I’m so going to blog this!

I don’t really have time to write a full post today but I know I need to start writing again so here’s the quick run down of the current awesome:

• Since I came back from vacation, I’ve (along with support from my rad teammates) been socially hacking things up over at Comcast Interactive Media.  Breaking down silo walls and getting people to talk to each other.  For two projects in a row I’ve got all the team members from product, QA, IA, design and development (~12 person team) sitting at the same table together.  The. same. table.  For the entire sprint. For those of you in big corporations, you understand how hard this is to do.  And the thing is… it’s working!  People love it.  Turns out sometimes you just have to get everyone to show up in the same place and a whole lot of awesome happens.
• Craziness going on in the world of automated testing at CIM.  ScrewUnit, RSpec, Webrat & Cucumber and a big ol’ Java web project. Hellz yes. Oh yeah, and it’s behavior-driven all the way for me from now on.  I pretty much won’t work without automated acceptance tests anymore.
• Project RocketSauce is dead.  RocketSauce was the codename for the wifi finding project I started a while back right after BarCamp.  It was an OK idea, but too many things got in it’s way.  My own inaction being one of the biggest.  There’s a post here on lessons learned, but that’ll have to come later.
• A project did come out of the RSS reader discussion.  Can’t talk too much about the details for the moment, but I’m working with the incredibly talented team over at IndyHall Labs.  Plenty of blog-worthy stuff here, too.  I know, you’re trembling in anticipation.
• If you’re in Philadelphia, check out the culinary goodness going on with the ChefAMe guys. Announcements to follow soon about some bar- and booze-focused events!
• Just started on another great side project revolving around beer & Rails.  Mmmm, beer. Mmmm, Rails.
• Philly Supper Club is back up and running! This Wednesday we’ll be at Chifa. Check us out at www.phillysupperclub.com and follow what’s going down on Twitter: @phlsupperclub
• I’m working with the rest of the crew from RefreshPhilly to see if we can’t get a contest going similar to Apps for Democracy or Apps for America for Philadelphia.  Come out to our May 4th meeting and talk to me if you’re interested. Also, come out and meet our special guest Allan Frank (@alzo999), the CIO of Philadelphia!

Whew.  Ok.  I’m going to go rest now.

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Hey all! I know it’s been a long while since the last update, but I’ve got a lot of exciting things going on and I want to share all the excitement. New projects, new fail stories, and lots of ideas!

Check back soon for more awesome!

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I’m writing this from by iPhone using WordPress’s iPhone app. You can check it out at iPhone.wordpress.org.

Generally I find it very syriaght forward and easy to use but the edit options are pretty much limited to writing straight HTML. Needless to say, the iPhone is not the best platform for writing verbose code. Still, it’s very cool to be able to do this

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http://www.barcampphilly.org/

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It’d be great to have a firefox addon which allowed me to bookmark pages at a specific point in the page.  Essentially, I’d be adding in my own anchor into the DOM and then booking marking that.

Implementation might be a bitch, but I’m thinking it would be really useful. Especially useful for dealing with things like long programming tutorials, which you will read over the course of several sittings and will want to put a placemarker.

Alternately, it could just be an add-on that puts a placemarker on the page at an assigned length down the page.  When you come back your placemarker would still be there.

Anyone know of anything like this out there already?

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Arpit Mathur, one of our senior developers at CIM, has been leading the charge on a new open source ActionScript 3 framework called OpenPyro.  It’s a really light, easy to use framework for developing Flash/ActionScript components and applications quickly.  OpenPyro does a lot of what Flex is doing for you without all the bloating you get from using Flex.

Check out Arpit’s post on the framework at http://www.arpitonline.com/blog/?p=147

The project homepage is at http://code.cimians.com/redmine/projects/show/pyro.

Sign up for the Google Group at http://groups.google.com/group/as3-pyro-user-group/

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When Ubiquity came out, I knew I had to put some something simple together with it just to see it working. As most of the people who read this blog know I work for Comcast Interactive Media and one of our big products is Fancast.com. It seemed appropriate to write a command that would search Fancast’s content.

It’s a pretty simple command that works pretty much just like the Google and YouTube searches. Down the line, I’d like to add in the thumbnail previews and category filtering similar to the piratebay command.

You can subscribe here at github: http://gist.github.com/10509

Please visit the project site for more info on:

• Ubiquity
• How to Install It
• and How to Develop for It

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It just occurred to me as I was looking at a wordle of the recent presidential debates just how cool of a data visualization Wordle really is.

So here’s one I recently created using this blog:

I don’t think that a wordle image can give you a full sense of the text without the context of reading the original, but I do think it can give you some insight into the kind of words the author is using.

I really like that in a blog that is currently focused on application design the words “people,” “content,” and “idea”  are so visible.

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Thanks to Mat for calling me on the lack of clarity in my idea post.  I realize that it ended up being a bit more of a brain dump and much less of a coherent project idea.  I’ve found that I’ve been able to sell the idea pretty well in person, but text is a much more difficult medium for me.

So here’s the quick pitch:

Native iPhone application for one site/blog (e.g. The Sartorialist) which leverages all the great features of an RSS reader, can be used offline, supports comments, and most importantly has an interface which is tailored to the content.

If the major contents of the site are images, then the interface should give the user the tools to browse through them in a way suited to images, not to the the generic RSS format.

Is that more clear?

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EDIT: I’ve added a couple of edits for clarity’s sake.

I’ve been ranting a lot lately about people sharing their ideas.  However, to my shame I’ve actually been holding back on posting this one out of all the fears that I mentioned back in “Don’t hide your ideas”.

So here’s my one big idea which may be made of Awesome or 100% Fail. Most likely, it’s somewhere in between:

There are some very, very popular blogs out there with huge readerships.  I’m thinking specifically here of The Sartorialist, a fashion photographer who wanders around world cities taking some amazing shots of people with great style.

However, for most people the only way to get all of those fantastic photos is to stop back at the site every day and look for updates.

“But, Kevin, why don’t those poor, misguided fashionistas just subscribe to it in their RSS aggregator of choice?”

Because they don’t know what a RSS aggregator is and don’t want to know.

There are plenty of people, no, probably most people who get their news, blogs, and media every day by opening up a folder of bookmarks. And lots of those people have iPhones.  I’ve talked to these folks and they would love to catch up on their favorite writers, wonks and icons while they rode the train in.  But they’re not ready to fire up Google Reader just quite yet.

Couple of problems I want to solve for users:

Problem #1: Understanding RSS and then subscribing to a feed is a pretty high barrier to entry for most people.
Potential Solution: One blog, One app. They’re already subscribed because they installed the app.  Done.  They have their posts and they’re happy. No technical understanding necessary.

Problem #2: Generalized aggregators have generalized interfaces which don’t display non-general content in the most compelling and fun to use way.
Potential Solution: Since RSS is pretty standardized, write a solid RSS engine which is repurposable but don’t try to be all things to all blogs on the interface side.  Sites like The Sartorialist have very particular content and only ever post a couple of different kinds of content. [EDIT for clarity] The goal here is to write an individual custom interface for a site like The Sartorialist. [/EDIT]

Problem #3: Commenting. It just isn’t there.
Potential Solution: It’s easy to forget that half of the blog experience for many people is the social thing that comes out of commenting.  I haven’t found a good mobile aggregator that handles commenting at all, let alone well. So we give the user a way to comment and be updated when someone replies to that thread.

Problem #4: Brand and the trusted source.
Potential Solution: Would you rather use a dull, all-purpose reader or a shiny, colorful, feature-full application from your favorite content provider? …Ok, well you’re reading my blog, so you’re a geek and you probably prefer the all-purpose reader like me.  But feeling that you’re still connected to your favorite content provider will make a lot of people feel a lot more comfortable.

So why not just make a custom web page? [EDIT] Because a custom application is going to give you a better experience. [/EDIT] It’s all the same reasons to write any native app for the iPhone: intuitive, tactile interfaces; faster load times (not a lot of pesky graphics); easily statefull; offline reading… You know the drill.

So what do You think?  Somebody already do it? What’s wrong with it? What’s right with it? Want to get involved? I love any and all feed back.

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