Extempore » internet

Simple file sharing, share1t.com

Michael Hendrickx — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:34:34 +0000

Share1t.com is one of those websites I wish existed more. A form to share files up to 100MB; simple, neat and fast (thank you, whoever, for fixing the broken cables).

A great, nifty tool from the guys at builtBackwards.

Love it!

Cable cuts make UAE’s internet slooooow

Michael Hendrickx — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:02:05 +0000

With recent cuts in “internet cables” off the coast of Sicily, the internet and voice traffic has been seriously affected in the region.

It would take several days to be repaired…

I forgot already what 14400 felt like..

Make HTML pages quickly, Drawter

Michael Hendrickx — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 14:23:03 +0000

Drawter is one of those tools that are just too good to be true. It allows you to “draw” a page, and then export it’s CSS and HTML code.

It uses JQuery heavily, and I’m loving it. It does one simple thing, making HTML pages, but does it very well.

Linked-In to have applications. Professional superpoke anyone?

Michael Hendrickx — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 05:57:50 +0000

Linked In, the professional social network introduced the possibility of using applications. Just as facebook, myspace and friendster did.

Linked in feels the threat of Facebook, especially combined with applications such as Kuhnektid to increase your professional “visibility” across the work. Most of linked-in users, are on facebook too.

A set of examples are there in their application directory. Tools such as file sharing, project collaboration, or being notified when one of your “contacts” is in the same city as you are there. No sight of a SDK yet, and no superpokes either.
yet.

Let’s see how users adapt to this.

Thanks,
Michael

Enterprise and usability, they don’t get it.

Michael Hendrickx — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:35:31 +0000

A bit of a personal rant.. At work, we have quite a few enterprise applications. Ranging from intranets to performance management systems, and from document management, to service desks. Being the application team lead, their administration fall under yours truly.

We just implemented a new service desk solution, and even though with the world using buzzwords such as Ajax and web 2.0, most of our enterprise solutions are horrible in terms of the UI’s usability and simplicity.

Overloaded menus, pages with dozen links, and basically, so much controls that one cannot see the forest through the trees. Or vice versa.

Is it that hard for enterprise applications to have a simple, easy to understand interface? None of us had to take a “training” to learn how facebook operates, or blip.fm or youtube.

Michael

Google map secret backend API broken?

Michael Hendrickx — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:20:25 +0000

Hi all,

Some of you might have been aware already about (and alpha testing) the Windows Mobile client for places.ae, which will allow you to find out the closest restaurants, petrol stations and such (pretty much the same functionality as the blackberry mini site). These searches happen using triangulation of celltower ID’s on a mobile phone.

Now, in the backend, we were utilizing google’s API for mapping these cell towers to a location, which in return gives us the ability to locate you. This services was moved to another URL silently, which kinda slows down the Windows Mobile development. I guess too many users were using it, using non-google programs.

If anyone is working on more-or-less the same, please get in contact with me. For the others, the windows client will be delayed for a little while then.

Thanks,
Michael

Microsoft to enter the clouds

Michael Hendrickx — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:03:21 +0000

Microsoft is entering the cloud computing zone pretty soon. It was announced yesterday and will hit the public a month from now with it’s new OS, Windows Clouds (yeh.).

It’s feeling the ppressure from easy to use, browser only, applications such as Gmail, google docs and the like.

I wish Microsoft (or anyone) would come out with an enterprise cloud platform, not on the Internet. I am sure there are more users who wish to make a storage cloud on their network. Or am I the only one?

Thanks,
Michael

Quickly share music with your friends, TinySong

Michael Hendrickx — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:53:18 +0000

Suggested by a friend of mine, Tinysong allows you to share any song with your friends.

A simple web application. I wish more web apps were like this, simple and straight to the point.

Minimalistic browser, Google’s Chrome

Michael Hendrickx — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:40:15 +0000

Google came out with a new browser, called Chrome. A company that pushes so much into a browser, made their own browser with minimalistic design (as usually done by google) multiple features, such as the incognito windows (wont leave traces in your sites’s history), the built in javascript console, V8 Javascript engine.

See it as a firefox with your necesarry plugins, in a new jacket.

Very interesting product. And it seems that places.ae renders correctly in it, which is probably due to the borrowed Firefox code.

I am afraid that IE(8)’s days are counted.

Thank you,
Michael

AIR version for your Google services

Michael Hendrickx — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 04:28:46 +0000

GMDesk is an Adobe AIR program that allows you to do your Gmail, Gdocs, GCalender and other GPerks all in a desktop application, cross platform.

There’s no need anymore to open Google in your browser.