Back in March I started thinking about doing a photo project, something to force myself to take more photos. This turned into Threee, a project with Blaine Bowers, John Hoover and myself. We each take and post one picture a day starting April 1st. The iPhone 4 was recently released and we all got one on launch day. With the new phone comes the ability to record 720p HD video. This prompted me to think about a video project that we could do to go along with Threee. We came up with Ninety Second Week, shooting as much as you can during the week and compile it into 90 seconds to show off your week. We hope this turns into more videos then just those for 90SecWeek. As with Threee, the rules require the video to be shot using the iPhone only. We can also only edit using iMovie (full or mobile version) and the video has to be posted every Wednesday. I’m looking forward to this project and hope we can keep it going as well as we have with Threee. Check out the other videos at 90secweek.com.
Everybody has their opinions on Apple’s new iPhone so I figured why not put mine out there as well. If you aren’t interested in yet another post on the internet about the iPhone 4 then feel free to move along. On June 15, like hundreds of thousands of other people, I attempted to pre-order the iPhone 4. After a few hours I was able to finally get an order placed with Apple. That also means I was lucky enough to have mine delivered June 23rd instead of the 24th launch day. After spending the past 3 days with it only one word sums it up for me, amazing.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the new design when it was first leaked as I really love the shape and look of it before. So that is the first thing you have to get used to is a new shape in your hand. The new design is growing on me but I still miss the 3GS shape. The single most important thing that stood out to me was the new display. The second I plugged it into iTunes for activation I was blown away. The colors, icons, and text just look perfect. I had to pick up my 3GS and do some side by side comparisons and was just blown away. Everything on the home screen icons stand out so much more. Of course this does mean some of the icons look ridged or blurry as they either weren’t designed very well or compressed to much when saving. Notable is to look at the App Store icon vs the Apple Store icon in which the latter is extremely blurry vs the App Store. I’m sure Apple will release a new icon before long.
I set about a few days ago learning the in and outs of writing a Chrome Extension. I’ve been using the browser a little more recently after being a die hard Safari fan. Although Chrome is awesome and very fast I’m not ready just yet to claim it as my default browser over Safari. However I couldn’t pass up the chance to learning a few new things and release an extension for Chrome (and next up Safari).
Like many others I use a social checkin/location/whatever app. For me personally its Gowalla. I have used them for a little while and they have a much better interface then Foursquare. So, why not have an easy way to see where your friends are by clicking a little icon in your browser. Thats exactly what this extension, Gowalla Friends, does. It sits in your browser and upon click will show you a nice list of your friends recent checkin’s. It is the same feed you see on gowalla.com when logged in and has the same style, Gowalla has an awesome design so why change it?
You just specify your Gowalla username and thats it. To avoid overloading Gowalla’s servers I am caching the feed for 10 mins. I may change this in the future or at the very least allow you to set your own caching time (depending on how many people you follow and how often people check in). I also plan on making the code opensource and post it on github in the coming weeks so keep an eye out for that. There is nothing major in the code as its just parsing an xml feed from Gowalla but I’ll make it available non the less.
If Gowalla will open up their API more and allow me to pull in recent friends checkin’s (besides using an rss feed), allow me to get comments and photos posted, and even allow replying/leaving a comment on a friends checkin then I would love to update the extension to allow more features but as it remains the Gowalla API doesn’t seem to allow much of what I would like to do with this extension. Either way this was more of a learning experience in writing a simple extension and releasing it to Google. There might be a future blog post about it as well.
