The AppsLab

I’m convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is great for enterprise software. I’m similarly convinced that innovation on the consumer side of the web is terrible for enterprise software. Reading Marc Benioff’s post “The Facebook Imperative” on TechCrunch last week reminded me of these mutually-exclusive conclusions. On the one hand, as Benioff points… Read More

Not long ago, Twitter announced its inaugural developer conference, whimsically called Chirp, would be held April 14 and 15, 2010 in San Francisco. It may or may not be coincidental that the dates are one week earlier than Facebook’s annual f8 developer conference. Anyway, Chirp looks to be an outstanding opportunity to learn more about… Read More

Last week’s kerfuffle about foursquare and how it exposes you to would-be burglars was hilarious to me. More accurately, it’s Twitter that poses the risk, which isn’t a new problem. Foursquare encourages people to socialize their game-playing by adding friends from Facebook, Twitter and GMail. As with any service, this is to their advantage. Although, I… Read More

Ruby enthusiast and friend of the ‘Lab Raimonds Simanovskis (@rsim) just released a maintenance update to his ActiveRecord oracle-enhanced-adapter, bringing it to version 1.2.4. This will be the final version of the adapter for Rails 2, after which he’ll move it to Rails 3. Last month, he updated ruby-plsql. As you know, we’re big fans… Read More

I did some printer support over the weekend, which reminded me of the whole “facebook login” fiasco from earlier in the month. Long story short, the person I was supporting couldn’t get Windows to recognize the printer. The PC tower was under a desk and in a difficult spot to reach. The area was so… Read More

In life if something doesn’t work out, at least you can learn from it.  That is the power of doing.  The beauty of being a human being is that we are exceptionally good at learning from others.  As I watched Google launch Buzz, and the ensuing mess, it got me thinking.  Why did a project… Read More

In an IM conversation I had with Paul this morning, I decided to embark on an experiment. I’ve decided to drop out of all things social (online) for a few weeks. This includes Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, blogging, etc. The only thing this doesn’t include is email and IM — those are essential. My online activities… Read More

Halfway through a blah post about Google Buzz, I ran across this post about the correlation between Facebook relationship status and happiness. I’ve largely ignored Facebook for a while now, and it didn’t occur to me until Pete Warden released his initial observations about Facebook and US geography how much statistical gold exists there. Turns… Read More

It’s been a few days since Google Buzz was born and it’s time for an AppsLabber to review it, so here are my thoughts. Day one It was a lonely experience — akin to showing up to a party you knew was going to be fun, but you ended being one of the first ones… Read More

A post from Signal vs. Noise titled “Computers shouldn’t make people feel like idiots” has been open in a tab for nearly a week. Reading it, and other iPad coverage, has me torn. I know that I exist in a world populated by geeks, and I know that many outside this world are uncomfortable with computers.… Read More

Thought of something interesting (see disclaimer) yesterday, namely observing the evolution of how design solves problems with software. Take a common requirement for the interwebs and its viewer, the browser, like wanting to view more than a single web page at a time. In the first few iterations of browsers, this was possible only by… Read More

So, Google has been busy announcing products this week. Lost in the Buzz news was this bit that Google is planning to build its own high-speed fiber network. Mmm, fiber. Their goals are: We’re planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We’ll… Read More

Writing and maintaining a blog requires a fair amount of effort. Hence the rise of micro-blogging, which is almost frictionless (one of my favorite interface-isms), creating mountains of content, a long tail for blogging as it were. That’s actually pretty funny, since blogging was initially the long tail of online content publishing, which was kind… Read More

Rich has been a big proponent of Posterous for a long time. I’ve been meaning to try it out, so here goes. I saw this link in my Reader today, pretty interesting stuff. I <3 data visualizations, as you know, so it was a gimme. Not sure how he got access to all the data… Read More

I’ve been thinking about comments lately, mostly because several interesting points have converged to draw my attention. First, Cult of Mac pointed out that John Gruber’s Daring Fireball will now have comments, via another site, i.e. DaringFireballWithComments.net. Next, Engadget turned off their comments because the had “really gotten out of hand”. Then today I see… Read More

Have you noticed the subtle change to the VirtualBox logo? Probably not, but thanks to ReadWriteWeb for pointing out the change. VirtualBox is one of several open source projects that Sun oversaw, and in his strategy briefing last week, Larry Ellison announced that VirtualBox images will be deployable on Oracle VM, which is great news.… Read More

Last week, you got not one, but two posts by authors not named Jake. I felt lucky too. Matt (@topperge) gave us his rundown of “no brainer” features in advance of the iPad announcement. As a giggle, let’s score his accuracy: Books in the App Store: Win. Apple announced a new app called iBooks, delivered… Read More

In case you were unplugged, Apple announced a tablet last week, called the iPad. By now, the jokes have died down and the geek world has been furiously dissecting the pros and cons of the iPad. It’s what we do. My quick take is the same as its been for a while: I don’t need… Read More

Wednesday was an interesting day, with two very interesting announcements happening at the same time, one in the consumer space, one in the enterprise space. I’m talking obviously about the Apple event to announce the iPad and the Oracle-Sun strategy announcement. It’s well-known that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have been friends for many years,… Read More

Last week my imac (home computer), that my wife uses to run our little lunchbox company begin having some serious issues.  Slow access times, constant rebooting and as of yesterday a complete inability to boot.  Just a lovely grey screen of solitude much like the image above, until it refused to even show that little… Read More