Presenting ZipApp

Tomorrow I will be presenting the project I've been working on since June at the New York Tech Meetup. It's called Zipapp, and it turns your Excel or Access database into a web app. I'm launching it a bit prematurely, so there are still a few bugs here and there. But I really want to have it launched before the meetup so that everyone can try it out afterwards.

Yahoo! enters the social networking fray

Yahoo! has revealed its new social networking service, Yahoo! 360, to selected "influencers." Accounts can be found here and on Many-to-Many. Burham's Beat also writes about 360's impact on Friendster. It's looking more and more likely that Friendster will end up being a one-hit-wonder. MySpace and thefacebook.com have already stripped away the younger user base, and now Yahoo! will likely take away many of the older, less tech-savvy users. Yet as crowded as this social networking space is, the web is still not nearly as socially based as it potentially could be. I think that there are still many opportunities remaing, and I hope to take advantage of them.

Developers, Developers, Developers . . .

Last year I read a great article by John Gruber that refuted many of the myths about how Windows won the operating systems war ("The Art of the Parlay"). He argued that the reason that Apple lost was not price or their failure to license the operating system. Rather it was that Apple made Macintosh a complete break from the Apple II, while Microsoft made every effort to keep DOS programs working on Windows. It seems that Macintosh is still making this mistake. Over the past month I have been trying to port Lanovision to the Macintosh. This has been a frustrating experience. The biggest problem is that I do not have a Macintosh, and so have to beg my friends to let me borrow theirs', while giving them solemn promises that I will not harm their precious computer in any way. But it's also been frustrating simply because OSX Panther and OSX Jaguar are so incompatible. My friends are pretty much split on which system they have, so I have to build for both. A lot of the tools I have been using do not install on Jaguar. One can complain about Microsoft's slow release cycle, but I am glad that I only have one version of Lanovision for Windows and that it runs on every computer. Linux has the same problem. The wxPython download site has separate binaries for Debian, Fedora, Mandrake, and RedHat. That pretty much sucks all the fun out of creating a linux version. Both Apple and Linux providers are going to have to get their act together if they want to grab more market share. After all, as Steve Ballmer said, pleasing developers is the most important part of designing an operating system.

The Ultimate Search

When I want to look up a web page I once visited, sometimes I can only remember a few words, an image, or a "feel" of the page. Unfortunately, those few words are rarely destinctive enough to find the page in a Google search. Yet to my brain the page feels very distinctive; I know exactly what I am looking for. Now imagine I had an MRI/brain scanning device as I browsed the web. Then, whenever I wanted to remember a page, I would merely have to think of it. The distinctive thought pattern would be detected by the MRI and the right page retrieved. Some day . . .

Lanovision gets press

For better or worse, one of the favorite pastimes of Yale procrastinators has just been taken to a whole new level. Now, instead of wasting a few minutes browsing through someone's iTunes music library, students can waste hours browsing through other students' video collections.

Oh no! What have I created! The Yale Daily News just wrote an article about Lanovision. The article is pretty good, although the picture didn't come out so great. The reporting was mostly positive and accurate, though she did confuse iTunes with OurTunes at one point. She also got a quote from the director of academic media and technology who, "said that he had not yet heard of the program but was pleased to see students experimenting with technology." That's good to hear. Lanovision has been rocking since I emailed all of Morse College on Saturday. It's had over 80 downloads, and has been averaging around 35 unique users per day. That comes out to about 20% of the Morsels on the network who have Windows. Not bad at all. Now I just wonder how many hits lanovision.com will get tomorrow . . .