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New Pownce.app on the horizon?

Posted on 2008-07-02 12:12:23 | Tagged with , ,

For the last month and for some reason I never could log into Pownce using the official Pownce.app anymore. No idea why, but it seems like the App has enough problems to justify a move that I would have never guessed possible: Pownce now suggests more or less officially, that you should use a different app -- and PownceMonkey in particular -- if you're "experiencing substantial bugs".

(Pownce is currently working on a new Pownce app - in the meantime, users experiencing substantial bugs may want to try http://powncemonkey.com )

Big props for admitting that there are indeed tons of problems with the current app. Now I just hope, that the new app will offer such nice things like content preview and such :D For instance I'm still not really convinced that AIR is a good solution for stuff like that. First of all it still doesn't offer the look&feel of a native application and only in really rare cases it offers all the functionality the actual website -- it's supposed be a frontend for -- has. A small docklet that just shows me that there is new content would be much more interesting to me which just keeps me up to date and gives me some notification when someone posts something new.

While I'm at it: This would be really nice for FriendFeed too ;-)

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  • A Look at Disqus

    Posted on 2008-07-01 10:07:27 Tagged with , ,

    I have to say, that I really start thinking about just adding Disqus to my site here. The problem Disqus is trying to solve is exactly the one that annoys me the most when commenting on someone's weblog: I tend to forget where I commented, so I miss the whole discussion taking place afterwards. For this Disqus offers a unified interface that shows you all your comments on Disqus-enabled weblogs.

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  • Know your rate-limit on Twitter

    Posted on 2008-06-29 12:31:45 Tagged with , , ,

    When you write an application that uses any kind of web-API out there, you eventually get to a point where you hit some kind of rate-limit. It's especially a problem when the API has a frequently changing rate-limit as Twitter's has. Well, at least on this front, there is now an easy way around :-)

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  • Star Trek: Mirror Universe - Glass Empires

    Posted on 2008-06-28 15:32:39 Tagged with , , ,

    Cover picture taken from OpenLibrary.orgIf you remember how the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" ended it had introduced a whole new universe to the world of Star Trek: The mirror universe, where everyone was more or less the evil counterpart of the universe Star Trek fans were used to. When 30 years later the Deep Space Nine episode Crossover) continued the plot, it just gave small hints of what happened in between and between the Enterprise double-episode In a Mirror, Darkly and "Mirror, Mirror". And this is exactly where the two "Mirror Universe" books, Glass Empires [OL] and Obsidian Alliances come in.

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  • Ads and Terms of Service

    Posted on 2008-06-26 17:21:10 Tagged with , ,

    On the GitHub mailinglist there is currently quiet a weird discussion going on regarding following clause in the terms of service there:

    7. If you are using a free account you are not permitted to block ads.

    The discussion more or less is centered around the question, how GitHub plans to enforce this condition. The funny part comes, when you just google for this term and notice, that this isn't really GitHub specific, but more or less part of a wildly used set of TOS.

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  • Create a Timeline in JavaScript with SIMILE

    Posted on 2008-06-25 19:41:02 Tagged with , ,

    From time to time you get to a point, where you want to present information in a way that makes it easy to see and understand their temporal relationship. For these occasions, timelines are a pretty neat tool, yet how do you do something like this within a website in a way that keeps the whole thing interactive?

    Besides the usual suspects (the 1000th Flash/Flex implementation), there are also some JavaScript based solutions, that get the job done quite well. For a project that is part of my master thesis right now, we were looking for a simple timeline tool that could easily be embedded and extended to our needs and found the SIMILE Project of the MIT. Part of this project is also a timeline implementation in JavaScript that is remarkably flexible.

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