Alex Bosworth's Weblog: Archive

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

1 tag

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

1 note

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

Watch

Talking Carl is an app with a cute figure ‘Carl’ who listens to what you say and then says it back to you in a cute ‘Carl’ voice. You can also poke or tickle him and watch his reaction. It’s a $1 app. The main reason this app is great is the character design, done by a French 3d artist Yann Le Coroller The app hasn’t got a lot of attention, but to me...

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

Watch

Make: Online : Fluid sculpture from plastic tubing Someone should make a business of selling nifty ‘maker’ type stuff to people who are too lazy to actually be makers.

Apr 2nd

1 note

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

“Google App Engine - Read the maximum request quota - 500 request per second.”

– Broken Promisms: The Google App Engine Hoax Google never seems serious about App Engine in the way that Amazon is about AWS

Mar 2nd

1 note

Amazon.com: Digital Text Platform: Sign In →

This is very cool. The kindle is really forward thinking by Amazon - they are really middlemen for a lot of sales, and middlemen tend to be eliminated over the long run. Why can’t an author sell directly to readers? Why can’t a musician sell directly to fans? With the internet there is no reason why not.

Mar 1st

I know it would be instantly spammed to death, but I wish blogs and comment-allowing sites like hackernews would allow me to post my response on my own blog, and then republish it on their blog. There have been attempts at this but no one has gotten it right so that the responses flow together properly. Tumblr as an integrated system with their reblogging offers something like this, and twitter...

Feb 26th

If It's Hard To Say, It Must Be Risky →

Could be bad news for ‘Adylitica’ but of course Arnold Schwarzenegger is the highest paid actor ever and the governor of California.

Feb 22nd

Adylitica Wiki →

I’m still working away at our Adwords project: Adylitica, and things are coming along nicely, although we have slipped a little on our date estimates. If you are waiting on a beta invite, we wanted to send them out this week, but we need another week or so before we can accept new people. One thing I have been working on to go along with Adylitica is a wiki for Adwords information, trying...

Feb 19th

Facebook: All Your Stuff Is Ours, Even If You Quit →

Facebook owns the rights to everything you post there. One way I think they could monetize their data is by selling the ability to show friend’s pics on banner ads If i see someone I know in a banner ad, I’d be much more likely to click, although that is pretty freaky stuff from a privacy perspective

Feb 16th

1 note

“Defining the time frame, locations and specifics for planned Microsoft-branded...”

– Microsoft to open retail stores What will they sell in these stores? Maybe Microsoft is working on a secret laptop project. The reason of opening retail stores just to learn what consumers want is too ludicrous to be true, although I guess I can’t put anything past Microsoft.

Feb 12th

Lifestreaming vs Blogging

I’m a fan of lifestreaming, party because it’s the new thing to do, but also partly because it’s easier to do, blogging takes effort - it used to take me days to write a post. Of course, this means that my blog posts previously were higher quality, even if they were fewer and far between and I eventually stopped writing them because it felt like a chore. I’ve had some...

Feb 11th

Coding Horror: The Elephant in the Room: Google... →

Stackoverflow.com is an SEO based site: 83% of traffic is search referrals. And by SEO we should say GEO - no other search engines are competitive. Businesses built on an unseen, unpublished and unpredictable algorithm are a bit risky, what happens if Google decides to cut off your traffic?

Feb 9th

Could Google Open Source Their Rankings?

Google has been asked if they could open source their search engine algorithms before, and have pretty solidly said that they can’t because it would lead to even heavier gaming once everyone knew what really drives Google rankings. Of course there’s probably a business reason there too, it’s likely Google thinks that if their competitors could see their code, they would have a...

Feb 8th

Why I don't use 37Signals

I used to like 37signals, but I got turned off last year by their support last year, when a problem with their backpackit design destroyed a page I made on the site: they enabled ‘email to page’ on their pages, without considering that people would spam the emails, resulting in tons of spam on my backpackit page I emailed them about the issue, and they were not very helpful. Instead...

Feb 6th