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WeBreakStuff

A blog on entrepreneurship, user experience, and web innovation. Published by Fred Oliveira.

Be a virtual sticky note ninja, with Melee!October 21 2008

It’s pretty easy to let routine take over. No shame in that, everyone gives in. This weekend we popped out of the same old, same old and decided to build something new - sure, there was a motive (Rails Rumble 2008), but we just took it as an excuse. In 48 hours (well, we slept two full nights, so make that about 24) we sketched, built and privately launched a new product called Melee.

If you do agile work (design or develoment), you probably do the stuff Melee helps you with, but with sticky notes and office walls. Melee is an agile brainstorming app. What does that mean, you ask? Let me give you a couple of use cases.

1) You’re a design and development shop who just got a RFP for a new social network. You might brainstorm a few ideas, throw them at the wall, cluster them, prioritize them, and build a proposal. Melee is your new wall.

2) You’re a development shop that uses SCRUM (ed: if you don’t use it yet, give it a try, you’ll love it). You maintain a produ

Intel, sign me upOctober 20 2008

Look, I get overly exceited about stuff - sometimes that’s unwarranted, other times, it totally is. I believe this is a good reason to be at the edge of my seat: Intel showed off a prototype of a handheld - based on their Moorestown platform - today at the Intel Developer Forum. And I’m drooling. Here’s why:

I have an iPhone and I love it. I love how it looks, how it feels, the possibilities it has as a platform, the whole experience. But now I want this. Sure, the form factor may be weird because it’s tall/wide, but if the tilt experience is as good as on the next few videos, I’m hooked.

Ubiquity: this is a big dealAugust 27 2008

I’m gonna go out on a limb and do something I don’t typically do, which is guess the fate of something. But my gut tells me Ubiquity, a new project just announced on Mozilla Labs, is going to be a hell of a big deal. Ubiquity, in a nutshell, is a set of functions on top of the browser that allows the user to take data sources existing now, and being created now (i.e like Microformats) and explore them in different (and useful) ways. It’s much better seen than read, so watch this video and then come back to me:

My feeling is that you’re as impressed as I was when I saw it. This is a big deal. We’re creating all sorts of data every day, by using social networks, social software and the web as a whole. What we’re not doing, though, is using that data to its fullest potential. We’re still used to looking at our data as belonging to a silo (even though, as you know, many as I do defend open data) - which it shouldn’t be. The craigslist is a crucial example to me: CL isn’t going to implement (at least not if they’re sticking to their KISS approach) maps anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean that their data should only be visualized in their typical texty-manner. Data is data is data - we just need more ways to look at it.

Write the future

Ubiquity is a step in the right direction. A step I’m sure many of my readers will gladly want to help browser technology take. So get involved if you have the spare cycles and/or the right i

Really achieving your childhood dreamsJuly 25 2008

Unfortunately I heard of Randy Pausch a little too late. Back in October last year people sent me a link to what was called his last lecture, “Really achieving your childhood dreams”. Professor Randy had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and this video moved me like no other had before it. Since words are typically not enough in these situations, I’ll just share the video. Carnegie Mellon announced on their website that Professor Randy passed away today.

Rest in peace.

On the iPhone as a closed platformJuly 24 2008

Got quite a lot of feedback on yesterday’s post about the iPhone App Store, so this one comes as a bit of an addendum. I typically don’t create a new post just to link somewhere else, but Gizmodo has a great new article with a few thoughts on the iPhone SDK that developers - and those of you interested on mobile platforms as a whole - should read. Click here for the full article.

From Gizmodo: There are no less than five apps to turn my iPhone into a flashlight, yet I can’t turn it into a 3G-powered Wi-Fi hotspot. Why? Because the SDK has more restrictions than Guantanamo—devs can’t integrate with the OS and have to steer way, way clear of copyright and trademark issues—so the most innovative, game-changing apps might not ever make it to your squeaky clean iPhone. That’s why we need more than Apple’s official app store—we still need jailbreaking, Installer.app (now Cydia) and the best unauthorized third-party apps to make the iPhone an ultra-powerful open platform we really want.

In all truth, I never expected Apple to revamp the iPhone as a fully open platform. I hinted at that a while ago in a previous post. But truth is I don’t think Steve and Co realize the potential of loosening the chains they have on developers. True, they don’t want