The AppsLab

Online Passwords Could Be a Map : Discovery News (h/t Slashdot) Interesting idea. I’ve been using 1Password for a while now, thanks to nudges from Paul (@ppedrazzi) and Rich (@rmanalan), but one danger is using that strong, random, automatically-generated passwords means I’ve no idea what my Facebook or Google password is. Therefore, I’m at the… Read More

Rich (@rmanalan) has been bragging about CyanogenMod (@cyanogen) for nearly a month because it provides the closest experience to a vanilla Android install, if you don’t have a Nexus One. For the unfamiliar, the basic Android distro is modified by hardware manufacturers (e.g. HTC, Motorola, Samsung) and carriers (e.g. Sprint, Verizon, AT&T) and installed on… Read More

Error Messages: Help Users to Understand What Went Wrong While reading this post from ReadWriteWeb (@rww), I had a thought. Error message pages should be wikis. Applying crowdsourcing to error message pages creates a dynamic forum that could benefit both users and developers. Instead of request-response support through email or trouble tickets, i.e. asking for… Read More

Last week at OpenWorld, I ran into a web app with some, erm, interesting design. I flew into SFO, which I rarely do anymore, and checked into my flight online via the airline’s website. I’ve used the site in the past, but the checkin process has become much more involved now that everything is a… Read More

I long ago resigned myself to the fact that the day would come when everything was recorded, but I’ll admit this is both cool and frightening all at once. Looxcie, a Camera Recording Everything You See

So, yeah I’m about to toot my own horn a bit. Obviously, one major story coming out of OpenWorld last week is Exalogic, the integrated middleware machine. I riffed on the need for enterprise clouds more than a year ago, so I’m stoked that we’re going in that direction. As a workforce, we could benefit… Read More

After fixing last week’s XSS bug, Twitter rolled out its new twitter.com interface, a.k.a. #newtwitter, to more accounts, including mine @jkuramot. I’ve played around with it for a bit, using it as my client for several hours, and what follows are a few impressions, not necessarily a review. I don’t expect to switch from the… Read More

I planned to get this out yesterday before our session started, but sadly, I just forgot. Anyway, check out the Prezi, incidentally a pretty sweet and engaging way to create a presentation outside the PowerPoint mold. WebCenter: A Web Developer’s Playground on Prezi Questions? Find the comments and speak up for the audio recording.

I always have trouble keeping up with blogging and reading during OpenWorld, and this year is no different. Aside from our yearly session, my main goals at the conference are to reconnect with people I see infrequently and meet new people. Again, this year has been no different. So far, I’ve had the pleasure to… Read More

Chatting with Bex (@bex) and John (@jpiwowar) about the LOLcat-Double Rainbow meme collision last night, I was reminded of this gem. A Baby Photo Becomes an Internet Meme – NYTimes.com How weird (and awesome) would it be to find you’ve become a meme in Japan, complete with Photoshopped pictures and even a doll? Gives a… Read More

Getting down to the wire for OpenWorld now, and the hits just keep on coming. I found out today from Friend of the ‘Lab Marius Ciortea (@radu43) that the oracle.com team’s iPhone app, Oracle Now, is available in the App Store. One question: where’s the Android love? Anyway, with the app, you can follow all… Read More

Google Reader just provided an interesting confluence of posts about mobile apps that are perfectly timed for OpenWorld. OK, fine. One is actually for OpenWorld. First off, via Chet (@oraclenerd) with h/ts to John Piwowar (@jpiwowar), @alanwill and @carymillsap comes the Oracle OpenWorld conference app for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. You can find the right… Read More

At the sublime intersection of infographic and design, you’ll find this fascinating study of color mapped to relative intertubes power. Business Blog / The Most Powerful Colors in the World by COLOURlovers :: COLOURlovers (h/t Geekosystem) Not surprising to see blue and red in the 1 and 2 spots, but I didn’t realize how rare… Read More

Rich (@rmanalan) continues to add features to the WebCenter Chrome extension, and it’s looking like we may eventually get it released outside the firewall. After adding a few new features last week, the latest version (1.0.9) added a few tweaks, including improved sizing of inlined media (e.g. the viewers for YouTube and Vimeo clips) and… Read More

Found this interesting piece via my pal Brian Walsh (@bpwalsh), who worked with Clearwire on the 4G WiMax drivers used in the HTC EVO. Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision? — Engadget Interesting quote: Google must take a stand for the end user and insist that all carrier installed apps and services are easily… Read More

We just found out today that our OpenWorld session has been moved to Marriott Marquis Golden Gate C1. So, same venue, different room. If you plan to attend, make a note. Actually, they’ve moved us to a much smaller room, about a quarter of the original room’s size. I guess our session isn’t very popular… Read More

Amazon’s Kindle vs. iPad for reading in direct sunlight ad is buzzing around the internets today. It’s a very clever spot that calls out a specific use case that I’m sure many people have. Over the weekend, the NFL season began in earnest here in the States, and I got to see the ads I’ll… Read More

On Friday, Rich (@rmanalan) shared this interesting slide deck by Bryan Rieger (@bryanrieger) to our internal instance of WebCenter. Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu View more presentations from Bryan Rieger. The slides give a good dose of perspective about who exactly is consuming the mobile web and how we should develop to support them.… Read More

As I read this TechCrunch post, I wondered immediately if the conclusion reached would match my own, i.e. Google should buy its way into the carrier business. The Nexus One Was Google’s Dream. The Carriers Were Freddy Krueger Turns out, it wasn’t, but this move makes sense. Having failed to wrest control from the carriers with… Read More

My pal Jason Grigsby (@grigs) poses an interesting question: Do Mobile Apps Create Lock-in? « Cloud Four The premise is that the ancillary costs of apps bought to augment your awesome smartphone will lock you into that phone (and carrier, in the iPhone’s case) and prevent you from jumping to another smartphone platform, like Android… Read More