Posted by Scott Guelich April 11th, 2008
in Web.
For some time now I have wanted to post about the value of creativity and original design in software development. Much has been written in the last couple years about the importance of presentation in the Mac community. Forget lickable, nowadays a good Mac app needs to be downright delicious. But less has been said about the value of higher level of design — that more ephemeral quality that captures application flow and feel. Fortunately, Google’s recent HuddleChat debacle provides a perfect context for such a discussion.
Google burns Campfire
In case you missed it, earlier this week Google created a big stir by announcing a new application called HuddleChat during one of their campfire sessions. It was intended as a working demo for their new App Engine service, but it quickly created an uproar from many in the development community who felt that Google developers had blatantly ripped off another application. As irony would have it, that application’s name happened to be Campfire, and it was created by some company called 37Signals (never heard of them, but apparently they’re big in the mining transportation industry). Anyhow, sensitive to the bad PR they were suddenly generating, Google quickly yanked the cord on HuddleChat.
That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t.
>> Continue reading ‘The Value of Design, pt. 1′…
Posted by Scott Guelich April 1st, 2008
in Ruby and Web.
Woot is all charged up over 4/1.
Antidote:
#!/usr/bin/ruby
require "hpricot"
require "open-uri"
def growl ( title, message )
system "growlnotify", "-m", message, "-t", title
end
while (1)
begin
doc = Hpricot( open("http://www.woot.com/") )
item = (doc/"h3#ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder_TitleHeader").text
raise "Failed to parse title" if item == ""
if not item =~ /Decker/
growl "Woot!", item
system "open -g http://www.woot.com/"
break
end
sleep 30
rescue
growl "Ruby Error!", $!
end
end
Posted by Scott Guelich March 22nd, 2008
in Personal.
It’s time to start blogging again.
When I started this blog, I planned to primarily explore areas like bioinformatics where medicine and technology come together. However, over the past year my interests in programming and medicine have remained on distinctly parallel paths. They just have not come together.
Currently I am hard at work on a Mac app that should be out this summer (WWDC with any luck) and have had lots of ideas for strictly Mac programming posts. So for the near future this blog will primarily focus on Mac application coding.
Posted by Scott Guelich April 14th, 2007
in Web.
“Don’t be evil.” That’s Google’s informal corporate motto, which they proudly advertise. Like a lot of companies started by young innovators, they try to uphold the idealism of their founders, and though they may have grown to become a multi-billion dollar corporate giant, they’re mostly a gentle giant. So when news came out that Google has decided to buy DoubleClick, it left many of us stunned. If there’s an online company that epitomizes evil, it’s DoubleClick.
If you aren’t familiar with them, DoubleClick is in the business of selling banner ads — those flashing, annoying advertisements that sit above, beside, and even above those web pages you visit. That, in and of itself, is not why I dislike them — in fact, thanks to Privoxy, I almost never see their ads. But I’ve been doing the web thing long enough to recall back in 2000 when DoubleClick announced an frighteningly Orwellian scheme to identify every single web user and track the pages they visit.
>> Continue reading ‘An ugly marriage’…
