website – Sean Shadmand

Leave the caves and create your tools!

GAE offers a free to get started approach, along with an instant “hello word” initial environment, making sandboxing ideas and building helpful tools for productivuty a snap.

To get started, download GAE, press the plus sign in the bottom left corner. Set the directory you would like to work out of and your almost done. Well, at least you are already at the stage you need to be to start playing with the system locally, in what we call the development environment (No one can see your system but you.) Just hit the [play] button on the GAE dashboard and you are running with your first environment. Just click the Browser (the compass looking thing), or go to http://localhost:8080 in your browser, and you should see your first “hello word“! It is quite reassuring to see it work so smoothly (if indeed it does), and if this is the first time you have coded, trust me they have taken out a hell of allot of pain out of the tedium it can take to get here.

Without getting into the nitty gritty of code just yet, let’s push your baby to production (That means make it live/accessible to the world). That’s right, you are about to push a web application live to production! First create a new app at the google app engine home page and follow the steps there (setting up your yaml for upload). Your yaml file tells google which app your are updating when you do so. Not making sure your yaml matches your project is like you sending mail through the USPS without out a “from”/”to” address.

Once complete, press the blue arrow pointing upward (the “deploy” button) and it will deploy (AKA: push to prod, go live.)

Once deployed, you can update, monitor, or even share you application with the world. And all for free. Not that this baby would get allot of attention in its current state (just a “hello world”), but if it did, it would also be scalable. I mean 10 years ago this would have cost you quite a bit of time money, especially if you didnt know allot about server configurations, apache, linux, or windows server, or…well you get the idea.

There are a few sample apps you can play with on the GAE site. If you are ready, start developing some code i Python. Maybe had a hellow world message of your own.

When you start feeling saucy, try and create a model. A model is a data structure you can save, or persist, data to your system. Again to you newbies out there, this is the equivelent of your granfather telling you, “back in my day I had to walk up a hill in the snow to get to work, and up a hill in a blizzard to get back.” Setting up a database on a production server was a skill on its own, but to create one that is scalable, and without the need to architect it is amazing. You see, based on the models you create GAE intuitivley creates your “database”, stores it efficiently, and assumes where indexes need to be placed. You really don’t have to understand any of this, but if you want to you can look up those terms have at it: indexing, database, architecture, MVC…. Like I said, I’m just an old guy complaining about hills.

If you are still a bit timid about getting started, don’t worry there is a baby step in between these tween sized steps that can help you get ramped up before you start churning out lines and lines of code. Click on the “SDK Console” button on the GAE dashboard. It will open up a web page that is running locally, on your stage environment, that gives you windows into your system to hack around with. (This console lives inside your development app, so don’t forget to run your new app to get access to it.) Once in the console, click “Interactive Console”. There you will have a very rudimentary terminal that you can write temporary test scripts in. The output is shown on the right of the screen. This is a great place to get errors, make mistakes, and go nuts! (Note: The SDK Console also houses your development DB, so you can check to see what data you are saving after you have attempted to save it.)

Note: The easiest way to get started as a newbie, in my mind, is by using Python in GAE. Java, although awesome, is a bit more advanced.

I recently used GAE to create a few projects to help out the team. One for TeamCity monitor to view coverage reports and if a build is broken or not. And also one for Pivatol Tracker to help our press and marketing interpret what is coming out of the product pipeline, if its ready, and what are the stories of value within. I will post templates for those projects in the near future.

Hit the ground running

I love focused ideas that get one thing perfectly right and easy. Remembering URLs is getting easier and easier and more and more tools will be used per day on purpose and app like based on social discovery (I’ll explain more in other blogs). For now here are two sites that are hella useful. The second you go to the site it gives you a unique idea. Simply save the unique url and share it to collaborate with friends. Super simple:

Pirate Pad: Instant realtime collaboration document writer: http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/newpad

Thingler: Instant todo list: http://thingler.com/

Kick Start Your Idea

http://www.kickstarter.com/
Fund your idea crowd source style. A startup for startups.

Hilarious or Just Douchee?

Dear Blank Please Blank

Was just introduced to me by a friend. At first I thought it was just another try to be funny blog — and in most ways it is, but there are some things about it that I thought were clever. One, they set up the forum in an interesting way — you must form your comments in the form of Dear ___, ___, sincerely ____. It is designed nicely and instead of ordering comments up and down you tag them with one of the following sentiments (alot like the yelp tag comments options)

HOW DARE THEY
YOU’RE A DOUCHE
HILARIOUS
I LIKE THIS
UMM, WTF?!

Which actually covers the initial emotions of each comment accurately. I laughed so its worth a shout.

Check it out at http://www.dearblankpleaseblank.com/

Politifact

I heard about this site while listening to an interview on NPR. In this interview the host asked thier guest some questions as to why “they are so angry” at thier local senator. The guest replied that he is a liar and signed bills to allow a rediculous measure in an unwanted bill. She was irate at the situation, what was interesting is how the host then turned to a guest from Pilitifact who seemed to have researched the case and found taht many of the angry protesters points were driven by rumors as the references to documents they made were unsubstantiated. Now I am perfectly aware that Politifact is yet another level of abstraction from the “real truth” just like any other news agency. What is interesting to me, after I browsed around thier site is the fact that they give you thier opinion and consolidate every reference and statement into linkable sources on the right hand gutter of the web page. It’s like having your own senate secratary gathering the facts for you so you can make your own informed descisions on a topic.

They give a summary of statment or claims made by our politicatns and then exmine their refernces and sources and rate how true the statememnt is on a “truth -o-meter”. Their meter varies from basic true or fals all the way down to “Pants on Fire” for those claims made that are not only exagerated but baseless.

They also show you links to all the references and sources they reveiwed so you can digg into the claims yourself and form your own opinion. The site definitely fills a need and will ecome popular enough so that our politicians are more careful when trying to exagerate claims just to gain the viewers attention. ALso a nice reference for Politifact is thier wininnging of the 2008 pulitzer for national reporting after only being luanched in 2007.

Boxee

Isaac just demoed a great peice of software for the mac or PC called Boxee. Boxee is loaded on your computer and plays online video from hundreds of sources including videos from your local hard drive, hulu, youtube, and digg. Simply hook your computer up to your TV and watch these shows and click through options and menus with your remote. Best of all its an open source project so downloading is free and you are able to improve the product or add your own video modukes as you please.

Since Boxee allows you to login to your favorite social networks you can see what friends are watching while you watch and more. The bads: since it’s open source and downloaded software when a web site that boxee pulls from is changed those interfaces in Boxee fail as well until you download a newer build. Its a great tool and relly merges computer with tv experience, definitly a project that has been needed for a long time and meant for the open soure community.

See more about what Boxee can do below:

Balsamiq, an interesting taste of things

Balsamiq.com is a web application (that also comes in a downloadable software version) that allows users to quickly create mockups for web sites and iphone products. I was skeptical at first, but 2 things made me pretty happy with thier approach to this common problem.

The first was the choice they made to exagerate the concept of fuction over form. Their toolset, or stencils are purposly quasi-poorly hand drawn graphics that have a major lack of attention to detail. As the owners of Balsamiq.com put it, “it encourages critisism” … “so that people don’t get attached to ‘that pretty color gradient'”. The secod thing I liked after playing around with the app a bit was the way they decided to implement the editing process of these draft like stencils. Most implemetations of design toold have properties panels that allow you to change many aspects of a feature, but not only do those properties get complex but since you are given many properties you try to use them in various combinations and often times doing so has unwanted results i.e. certain border style doesnt work well with large boxes with italic text.

At balsamiq.com the stencils are all pre fab and standard, not much is expected of them other then being better then just a place holder. Content is, for the most part, the only thing you can change and they use a simple text edit box when that content needs to be changed. When you double click a stensil the data is presented in a markdow laguage. i.e. buttons that are hard to align and choose width and colors are nothing more then a comma delimited list in edit mode — (button 1, two, and three). When you click of the text box the buttons are created for you.

They truly stuck to the motto of just use the bare essentials and KISS paradigms to set the expctations of the designers and reviews while making the process of creating dead simple. Which in the end created a great mockup tool, allowig you to focus on what you shoud be focusing on ayways — workflow and content placements.

Give it a try @ http://balsamiq.com/demos/mockups/Mockups.html

Give a hoot track your tweets

There are many apis that offer shortening of urls tinyurl.com, tinyurl.cc, bit.ly and many others which have all been useful over the years as services that take a URL like this: http://www.seanshadmand.com/2009/07/18/give-a-hoot-track-your-tweets/ and convert it to a url like this: http://tinyurl.com/len47k. Once the tiny url is clicked a user is quickly redirected to the true url of the site.

Now, with the advent of the Facebook status and more recently Twitter tweets, fitting text based information into a very small space is ever more important and shortening URL’s has become big business and an interesting space to be in for startups these days. (check out some techcrunch articles here at http://bit.ly/jytKD and http://ow.ly/hWSV).

I have recently been turned on to yet another player in the field found at http://ow.ly. This url shortner is provided by a comapny called HootSuite and not only provides shortened urls but aggregates all of your twitter feeds in to one place and allows you to quickly convert all urls within a tweet into shortened ow.ly based urls. The cool thing is those shortened url’s also provide tracking analysis so you can see how many people clicked your link in a line graph inline with all of your posts. Pretty cool, if you twitter at all or can find it usefull to track a urls number of clicks beit through an email or web site give ow.ly or hootsuite a try.

Knol: a Unit of Knowladge

Knol (http://knol.google.com/) is a product from Google that allows users to post content about whatever they feel they have expertise in to th web. At first glance I wondered if this would cannabalise blogger or any other form of content publishing Google already has on the market. After diving deeper I realized that knol is between a blog and a wiki. In that it’s not just for posting information in a time line like a journal, although there are plugins to make blogging apps work less like a journal and more like a site, and it isn’t modertated bu some elite “truth finder” entity like a wiki.

About 6 months a go a friend asked mine asked me for some direction when trying to figure out a way to put up what he knew about his local citities night life, as he found many people came to him for suhc data, but he didn’t want it to neessacarily be a blog. A blog in his eyes was to date based and abstract. He wanted a different interaction model that allowed users to dive into specific ascpets of information about going out in his city. Not knowing of Knol at the time I told him the simplest thing to do would be to start writing a blog and if there is traction but some extra time into manipluate the front end to cater more to his needs through stylings and graphics or plugins. So based on that interaction with him then I can see exactly how Know could have an audience to cater to. I offered this tool to him recently and he seemed pretty excited about it. I awat his response on how much better it is then the blog and I’ll be sure to let y’all know what he finds as soon as I get the info myself 🙂

Augmented reality: Nearest Subway

Latest coool app that takes augmented reality and makes it practicle for the everyday user using GPS and the New York City Subway.

Augmented reality uses your screen to superimpose CGI or digital media as an overlay to a real life realtime backdrop. The first big example of comercial use I know was by GE who did thier own version of augemnted rality for thier website. On the site GE asked its users to print a pattern out and hold it up to the camera on thier computer. The site would recognize the pattern and place digital graphics, of a wind mill for instance, on top of that pattern but using the computers camera. They also added an audio feature so that when you blew on the microphone the windmills would start turning. Here are some other exampes of augmeted reality on youtube.

Now the latest augmented reality product is out on iPhone and allows users to not only see the nearest NY metro stops to them but it overlays a marker in realtime over the video functionailty of the camera so that you can see the marer over the landscape in fornt of you. With teh camer faced town arrows are placed on the ground, through the camera, showing you the direction you need to walk to get to the metro of your choice. Check out more iformation and a video on crunch gear showing off how it works here and learn more about the comapny that produced it called AcrossAir here.