The AppsLab

Found this over on Digg. Very cool stuff, even if you’re not into hideaway furniture. The design and engineering that go into these pieces must be fascinating stuff. Enjoy.

This is really smart and surprisingly cheaper than most hoodies. Hoodie With Earbuds Instead of Strings Is Greatest iPod Accessory of All Of course, I live in Portland, OR, where the hoodie is a wardrobe must-have.

Several of us use Agile Web Solutions 1Password to manage our multitude of credentials. However, they don’t have an Android solution, and I’ve hated living without it since my move to Android. Aside from the password store on Mac, 1Password offers a bunch of great options to access credentials on other devices, including an excellent iPhone app that… Read More

Data from yesterday’s iPhone 4 marathon of line-standing are trickling across the intertubes. I found this to be less sunny a prediction than the analyst they quoted as saying “mission accomplished.” 77% of iPhone 4 sales were upgrades – Apple 2.0 – Fortune Tech Apple has always sold well into its sweetspot of users, so… Read More

Interesting. Reminds me of Amazon remotely wiping 1984 from Kindles last year. Google remotely wipes app from a few phones, explains why | Android Central Apple has a similar power over iPhone apps, i.e. disabling them. I suppose this is a concession we make for carrying these Intertubes ready devices. Another argument against device convergence… Read More

An emailer to an internal iPhone mailing list yesterday mentioned that he’d cut the SIM card from his old iPhone to put into his new, but not yet activated, iPhone 4. The iPad 3G and iPhone 4 both use MicroSIMs, another Apple-specific hardware invention. I thought this was a joke, but it’s a legit technique,… Read More

I saw an ad for the Garminfone during the World Cup today. It’s essentially just another Android phone, but focused on Garmin’s navigation rather than Google’s. I’d heard about its existence in the past, but never paid much attention. This move makes sense for Garmin, but I wonder if consumers care. After all, Google’s Navigation app… Read More

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. iOS to make its desktop debut with next iMac revision? Even though the iOS claim that “you already know how to use it” appeals to my quest to design simpler software, the hubris coming out of Cupertino lately has me worried that this won’t end well. Especially… Read More

Early last year, Friend of the ‘Lab Clayton Donley (@cdonley) introduced the Oracle People iPhone app. That app has been wildly popular. I routinely get a couple requests a week for the download information here, by email and in various other forums. Today, Clayton dropped People2, a new version of the app that supports iOS4… Read More

As I mentioned last week, Rich and Anthony were moving on from the WebCenter bookmarklet to browser extensions for sharing to WebCenter. When Chrome extensions were first announced, I remember reading that they were enormously easier to build than Firefox add-ons. Apparently, this difference wasn’t overstated. Yesterday, after spending a few hours on it, Anthony… Read More

I have a smug desire to point out that AT&T, the primary reason a lot of people won’t buy an iPhone, has expanded its smartphone offering with another Android phone. Namely, the HTC Aria, which runs watered down Android. AT&T locks down Android again with HTC Aria Yeah, I did an informal poll about reasons… Read More

We do more prototyping that most product teams. Probably because a lot of what we build is brand new, but also because we all somehow silently agreed that we like working that way. Design Better And Faster With Rapid Prototyping – Smashing Magazine Prototyping is key to agile development, and I always-always-always struggle with the visual fidelity… Read More

To my point about Android needing marketing, Verizon is at it again with the Droid X: Teaser Reveals Droid X Twitter | Android Phone Fans Droid marketing may inexplicably target men over women, but at least they’re pushing Android aggressively as an alternative to the iPhone.

An email today triggered a thought I’ve had before, but never bothered to put into writing. Once you learn to use a piece of software, are you tied to it forever, for better or for worse? This is an multi-faceted problem, so I’m not even going to pretend like I have an answer.  However, it’s… Read More

We here at the ‘Lab love Ruby, especially the Rails variety. As such, we’re also big fans of Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) and his work building Ruby adapters for Oracle, which allows modern web apps built in Rails (think Twitter.com, 37Signals, etc.) to run on top of Oracle data structures. Today, Raimonds blogged a plea for… Read More

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