So its been a while since anything substantial was posted here on my blog. That’s not cool. Shame on me. Well to remedy this situation, I’m posting something. Not just any something, but a preview of what’s to come.
Other than that, I’ve been busy with the day job. (http://tilestack.com for the curious) Been redesigning and re-factoring and reinventing the code base there, gearing up for a pretty substantial release. We’re going to have user invites and such, its going to be an all around good time.
Today was an interesting day for the internet. Not only did Facebook launch a few things at their F8 Keynote, but Twitter had a bit of a near death experience. As of 5:30 PM CST I had almost 0 followers and I followed 0 people. That would be a decrease of about 1500% or so I guess. Turns out a screw-up over at Twitter HQ was to blame, affected almost every single user and they’ve (as of about an hour ago) started restoring all the data from a backup made 12 hours prior. Which is fine I guess, but man, can you just imagine if another large site had a data loss this large and widespread? If Digg, Facebook, MySpace or YouTube just started reporting that you had no views, friends or comments on your wall, the internet would revolt. It’d be like the 60’s riots for the digital age. Just a thought. Twitter, lets not let this happen again.
Also, MANY of you have written asking about the winner/details of my iPhone contest. While I’m not quite ready to announce anything yet, I can say there will still be a winner. So everyone can relax on that front. I promise an update is coming on that real soon.
So today the iPhone wordpress application was released and I couldn’t wait to try it out so consider this little guy a test post from my iPhone. As a reader you probably can’t tell the difference and I can really either except that upon clicking post, my thumbs are more tired than they usually are. Anyways that’s about all so thanks for reading!
For those who aren’t aware, I work for TileStack.com and I’m LOVING it. We just did a site update and release today of some awesome new features including: an iPhone interface (simply go to tilestack.com on your iPhone or iPod Touch), embedding of stacks and tons of bug fixes and enhancements around the site. Read all about all the updates and changes here: Some Cool New Features. Also go ahead and click the screenshot below to play a little demo game I whipped up to show off the power of TileStack!
Yep you read that correctly. I’ve decided to give away a brand new iPhone 3G. That is the NEW iPhone that was announced this past week here at WWDC in San Francisco, CA. The phone will be brand new, in the box never opened. All you’ll have to do is take it up to AT&T and get it activated.
So how is it going to work?
Well the contest will last until July 11th (The release date of the new iPhone 3G) and on that date, I’ll pick someone at COMPLETE RANDOM from the people who have completed the steps below successfully. I’ll then contact that person, get their info, and ship them a new iPhone 3G that day.)
Email iphone@thejakemarsh.com with “ENTERING IN THE IPHONE CONTEST” in the subject line.
Your email will have to contain some type of proof/screenshots to the 4 things above. (I will be checking them all). This will be your “entry form” so don’t forget to do this part!
But wait, IMPORTANT! AHHH IMPORTANT! There’s two small catches:
CATCH ONE: You MUST CC your best friend on the email so they have a chance to win too! If you don’t, you won’t be entered in the contest, also make it real, this is supposed to be fun so don’t CC ‘bestfriend@myfakefriends.com’.
CATCH TWO: My twitter follower count must be above 20,000 followers by July 11th, so tell all your friends about the contest so that they might win too
In this second screencast, I demo more of the features of my
iPhone MySpace Web Application. Cover this time is listening to music from bands on MySpace as well as photo albums, and much more. (You’re going to want to click the full screen button on this one, so you can see it all in detail.)
Okay, for a long time now, I’ve had this love/hate relationship with MySpace. I love that fact that I know every time I meet someone there’s a 99.9% chance I can find them on MySpace and keep in touch and such. I HATE the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do ANYTHING right.
Case and Point: Event A: They decided to steal Facebook’s features. I’m fine with this, I mean its not surprising, and at least they’re stealing good great ideas. Event B: They do a terrible job of re-implementing said stolen features. Event C: They end up with an even worse user experience afterwards.
A good example of this is in two distinct and relatively new features. “Friend Status” and “Friend Subscriptions.” Two features that are clearly COMPLETE rip-offs of Facebook’s “Status Updates” and “News Feed.” Again, I’m fine with this, as most of my friends haven’t made the jump to Facebook yet, so I’d love to stay updated on them using these types of features. However, on Facebook, the news feed is compiled automatically and put together for you based on who you talk to most and you can even configure what types of stories and people you’d like to hear more or less about. On MySpace, “Friend Subscriptions” forces you to subscribe to friends one-by-one. And they don’t even put a button on the profile pages to do this. So you’re forced to search through hundreds of pages to find the person you’d like updates on and then click a check box then click save. Then when you view your updates, you see stories about them uploading pictures, videos, etc. You DO NOT see stories such as “Person A posted a comment on Person B’s page.” MySpace could NOT pull off stories like this because their databases and code base are just too convoluted. There’s tons more small problems with this feature, but I’m already rambling. Moving on to “Friend Status.” On Facebook, I can click my “Friends” tab, and see a paged out list of my friends with the most recent status updates at the top. I can also filter, search, etc. (BTW: Facebook’s site layout/organization/feature set/etc is LIGHT YEARS ahead of anything MySpace has ever and most-likely will ever do). Anyways, back to “Friend Status.” I can update my status on my Home Page. Pretty much a direct feature rip from Facebook, but again, I’m fine with it, because its a good feature. However, when I click to “View All” of my friend’s status updates. It shows me ALL of my friends on ONE page. Are you kidding me? As of this post, I have 22,319 friends on MySpace. I know not everyone has this many but most people have at least 500. And listing out 500 users on one page with no apparent order to the list is the web application equivalent of telling someone to go to hell.
I have to digress so I can work on my iPhone MySpace web application, but please, if anyone reading knows anyone at MySpace, tell them to read what I’ve posted here, and feel free to get in touch with me as I have about a million other simple, small fixes that would make the site be a MUCH better place.
These wold have been in a particular order, but I’m an indecisive little boy. And to be clear, this is not a list of my favorite bands or a list of people that were influential to me, but rather a list of artists that once popular, inspired other people to become musicians.
Without further ado,
1.) The Ramones
2.) The Cure
3.) NOFX
4.) NWA
5.) Eminem
6.) Bad Religion
7.) The Ataris
8.) Green Day
9.) Blink 182
10.) Bon Jovi
I work in an office. I am the “computer guy”. I built the system we use to manage our information so I get a lot of “Why doesn’t this work?” and “My so-and-so isn’t doing so-and-so like it used to!” phone calls. Sometimes I just like to mess with them, so here’s some good lines to use if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.
Conversation usually goes something like this:
Office-Lame-Guy: Uhmm, dude my computer, like. It won’t. Like. See my email used to… Me (Awesome Tech Guy): *Clears Throat*, Ok, What exactly is the problem? Office-Lame-Guy: Basically I think my email has some spyware or virus or something. This thing keeps popping up when I try to upload this animated picture of my friends cat to my myspace as the background of the page. Me (Awesome Tech Guy):INSERT ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:
“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”
“Do you have a sledgehammer or a brick handy?”
“Ok first I want you to go to http://apple.com/store…”
“Let me put it this way: Have you ever seen McGuyver?”
“So… what are you wearing?”
“Duuuuuude! Bummer!”
“Oh your MySpace must have gotten hacked, just give me your email and password and I’ll take care of it.”
“Looks like you’re gonna need some new dilithium crystals there, Cap’n.”
“Sounds like you may need a new flux capacitor.”
“Press 1 for Support. Press 2 if you’re with Fox News. Press 3 if you’re with the FTC.”
“We can fix this, but you’re gonna need a butter knife, a roll of duct tape, and a car battery.”
“In layman’s terms, we call that the YouSuq™ Effect.”
“Okay, turn to page 523 in your copy of libro de los muertos.”
“Please hold for Mr. Gates’ attorney.”
So I’ve been a T-Mobile customer since 2002. Call me stupid if you want but I’ve never had a single problem with them. Well, sort of. See about four months ago I started getting really annoyed about my Sidekick 3. Even though I have developer access to the device (after a long and grueling screening process mind you), I still felt like it wasn’t an open enough platform. If I wanted custom ringtones or applications on my phone, I had to go through this REALLY clunky command line interface to get them. And if I wanted to give the applications I wrote to my friends or to the public, forget it. There’s no way unless you are one of the VERY lucky few to get your application into Danger’s “Catalog” which is only viewable on Sidekick devices. So I decided to switch to Windows Mobile.
I know this goes against all that is good and holy, but I couldn’t take not being in control of my mobile world. Anyways, it serves me right for trying to actually use a Microsoft product because after four solid months of torture, I’m back to my Sidekick 3. I tried the T-Mobile Dash, and the T-Mobile MDA. Both phones were absolutely great form factors, to the credit of their designers. However, their software was purely ridiculous. I can’t even begin to explain how simply idiodic I felt trying to use it for even normal day-to-day operations.
This brings me to the point of this writing. Why can’t anyone just get it right?! Even the all powerful iPhone has a laundry list of things consumers and geeks alike agree are missing or done incorrectly. The only real difference here is that I know Apple, Inc. is a good enough company to listen to its masses and fix these problems. But even then, the phone will still be locked to AT&T. Now, I’m a businessman. I understand you need to maximize profits to all those shareholders whose not-so-hard-earned dollars paid for the R & D to make the iPhone as good as it is. But C’mon Apple, at least give me an unlocked super-duper-change-my-life device!
This isn’t an iPhone bashing post by any means. To be fair (and honest) its actually an everything bashing post. I’m sick and tired of waiting for somebody in some board room to have the guts to suggest making a product with the consumer’s real interests in mind. Now, I say this knowing that Apple has come the absolute closest to getting it right. And an iPhone would make my Christmas list any year. But, I still feel like there’s so much missing.
I could go into detail, but this is an insanely long post already, so basically, give me an unlocked phone with enough RAM to do what I want that won’t burn a hole in my pocket (literally). Also, Microsoft, please work on making your Mobile OS not freeze when it receives a call. Thanks.
Yep you read that correctly. I’ve decided to give away a brand new iPhone 3G. That is the NEW iPhone that was announced this past week here at WWDC in San Francisco, CA. The phone will be brand new, in the box never opened. All you’ll have to do is take it up to AT&T and get it activated.
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