This past Saturday and Sunday a team of ITP students (including myself) created and presented API for the World at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hack Day. Here’s the rundown: API for the World is a sensor and web application that turns anything with a power cord into a networked object. At the flip of a switch [...]
Entries Tagged as 'web'
Global Services for Local Good
April 11th, 2010 No Comments
Bridge into Beacon is an application to encourage economic growth in Downtown Beacon by providing context to visitors and tourists. I began the project with a post about resilient communities, and an intention to create an app that promotes resilience. From the beginning, I’ve tried to keep the application simple, not just for the end [...]
Tags: api · beacon · cloud · resilience
Impulsive and on-the-go
March 2nd, 2010 1 Comment
I had a meeting at BEAHIVE in Beacon, NY last week to present my ideas for a “digital bridge into Beacon” and got some great feedback. Based on the conversation and subsequent consideration, I’ve decided to focus most heavily on the mobile web component. BEAHIVE member Chris Joslyn highlighted the importance of knowing the user’s [...]
Tags: beacon
Community App – Custom vs 3rd Party
February 7th, 2010 No Comments
Thanks to encouragement from Mark Frazier at Open World, I’m more seriously exploring existing platforms and content management systems as digital hubs for local communities. I had been thinking along the lines of a fully custom app that I could open-source, but the development and documentation overhead would be high on a project like that. Right [...]
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Etsy Keyword + Location Search
December 21st, 2009 No Comments
Just launched Etsy Around, where you can search for Etsy listings by keyword AND location. This is something that Etsy hasn’t gotten around to, so I’ve used their handy-dandy API to create a prototype. Give it a whirl. I hope that this prototype can serve as an inspiration for Etsy to develop a similar feature, [...]
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Getting Shacked on Google Wave
December 3rd, 2009 No Comments
My first experience with Google Wave proved to be entertaining and Wave seems promising as a useful collaborative tool. I was on a wave with 4 other people, and I think the more the merrier. We weren’t doing anything obviously meaningful, but as a backchannel for class it proved entertaining. I can see more constructive [...]
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AT&T meets its match
November 28th, 2009 2 Comments
Right now I’m feeling especially good about technology innovation. After experiencing the AT&T’s tyranny and crappy service, I’m ditching my contract and setting up an array of services and devices to do what I need, with no contracts and at half the price. I signed up for a Boingo wireless for my iPhone, getting lifetime [...]
Tags: mobile freedom project · mobile service
Native vs Web mobile apps
September 10th, 2009 No Comments
Lately I’ve been questioning the advantages of native mobile app development over web apps. I’m impressed with the possibilities for web apps, especially now that Javascript includes an API for geolocation (code sample). iPhone 3.0 supports the feature out of the box, and Android phones can access it via Google Gears. The major advantages I [...]
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Etsy Internship recap
September 6th, 2009 No Comments
Friday was the last day of my summer internship at Etsy. I met some great people and worked on awesome projects while I was there. My main focus was prototyping, both creating actual prototypes and documenting a process to promote ongoing prototyping there. The tools I explored were balsamiq mockups, Adobe Dreamweaver (templating and libraries), [...]
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Learn to love the what?
September 6th, 2009 No Comments
Over the past few years I’ve advised people and organizations wanting a basic web presence. In general they’ve had limited awareness of technology, so the work becomes an exercise in education rather than a development and design project. I’ve successfully helped these people, but it has been an uphill battle, and limited in scope. To [...]
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