This is probably more of a wish list than predictions of what will be announced at WWDC 2009. I really have zero insight into the Apple world, but I know what I want and have a few guesses.

Here goes.

Continue reading "WWDC 2009 Predictions"

Just incase you been living under a technology rock for the last week or so, please go check out the Google Wave demo video before continuing reading this post.

Continue reading "Smile and Wave via Google App Engine"

What a spectacular quote,

But I am still not satisfied; every day I reach higher, trying to grasp the level of awesomeness that I can feel but can't recreate.

A really interesting article, The Flimsy Doorknob & A Forgettable Receipt, by Dustin Curtis.

I think his points are spot on. Stop and think about some of your recent experiences (especially bad ones). I think you will be amazed that in hindsight it is the little things that stick with you.

Last night I asked on Twitter if anyone had signed up for Pandora One and thought it was worth the $36/yr price.

Omar Shahine quickly responded that he felt it was and also said, “I consider it a donation for such an an awesome service”.  He is absolutely correct. Even if Pandora One sucked, making a donation to such a useful service is definitely worth it. So this morning I went ahead and signed up and I have to say it is an absolutely fabulous experience on a couple fronts.

Continue reading "Pandora One – Simple Done Right"

You know what they say, it only takes a spark. :)

As I mentioned before, I have fallen in love with the Spark ViewEngine. It is a very nice mix of power and simplicity. I also been spending a lot more time on cloud related initiatives, so I was bummed to learn Spark could not be used on Azure (compute) since it requires full trust (and Azure initially had a no concept of trust levels, it only had one limited trust level).

Fortunately for me (and hopefully you) one of the many Azure Mix announcements was support for Full Trust. What this means is that you can now easily use Spark on Azure. All you need to do complete the following two steps.

Continue reading "Sparking Azure"

How often do you say to yourself, I would start X or build Y if I only had the time.

It’s amazing the amount you can accomplish when you find an extra 3,285 hours to work on something you enjoy doing rather than vegging in front of the TV. Those hours helped us create a small network of websites and blogs which allowed both of us to quit our jobs and work on them full time a couple of years ago.

Full Article: How Dumping TV Allowed Me to Quit My Job, Create an Online Business and Fund My Retirement Account

Continue reading "Do You Never Have Time?"

Or put another way, when a feature does not really exist.

I always thought Graffiti had support for RSS feeds per tag. But it turns out that while we have RSS autodiscovery for these feeds, they are never generated by Graffiti.

A couple users pinged us this week about this feature. Unfortunately, it is not on the current feature roadmap, so I figured I would put together a simple example and publish it here.

Continue reading "RSS Feeds For Graffiti Tags"

I am constantly amazed at the number of awesome services which are available (at least in some capacity) for free. Some like Twitter get tons of press. Others, provide a quality service to a loyal set of users but largely remain out of the spotlight.

Here are four services which you might not have heard of, but I highly recommend you look into.

Continue reading "Four Great Free Services You Are Likely Not Using"

It is hard to imagine why a major hotel chain would impose these kinds of limitations on their customers.

Continue reading "An Unnecessary Usability Compromise"