Jul 17

iPhone Fusin’

Tech No Comments »

It was very cool to see iphonedisk pop up over on Google Code.

iphonedisk is a MacFUSE file system for the iPhone, so now you can easily poke around.

$ ./mount.sh
Waiting for phone... established.
Mounting iPhone Volume...
$ ls -l /Volumes/iPhone/
total 0
drwxrwxrwx   2 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 DCIM
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 com.apple.itunes.lock_sync
drwxrwxrwx   2 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 iTunes_Control
$ echo hello > /Volumes/iPhone/foo
$ ls -l /Volumes/iPhone/
total 2
drwxrwxrwx   2 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 DCIM
-rw-rw-rw-   1 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 com.apple.itunes.lock_sync
-rw-r--r--   1 root  wheel  6 Dec 31  1969 foo
drwxrwxrwx   2 root  wheel  0 Dec 31  1969 iTunes_Control
$ cat /Volumes/iPhone/foo
hello

Jul 14

Ryan Stewart’s favourite Flash site

Tech 6 Comments »

Not to pick on Jesse, but this is why Flash gets a bad wrap:

  • Having an animated version of yourself making poses
  • Having a cursor that is a big blue ball
  • Implementing your own scrollbars that don’t react to scrollwheels etc
  • Having each “page” be a totally different UI

I know that you love this site Ryan, but please take it out of your “Best practices with Flash and RIA” Ignite session.

jesseflash.png

Jul 10

Geek Road Rules: Joining the Adobe Bus

Tech 24 Comments »

I am joining the Adobe Bus tour for a nice trip to Seattle, Vancouver, and Portland.

When I heard about the tour I thought that it sounded like a fun idea. It was nice of Adobe to shake it up a little, and create “Road Rules” for geeks. I am looking forward to spending some time on the bus with the likes of Mike Chambers, Ryan Stewart, Robert Scoble, and the other folk.

I will be presenting on Google Gears, and tonight will be following the lightning talk format of 20 slides, auto progressing every 15 seconds (so a forced 5 minute presentation).

I have uploaded the talk here.

Come join us, so we feel like it is worth busing around! And, don’t worry. We know that we won’t have the rock star paparazzi or groupies that we wish we had ;)

onair.png

Jul 10

Facebook AppFactory

Tech No Comments »

Salil Deshpande, friend and Bay Partner, has launched a new seed program specifically for Facebook applications.

Facebook inverting itself to become a platform is going to go down as an ingenious move and it has changed the entire landscape. This is just the beginning. You can bet that the API will get better and better.

It is quite fascinating to see the social network evolve in front of your eyes. It has gone from “the site that my sister in law and her college buddie friends use” to one that I sign up for, and then see people in my parents peer group!

If there is One True Social Network, then tools need to let you chop up that network (there are some apps that do this already). If I am going to run for office, I may not want people to know that I am part of an S&M group for example. This is the last frontier that makes LinkedIn different… the notion of work versus play. There is a good chance that: a) people won’t care, and b) the tools will allow you to slice and dice when you need it.

I can’t wait to see what Salil funds!

Jul 09

Hope for Gmail on Mobile, Java style?

Apple, Java, Tech 3 Comments »

I have proclaimed several times that I miss my Gmail for Mobile experience on the iPhone.

Ed Burnette then points out that Apple sneaks Java support onto the iPhone.

They didn’t really sneak it on though, it is just on the ARM chip (although not available):

Despite public comments by Steve Jobs that

Jul 08

iPhone Porn Development

Tech 12 Comments »

The iPhone Barcamp has been fantastic to see. How people come together that quickly to build a flash mob like that is impressive and shows how eager people are to target this platform.

There were all types at the event, including someone who had never heard of Ruby or Rails (shock horror!).

There was also a set of porn lobbyists that were hoping to get Apple to listen to them. They had video mockups of the amazing things they could do on the iphone wrt pornage, if they have access to the gestures, specifically pinch.

At least we will know that some people will be making a bunch of money off of the iphone (as well as Apple).

;)

Jul 07

Susie’s Rules of Choosing Karaoke Songs

Personal No Comments »

Lessons from a true pro:

  • People should know some of the words, but not all of them (so they listen to you)
  • There has to be some slow parts and some fast parts
  • There has to be a speaking part
  • There has to be some instrumental time so you can talk to the crowd.
Jul 03

Does anyone at Facebook use multiple machines?

Tech 7 Comments »

Facebook is the most anal website when it comes to logging in. As soon as you login in one location, any other computer/phone is locked out and you need to login there (which causes you to have to re-login on computer A).

What a royal PITA! This isn’t my bank (although, actually, one day it may be!) site, so let me login once and leave me alone :)

Jul 02

deliphone: iPhone Bookmarks

Tech 3 Comments »

I use del.icio.us for bookmarking. I am not about to start using the iPhone browser bookmarks thank you very much.

I should have looked harder for a del.icio.us to Safari syncer, and then when I sync my phone it would pick them up.

Instead, I whipped up a simple tool that sits in cron and generates my bookmarks for me using the del.icio.us API.

Then I can just go to http://almaer.com/iphone in the browser and I have my bookmarks. Like #{name} " end end links.join "\n" end

I use the style from David Cann. I hope to see a nice iPhone skin soon, that would take all of the UI of the phone (blue and red buttons, arrows, (X), etc and CSS it. Then, you could wrap a body class=”iphone” and things would look nice by using simple ul, li combos, and special CSS tags. Life would be good. I also need to add scrolling and the like. And this should be a service and not a script in cron :)

Jul 02

The Apple Balance isn’t in the iPhone: You, and your mum

Tech No Comments »

As good as the iPhone is in some regards it is missing the balance of the Mac computers, and that is what is bothering me.

I recommend the Mac for both developers, and their mothers and fathers. For the “I am not a computer person, I just want to check email, write docs, and have no issues” the Mac is perfect. It’s usability is second to none, and everything integrates nicely. The iPhone is the same. It is how Steve wanted it, and that is great for most users.

For developers, the Mac is perfect as you can get in under the hood and tweak anything you want. It’s just Unix. It has an incredibly open API. Non-hard core types can still tinker around via AppleScript, Automator, and the like. I can run my Rails app in a similar configuration on my Mac to my server up in the cloud.

This is the piece that is missing from the iPhone. We have no window into the device at all. We can’t make the most simple tweaks that would make our worlds easier to deal with (e.g. even email filters and such).

Apple needs to redress this balance shortly, else the developers will get bored of the device and someone like Nokia or RIM could come along with a more open platform and entice them.