Lately I've been working on new algorave music in the style of drill&bass and I'm playing a set here in New York for the PdCon16 party. It's at a space called Vital Joint in Williamsburg, tonight (Saturday) at midnight.
Nov. 14, 2016
Although it is an exadgeration to say that app stores are dead it is true that web apps (applications that run in a web browser) and the mobile-device browser platforms have become powerful to the point that it is often not neccessary to build a native app.
There is a gap in the web app paradigm as users don't always realise they can install a web app they use by going to "Add to homescreen".
An interesting way to fill that gap would be to build an "app store" for web apps. That is, a native app that curates and carries out the "add to homescreen" process for the user for a wide variety of quality web applications. So basically like Firefox OS but without the OS - just the installer, and for the native browser of each platform.
Ideas are cheap and execution is everything - you don't need my permission to take this idea and run with it if you're convinced.
Oct. 20, 2016
Couple of weeks ago I was fortunate enough to visit Delhi and spend a week with my colleagues Umang, Gaurav and Tom. We had an excellent and productive week and in between development discussion Umang was kind enough to drive us to many fascinating and beautiful places - not least of all to enjoy a wonderful meal at his sister's house.
We worked out of Awfis co-working, which I recommend.
I feel lucky to have seen Delhi this way.
Sept. 11, 2016
I built these sci fi user interfaces using ClojureScript, React, and SVG:
Tap or click to interact with them.
May 28, 2016
My wife and I needed a collaborative shopping list that we could update from our phones. There are proprietary solutions to this but after some research I was surprised to discover that there is no Free Software application that meets the following criteria:
- Web based.
- Easy to deploy.
- Self-hosted & FLOSS.
- Allows multiple people to update a list.
- Simple text based format for easy editing.
- Mobile friendly - "Add to Home Screen" webapp.
- Satisfies the single use-case of collaborative TODO editing.
Of course I built one with ClojureScript.
We've been using this "in production" for 3 months and so far it fills our need without issue.
- Authentication can be accomplished with a .htaccess file or similar.
- The text-file format is designed so that you can edit lists with a text-editor directly if you want to.
- If you want to support multiple users you can set up two instances in two different folders and symlink the textfile of the list you want to share between them. Each folder can have its own authentication.
- You can also do other textfile things like make a symlink into a Syncthing folder which enables you to modify your TODO lists on your laptop or server as well as through the web app.
The realtime updating is accomplished via long-polling. Primarily I used this instead of websockets because when it comes to browsers, older tech is more robust to different operating environments than newer tech.
I resorted to using PHP for a very lightweight server backend because it has the property that basically anybody with web hosting is able to upload a PHP script and I think it's good to give software as egalitarian a deployment surface as possible. Luckily it is only 150 lines of not-too-painful PHP.