April 18th, 2009
Since creating TweetSharp, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a lot of folks who are using it to build their Twitter projects, which is great to hear. Most developers feel that a) the current state of the union for Twitter clients like Seesmic Desktop and Twhirl, TweetDeck and hootsuite, blu and Witty, just doesn’t do “all of the things I’d want a Twitter client to do”. And this is fair criticism, since client developers can’t possibly anticipate every use for Twitter, and new uses are emerging all the time.
The most common use for TweetSharp has been to accelerate the development…
Continue reading "Why Twitter clients don’t matter" »
March 17th, 2009
One of Merlin Mann’s articles, “Making Time to Make” describes the tension between answering to an audience, and avoiding distraction to do creative work. This problem manifests on blogs as the problem of producing value vs. writing about it; the former must always precede the latter but on a blog, the only tangible measure of value is the update. The web is changing, conversations are changing, and blogging is changing its mind about the value of frequency. There’s a lot going on over here, fortunately manifesting as tangible software, not blog posts. Here’s what’s on the roadmap today.
Continue reading "Roadmap" »
January 27th, 2009
[Correction: I referred to gnip as a paid service, but it is actually quite free, with a paid version for the heavy lifters. They are also working on a .NET API which I am eager to evaluate when it's available. Stay tuned.]
Here’s a problem you want to have: many concurrent connections to your web application, all vying for your precious data. Before you enjoy the challenges of that problem, you should consider whether your application works best in a push or pull scenario. In summary, pull applications are the most common; any time your client makes a service call…
Continue reading "Managing social data in Silverlight: do you push or pull?" »
January 23rd, 2009
Back in October, I wrote an article for MSDN’s {youshapeit} campaign called “Innovate with Silverlight 2: Community-powered client side imaging“, outlining several open source approaches for displaying and editing GIF, PNG, BMP, and JPEG images in Silverlight 2 exclusively from the client-side.
I’ve received quite a few messages over the last while notifying me that the source code for the article is no longer available on the site. Luckily, I was given permission to share that code, so you may download it here. Please refer to the article for a description of licensing terms.
Continue reading "‘Innovate with Silverlight 2′ article code available" »
January 19th, 2009
In a social application there are always two domains: the domain you define, or the ‘problem’ domain, and the social domain. A video-sharing web application, for instance, has no problem domain. Its entire story can be described within the social domain: it has users, videos, possibly forums, possibly blogs, possibly syndication of content. In other words, there are patterns we can apply that allow us to describe this system to a framework without writing any code, at least not code that isn’t contained within some higher API-level abstraction. If we aren’t there today, then we should move in that…
Continue reading "People + Media + Messages = Social" »
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