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  • Nuno Morgadinho 9:22 am on November 4, 2009 Permalink  

    Stack Overflow Dev Days in Amsterdam 

    Last weekend there was ‘Stack Overflow Dev Days’ in Amsterdam. Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for programmers, brought to life by Joel Spolsky, from the blog Joel on Software. It has less over a year now and it is already pretty popular among programmers. The Dev Days was a one-day conference, around different world cities, covering different topics that are hot and trendy among programmers these days (Javascript, iPhone development, etc) and also bringing the site community together and listen to a bit of propaganda by Spolsky.

    Joel opened this edition of the Dev Days with a talk on Elegance and Beauty on software development. I felt this talk had an important message underneath: more functionality doesn’t mean increased complexity for the user if the right abstractions are used. As an example, consider the Amazon 1-click shopping. While some people advocate that “less is more” is about implementing less features it can also be regarded as implementing the right abstractions, in a way that the user doesn’t perceive the complexity under the hood.

    Jörn Zaefferer then delivered what seemed to be a sales pitch on jQuery, rather than showing what gets him excited about it. Nevertheless, he showed what jQuery is all about and some of the new functionality in the library.

    Eero Bragge talked about Qt and the feeling I got was the only reason this talk went in was because of the sponsorship. Enough said.

    Joel then presented Fogbugz and what a nice product he has there. He gave a very nice overview of the product and got me excited to try it. There is a free subscription for students and startups so you might want to check if you apply.

    Simon Willison then talked about Python and created a heatmap in a matter of minutes. Overall very nice his presentation and brought the feeling I have to explore Python again.

    Nick Johnson presented the Google App Engine and created a small answer/question site in the cloud, also in minutes. Unfortunately what he presented was more or less what you get when following the tutorials on the subject, so for me there wasn’t really too much added value with this talk.

    Christian Heilmann talked about the Yahoo! Developer tools, namely YQL. For me it was the best presentation of the day and he completely nailed it. I won’t get into details about YQL because I don’t want to dumb it down but everyone should take a few minutes and check what it is all about.

    http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/

    Chris Heilmann on the Yahoo! Developer tools (mp3)

    http://tinyurl.com/yfoh3cc

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 5:34 pm on October 23, 2009 Permalink  

    Cycle Ride to Höchst 

    Today was a day of adventure. We set with our bikes at 10.30h on the train to Dieburg and then cycled almost to Höchst im Odenwald. We did around 45-50km, so I’m completely wracked, and then took the train back. A very nice cycle ride all together. Should do it more often. As I was pedaling up the hills I thought about the other great adventure I have going on (I’ve quit my job and I’m starting a small company) and how climbing the hills can be compared to that. After each hill there’s always a downhill but there’s also, most likely, another hill. So enjoy the path.

    P1160031

    P1160054

    Phil's iPhone

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 3:22 pm on September 16, 2009 Permalink  

    iPhone App Listens to Music and tells you the name of Song 

    There is an application for the iPhone where you can humm along a song and it will identify it for you. You can then even buy it from iTunes or see related videos on YouTube. The application I’m talking about is Shazam. We were talking about it over lunch and we all agreed it was impressive technology. We were wondering not so much the part of fingerprinting the music, which is already impressive to get right, but how is it possible to search such a large database, supposedly containing every song in the world, in a timely manner? Someone then asked: “who are the people doing such great software?” I then decided it was time to do some digging and found this great video, a bit romanticized I grant you that, but pretty cool..

    Some of the things that caught my eye.. they started back in 2000. Also I was reading about the technology and how it works. Fingerprinting the music is based on the spectrogram. The database is an hash table, where the key is the frequency. When it receives a fingerprint it doesn’t need to search all the songs. Still there is an immense amount of work involved in making the whole thing work. It’s fantastic what they have accomplished.

    The People

    Chris Barton, Philip Inghelbrecht, Dhiraj Mukherjee and Avery Wang.

    Chris and Philip were still in Business School (at UC Berkeley in California) when they started Shazam. Dr. Avery Wang comes from Stanford University. Not sure about Dhiraj.

    Shazam Founders on Twitter

    The beauty of the Internet these days.. you can follow these guys on Twitter.

    Chris Barton – @bartonsurfer

    Philip Inghelbrecht – @Inghelbrecht

    Dhiraj Mukherjee – @dhirajm

    References:

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 2:14 am on May 5, 2009 Permalink  

    Personal top 5 list of iPhone Apps 

    Without the built-in apps:

    1.Twitterrific (I use Twitter a lot)
    2. Skype
    3. Google Earth
    4. Fastlane Lite (nice car game)
    5. Translator

    Who about you? :-)

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 5:23 pm on March 17, 2009 Permalink  

    iPhone 3.0 new features 

    The Apple iPhone 3.0 was presented today at Cupertino. Here are some of the new features that I think are quite exciting:

    + Purchasing new content from within an app
    “You can now purchase a game that comes wiht 10 levels, and when you’re done playing those levels, you can purchase the next 10 levels for the game.”
    All of it is tied into the iTunes Store. You’re asked for your iTunes password but you remain within the app.
    Developer picks the price for in-app purchased items. Same 70 percent goes to developer, charing no credit card fees, and developers are still paid monthly. But: this is only for paid apps; free apps cannot charge for content.

    + Peer to Peer connectivity
    Example: kids in the car and they want to play games back and forth.
    iPhone 3.0 now has a standard system for finding other devices in the same area – no WiFi network needed.
    Automatic discovery performed over Bluetooth.

    + Talk directly to an accessory
    Example 1: iPhone can control the speaker’s EQ.
    Example 2: About FM transmitters for cars, FM signal can now be controlled from the iPhone’s display.
    Example 3: Talk with medical devices and accessories. iPhone apps can send data from medical devices straight to doctors.

    + Maps: Apple will allow downloadable content in apps
    “We’re taking the heart of the Maps application and making it a public API so developers can embed that map in their apps.”
    You can pinch and zoom, get satellite view, hybrid, standard map, add custom notes, use WiFi and cell triangulation.”
    Even reverse geocoding.
    Enables developers to use Core Location as the basis for turn by turn apps.
    Can use WiFi and cell triangulation, but there’s one catch: “Bring your own maps.” Due to licensing, Apple cannot allow developers to use the Maps app tiles.

    + Push Notifications
    Apple tested apps that ran in the bkg on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, etc. “In all cases, standby time dropped by 80 percent or more.”
    Using Push Notifications on iPhone, standby time only dropped by 23 percent when testing an IM app.
    3rd party server pushes notifications through to Apple and to the user’s iPhone.
    can push sounds, text alerts.
    “The nice part about this is: it scales.”

    Some other features:

    + Has a new email sheet so apps don’t have to quit
    + Proximity sensors, iPod library access.
    + Streaming audio and video over HTTP
    + Data detectors, built in VoIP APIs

     

  • Nuno Morgadinho 11:08 am on January 27, 2009 Permalink  

    iPhone 

    I didn’t buy it, Ana got me one for Xmas out of nowhere! I was pretty astonished as she had to sign a contract with Telecom to get it :s

    On the cool side:

    • the apps – you buy them of Apple App store using iTunes or directly via the phone very easily.
    • software updates – with many mobiles if you get an error in the factory software the only way to get it fixed is to do a firmware upgrade, and you need to be a bit adventurous to do that and hope it works. With the iPhone it is very easy to upgrade the software and people are improving and reporting bugs every day.
    • it’s a GPS, it’s a PDA, it’s a mobile phone, it’s an iPod.
    • internet browsing, google earth, youtube, games, etc.
    • you can ssh or remote connect from it.
    • good integration with the Mac and Google, it syncs calendars, GMail accounts, etc.

    On the not so cool side:

    • the battery – it’s a GPS, it’s a PDA, it’s a mobile phone, it’s even an iPod but it is not magic :) That means the battery doesn’t last too long if you use it for internet browsing, google earth, youtube, etc. If you use it like a mobile phone it should last the same as a normal mobile but I haven’t test this (guess why). Nowadays I charge mine every two or three days depending on the usage. This is the only reason I see why it may not be the ideal thing for a traveller. Maybe you can work around this with a second battery?
    • camera quality is so-so.

    This is all I can remember but as you know there are a lot of reviews out there. Someone was telling me it doesn’t do photo sms’s but it is not something I use anyway. I can upload photos to Flickr or Picasa on the go with an app I have :-)

    And apart from that, you’re always connected to the Internet, which is a new experience. Sure you can get the same thing with a Blackberry but … this is such a cool device really. You should just go to a shop and try it for a while. You’ll see.

     

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