One of my strong beliefs is that there are enough good ideas in the world to go around, and thus sharing those ideas early is a good thing. That is the whole premise surrounding my idea of Concept Buzz and it would appear the folks over at clusterify have a similar belief.
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posted on the May 29th, 2009 No Comments »
Rightio, the second day of JAOO in Brisbane is over and has brought a nicely balanced conference to a close. Definitely a conference with a broad spectrum of topic areas covered, and personally I loved it. It’s great to go to a conference that doesn’t align itself to any particular vendor or language, and promotes the kind of openness that is really required to move our industry forward.
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posted on the May 12th, 2009 No Comments »
Well the first day of JAOO was quite good, maybe not what everyone was after (looking at the twitter traffic). Personally enjoyed the sessions and the conceptual nature of the talks I attended. Here is a quick wrap-up on the sessions I attended.
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posted on the May 12th, 2009 2 Comments »
Online video is something that helps to make a product or website standout from the rest. Whether it is a screencast tutorial or a promotional video for a product, the presence of video can help your offering stand-out from the crowd.
Stupeflix is a site that enables you to automatically generate video from a series of images, and apply text and a backing track to make a video that is quite compelling. In the past I have used Animoto and recommended it to friends as a great and simple way to put together a great video from existing static images. Honestly, I will continue to recommend Animoto as an excellent tool for generating video online – the effects and overall feel of the video coming out of Animoto has an edge over the end product Stupeflix creates (you can do a side-by-side comparison of their demo videos and you’ll see what I mean).
What makes Stupeflix different, however, is that it exposes a RESTful API for generating the videos. This in turn opens up some amazing opportunities for websites that already have a large amount of static imagery they would like to present in a more compelling way. Mike Butcher in his techcrunch post suggests a few application possibilities around generic eCommerce sites which includes some potential uses of the generated videos to assist with monetization of your own sites.
One of the most useful real-world examples I can think of would be on property sales / real estate websites. Nothing would showcase a property better than a video of the still images taken by the property photographer. It would certainly be more compelling than the clunking slideshow mechanisms most of these sites currently offer. The same of course could apply to car sales sites and the like.
Image hosting and stock image sites are another obvious big area that could put Stupeflix to good use. So the next thing to do is to get some time get mashing with their API (I’ll post any updates on this post).
posted on the May 8th, 2009 2 Comments »
Starting out building a new website leaves you with a whole pile of stuff to think about and plan. Generally you get drawn to thinking about how you’d like it to look, and maybe some of the swanky new features you’d like to incorporate. Easily the thing that I get bogged down in though, is the content and the information architecture (what goes where). Maybe it comes easy to some, but for me it feels like a real slog.
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posted on the April 25th, 2009 No Comments »
This one is a goody, and in all honesty I thought I was on the tail end of find it. Apparently not. I’ve seen both lifehacker and techcrunch blogging on this particular application recently and have to add my two cents.
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posted on the April 22nd, 2009 No Comments »
If you haven’t seen it already on other blogs around the place (lifehacker or makeuseof) I’d recommend checking out yet another online project management system – taskbarn.
Even though it is entering a pretty overpopulated field in terms of online project and task management solutions, it’s delivery is exceptional (and best of all it’s free). Feature-wise it’s on the light-side, but in many ways that’s a relief. I’m definitely a person with lots of things on the go at any one time, and whilst I’m happy to use full blown project management solutions in my day job, it does feel more than a little over-the-top for my “out of hours” initiatives.
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posted on the April 22nd, 2009 No Comments »
Recently I logged into the Google AppEngine dashboard, and was pleased to be greeted with the option to take an “early look” at their Java support. Nice, I thought. Java on AppEngine – that’ll be pretty handy. Didn’t think too much more about it. Then today in my normal web reading time I came across a post on SpringSource about How to write your Google AppEngine applications in Groovy. Now *this* was interesting. Groovy is a language that has caught my attention on more than one occasion, and has actually proved pretty useful for writing small utility applications.
Using Groovy for Web Application Development
Groovy is well suited to the domain of the web programmer. Being fairly impatient types, who would like to produce applications quickly and would rather not write more code than we have to, Groovy is an absolute diamond in the J2EE coal mine. Groovy offers groovlets in the place of servlets, which essentially do the same thing; but some of the syntactic sugar offered with groovy builders make generating HTML pretty simple.
The quest for Grails
As it stands, groovy is pretty useful for building simple scripts, but of course it’s not going to compete with the popular frameworks out there at the moment. Well along comes Grails. I came across Grails a little while ago, but have to admit passed it off as “just another Ruby on Rails clone”, and without being too harsh, it more or less is (with some minor differences). Without having committed myself one way or the other (a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none, perhaps) I could have gone for either RAILS or Grails without caring too much.
The potential (and likelihood according to SpringSource) that GAE will eventually work with Grails applications, really tips the balance for me. GAE hosting is probably some of the most economical and easy to manage scalable hosting environments currently available. With a framework as powerful as Grails deployed on it, I would expect more developers showing an interest in, and migrating to both Grails and Groovy. This in turn, would probably encourage more developers to use AppEngine to deploy their applications.
A note about CRON
Additionally, I noticed today that there is a menu item for Cron Jobs now in the AppEngine management interface. Anyone know when that popped in there? Was it at the same time that they implemented the Java support? At any rate, I’m pretty excited about it – previously I was thinking I would have to run an EC2 instance or something to handle background tasks required by my web applications. Now I don’t think I will have to 
posted on the April 9th, 2009 3 Comments »
Whilst investigating platforms for managing Amazon’s EC2 platform, I came across a company that have a site / product called Scalr (which is interesting in itself), but once I delved into the company behind that product – Intridea I was even more impressed. These guys are really producing some quality stuff.
One piece of tech that is particularly interesting is their product called present.ly – which in their own words is “Twitter meets LinkedIn”. Now whilst I believe these guys have done a good job building the technology I have to wonder if the product will make the dent in the market I believe they would like it to.
So many questions in my head around this space…
Will corporates show interest in microblogging? I can just imagine the CEO of some large multinational just microblogging about some aggressive job cuts he is having to make given the financial environment.
If enterprise microblogging becomes something to investigate, will the new kids on the block get to play, or will twitter take that business?
Still, kudos for the build of the app – it feels and looks good; and good luck to the guys at Intridea with the project. From what I’ve seen on their site, they definitely are pulling some great stuff together, so I’m going to keep an eye out for more interesting projects from them – their labs area is a good place to start if you are interested.
posted on the March 26th, 2009 2 Comments »
In my opinion Google’s AppEngine is a application prototypers dream. Up until just now I was tossing up whether to code a prototype or ConceptBuzz in PHP or RoR, even though I had a predisposition to building components of it using python. This was purely for the reason that I was being conservative with regards to economics – it’s cheap to get PHP hosting (and in general if you have cpanel hosting, you get RoR as well) so I was leaning that way.
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posted on the March 20th, 2009 2 Comments »
