EclecticGuy

As I mentioned in the last Shrugh post, we’ve been getting a lot of great feedback and doing some brainstorming on Shrugh. Last time I described how users respond to shrughs. This time, I have a demo that shows the simplified shrugh creation process. It also has a couple of new bells and whistles – like how Shrugh automatically finds other shrughs similar to yours based on words in your shrugh and description.

My goal is to have this idea implemented in the next week … Continue Reading

My friend and UI guru Bob and I have been thinking about Shrugh. This collaboration has been really helpful and some good stuff has come out of it. As part of the initial discussion, I created a short demo on how a user responds to a shrugh that has been posted. You can see it here (and please leave feedback at the end). (This was, of course, created with balsamiq Mockups and my technique for making an … Continue Reading

As I make progress on Shrugh, I plan to capture the experience as I go. Last week I gave a status update on the Shrugh concept demo and feedback I’ve received. I’m still getting feedback (a good thing) but I have enough already on the concept and usability (collected on this Google Form) that I am ready to start exploring implementation.

As I mentioned in the last status update, I had done some prototyping in both … Continue Reading

First, I want to thank everyone for their feedback on Shrugh! The response has been great! I’ve been working on the demo (you may have seen several versions of it already) and now have a scripted demo that is reasonably complete. It shows how to create all 3 types of shrughs – Yes/No, List, and Pros & Cons. It also shows how you can tag and add notes to other Shrughie’s shrughs and follow Shrughies that you are interested in. Finally, the demo ends with … Continue Reading

At Microsoft’s PDC ’08 today, Ray Ozzie announced Microsoft Azure. In a nutshell, Azure can be described as “Windows in the Cloud”. More specifically, Azure is a cloud service operating system that serves as a development environment with on-demand compute and storage, service hosting, and a service management environment. Sound familiar? Azure is squarely aimed at Google’s App Engine with a healthy dose of Amazon EC2.

Azure Services Platform

As you can see from this Microsoft marketecture diagram, … Continue Reading

Anyone that knows me knows that I L.O.V.E. Balsamic Vinegar! Well, this post has nothing to do with that passion! balsamiq is a a Micro ISV based in Italy. I have had a long-standing passion for Micro ISVs too! My first company, PiWare, which I started back in the late 70s was a Micro ISV. There were lots of us back then in the early days of personal computers. We didn’t call ourselves Micro ISVs though! I maintained PiWare until about 1989 and brought 8 products to market on Apple //, Apple // GS, and Macintosh … Continue Reading

One of my favorite tech books – “The Art of Ware” – is available as a free PDF here. I don’t have time to post my thoughts on this book right now but I will soon. I wanted to get this out now for the benefit of my readers.

One of my interests and responsibilities as a member of EMC’s Content Management and Archiving (CMA) Group’s CTO Office is “Social Computing“. It occurred to me that I have watched and participated in this area from its very earliest – at least from the perspective of an average technically-inclined citizen. As I thought about my experiences and related them to the current surge in Social Computing, I thought it might be interesting to capture a little history from my perspective.

Back in “the day” we dialed in to on-line communities called … Continue Reading

I’ve noticed more and more doom & gloom blog posts and other writings about the death of the Mobile Web and/or mobile applications. Enough Already! Here is my take on what is going on and why mobile has taken so long to flourish.

1) Mobile device manufacturers are keeping tight controls on application development on their platforms

With the exception of Apple’s iPhone and the future possibility of Google’s Android, developers have to jump through hoops and pay for the privilege of developing on the platform. Talk about stifling innovation! These same mobile device manufacturers have not put … Continue Reading

I’ve been playing with the Google App Engine since it was released yesterday. Wow, is it ever cool. Currently, the App Engine only supports the Python Programming language (not a bad thing) and there is no support for native code. There are also a few sandbox limitations.

One of the best things is that the SDK is a complete, standalone system that includes a Web server, the App Engine framework, support for Datastore, Users, Mail and URL Fetch Apis, and the Django template language – all in a 2.3MB (Mac OSX) download! You develop in the dev environment and … Continue Reading