^IfMine - Now with ^Notes

Disclaimer: The contents of this post are the thoughts and opinions of a lowly Software Developer working at Agile Oasis Technologies on IfMine.com.  They are not representative of the official viewpoints of Agile Oasis Technologies nor of ^IfMine.

We finally pushed the newest version of ^IfMine out today.  With the newest feature: ^Notes.

I've been working on the ^IfMine project for about a year now; slowly building it up, improving and expanding features.  The original idea was to have some sort of input on your projects.  Pose a question or two and people could answer "If it was my project, I would do this..." and provide users the ability to "Evolve" their project to the next state - clean the comment and file history and focus specifically on what the new state of the project was.

Being obsessed with the valley and startups, I always thought that this was a really cool idea at its most basic instinct.  It seemed to me that ^IfMine was really focused on that area between "I've got an idea!" and "I'm making my idea a reality!"  It really focused on Idea Refinement and gathering input.

Now with ^Notes, it takes it to a new level.  Create a new ^Note for every little thought you have about your project and you can get input on each individual thought.  Quickly allowing you to pivot your project in the direction you think is best for it - and evolve it into a clean slate where you can post new ideas once you've already established some (With an entire history of those ideas still kept).

But most importantly: ^Notes feels like it was my idea.  The content of attaching notes to a project has been in the roadmap for a long time, but when the team stepped back and we started talking about how to best leverage our infrastructure for people with ideas and projects, something clicked and I immediately began drawing out the design on the whiteboard.  I know it's not just my idea - it's the idea my team and I had and refined together - but for once I really took charge with it.  I wanted to make sure that every aspect of it was perfect, and even though it probably isn't, it feels great.  It feels like my personal contribution to the project.

If you haven't checked out ^IfMine yet, please do - especially with this new ^Notes feature.  It finally feels useful.  You can see an example of ^Notes in action where a member is using them to keep track of different aspects of his project.

I'd love to see what you do with ^Notes, and where ^IfMine will go from here with this fantastic new functionality.  If you use them in any neat or interesting ways, please write a comment and link to your project - I'm sure the team would love to see what people are doing with our product!

An Update on GVOMS

So, as many people quickly found out - GVOMS.com wasn't working. At first, the
mirrors shut down, and then Google got stricter regarding logging in through an external server. With some
tweaks, however, I've managed to bring the service up just fine - including support for dual factor
authenticated accounts via application specific passwords.

However, there is
more bad news. It seems that the latest version of Outlook (2013) is removing
"Office Mobile Service". What that means is that GVOMS will only be available for use in Office 2000 and
Office 2007. I will end support for GVOMS no later than the version of Outlook after 2013 - unless
significant interest/donation is put towards it.

The good news is, however,
that GVOMS doesn't have to just be for Outlook. GVOMS provides a protocol that Office understands, but is
open for the entire web. GVOMS provides a SOAP interface for sending Text messages over Google Voice.

So
if you're an interested developer, let that sink in - and then try to build something on top of it ;) You
can read up on [MS-OMS]:
Office Mobile Service Protocol Specification over on MSDN.

And you complain about Android fragmentation?

Something very special and unique exists about Android - it operates on many different
types of screens, devices, and even operating system versions.  Android is a uniquely fascinating ecosystem
that I can never get enough of.  That said, I program Android applications as a student developer for my
University.  Nothing infuriates me more, however, than the constant accusation that programming for android
is hard due to fragmentation.

You couldn't be more wrong.

While I
have yet to suffer the "a new version of android just came out, better test!" scenario, I've successfully
programmed on a two person team for two apps that work on 2.1 and up using 4.0-like features.  Is that
surprising?  It shouldn't be.  The fact of the matter is, Android is built so that differences between
hardware, OS, & al shouldn't matter in the slightest.

That said, I couldn't
help but chuckle a little when we installed iOS6 on one of the test devices in the lab.  (My coworker does
the iOS side of things, so we have native apps for both Android and iOS).  For our little news application,
a drawing thing with the way we were doing the titlebar broke.  Not a big issue (broke for maps too).  For
our maps app... everything broke.  No map.  No pulling up the native application for directions (launched in
safari instead).  Nothing.  With iOS6, Apple went ahead and BROKE apps relying on the maps application.

Sure,
this is probably because they've moved to their own framework, and this is in the early stages of the OS -
but still - entire app. broken.  One iOS update.

And you complain about Android
fragmentation?

Rant: Chrome for Android

I have yet to understand why Google Chrome for Android never bothers to synchronize
your profile and passwords. It is kind of frustrating to be using the same web browser that I use on my
desktop. One I know synchronizes my usernames and passwords and yet I still have to enter in and resave all
my usernames and passwords for any website that I decide to visit on my Android tablet. It is kind of
ridiculous.

Why buying a tablet will improve your phones battery life

I discovered something interesting already in the use of my brand new android tablet. 
It would appear that my phone has started to live for longer periods of time.  When I stopped to think of
this interesting trend it occurred to me that many of the more tablet optimized tasks I partake in on a
daily basis, such as email checking and web browsing I had moved to my tablet, instead opting in to use my
phone only while on the move or for smaller tasks such as texting (which, thanks to my use of google voice I
could do with equal ease on my new Xoom)

This has greatly improved the battery life of
my phone.  My phone is now relegated to more phone-like tasks while my Xoom acts as a extremely portable
device, similar in function to that if a PC.

This brings to mind the conclusion that
the reason our phones battery lives are so horrible these days is because we tend to use them for
everything.  If you're sitting on a train and you don't have a tablet you're probably going to pull out your
mobile phone for instant entertainment.  Purchasing and using a tablet however will surmount in a
significant gain of battery life for your phone, so long as you have uses for your new tablet.

Xoom and ICS

So, today I managed to snag myself a Xoom.  By which h of course I mean that I received
a Xoom in the mail from my good friend Amazon.com.  I have been playing with it since I opened hue packaging
and so far I have to say that I absolutely love it.  Touch typing on a screen is definitely awkward but I
have a feeling that I'll get more used to it as time goes on. 

This is my first
tablet, and hopeful I'll be able to writ some neat maps for it.  I've already had a great idea that nobody
seems to be implementing in the android store atm.

So maybe I will at a future date?

Feeling like I'm PWNing REST

I'm working hard to make the private API I'm implementing at my current job a RESTful
uri scheme, and I feel like I hit a point of transcendence recently when I decided how to record a user
staring a story.

• PUT /article/:articleID/favorite/:userID



• DELETE /article/:articleID/favorite/:userID

I decided
that POST didn't make sense, as you couldn't really favorite a story more than once at
a time, and of course DELETE makes sense here.  Adding them as a relation between the article and the user
seems to make sense in this URI scheme as well.

So, all in all, I'm proud of myself.
 Despite it being such a tiny, simplistic thing.

Future of Facebook?

href="http://tech.navarr.me/2012/02/future-of-facebook.html/mark_on_fb" rel="attachment wp-att-564"> class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-564" title="Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook"
src="http://tech.navarr.me/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mark_on_fb.png" alt="" width="264" height="178" />

style="text-align: left;">So, Mark Zuckerberg posted a photo today of his desk.. and I couldn't help but
notice that his Facebook is different from mine.  Some key things to note:

• Instead of a tiny search bar at the top, there is now a very very large white bar.  This bar
  contains text in it, so I'm presuming it might be the new way to post data to Facebook, replacing
  the comparatively clunky share box we use today.


• Instead of three icons
  (Adds, Notifications, Inbox) on the top bar, there is a single icon.  Perhaps these have been combined into
  one?


• The icon appears squarer than the others.  Maybe its a Facebook icon,
  since the logo is clearly removed in this version?


• To the right of this
  large search box seems to be something else, but I can't make it out - and unfortunately I can't just do a
  CSI-esque "enhance" on the image.

So maybe this is a sneak peak
at what is to come in the future?  Despite that, however, it should be noted that the changes seen here on
Mark's computer may never hit production servers.  This is simply some speculation on some noticeable
changes.

Source: Photograph
Uploaded by Mark Zuckerberg

Idea: Code Reading App

Just jotting down an idea I had for a code reading app.

The idea
is that the application would read through the code and find all the structures, classes, etc and would
combine them in such a way that it could be read as a single line-by-line piece of code, with a UI that
shows the separation between elements.  Possibly using indentation to show the differences between scopes,
possibly with a collapsable block that specifies what the variables in that scope are set to.

A
good version would, of course, automatically change the values of these variables based on the code.

How Software Ruins Ratings

I'm a long time Harry Potter fan.  It's part of my childhood like most people my age.
 I'd gone to the theaters to see every single movie, except for 7P2.  I read today that Amazon was having a
rental sale on the movie (apparently it normally costs more than $1.99 to rent it on Amazon?).  Either way,
I went to the page and I was absolutely surprised to see the rating for the movie was only 2 and a half
stars!

Even if the movie was terrible, there would clearly be such a massive amount of
fans rating the thing that it'd probably hit four stars.. but two and a half?  Not even a full three?  What
was going on here?

A quick glance at the "customer reviews" told me everything I needed
to know.  The full copy included some software called  "Ultraviolet," the main cause of over 200 1 star
reviews.

Ultraviolet is another feeble, doomed attempt by some dinosaur brain
Hollywood execs to restrict the use of your legally bought digital purchase. Ultraviolet is NOT a digital
copy that resides on a device of your choice to be used on a device of your choice. It is a streaming
service, for which you have to sign up and maintain an account, at the expense of your bandwidth, compatible
with some but not all mobile devices. If you're willing to wait another 4 weeks, order this disc set from
Amazon's UK website you can do this with your current US account). Not only are you getting a REAL digital
copy, but the Blu-ray disc is region free too!! Price + shipping is the same as the price in USD with free
shipping.

- href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R3UIUNTBP6BE8Z/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt#R3UIUNTBP6BE8Z">John Dettingmeijer

So,
that wrapped up that mystery.  Horrible software is murdering ratings.  A damn shame.