Simpable

WWDC 2009 Predictions

Scott Watermasysk — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 15:10:34 GMT

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.

iPhone 3.0 – In addition to the already announced OS updates, I am hoping for a better camera and video support (it kills me that I need to carry an iPhone and Flip) as well as an announcement about improved bandwidth from AT&T. Anything else is gravy.

If they really wanted to make me (and many others) very happy they would announce the ability to pre-purchase online and save me the hassle of checking store availability and potential lines. Seriously, I would pay extra to just buy and get on with my day. Odds: Very likely (minus the web store)

iPhone Nano – Price is often sited as a something that holds the iPhone back. I think size does it for many as well. If they went smaller web browsing would suck, but most other items would still be quite useful. I think you will see a version that is about 70% the size of the current iPhone. Odds: Likely.

iTablet – this has been circulating for years in some way/shape/form. I would love to see a device that is about 2.5x to 3x’s the size of an iPhone, running the iPhone OS, and essentially provide the iPhone experience in a slightly bigger form factor. Odds: Somewhat likely.

MacBook/MacBook Pro upgrades – I have been sitting on a the new purchase of a MacBook (not pro this time) until June 8th. I would love to see the MacBook updated to support for than 4gb of RAM. I am likely going to splurge on a really good SSD, if I can boost the RAM I would be very happy. Odds: Not likely.

Steve Jobs cameo – He will be there. I guarantee it. Odds: just guaranteed it didn’t I?

Posted to Technology and tagged as apple , wwdc , iphone

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Smile and Wave via Google App Engine

Scott Watermasysk — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:31:56 GMT

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.

Based on the Wave video and this roadmap post by the Google App Engine (GAE) team (along with a little bit of bias/opinion) I think it is safe to assume the following:

GAE will be the preferred/default way to host your own instances of Google Wave (remember, it is largely going to be open source).
GAE will be the preferred way to build extensions to Wave (XMPP and bi-directional email support)

Regardless of whether or not Wave is largely adopted and has long term success (the best technology does not always win…Twitter, I am looking right at you :) the power and beauty of HTML 5 is being put front and center. While I was starting to see some potential in Silverlight, I am now firmly back in the camp of primarily leveraging the browser.

Posted to Software and tagged as gae , wave , google , xmpp

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On Awesomeness

Scott Watermasysk — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:23:23 GMT

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.

Posted to Life and tagged as quotes

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It’s Always the Little Things

Scott Watermasysk — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:09:09 GMT

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.

Posted to Business

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Pandora One – Simple Done Right

Scott Watermasysk — Thu, 28 May 2009 12:49:50 GMT

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.

First, before we even get to the application, check out the sign up process and form (assumes you already have an account).

It really doesn’t get much more simple than this. No request for information they don’t need. An easy option to opt out of auto renewing. A thing of beauty if you ask me (although for the record, I would have loved to use PayPal or Amex, but maybe that is just me).

Next, the client. It serves a very simple task, show what is playing and it does it very well.

There is even some nice Growl like popups when the song changes.

Finally, there are a bunch of options at your disposal for configuring the player, experience, and ratings.

Overall, this is a killer experience and I highly recommend checking it out if you are even an occasional Pandora user.

Having said that, here are a couple things I think could make this better:

1. Gifts – At $36 this would make an awesome gift for people. I would recommend they make it very easy to give this away very easily.

2. At least on Windows (have not tried the Mac yet) I cannot get the player window to completely disappear.

…thought there would be more. This is really good. Stop reading this and go buy it.

Have you tried it out? If so, please add your experience to the comments section.

Posted to Software and tagged as pandora , pandora-one , air , easy-things

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Sparking Azure

Scott Watermasysk — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:38:27 GMT

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.

1. Enable Full Trust. Unlike traditional ASP.Net sites, full trust is not enabled in the web.config and it is not the default setting. As pointed on on the WindowsAzure blog, all you have to do is set the enableNativeCodeExecution attribute to true in your service definition file (for the web role).

2. Mark your view as content. This unfortunately needs to happen for every view you add to your project. I am hoping there is a way to automate this or do pre-build. However, until I figure that out, it needs to be done manually otherwise the view will never be found. (hat tip)

I have only done a minor bit of testing, but so far, it all seems to be working. If you find any issues, please drop me a comment.

Posted to Code and tagged as azure , cloud-computing , spark , mvc

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Do You Never Have Time?

Scott Watermasysk — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 21:10:38 GMT

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

Think about last night. Would your life be worse if you missed whatever it is you watched? How much better would today have been if you had taken the opportunity to learn something new? Read that book you keep meaning todo? Prototyped that idea you had? Or simply got a good nights sleep.

Posted to Life and tagged as simplicity

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RSS Feeds For Graffiti Tags

Scott Watermasysk — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:07:45 GMT

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.

If you would like to add support for RSS feeds per tag within your Graffiti site, you can now download the this httphandler. To use it, just unzip it and add the tagrss.ashx to your site (I recommend the root). Then it is just a matter of adding a “tag” querystring to it. For example, all of my posts on Windows Live Writer can be found at http://simpable.com/tagrss.ashx?tag=wlw.

This is very simple implementation that is roughly a copy & paste job of some existing code. It does handle caching, filtering by the last 10 results, and 304 status codes. Unfortunately, at this moment, it does not honor category permissions. So if you have public and private categories, this example is not for you.

Finally, if you find the url above a bit fugly and would have access to a rewrite component like ISAPI Rewrite, you can add the following rule: RewriteRule ^/tags/(.+)/feed/ /tagrss.ashx?tag=$1 [NC, L]. With this in place, the tag url above can be accessed at http://simpable.com/tags/wlw/feed/ which falls in line with the rest of Graffiti (you should be able to achieve a similar result with ASP.Net Routing or URL Rewrite module for IIS7).

Posted to Code and tagged as graffiti , isapi-rewrite

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Four Great Free Services You Are Likely Not Using

Scott Watermasysk — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 02:21:51 GMT

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.

1. Instapaper – So much to read, so little time. Instapaper provides a very simple unobtrusive way to save a link to be read later. Simply click a bookmarklet and it is done. No confirmation. When you are ready to read the items just navigate back to Instapaper.com. There is also an iPhone app which lets you read your links on the go.

There are other similar services, but none are as drop dead simple as Instapaper.

2. Tumblr – No other way to put, just really simple hosted blogging. There have been times in the past where I was ready to stop hosting my own blog and Tumblr is definitely where I would go. So many bloggers get caught up on all the other meta-features and forget it is just about the content. With Tumblr, all you really have is the content. Similar to Instapaper, an iPhone app makes it even better on the go (My Tumblr Site).

3. Wufoo – Wufoo servers one basic purpose, make it easy to build clean HTML forms. Really easy to use and very helpful for everything from contact forms to mini surveys.

4. Disqus – I debated putting this one on the list since it is gaining popularity, but I am still shocked when I visit an independent blog not using it. Comments are the lifeblood of a blog and Disqus simply makes them better via great spam prevention, bi-directional email, and even support for Facebook Connect.

Your Turn

So, what services am I missing? Which would you add to the list?

Posted to Technology and tagged as instapaper , tumblr , disqus , wufoo , services

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An Unnecessary Usability Compromise

Scott Watermasysk — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:38:37 GMT

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

1. Instead of encoding the content you want me to avoid using &, %, <, and >?

2. All you can offer me is 100 characters? Even twitter can do 140 characters.

I am sure if you talk to their web team they will have reasons for these requirements. However, you have to ask yourself if the benefits here even remotely outweigh the usability friction they created.

Posted to Software and tagged as us

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