Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Archive

Working with JQueryMobile

I’ve been playing with and building small apps in JqueryMobile since it came out. I still can’t make up my mind if I like it or not. On one hand, it is completely against the principles of JQuery: which a simple, non-intrusive, non widget focused library. Jquerymobile on the other hand holds your hand the whole way and is basically an app framework. However, it is very fast to...

Dec 16th

Fear and Civilization

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” - FDR summed it up nicely. Society has a flaw: paranoia. At the core of human psychology is a processing error, a bug: our ability to logically assess risk is out of whack. We are living in a golden age: from the Renaissance to modern times, the embrace of reason has carried us on a rapid wave of advances that have extended our...

Dec 15th

Should I use Heroku

To Heroku or not to Heroku, that is the question. (I should preface this with the info that the CEO / now General Manager of Heroku was my previous boss) I personally love building web services, but hate configuring Linux boxes, and database and web servers. That is why when I build new services, I gravitate towards outsourcing the configuration and database/web server stuff, or using a...

Nov 23rd

Oct 12th

Do It (Tomorrow) Web in HTML5

We’ve now had 1 million iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches and Androids install our App Do It (Tomorrow) - So we figured we should also bring the App to the Web as well :D If you are not interested in the dirty details of development, depart. If you are, great: read on. Prototype I often like to develop in a quick style where I put together a prototype and then look and see what I learned....

Jul 20th

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Buy Bitcoin!

Here at Adylitica we have been paying close attention to the new currency you probably have heard of by now: Bitcoin. In a sentence: Bitcoin is a new currency of virtual coins that are limited in number and can easily be traded in a decentralized internet marketplace. Obviously the concept of Bitcoin is to be used as a medium for commerce, but to a person everyone I have talked to about Bitcoin...

May 15th

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Android Gripes: Why do apps from the same company... →

Interesting comparisons, I think Android is getting better fast but it still has a long way to come before it’s as good as the iOS platform. android-gripes: When I use an iPhone and an Android phone at the same time, I often find that apps from the same company look a lot different on these two platforms - the ones on Android usually look much worse. Here is a couple of examples. This...

Apr 7th

2,668 notes

App Advice reviews our iPad App →

Feb 23rd

Feb 21st

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Services + HTML5/iOS, a new model for App...

A lot of things are changing with the advent of HTML5 + the rise of iOS/Android. We are going to have to throw out a lot of how we make service oriented Apps. This stuff isn’t going to be done overnight, but the kind of web frameworks that exist now and new web frameworks and languages going forward are going to need to adapt to a new dynamic of smart clients like HTML5 browsers and...

Dec 14th

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Switching to Node.js

Although it’s still very new, I’m confident now that Node.js represents a changing point in web application development and the line blurs between front end and backend development. I’ve been porting my http://tweetbe.at/ code over to run on Node, and it’s not seamless as Node.js is still a different environment, but my end goal is to merge the two worlds and write client...

Sep 27th

Aug 2nd

Working with Javascript Worker Threads

When the Web Workers feature was announced for the good browsers (safari/chrome/firefox), it seemed to me like something fairly cool but mostly useless. How often do you really need to calculate a Fibonacci sequence in the browser, as Mozilla suggests? Well I finally found a legit use for it in TweetBe.at, in calculating follow back percentages - which is a major new feature for the site. ...

Jul 27th

Jul 25th

App Store Bad Karma

Having experienced getting Electron Zero through to the App Store was good, but now I can feel the other side of the equation - of the last 6 apps we submitted to Apple, 3 were approved - our awesome Beijing, Formula 1, and Stock Trading apps all got through! You can search Adylitica on the app store to check them out btw. Also if you want a free copy of one comment or email me...

Jun 19th

Bummed World Cup app wasn't approved, having fun... →

Jun 19th

My version of Google News, using my trends... →

Jun 7th

Learning to Love the iPad

I have to admit I’ve always been a bit skeptical of Apple product releases. The removal of the mouse button on the MacBook, the iPhone with a terrible camera and weird lockdown environment, and most recently the iPad. These and more are things that have made me view new product releases thinking that Steve Jobs has finally lost it and is going to release a giant dud, a useless product. ...

May 30th

Apr 12th

Apr 9th

Mar 31st

Mar 30th

Karmic App Store Happiness

After hearing so much about the iTunes app store, I was pretty worried about offending the Gods when it came to submitting a new iPhone game. But everything went great! One tip is to delay the release date when submitting your app, this will give you control over the launch day as they will approve on a variable schedule. Approval took a couple days and was no sweat. Electron Zero is a very...

Mar 1st

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Building HTML5 Webapps

In the revamp of TweetBe.at and for another contract project for the iPhone browser I’ve been working a ton with new HTML5 (+CSS3) features, and I’m finding them very very useful in building rich web applications, although new capabilities are not without their perils. In TweetBe.at I pretty much run the gamut of HTML5 features available today, and I am happy Firefox 3.6 was released,...

Jan 27th

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TweetBe.at →

I’m relaunching TweetBe.at with a 100% rewritten code base and a refocus on lists, now that Twitter officially supports them and I don’t need to hack them in. Managing lists through Twitter is still a huge headache though. To solve this basically TweetBe.at lays a GMail style interface on top of your Twitter contacts, so you can do operations on hundreds of contacts at a time instead...

Jan 19th

IndieApps →

I’m going to start a new blog about indie apps @ http://indieapps.tumblr.com/ I will only write about indie apps, since the non-indie ones are often lower quality but due to huge flaws in the iphone store, they get all the top spots and the great indies are not shown. My definition of indie is a small dev shop that isn’t putting out apps based on massive franchises, ports, or spammy...

Dec 17th

Dec 7th

(twitter) ReTweet dilemna

I’m fully in the Twitter cult now, even though I may have been dragged in kicking and screaming, I like tumblr but the conversation ability of Twitter really takes things to a level above blogging… I’m still working on http://tweetbe.at/ , which has solved a lot of the ‘noise’ problem that I had on twitter - but it’s been challenging work given the limitations of...

Aug 28th

Jul 28th

Jul 13th

Jul 4th

Tweetbe.at live twitter chat

I’ve been working on a side project for Twitter, which I discussed in a previous post - what it is is a live chatstream for twitter, which builds on the #hashtag idea With tweetbe.at you can see who else is watching a #hashtag and chat with them. You can also fold in other searches or hashtags, or posts from other users into the stream: The idea is based on the similarities between IRC...

Jul 1st

Jun 30th

Tweets are serious business

I’ve been working on a new tool for Twitter recently which is actually pretty involved, and this has gotten me seriously into twitter, which I had originally struggled to find any point to. But twitter is serious business as demonstrated by the #iranelection stuff and even here in Beijing by a service from the US Govt that shows the air quality at our embassy. The ‘official’...

Jun 29th

Jun 17th

Jun 13th

Twitter is now officially blocked in China - I don’t think that you could ever SMS twitter from China, but now the website itself is inaccessible.

Jun 2nd

Single sign on seems to be everywhere now, with federated logins provided by facebook, google, twitter, openid, etc. In theory this is really good, but I find now on many sites I can’t remember which login I used - did I sign in with facebook or make an account or did I use my google credentials?

Jun 1st

JavaScript language advanced tips and tricks →

I love Javascript as a language, but a lot of the awesome new language features are missing from webbrowsers, which sucks!

May 9th

The Biology of B-Movie Monsters →

Apr 30th

Twitter breaking API rule #1

Rule #1 when you publish an API - if you change how it works, warn people ahead of time or at the very least: add the change to the changelog or api blog! Twitter recently silently disabled the ability for API users to find friends on twitter based on friends’ email addresses. I wasn’t too happy about this because I wrote a tool to find friends on twitter so that I wouldn’t...

Apr 6th

Apr 2nd

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Trying out JQuery

I’ve looked at JQuery before, but hadn’t really played around with it until recently. I’m a prototypejs kind of guy, but jquery is so similar that it’s easy to switch. There are a lot of small differences, but overall I would say that JQuery feels a lot like Prototype lite. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: JQuery is a lot faster to download than prototype,...

Mar 29th

Mar 15th

“Even the iPod shuffle clip gets the rock star treatment. Now forged in stainless...”

– Apple - iPod shuffle - VoiceOver. Multiple playlists. 4GB. Apple isn’t afraid to be breathless in their marketing.

Mar 14th

Mechanical Turk: Profitable or Not? ~~ (A Computer... →

Mechanical Turk only has $600k a month worth of jobs - I don’t understand why it’s not 10 times more.

Mar 11th

McDonald's Business Strategy Amid the Recession -... →

It’s interesting how some companies prosper during a recession - people cutting back means that companies that help save people money do well. McDonald’s here in China has stopped offering their neverending stream of new items in favor of slashing already low prices across the board: a standard combo meal is down from around 3 bucks to around 2 bucks.

Mar 10th

Warren Buffett Explains How The Bailout Is... →

Not good.

Mar 2nd

1 note

Japanese Brazilian - Wikipedia, the free... →

Omoshiroi

Mar 2nd