Pek Pongpaet

With the advent of Twitter where posts are 140 characters or less and Tumblr and Posterous where blog posts are getting shorter and shorter, it is no surprise that a site like ShoutWorthy exists. ShoutWorthy is another online reputation site that lets you recommend people and receive recommendations in 140 characters or less. It even integrates with Twitter or Facebook so you don’t have to sign up with another login and password.

LinkedIn is great for recommendations but because of privacy settings and the fact that you might not be connected to the person, it may not be possible to view those recommendations. My friend Sachin Agarwal once commented that the problem with LinkedIn recommendations was that after the first few recommendations, everything else was just noise. Having 20+ recommendations is great only from a numbers perspective but nobody was going to sit and read all 20 of them if they were 300 words or more.

ShoutWorthy does away with that Twitter style – everything is short and public. Here’s a screencap of a recommendation I made for my friend Paul Saini.

The setup is pretty much like Twitter in that you see feeds of recommendations by your friends. You also have your own ShoutWorthy page people can see recommendations you’ve given as well as ones you have received.

Thanks to Justin Reidy for introducing me to this site.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Some people believe that there is room for only one viable social network at a time. First there was Friendster, then MySpace, and now Facebook. Well, maybe Facebook and Twitter. The fallacy of that argument is that these social networks are too broad. There will always be room for niche players. Even among the art/design community there are a few vibrant economies. DeviantArt has been around a long time and is not going away soon. Niche social networks have an appeal because the members can discuss and go into detailed discussions about their topic in a way that wouldn’t feel inappropriate at a more casual social network say like Facebook.

I’ve lately been a fan of Dribbble, an invite only social network for designers made by designers. The idea is you post small shots, using a tongue in cheek basketball analogy, of what you are working on. Other designers like and critique your work and offer advice on how to improve upon it. I found the community to be very helpful and friendly. But a site like this would have no appeal to the average consumer, a rocket scientist, or a musician.

A general social network like Facebook would not be appropriate place for uber web designers to geek out over every pixel. A social network like this also offers much more targeted advertising opportunities. The best Facebook ads could do for a while was to offer me American Apparel. For all the information Facebook had about me, they still couldn’t show me an ad that truly engaged me. Here’s where a niche social network does better. People who come to that site are already interested in a very specific subject. Products and services that cater to that group of people would do very well.

Obviously networks like Deviantart and Behance will never be the size of Facebook but they don’t have to be nor should they try to be. As long as you can get a critical mass of users, you have something.

Popularity: 15% [?]

This is the story of how two people who’ve never created a mobile application developed an iPhone app at the Day of Mobile Hackathon on March 6, 2010 in less than 12 hours and went on to win the Best iPhone App prize of $250 cash.

First off, what this blog post isn’t:

• It’s not a get rich quick scheme. (Well, maybe it is, if it motivates you to crank out some apps with some new gained knowledge).
• I’m also no trying to sell you anything. There’s not going to be some affiliate link or buy this e-book crap.
• This is not a turnkey solution for a non-techie. If you can’t code, other than it being a good read, this article is not helpful to you. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, move along.

If you are still reading this, awesome!

Day of Mobile is a one day developer conference focused on the mobile phone industry. Speakers range successful iPhone app developers who made gobs of money to a lawyer who talked about the legal issues that come up when creating these apps. At these types of conferences, it is not unusual to have a hackathon.

My friend Chad Paulson and I decided to partner up and compete in this hackathon. I’ve served as a judge at 2 hackathons including SocialDevCamp 2009 Chicago and Google Android Eco Challenge Hackathon in Chicago. Both hackathons turned out really well in terms of number of teams competing and apps that came out of it. Chad’s app actually won Best Overall at SocialDevCamp. He made out like a bandit. I was really pumped and inspired.

However neither of us had ever made a mobile app. I made a hello world iphone app that had a label that said hello world over a year ago. That’s about my level of experience with Objective-C. Since it was a one day hackathon, we really didn’t have much time. The conference started at 9AM on Saturday and code freeze was 2:30PM.

With that in mind we had to find a solution that would work for us. I had already done a tech evaluation of several mobile development platforms including Appcelerator Titanium, PhoneGap, Flash CS5, Mono, Rhodes and others for a client who was looking into mobile apps. These are development platforms that provide a layer of abstraction that allows one to develop a mobile app that would publish to one or more platform without having to learn said platform. In that research, I had concluded that the solution that would work for me and my team was Appcelerator Titanium because we were web developers who were comfortable with javascript and html. That’s what I ended up going with when we did this hackathon.

The mobile app that Chad and I decided to develop for the hackathon was a mobile version of my webapp, a social media monitoring tool. In keeping with the spirit of the hackathon, we decided not to start coding till Thursday (keeping development time under 24 hours). We realized later on that some of the other teams had been working on some of these apps for a week and had more people on it even. However, what we did do is install the necessary software before hand and started to figure out HOW to do the things we needed for our app. I also started designing the screens before hand so that we would hit the ground running the second we started coding.

If you think of it as an Iron Chef episode, we essentially figured out what we were going to make and had done all the prep work like chopping vegetables so that once the competition started, everybody just started doing stuff.

Friday March 5th, 10:00PM. Chad gets home from dinner with his girlfriend. We already had a skeleton project that was created when you create a new blank project in Titanium. We also already had Kitchen Sink installed. It’s a sample project provided by the Appcelerator guys that has all the sample code you would need to get started on anything except the most esoteric of projects – hence the name Kitchen Sink.

Since my web app already had a REST API that we could access, we just had to figure out how to make those calls and display them in the conventional mobile way, usually in a list. By 3:00AM, we had many of the screens showing dynamic data. By that time, I started to keep dozing off on my computer. I tried to push through but ended up going to bed around 3:30AM. Chad wanted to make more progress so he cranked at it till around 7:30AM. That was around the time I got up and I dragged my groggy self to the conference and started coding again.
When Chad got up at 10:30AM I had the final screen working.

At this point the app was basically working but it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a usable mobile app (like back buttons between views, title bars, etc). Overall, at that point, I had put in say 7 hours of work and Chad about 9 hours. It’s a testament to the ease of use and power of Appcelerator Titanium.

We spent the remaining time till 2:30 tweaking and cleaning up the code and making sure it was a polished app that would demo really well. I also used some of that time to work on my slides for the demo presentation.

To be honest, I didn’t think we were going to win anything. After seeing all the demos from the various hackathon teams, we were very impressed. Each app was cool and compelling in its own right. I was very surprised when we ended up winning the Best iPhone App category. There were 11 teams with about 4 or more iPhone apps if I remember correctly. That was the end of the journey. By that, we were so tired that we just wanted to go home and pass out.

Popularity: 28% [?]

I’ve been really tired of my blog design for a while now and it always seemed bloated with too many widgets that really slowed it down. When my hosting provider got compromised and my site was infected with malicious content, this gave me the perfect opportunity to update the site. I wanted a simple theme that looked well designed and clean. If you like the theme, here’s where I found it: WordPress Notepad Theme. I decided to bring the focus back to the actual content and get rid of all the other distractions.

As part of the design I decided to give people a sneak peek of my upcoming iPad app. Not only does it have a great design and looks great on the “desk” but it’s what I’ve been up to lately outside of work. Also it’s something that I’ve created and makes sense to feature as part of my identity.

Popularity: 17% [?]

It seems that every week there is some article on yet another iPad Killer. Whenever I hear this, two things happen: I groan, and I vomit a little in my mouth. I get that these articles capitalize on the popularity of the iPad, and other companies are jumping on the bandwagon also because of the popularity of the iPad. Companies just don’t get it.

The iPad is a beautiful device. I’ve had it for 6 months now and find that indeed it has a place between my mobile phone and my laptop. However it’s going to take much more than just a super awesome touch based tablet to take down the iPad.

The beauty of the iPad is that it’s much more than just the iPad. The iPad is really just a gateway to Apple’s money making machine. Through the iPad I have access to Apple’s immense library of music and movies through iTunes, Apple’s massive collection of apps in the App Store, and now Apple’s growing library of books in iBooks. It’s a whole ecosystem. If I went with another device, say a Windows tablet or Android tablet, currently I would need an account to buy music (Amazon mp3), a separate account to buy books (like Kobo etc), and another account to buy apps (Google). With Apple, it’s all tied to my iTunes account and it just works. They make it really easy and sweet to buy content. That is why the iPad is optimized for consumption and not for production. Any tablet device seriously thinking about toppling the iPad better have all these things. And this is not something easily done since it took even Apple over a decade to build all this up and build a brand and mindshare.

Another thing Apple has done better than any other device manufacturer is to embrace designers. This was a fortunate side effect from designers adopting the Adobe software + Apple hardware combo. This is why there are so many gorgeous apps in the Apple App Store. For example Microsoft has never been able to crack that egg. Even though the Microsoft stack has been adopted in the enterprise, they’ve never embraced designers until lately. Their attempt at that with the Microsoft Expression Engine is not likely to turn over any designers any time soon. Designers have been using the Adobe suite of graphic tools for over a decade. I myself have been using PhotoShop for over that long and don’t foresee switching anytime soon. I’m not the only one.

Why are designers important? For one thing – gorgeous apps. Consumers will buy well designed applications. You only need to look at the Apple App Store’s top sellers and compare it to the Droid Marketplace. The App Store’s top sellers list is filled with beautifully designed apps whereas the Marketplace list various game emulators. It’s pretty clear to me that the demographic of the Android platform is mostly developers, engineers and tech geeks. I think it reflects the culture of the two companies pretty well. Apple is about design and Google is mostly an engineering company. Google has been described as antidesign if anything. That’s fine but at the end of the day ugly apps just won’t sell.

All that aside, there’s really no way to tell who’s going to win in the long run. The Androis OS is quickly gaining marketshare and will continue to do so as more and more phone manufacturers and tablet manufacturers adopt it. Who’s to say that other companies might not be able to address the issues I’ve mentioned and eat into Apple’s marketshare.

Popularity: 3% [?]