World, meet the Worst Album Covers site. As a vinyl collector, why am I just now discovering this?
Africa Programmers Survey Results
Interesting survey conducted by Afrinnovator on the programmer landscape in Africa. Great data, especially re: the types of languages and platforms used for developing web and mobile applications. That said, the survey also shows an unsettling problem — the lack of female programmers. Out of the 181 survey participants, only 9 were women.
The entire (pilot?) episode of Graffiti Rock.
More on the show via Micheal Holman’s site.
“The short-lived program Graffiti Rock premieres [June 29, 1984] on WPIX TV New York. It features performances by popular hip hop groups like Run-D.M.C. and the Treacherous Three.”
- Vibe Magazine, December, 1995
I just saw this the other day on Netflix. If you look closely at the dancers, you might see a very young Vincent Gallo and Debi Mazar in the crowd.
Ten Biggest Africa Stories Of 2010
Posted by Alexis Okeowo
Though I’ve lived in and write about the gigantic, endlessly fascinating continent that is Africa, I still find it difficult to keep up with the myriad of elections, celebrations, conflicts, and sporting matches that take place there each year. 2010 was no exception. Among the elating, disturbing, and promising, here’s what caught my eye.
The World Cup
A gay-rights movement in East Africa
Guinea’s presidential election
Shell’s oil spills in Nigeria
Nigeria’s Boko Haram, an Islamist terrorist sect
The International Criminal Court’s push for justice in Kenya
South Sudan’s imminent independence
Ivory Coast’s disastrous presidential runoff
Rwanda’s presidential election went off without a hitch
The summer’s bombings in Uganda
Using Facebook Data to Visualize Friendships
Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.
When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.
Don’t believe the hype: 4G is a myth (and a confusing mess)
From CNNMoney:
You’ve seen the 4G advertisements from T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon, bragging about a much-better wireless network with blazing fast speeds.
Here’s the secret the carriers don’t advertise: 4G is a myth. Like the unicorn, it hasn’t been spotted anywhere in the wild just yet — and won’t be any time in the near future.
Save your money….
Google Instant for the iPhone
Google recently enabled Google Instant for the iPhone and Android: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/power-of-google-instant-now-in-your.html
Now I can have fun/waste time coming up with search snippets like this:
Are mushrooms good for you?…wait, huh?
For those who need to know exactly where Africa is located…on a map
Africa is …
Apple’s Section 3.3.1 and iPhone Development Tools
I just read John Gruber’s post which does a great job in explaining why Apple implemented recent changes to their iPhone Developer Program License Agreement (the infamous Section 3.3.1). The result of this change, it appears, is a banning of the use of all middleware applications/meta-platforms that assist in the development of native iPhone applications. Here’s the actual language:
3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Does this mean that I won’t be able to use tools like Titanium or Phonegap to develop iPhone apps? I’m just trying to wrap my brain around why Apple would cast such a wide net and prohibit all meta-platforms from being able to produce iPhone apps. Is it because it would look bad for Apple if they only banned the use of Adobe’s Flash CS5 iPhone packager? Why make everyone suffer, if this whole mess stems from Apple’s long-standing beef with Adobe?
Given the new rule, where does it leave the following applications/tools?
Appcelerator
Description: Appcelerator is a free SDK that enables you to build native iPhone and Android apps (no Blackberry). You’ll need the iPhone and Android SDKs installed in order to use it for mobile app development. A great all-around tool (you can even build desktop applications), I’d hate to see the platform and its community of developers pushed out the iPhone space due to this rule.
Update: Here is Appcelerator’s response.
NimbleKit
Description: NimbleKit is basically a template that you add to XCode. Once added, you can then start adding your CSS, HTML, and JavaScript to create you iPhone app. Given that it is an XCode template, maybe it’ll fly under the new rules radar?
PhoneGap
Description: Like Appcelerator, PhoneGap is another device agnostic native app development tool. A good community of developers has grown in support of this platform. It even had a chapter dedicated to it in a recently published book by O’Reilly entitled, ironically, “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa”. Per the Phonegap Google group, they are saying that Phonegap is in the clear. Is that true?
Update: It looks like PhoneGap is in the clear.
Rhomobile
Description: I know very little about Rhomobile beyond a screencast that I saw on infoQ.com. It’s an open mobile framework that builds native mobile apps and is enterprise-focused. A very interesting platform that, unfortunately, appears to be locked out of the iPhone native application space due to the new rules.
App: AppMakr**
Description: AppMakr is a service that allows anyone to make an iPhone application using a WYSIWYG interface for creating a fully native iPhone application. Good for agencies and anyone interested in building quick RSS-based native iPhone applications. Or, rather, was good for agencies and anyone interested in building quick RSS-based native iPhone applications.
App: TapLynx
Description: Similar to AppMakr, TapLynx is a WYSIWYG-based application builder. Again, great for agencies anyone wanting to create a nice iPhone application quickly. The interesting thing about TapLynx is that it also offers you the ability to add additional pieces of custom functionality to your app. So, presumably, this would be done via the TapLynx SDK. Will this throw a red flag for Apple?
App: Swebapps
Description: I haven’t used this service in months, but I do remember it creating really basic applications that all looked alike. Swebapps is slated to launch a new version of its service soon. Not sure if they are doing anything to address the new rule.
Do you use any of these or similar services? Are you running into issues? Do you see any cause for concern or am I reading too much into this?
Graph Databases and Social Data
Recently, Ben Scofield, Viget’s Technology Director, gave a great presentation on “The Future of Data.” In giving everyone a general overview of the database landscape, he pointed out that traditional relational database systems, such as Postgres, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and MySQL, were being assaulted from two different directions. On one side you have browser-based HTML5 DOM-based storage and on the other the side you have a whole slew of non-sql/post-relational systems, such as CouchDB, MongoDB, graph databases (such as Neo4j, and Google’s hypergraphdb), among other systems.
Fascinating discussion, but what really caught my attention was the mention of the “graph database,” which was a new one on me as well as others in the room. Graph databases have been around since the 80’s, but have found new life given the rise of social data. Emil Eifrem of Neo4J sums up the advantages that graph databases have over traditional RDBMS when dealing with social data.
Most applications today handle data that is deeply associative, i.e. structured as graphs (networks). The most obvious example of this is social networking sites, but even tagging systems, content management systems and wikis deal with inherently hierarchical or graph-shaped data.
This turns out to be a problem because it’s difficult to deal with recursive data structures in traditional relational databases. In essence, each traversal along a link in a graph is a join, and joins are known to be very expensive. Furthermore, with user-driven content, it is difficult to pre-conceive the exact schema of the data that will be handled. Unfortunately, the relational model requires upfront schemas and makes it difficult to fit this more dynamic and ad-hoc data.
A graph database uses nodes, relationships between nodes and key-value properties instead of tables to represent information. This model is typically substantially faster for associative data sets and uses a schema-less, bottoms-up model that is ideal for capturing ad-hoc and rapidly changing data.
Very interesting/cool.
For a more in depth write-up on graph databases, check out Lorenzo Alberton’s article on “Graphs in the database: SQL meets social networks” and Neo4J’s “Social networks in the database: using a graph database”.
You can watch a presentation that Emil gave about graph databases on InfoQ.com.
And you can view Ben’s slides on the “Future of Data” here:
My 5 iPhone Productivity Apps
Being productive on the iPhone?!?! Who would have thunk that. What with the various Fart apps and the game changing Beer app.
Seems like a lot of my friends have gotten iPhones over the past few weeks. I’ve had mine for about a year and a half (wasn’t quite an early adopter). Like the new crop of users, the first thing I did was bloat my new purchase up with time wasting games. This ultimately ended up with me literally burning out the battery within the first two weeks of having it. I quickly replaced it and decided to get serious about my new and indispensable tool. No more time and hard drive wasters for me — I moved full speed in molding my iPhone into something that would make my life easier, more productive and less hectic. In short, I wanted a computer (notice, I don’t call my iPhone a phone — I hate phones) that could fit in my pocket and extend my productivity when I’m away from my laptop (my second home). Nowadays, marketers call such a tool a netbook, but whatever. Here’s some of what I use:
Dropbox:
This is actually a website and not a native iPhone app. It’ll work with any browser, but the layout is optimized to work on an iPhone. For those not familiar, Dropbox allows you to place files on the web making them available to you where ever you are. On a Mac, Dropbox integrates with your Finder and allows you to easily move files around on what would appear to be a folder like any other folder on your box. I use it primarily to store PDF and Word files (books, proposals, etc) for viewing when on the road and away from my laptop.
1Password:
This iPhone app keeps track of all of my passwords. It synchs with its counterpart on my laptop and requires a password to access in case in the wrong hands. Very cool and handy.
Radiant iPhone extension:
Radiant is a great Content Management System built using the Ruby on Rails framework. To help manage my Radiant sites, I use an app developed by Andrea Franz that allows me to manage my sites via my iPhone. It doesn’t allow for complete access to the CMS, but it does allow me to do basic site management, such as editing pages and creating page parts.
Things:
This app keeps me sane. I’m not big on the whole GTD thing, but I do recognize that I do need some structure to my day otherwise things will go spiraling out of control. Hence, Things. I use it on my laptop to organize my many projects and drill down to actionable to-do items. When on-the-go and away from my lap, I can synch it up to my iPhone. I can even create new to-dos on my iPhone and synch it up over wi-fi when I get back to the casa. Essential.
Evernote:
This is a beast of an app and I haven’t quite been able use it to its fullest capabilities yet. For the uninitiated:
Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.
I had to quote them, because I was unable to adequately summarize all that the app does. I use it for many things, but primarily for capturing the many, many, many random brain farts that I have throughout the day. With Evernote, I’m able to jot ideas down using a “Text Note”. Or if I see something that, for whatever reason, may be of importance to an idea I’m having, I can snap a picture, tag it, and write a quick reminder as to why the object is important. If I’m in a particularly verbal mood (which is rare), I can leave a “Voice Note”. I capture my thoughts when on-the-go, come back to the house and synch it up with my lap for further development or deletion. Good stuff.
When I first bought my iPhone, I was doing a lot of web development using Media Temple’s servers (I’ve since moved to Slicehost and loving it — MT is great too). While there, MT was probably one of the first hosting vendors to roll out an iPhone app that allowed you to manage your account via the iPhone. Very cool.
I’m always on the hunt for more time saving/productivity enhancing iPhone apps. What do you use?
