Monday, June 18th, 2007 - 13 Comments
I can’t get enough of I’m in like with you, it’s the most addictive site I’ve been on since I before myspace became crap. The concept is simple yet a bit difficult to explain so I’ll just send you off to the iilwy about page.
It’s currently invite only but they are ramping up and giving out more invites all the time (I have about 6 at the moment if anyone wants in)
From a Designer/Developer point of view its really interesting too, built on Ruby on Rails and using flash and instant messaging in some very cool ways. I’m keeping an eye on how well they scale in future too.
My one niggle about the site is they have gone a little OTT on the javascript, it tends to crash firefox if i have too many tabs of it open and it can be a little slow on the refresh at times.
But other than that I love it, they even have a version for mobile phones!
My profile is here: iminlikewithyou.com/profile/detail/Andrewnez so play on my games 
Sunday, June 17th, 2007 - 2 Comments
This is pant-wettingly good news, Google maps is now available for download on your mobile phone!
Head to Google.co.uk/gmm on your phone and download this straight away, you’ll never get lost again.
It has location search, business search, Satellite imagery, basically exactly the same as on the web but in your hand, why haven’t you downloaded it yet?!
I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been out for but I only found out about it a couple days ago, suddenly one of the iPhones best features is available on a huge amount of other phones, and what with me rediscovering 3G on my phone, I don’t fell anywhere near as annoyed that i won’t be able to get an iPhone for another 9 -12 months.
If you dont have an unlimited data plan I might hold off on using it too much tho, I can see it rolling up quite a bill in data transfers!
Saturday, June 16th, 2007 - 4 Comments
There has been so much buzz around the iPhone for the past months and I’ve been looking forward to it too, but being in the UK I’m not going to be able to get it for about a year so I’ve not got my hopes up too much.
Plus I just downloaded google maps for my phone and remembered that I had turned off 3G, my Sony K800i has 90% of the features of the iphone plus a few extra ones and it’s in my hand today, so I’m sure I can live without it.
The announcement last week about the iPhone “SDK” being safari has been purely good news for me, being a web developer already I’ve instantly became an iPhone developer as well. Thanks to Ruby on Rails I can whip up an app and as long as it nice and standards compliant (which all of my designs are anyway) it should work like a treat.
I’ve heard and read about a lot of apple developers bitching and moaning that there is not a full-on SDK for the iPhone but quite frankly i think they are being incredibly shortsighted. Lets look at an example and compare the two:
- Apple brings out the iPhone SDK and apple developers can produce an application that only runs on the iPhone, which if it doesn’t flop, will have about 6 million users in a years time, they will have the power to crash the phone, delete whole address books and even bring viruses or spyware onto the platform.
- Apple doesn’t bring out an SDK but includes full on safari on the iPhone, a developer can produce a piece of software that not only works on the iPhone but also every Desktop PCs, macs , Nintendo Wii and many other internet enabled devices plus any other new phones that are released by any other manufacturers which have a more fully functional web browser.
Plus if they put in the time and effort to use unobtrusive javascript then their web apps will also work great on hundreds of millions of existing 3G and GPRS enabled phones that exist today.
I think it’s pretty obvious which is the better choice for a developer who actually wants to make some money!
Another benefit of doing web development over creating packaged, downloadable applications is that you control all of the source code all of the time, your IP never leaves you server (unless you are dumb enough to write all of your business logic into your javascript) and you can update your code base as often as you like without ever having to worry that some lazy user has not got the latest update.
At Greenvoice we release small updates on an almost daily basis and we never have to worry about supporting legacy code and if we made a mistake along the way then so what we can fix it at any time and roll out an update to 100% of our users as soon as the fix is complete.
One argument that I’m sure a number of developers would come back with is that there are nowhere near enough tools or control over the system and that you need an internet connection for these things to work, but as it happens google, adobe, mozilla and microsoft are all working on ways of solving these issues with frameworks like apollo and gears plus the next generation of web browsers are heading in the same direction.
For me web development has so many attractive elements compared to traditional software development that i cant see myself doing anything else. So if the apple developer community is going to keep moaning and groaning then fine, leave all of the opportunities in web development to me, I’d be more than happy to have your money!
Friday, June 8th, 2007 - 8 Comments
Yesterday we deployed a brand new version of Greenvoice.com, I’ve been working on this design for about 2 weeks solid and I’m really proud to announce it. I definitely feel like it’s one of my best pieces of work I’ve ever done.
I’ve decided to extend the Feedback Competition until Monday, you can still grab a free greenvoice t-shirt just by leaving some feedback on the site (good or bad).
In other news my myspace profile was linked up on mashable.com which got submitted to digg. In the past 48 hours I’ve had like 22000 views on my profile and loads of friends requests and people asking me to make the profiles!!
This weekend I’m going have my own personal rails day, attempting to make a whole rails application in a 24 hours, my app of choice is the real Flashmeme!!!
