gR1 is released and available on OTN, you might be to the now-what step. Those familiar with Sites (and FatWire) are probably familiar with the Jump Start Kit (JSK) concept, which is a preconfigured installation of the Content Server, bundled with Apace and Tomcat running on an in-memory db called HyperSQL… Read More

Here’s a funny anecdote from the past that was brought back to mind last week. A few of us were chatting over dinner about how much we loved TripIt (@tripit), and I remembered a story from the AppsLab vaults. I remain a true believer that we need more dead-simple email (and IM) interfaces into web services,… Read More

I’ve been yammering about WebCenter Sites (formerly FatWire) for a while, and today marked its first release under the Oracle banner. Now, thanks to the power of OTN (@oracletechnet), you can kick the tires yourself. Let’s back up and talk about what Sites is first. Sites is all about web experience management, specifically through your… Read More

Collaborate 12 (#C12LV) has wrapped, and overall, I really enjoyed the event. I’ll lead off with a big thanks to all the organizers from OAUG (@oaug1), IOUG (@ioug) and Quest (@questusergroup), with a special mention for the IOUG WebCenter Special Interest Group (SIG) who made sure we found the right sessions and networked with the right folks. This is a definitely a… Read More