khal weir | blog

Often hailed as the next big thing in Social Networking, location based applications are increasing in popularity  as smartphones become more mainstream.  Facebook and Twitter have proven that people love to share their thoughts with anyone that will listen, so sharing your location is an obvious next step. The giants in this relatively new market are Foursquare and Gowalla, both use the GPS which is now commonplace in phones to allow users to create and check-in at a variety of locations such as shops, pubs, parks and museums. Achievements (e.g. Gowalla’s ‘Cup o’ Joe’ for visiting 10 different coffee shops) encourage users to explore

I’ve been using Gowalla for around a year now (over 320 check-ins), but after a couple of friends started using Foursquare I thought I’d give it a try too. Initially there doesn’t seem to be much difference between the two apps, they share a lot of common functionality such as posting your check-ins to Facebook and Twitter, but its where they differ that is interesting.

Gowalla allows users to upload photos at their check-ins and to add comments which only their Gowalla using friends can see. The application makes use of attractive graphics and a traveller metaphor – users have a passport, collect stamps and pins and add items to their backpack. Occasionally when checking-in to a location, you will find an item thats been left by another user and when creating a new location you can drop an item to become a founder. As well as adding locations, users can string together a collection of locations to create a trip, such as sight seeing or a pub crawl.

Foursquare is a little more popular and as such has more locations, most of the high street near my work is covered by Foursquare, with only a handful of check-ins available in Gowalla. One of the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare is that user comments are public, users can leave tips such as ‘try the steak!’ which you can mark as done or add to a to-do list. Check-ins in Foursquare are awarded points, although I don’t yet understand the criteria used or what the idea of the points is, also in Foursquare you can become a mayor of a location from repeated check-ins.

Personally, I prefer Gowalla – mainly because its more fun its in appearance and ‘gameplay’, I do like the tips idea from  Foursquare and a number of retailers have started recognising the power of this new phenomenon by offering specials e.g. Domino’s will give the mayor of each branch a free pizza every Wednesday.

REWORK is the new book from 37Signals, a former web consultancy that now make a a suite of popular productivity web apps. The book’s authors are Jason Fried (co founder and president) and David Heinemeier Hansson (partner  and the creator of Ruby on Rails).

I’ve been using 37Signal’s project management tool, Basecamp for a few years now. While it isn’t the most feature complete tool, it gets the important stuff right; in fact thats one of 37Signal’s mantras ‘build half a product – not a half assed product’. Even before using any of their products, I’ve enjoyed reading the company’s blog Signal vs Noise and have always admired their openess about the way they work and been inspired by their success.

I’ve never read, or had any interest in reading a business book before (I’m allergic to buzzwords and marketing speak), but knowing that this would be a different kind of business book I pre-ordered a copy and have read through it in only three sessions.

REWORK is playbook for starting or running any sized company, based on 37Signal’s principles with a proven success. The book is very easy and fast to read, each section is to the point and at most a couple of pages long. The statements are bold, contradicting what you have likely experienced at work, however they make sense and are backed by real world examples, not only from 37Signals but Amazon, Zappos, Dunkin’ Donuts and others.

I would recommend this book to anyone that works or hopes to someday work for themselves; even if you don’t there is a lot of great advice on productivity and that’ll increase your employability.

Food Inc

An eye-opening look into the American food industry; farmers that can’t choose what to grow, why it is cheaper to feed a family of four on fast food than fresh produce and how organic providers are fighting back. Visit www.foodincmovie.com for more information.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

A collection of footage collected from fans and musicians over a decade of the unique Butlin’s based music festival curated by bands or fans, featuring Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Portishead, Iggy & the Stooges, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Seasick Steve, Lightning Bolt and more.

A Single Man

Set in 1960’s California; very single frame of this movie looks like it was taken from a glossy vintage fashion magazine. The director, Tom Ford is a fashion designer and previously worked as a tailor on Bond movies; however there is more to the film than it’s look.  The film follows a middle aged man (Colin Firth) as he prepares to commit suicide after his partner is killed in a car accident, the story is compelling and the performances superb -- highly recommended.

MicMacs

This is the latest film from the director of Amelie and A Very Long Engagement, Jean-Pierre Jeunet; however it is closer to his earlier movies Delicatessen and The City of the Lost Children in its style and subject. It tells the story of Bazil, who’s life has been ruined by two rival weapons manufacturers and his ingenious plan to get his own back with some help from on odd collection of scrap collecting friends. If you’ve seen and enjoyed Delicatessen you’ll love this.

Apple are apparently going to announce their oft rumoured tablet computer (possibly called the iSlate) in the next few weeks and Microsoft unveiled their underwhelming (stock Windows 7 on a 5″ screen, really?) new ’slate’  PCs at CES earlier this month.

This form factor has been tried before but hasn’t been a widespread success, they are often large and bulky with poor performance; this new generation promise to smaller, lighter and well, we’ll have to see about performance. But still who needs them? A pure touchscreen interface isn’t ideal for work, I can’t imagine coding or writing documents with an onscreen keyboard on a regular basis, more suitable, although still unpleasent to spend much time using, are the cheap netbooks that have become so popular.

So whats left, web browsing and media playback? I already have a great product for that in the iPhone, a fair percentage of my personal web use is already done on my iPhone. Using excellent mobile formatted sites like BBC and Google’s web apps and apps like Facebook and Tweetie; I rarely miss a larger screen. About the only situation I could see the larger screen of a tablet being an advantage is as an ebook reader, however the larger the screen, the less likely I am to carry it, which is the strength of the iPhone I always have it to hand.

But what will the iSlate be? It makes sense that it would run existing iPhone apps, however it’ll be a huge disappointment if it turns out just to be an iPod touch with a big screen, but equally I don’t want Apple to go the Microsoft route of cramming their full OS onto a small device. Having owned a few Windows Mobile devices and a touchscreen PC I know that using unmodified Windows on a touchscreen is awkward and I don’t see OSX being much different. Microsoft’s Courier concept that cropped up a few months ago looks great and I’d love to use something similar, could the iSlate offer this kind of functionality?

Having said all of that, the guys at Apple are smarter than me and its quite likely they’ve thought of something I haven’t and the iSlate will be the most desirable product of 2010. So I’m saving for one, reading all the rumours and patiently waiting on the live blogging of the announcement anyway.

So its finally going to be 2010, from now on we get to say ‘twenty-x’ instead of the clumsy ‘two thousand and x’. Already it feels like the future is now; surely hovercars and jetpacks will follow.

This year, I lost over 20kg, took up mountain biking again, started growing my own chilli peppers and got into cooking and baking. I’ve been learning Codeignitor, Wordpress, jQuery and continued to learn Django.  I saw two of my all time favourite bands live and had awesome holidays in Germany and New York.

Anyway, so this is my lazy blogger year end post of stuff I’ve liked over the past 12 months.

Albums

Theres been a some great new music this year

Fever Ray – s/t
listen on Spotify

One half of The Knife returns with a fantastic album that I just can’t stop listening to.

Muse – The Resistance
listen on Spotify

Ok, so I admit its kinda cheesy, but I think this album is great.



The Dead Weather – Horehound
listen on Spotify

An awesome debut from the supergroup formed by members of The White Stripes, The Kills and QoTSA;  this is my album of the year. I saw them live in Edinburgh and was blown away, Alison has an amazing stage presence and Jack White just kills on drums or guitar.



Them Crooked Vultures – s/t
listen on Spotify

Another debut from a supergroup; Josh Homme (QoTSA, Kyuss, Eagles of Death Metal), Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters) and John Paul Jones (Led Zepplin). I had to pay a silly amount of money on eBay to secure tickets to the Edinburgh show, but it was worth it, these guys rock!

Fuck Buttons – Tarot Sport

Just under an hour of awesome, lo-fi instrumental noise (imagine Exit Planet Dust era Chemical Brothers combined with Mogwai); great for coding and working out to.


Movies

There were some really terrible movies this year, with the exception of

Where The Wild Things Are

A beautiful adaption of the much loved children’s book, I’m tempted to go see it again already. Everything in the film is fantastically designed and takes inspiration from the source material; I loved this film.



The Hurt Locker

A superbly shot film about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, directed by Kathy Bigelow.



District 9

I loved this, I was really into it’s documentary style beginning; although it gradually devolved into something more generic later on. For me, its between Where the Wild Things Are and this for the film of the year.



Moon

I caught this at Edinburgh Film Festival and have been looking forward to seeing it again since.  Moon is a dark, moody SciFi film directed by David Bowie’s son starring Sam Rockwell and Kevin Spacey with a great soundtrack by Clint Mansell.

Drag Me to Hell

Sam Raimi returns to horror and kicks ass, the train wreck that was Spider-man 3 is almost forgotten.

Avatar

OK, so I love SciFi movies, and this is just Dances with Wolves in space, but it sure is pretty and the 3D is really well done.

Software

Spotify

With a premium account, I have almost all the music I could ever want, on my desktop or phone, legally – whats not to like?



Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 (XBOX 360)

Its the Call of Duty you know and love, but totally Bayified.



I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 (XBOX 360)

The best 80 points you’ll spend on XBOX Live Marketplace.

Tech

Apple Magic Mouse

I’ve always thought the Mighty Mouse was one of Apple’s weakest designs, its awkward to use the side buttons and the scrolling nipple gets clogged up and stops working. The Magic Mouse is comfortable, works really well and has replaced my MX 1000 at work.

Nike+ Sportband

I recently started a running program and bought new pair of Nike+ compatible trainers; I’m still using an iPhone 3G which doesn’t have Nike+ built in so bought the Sportband instead. I really like the simplicity of it, press to start a run, press to end, plug into computer, watch the animated man run across the screen to show how much you suck at running.

I managed to snag an invite from a friend who was lucky enough to be invited to a Google Developers event.

Just in case you don’t know Google Wave is the new web app from Google which they believe will replace traditional email and more. The project’s strapline is ‘what if email was invented now?’ and aims to solve some of the problems with they way we communicate online. Wave has the potential to merge and replace IM, Social Networking, Wikis, Email, will be open sourced and has an API allowing developers to write extensions or incorporate Wave in external sites.

Here are a couple of videos that explain Wave in more detail

Google Wave in 2 minutes

Google Wave revealed at Google I/O 2009

So far, my impressions are it’s fairly quick and clean… but until more people I know are using it, its only really useable as a kind of twitter/ forum hybrid by browsing the with:public waves. As far as I can tell, theres no way of knowing if a person is currently online, which seems odd to me and every now and again you are reminded that this is a product still in development as it hangs and gives you a quote from Firefly (incidentally, Wave gets its name from the show too).

I’m looking forward to Wave being released publicly and using it at work, as I think it will be an excellent project management tool. We have two offices, in different timezones and communication can be difficult. We currently use an inconsistent combination of Basecamp, Google Docs, Skype, phone calls, email and, within the main Edinburgh office, face to face conversations to communicate; I see Google Wave replacing and centralising a great deal of our communication in a clean, searchable organised tool.

If you got here via a Google search for free invites, sorry I don’t have invites to give yet!

The App store has over 55,000 applications and I read recently that the average iPhone owner has spent $80 on apps. This is a round up of  my favourite Apps, these apps are ones that I find useful to keep me connected when I’m away from a computer and which extend the usefulness of the iPhone allowing it to mimic expensive dedicated devices.

Weightbot
http://www.tapbots.com

I’ve been working on losing weight recently, this fantastic looking app has been a great aid in tracking my progress. The interface is attractive and simple, tilting either left or right displays a graph view or an overview of your progress and your data can be exported as CSV.

Convertbot
http://www.tapbots.com

I recently decided to switch to metric for measurements still more commonly expressed in imperial in the UK; this app has been handy to convert distance and weights to better communicate my achievements to olds and Americans.

Trails
http://trails.lamouroux.de

This is a slick GPS logger, I use it to map my bike rides and also for geocoding my photographs. The logged GPS data can easily exported to be used in Google Earth, TrailRunner etc

iTreadmill

Nike+ it ain’t, but it’ll track your runs (or  walks) and calculate calories burned.

Spotify
http://www.spotify.com

The mobile version of Spotify, a fantastic music streaming service, is a killer app. Streaming works well, playlists shared with you or created on your desktop are available, you can create new playlists easily and best of all you can ‘offline sync’ a playlist.  The app is free, however does require a Premium account (£9.99/ month) which also removes the ads from the desktop client.

Tweetie
http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/

I ‘ve hardly logged into the Twitter web interface since downloading Tweetie and it’s desktop counterpart. The interface is slick and easy to use. Bonus points for the slightly creepy location based search.

Awesome Note
http://bridworks.com

I just downloaded this one, but it looks like a keeper. I like the interface and the fact that I can import to and from Google Docs (its a shame it can’t sync though) and I’m considering using it’s ToDo list as an alternative to Remember the Milk (which I really rate, but the iPhone app requires the $25 Pro account and mine is due to expire soon).

Other favourites

• Facebook - this is fantastic, so much better to use than the terrible website
• Wordpress - I like this for starting drafts of new articles when I get an idea while I’m out
• BeeJive - instant messager app with push notifications
• Prowl - pushes Growl notifications from your Mac(s) to your iPhone
• Shazam - yeah, its been around since day 1, but I’m still amazed by how well this works
• Remote – this may as well come preinstalled, very useful
• HoldEm – this is the only game I play the most on my iPhone
• Zen Bound – a really pretty ‘game’, the aim is to to wrap objects in string

I’ve recently installed two new operating systems on my Macbook Pro and thought I’d write a quick comparison of them. I’m predominantly a Mac user and no longer own a PC, yet I need Windows for testing (damn you IE!) and gaming (damn you Left 4 Dead!).

Windows 7

Installing the Release Candidate of Windows 7 was quick, easy and a lot prettier than installing previous versions of Windows. To my surprise, everything worked out of the box except sound and 3D graphics but a popping in the Leopard DVD and visiting the Nvidia site soon fixed that. Only 3GB out of my 4GB of Ram is detected, as I’m using the 32bit version (32bit Leopard and Ubuntu don’t seem to have that problem.. )

Like many, I skipped Vista completely, so I’m not sure whats new for this version and what is brought over from Vista. Things I’ve liked so far are the new window management tricks, like Aero shake and full screening an app by pulling it to the top of the screen; things I’ve not liked are the confusing control panel, my NAS being detected as a media device and struggling to use it as networked drive and being nagged constantly (I’ve since managed to turn this off). There’s been improvements in the Start menu too, and the Spotlight like search works well.

Overall, Windows 7 feels snappy and is visually quite appealing (although Microsoft really needs to get together and make their UI’s consistent). The price is right and now that XP is almost a decade old, I think I’ll be buying a copy when it is released.

Snow Leopard

This release isn’t a huge update from the previous one and this is reflected by its name and very reasonable price. The installation process was as simple, but did take a while. After a reboot nothing looked different at first, but immediately I noticed my system was faster. Safari especially seems faster than ever and start up and shut down speeds are noticeably quicker too.

Snow has a bunch of tweaks and nice new features it can automagically set your timezone based on your location based on your WiFi connection. The largest change is ‘behind the scenes’ the move to 64bit and Open CL, allowing OSX to take full advantage of modern hardware and ditching support for legacy machines, this also means you gain some hard drive space back.

The only issue I’ve had so far is my older version of Parallels isn’t compatible with Snow Leopard, this was quite annoying but its good software and the manufacturer dropped the upgrade price for Snow Leopard users.

While updating to Snow isn’t like moving from XP to Windows 7 (in fact there’s been some criticism calling it a service pack ) but for £25 (or £39 for a 5 user family license) Snow Leopard is a bargain; for the performance increase I’ve seen alone, I’d recommend it for any Intel Mac owners.