technically me...

Like most tech obsessed American consumers I was up late last night trying get my iPhone 6 pre-order in to the Apple store. I became increasingly infuriated by the store's downtime and turned to Twitter to entertain myself with people's tweets. I eventually got my pre-order in for an iPhone 6 64GB (white/silver).

Here are my favorites of the night:

What if… what if the Apple Store never comes back online?

— Ryan Block (@ryan)

September 12, 2014

Ugh. They got the Apple Camera Truck guys running the store now

— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj)

September 12, 2014

Someone should buy the Apple Store folks an Apple Watch. I hear they’re accurate to within 50 milliseconds.

— Ryan Grove (@yaypie)

September 12, 2014

Maybe it’s going through app review?

— Sean Heber (@BigZaphod)

September 12, 2014

Guy in charge of the Apple Store fell asleep listening to the new U2 album.

— Mark Gurman (@markgurman)

September 12, 2014

Where the hell is the horological expert!?

— Evan DeLaney (@edelaney05)

September 12, 2014

Finally got my iPhone 5s order in. Cheaper than I thought! Wait. Shit.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon)

September 12, 2014

My Twitter feed is a virtual proxy for a line outside an Apple store.

— David Galbraith (@daveg)

September 12, 2014

The Apple Store is up for U2 fans.

— Micah Baldwin (@micah)

September 12, 2014

I knew if was a bad idea when Apple put the old maps team in charge of the servers.

— Dave Pell (@davepell)

September 12, 2014

Odd. If you hit refresh enough times when the Apple Store website is down you get this easter egg. pic.twitter.com/f9r5TggnoF

— Jonathan Paull (@zamn)

I dislike the slow Apple animations on both iOS and OS X. Here is a simple terminal command to turn them off and get some speed back when you're multi-tasking. 

Open a terminal window and paste the following command (Note: 0 for no animations, 0.25 for default speed, >0.25 for grossness):

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0; killall Dock

Should anything go wrong or you prefer the old animation speed paste in the following:

defaults delete com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration; killall Dock

Backbone.Marionette CollectionViews are awesome, but they don't support collection re-ordering out of the box. The library provides some documentation to order CollectionViews and CompositeViews, but it's based on the children already inserted. I prefer my views to reflect the state of my models and collections.

I wrote a small Gist for this. Feel free to comment, fork it, bash it, etc.

The best part about working with smart people is that you're always learning new things from them.

Here are a few things i learned form the awesome people on the Pulse web team this week.

1. (via @kdeo): "onload" events do not bubble in the DOM.

Solution:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9829580/using-backbonejs-view-what-is-the-...

2. (via @justinpeterman): <button> tags with containing a <span> are much easier to style than an <input type="button">. Especially when you need to style the font.

Snippet:

<button><span>Click Me!</span></button>

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_button.asp

3. (via @kdeo) Caching 'length' in for loops is faster than calling it each time through:

Not Cached: for(var i = 0; i < array.length; i++){ }

Cached: for(var i = 0, len = array.length; i < len; i++){ }

http://www.erichynds.com/javascript/javascript-loop-performance-caching-the-l...

I was an avid Oink user and was saddened to see it go away. Alas, services come and go and it's all good as long as you can export your data, right? Wrong!

Oink provided a bunch of CSVs and photos in a zip. CSVs tend to be messy to work with. I needed a JSON with all the information about the places and items. Instead the information provided by the Milk team was minimal (rating, reviews, foursquare_id). They didn't even include the name of the place visited!

I had to make sense of all this data in order to eventually export the data to another service (like Evernote). So, I wrote a Python script which outputs a nicely formatted JSON of all the Oink items including locations.

Script Features

Exports to single JSON file

Includes foursquare venue info (name, lat, long, address, etc.)

Removes entries with no location

Merges comments and ratings for those available

Requirements

Oink export CSV (can be requested on http://oink.com)

Foursquare OAUTH token (see section below)

Python 

Terminal

Part 1: Get Foursqaure OAUTH Token

Visit https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore#req=users/self 

Your token is everything after "OAuth token automatically added. https://api.foursquare.com/v2/users/self?oauth_token="

Part 2: Execution Instructions

Copy oink_export.py to same folder as your Oink CSVs

Open terminal to Oink CSV folder

Run 'python oink_export.py --token=YOUR_OAUTH_TOKEN_HERE'

Watch it fly through your data

Explore more here:

I was in a very festive mood this morning and quickly coded up a Christmas tree in all CSS/CSS3. I've used all kinds of things like, animations, keyframes and border-radius. 

Not a lot of code(also messy), so have a look. 

Merry Christmas!

You may hate or love the new TechCrunch blog redesign. I for one am indifferent about the matter. I read most of their articles on Pulse. I do like the header collapsing from the giant pixelated logo to the more compact one while scrolling. Neat! 

 While inspecting how they went about this, I discovered something I had never seen before in CSS. The header has an astrological giant z-index. 

This got me thinking. If you really want your design to stand out and make an impact, it has to smack users right in the face. Therefore, adding a high z-index. 

After digging around for a little while I came across this post explaining how the maximum supported z-index in modern browsers is 2,147,483,647. If you can afford the extra characters in your CSS, I say do it!

Happy styling,

I recently came across Console.fm. A great little project to organize streams from Soundcloud into genres with a little social layer on top (chat). I was interested on how the site worked, so i dug a little deeper only to find out the tracks are widely available to download through a little hack.

Note: The following steps are written for Google Chrome, but it should work in other browsers with Inspector-like functionality (Firefox + Firebug, IE Dev Tools, etc.).

Browser to Console.fm and login with your Twitter account. 

Select a Genre.

Right-click on a track in the list. Click 'Inspect Element'.

Once the Dev Tools console pops up from the bottom, you can clearly see the stream link from SoundCloud.

Right-click it and click 'Open Link in New Tab'. I 

In the new tab, you'll be presented with an embedded audio file. Pause it. Right-click and click 'Save Video As'.

Name the MP3 whatever you'd like.

Voila! Not sure how long this trick will work for. Enjoy!

Launch Safari

Apple -> Preferences

General -> Default Web Browser

Select “Chrome Canary” from the drop-down menu

via aaltonen.us

I love Google Chrome as my default browser, but ever since version 11 I've been having problems with it. I quickly switched over to the Canary builds and been living life on the bleeding edge since. Unfortunately, Google doesn't allow you to make it the default browser on OSX. I found this great little guide that provides a workaround.

At Pulse, we listen to a lot of music throughout the day. Most of it comes from Pandora. The ability to pick great Pandora radio stations was actually one of the requirements of working at Pulse that caught my eye when I applied. We're always looking for new office DJs. Especially ones with iOS, Android and Web skills. ;)

Streaming radio is great for music discovery, but what if I want to play songs I own/know? Normally, you'd fire up [insert mp3 app] and listen to your collection, while when away from the computer you're limited to the songs you synchronized to your device. 

I personally feel like local storage is a thing of the past. We now have cheap cloud storage with redundancy and fast mobile communication technologies(3G/4G). I haven't seen the point of storing my music locally for a while, let alone plugging my device to sync new tracks. Companies are claiming the we're entering a Post-PC era, but that's certainly not the case until you lose the USB cable. Let's face it, they're giants trying to please the record industry who care most about their bottom line. There's more money to be made by selling individual track/albums and upselling storage on machines and devices. 

Despite the licensing challenges with the record companies, there are a number of streaming music services that are great alternatives to the iTunes monopoly. I will discuss some of the services that I've used and their pros and cons. There are clearly some services that I've left out, but they should resemble the ones discussed. Let me know if you feel they're important and I'll make sure to check them out. 

Grooveshark

Probably the least likely service on the list to be fully legal, but by far my most used. I've been a long time user of Grooveshark and i even signed up for their Grooveshark Anywhere subscription before the price went up. The $30/year is a small price to pay for a streaming music library. Not only that , but it's a small price to pay for my innocence/ignorance in court when we find out none of it was legal.

  Price

FREE (Unlimited web access)

$9/month (Unlimited access on mobile, desktop and web)

  Features

Personal Library

Playlist (Making, Following, Discovery)

User Following

Visualizer

Radio stations

Song Upload

HTML 5 player (flash needed for streaming/DRM)

iPhone(jailbreak), Android, Blackberry, WebOS, Nokia apps

  Pros

Free web streaming

Relatively intuitive user interface

Actual web app rather than website with track links

  Cons

No free mobile access

No library access on mobile, only playlists and searches

Misspelled tags

No way to edit tags

Duplicate songs in searches, albums

Some songs are of terrible audio quality (can be flagged)

Not the best recommendation engine (Pandora still is king)

OK so tagging is awful, but this can easily be fixed with a little crowd-sourcing effort. Why couldn't the community edit ID3 tags? If users care about their music, then there should be no foul play. If there is then users can flag the person that edited the track. Seems simple right?

      Amazon Cloud Player

Store your personal music and Amazon MP3 collection in the cloud and stream it from the web and Android device. Great in theory and it works well, yet it suffers from the initial friction of having to upload your library. Would you like to wait while you upload 20GB? I like this product because of what it represents (Amazon's middle finger to the record industry). Amazon is simply offering storage for tracks you already own or are purchasing. The only thing that's changed is the easy access to the music. 

  Price

Free (5GB)

1 Amazon Album Purchase (20GB)

$1/GB/yr (20/50/100/200/500/1000 GB)

  Features

Personal Library

Playlists

Web and Android clients

  Pros

Expensive storage cost (Google offers 20GB for $5/yr)

Easy upload tool with iTunes integration

Great audio quality (varies based on your uploads)

Good UI

  Cons

[Update]Expensive storage cost (Google offers 20GB for $5/yr)

No ID3 tag editing

No iOS player

No radio

No music recommendation 

  With a lower storage price and more native client features (tag editing, music suggestion, radio) this could be the "cloud player" we've been looking for. 

    MOG

MOG has been creating some buzz lately. It wasn't always a music streaming service. It started out as a music social network. Due to its roots, the site has lots of content around the music including in-house editorial. Most notably it streams high quality 320kbps tracks!

  Price

FREE 14-day trial

$5/month 

$10/month

  Features

Favorites (kind of like a library)

Playlists

Radio

Featured Albums, Tracks, Playlists

Chrome app

Mobile clients (iOS, Android)

Social Music discovery (Pandora-like voting, and more)

Lots of content around the music

Pros

High quality tracks

Pretty good recommendations

Great Search

Great Mobile UI

  Cons

Flash based

Too many transition effects

Awkward 'add to favorite' and playlist workflow

Incomplete Chrome app (Can't create playlists or favorite)

  The price is steep for the experience and service offered in comparison to competitors. Not sure if the complementary content (artwork, blogs, etc.) is a great selling point. The overall experience needs to change from a website to more of an app. At the moment it feels very Last.fm-ish. 

  Honorable Mentions

Rdio is a service very similar to MOG with mobile clients and priced similarly($3.99, $9.99/month). 

8tracks allows users to create playlists of 8 tracks. The site has a great social community and now offers a mobile client. (Free, $50/yr)

Zune Pass is the famous music service from Microsoft which adopts the American all-you-can-eat mentality. $14.99 gets you unlimited streaming/downloading to PC, Xbox, Windows Phone 7 and Zune. Bonus, you get to keep 10 tracks each month DRM-free. 

I'm always up for discovering new music services that fit my needs, so drop me a line in the comments about services you like. You can follow my music listening at the following:

  Groovershark

Pandora

MOG

Last.fm

Ping

8tracks

I've always been a fan of GMail's undo feature. I can't count the many times the feature has saved me from misspellings in an email, forgotten content and forgotten recipients. 

The other day i was sending something in an email to my friend who was sitting right next to me. Don't ask... My undo setting is maxed out to 30 seconds. We were both left staring at the screen as we got the message displayed in the screenshot. The waiting was excruciating. We didn't care about undoing anything in the email yet we were forced to wait for it to send.

I was recently asked to speak for a few minutes at the launch of the 2011 Carleton University Nicol Entrepreneurial Competition about my 2010 competition experience (2nd place). A few minutes' notes turned into a decent sized post documenting my experience. Here it is:

    My Nicol 2010 business opportunity

  I competed with my 4th year engineering project, SynapSync. A blogging platform (site) for small businesses to post promotional material and have it be pushed out to a mobile application (Android), Twitter, Facebook, and mailing lists. My team-mate and I had a prototype developed and wanted to build a business around it. 

    Advice

  Get your business idea on paper! A lot of the time an idea will sound good in your head. You're going to change the world. Later, when you try explaining it to people and they end up giving you a confused look. I once came up with a communication system which sounded like AIM/MSN/Meebo when i discussed it with a friend. Turns out what i wanted to communicate was similar to the new Facebook messages product. :S

  Solve an actual problem. Who has it? Can this solution be applied to others? Analyze all of them and target the market with the biggest value created. Focus, focus, focus! Don't be a vitamin, be a pill. 

  Identify potential partners. Partners, not co-founders. These can be businesses and individuals that have something to gain by partnering. Give them value and make sure they also complement your business. Don't just look up businesses that you think would like to be partners. Meet with them and find out if it will be possible. Having confirmation or feedback will strengthen your opportunity. 

  Who are your competitors? Identify them and their estimated market share. What are they good at? Don't just copy that, try to differentiate yourself. Lowest price does not always win! Quality of service, value offered and innovation can. 

  Do your research. Market sizes, revenues, market share, etc. Google is your friend, but not your only source. I'd start with it, but then check out CrunchBase for competitor information. OCRI and the downtown library are great resources for statistics. Yes, there is a world outside of the web. 

  Don't get stuck on local. Think and dream big if you can. This will help you stand out from competition (Nicol). There is no problem saying you will start off local (Ottawa), but have a bigger market in mind and the plan of attack. You will need one.

  Business plans. This is definitely not my favourite part. I have heard stories of 100+ page business plans begin submitted. Mine was nowhere near that. I'd say you should try to keep it brief and to the point. Don't write endless pages. It's not a book/essay. Think of your evaluators and their patience. Furthermore, make sure your forecasts make sense. Do them to the best of your ability and then check them with someone that understands financial forecasting. Get challenged and go back to the drawing board or Excel spreadsheet in this case. 

  Get a mentor. Get 100 mentors. (Seriously) Most people are very willing to help. Ottawa has a great community of entrepreneurs. Browse your LinkedIn connections and ask for introductions. Email CEOs, attend conferences and social events, and ask for their time (there or later). It works. Listen to them and their feedback on your business opportunity. Identify overlapping key points. Do they make sense? Always trust your gut, but don't be a fool. 

  ABP! Always Be Pitching. A play on the ABC (Always Be Closing). Every chance you get to talk about your opportunity, take it. Tell your friends and family. Present in front of them. Book mock presentations with SIFE. Basically present in front of anyone who will sit and give you feedback. You should get so good at presenting that you can present in your sleep. Think of questions critics and evaluators can ask you. Can't think of any? Google can help again. You know there will always be that one question you're afraid of being asked. Trust Murphy's Law. It'll come up, so prepare for it. Here are a few basic questions:

  Can someone else copy your business?

How will you compete?

Have you looked into patenting a certain aspect?

Have you talked to customers? Do they need this?

Why you?

  Have fun. I find it so much fun to think about products and services. Be creative, dream, but stay grounded enough that people can follow. Remember that you are your own worst critic. Put a lot of effort in your work and the quality will show. 

    What I learned about myself

  I sucked at elaborating my idea. I used gimmicky language. Don't! I re-wrote my idea at least 25 times before i could explain it in a sentence.(See business opportunity above). 

  I gained confidence. Confidence in myself and my abilities. Confidence in my public speaking. Most importantly, confidence in my business opportunity. This confidence helped when dealing with critics and judges. Some of them can really eat you alive, but i still kept my head up and eye on the prize.

  I learned to ask for help. I am a person than believed I could achieve anything on my own. I've always been a great team player, but had the confidence to get something done on my own if it came down to it. A business is something you can do on your own, but is not advisable. I learned to reach out to professors, Ottawa entrepreneurs and other resources provided by Nicol. You slowly start to form professional relationships with these people and they end up becoming mentors. Today, i am very grateful for all the people that mentored and continue to mentor.

    In closing

  The Nicol competition was a great start to my entrepreneurial aspirations. I learned a lot about myself, business and entrepreneurship. I wish all the Nicol 2011 competitors the best of luck on their journey. 

I am a big fan of the Google Chrome's 'Pin Tab' feature. I keep my GMail, Google Calendar and Tasks pinned as tabs all day long. My application switching has turned into tab switching. I cannot wait to get my first Chrome Notebook and finally live in a browser.

However, one thing does bother me about this feature. When interacting within a pinned tab application, the user is still presented with the navigation bar. This makes it very hard for myself to disconnect from the fact that GMail is a web site instead of thinking of it as an app. If i have an app as a tab, do i need to browse to another website within that pinned tab?

Maybe we can do without the bookmarks and the navigation bar and the user can open a new tab in order to navigate to another site. Not only does this "appify" web apps, but the end user gains the extra vertical screen real-estate.  Here is a mockup of what this could look like:

Recently at Twegather we have started thinking about optimizing the event creation process. I recently wrapped up an experiment (A/B) involving the event creation inputs on the front page. I was interested in seeing how users perform when changing to a single textbox input. This is a sneak peek at what's to come for Twegather. 

  Here are the slides from my experiment presentation and the research paper.

   Paper:

  Background:

A while ago i ditched my PC setup all together and started using my MacBook exclusively. I miss Windows 7, but that's another story. Having left the beast of a machine to do nothing then collect dust, i went out on a search to put it to good use. 

  I've been a long time listener of Windows Weekly. In the podcast, Paul Thurrott recommended Windows Home Server (WHS) for all backup need on a network and media sharing. This intrigued me, so i did my research. At the time, WHS 2008 was the current edition available for $99. Being a cheapskate i decided to wait. A few short weeks later, WHS V2 'Vail' RC0 was released. This was my chance at trying the WHS product for free and remaining bleeding-edge.

  I installed Vail a short while after and formatted my drives in the machine to support Drive Extender (DE). This is simply a system which allows to "pool" all your hard drives together in order to simulate on giant one. DE supports redundancy, so should a drive fail you'd just pop in another one. Worked great, but sadly Microsoft decided to kill it this fall.

  Anyways...

  Seeing as i had essentially a big powerful NAS, i decided to fool around with OSX's Time Machine. This proved to be quite a challenge. Microsoft touted out-of-box functionality with Time Machine. Unfortunately, the method to enable it was nowhere to be found

  What's needed:

  Router

Apple Machine with Snow Leopard

WHS 'Vail' Machine

Method:

  1. Install iTimeMachine and run it in order to enable AirDisks.

2. Install Launchpad by going to your browser to http://servername/connect and installing MacConnector.dmg. Where Server name is the IP for your WHS. 3. Open Disk Utility in the Utilities folder. (CMD+SPACE, 'Disk Utility') 4. Select the Macintosh HD, then go to “File” -> “New” -> “Blank Disk Image”. 5. In the box that comes up enter:

  Where,

machinename - is the name of your machine. To get, launch terminal and type hostname -fs.

macaddress - is your mac address which is called the Ethernet ID (System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet -> Advanced -> Ethernet)

size - something larger than your current used amount. This will autoresize later. format - MAC OS Extended (Journaled)

partitions - Single Partition – Apple Partition Map

image format - sparse bundle disk image.

6. Click 'Create'.

  7. Transfer that disk image from your desktop to you time machine folder on the WHS.

10. Launch the Launchpad app.

  11. Select 'Backup computer'.

  12. Point time machine to your WHS folder and start the backup.

  Voila! This should mount every time you're connected to your network and automatically start backup. 

  Sources:

[1] http://social.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/whsvailbeta/thread/dfc063d9-304a-4f33-ab8a-58d4a7eb63d1/#34a221aa-4e1b-4eac-8d23-f96a53655cd6

Over the last 6 months we’ve been working on something very, very special.

Without further ado, I’m stoked to announce Gowalla 3, the most significant update to the service we’ve ever released—both in terms of design and utility. But before I dive into the specifics of new features, let’s dive straight into the feature that is sure to be the most talked about.

via blog.gowalla.com

I’ve been a long time fan of the service and was very sad to see it lose market share to Foursquare and Facebook places. The apps have a great design and were first to add a gaming aspect to check-ins (items, trips).

With the release of Gowalla 3 today comes a slew of new features i’ve been wanting. Most notably, the app now integrates your checkins with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Tumblr.

I’ve recently started using Instagram as a means to share photos of what i am doing as well as artsy photos. I usually check in to Foursquare through the Instagram app and leave a comment. This is then posted to my Tumblog on Tumblr. The only things missing in this process were the items and overall experience of Gowalla. Well, now you have it all with Gowalla and many other little features.

If you’re a Foursquare/Places user and want to just do more with your checkins, i suggest you sign-up.

Great job Gowalla team at throwing a curve ball and keeping a long time fan happy!