Ben Nolan

I’ve been designing a new mapping interface for a product I’m releasing shortly. I’ve copied the design of the twitter app for ipad, which has multiple sliding panes. I was trying to work out the widths of each pane so that the app looked a bit more cohesive, when I decided to try out the golden ratio.

On the 1st of February, Riss and I moved out of our apartment on Mount Victoria, and into our little green van. We had a bed in the back, gas bbq, chillibin and a box of food. We spent the next 7 weeks travelling around the South and North islands of New Zealand.

You’re building your site, you do it nice, you have regular line spacing, lots of white space, even gaps, nicely kerned typography. You took your triplet css values #ccc to #c3c3c3 for that perfect shade of grey, changed all the borders from dotted to solid. Your website is maybe starting to look like the pages of a design magazine. Then you add google maps to the page.

I have a bit of a thing for trying to fix broken social networks (see Diaspora-x), so when I recieved an invite to friend someone on Myspace, it jogged my memory that the company is up for sale, so I thought I’d make my list of 5 things the new owner could to to stem the decline and maybe even compete with the #1 social network.

Since my girlfriend and I are leaving New Zealand for good probably, I decided I’d write about the New Zealand economy from my opinion as a 30 year old. Take this with a grain of salt, as it is purely anecdotal, I don’t have time to lookup citations for my observations.

The biggest problem I have with keeping my projects going is paying for and maintaining my servers. When you’re consulting, $60/mo for a dedicated server isn’t a big deal, but when it’s seeing no real traffic growth and you have to be responsible for backups, updates and admin - I find that after 3-4 months I usually mothball a project and have one less thing to administer.

I live in Wellington, New Zealand - and we’re unlikely to get modern tramways for a while, but we do have an extensive bus network. Busses are pretty average compared to trams, but I don’t think it has to be that way, and I’d like to propose some quantitive measurements that can be done to ensure the quality of drivers of the busses.

I got inspired by the design of plaintext and redesigned my phonegap app. Weheartplaces is an app for bookmarking places and accessing them on the go. It syncs with your facebook account so that in the future you’ll be able to see your friends bookmarks and send bookmarks to friends.

I’ve been using Koala + Facebook connect for facebook development in rails. It’s an awesome tool for exploring the graph API using pure rails. You don’t need to use devise to do your authentication, just facebook connect, then take the access token and then you have access to the facebook api as follows:

I’ve added some features to capt, it’s still very rough and needs a lot more work, but it’s coming together. Added recently:

I’ve been working on weheartplaces again, trying to get it into the appstores and out the door. I used capt to build the bundled and compressed javascript, and using jquery mobile, the closure compiled code was 161k.

Pure javascript apps, or apps that use javascript for all the presentation have been coming to prominence for years.

I think couchdb is a good solution for creating pure javascript apps, but there are a few big problems with using a service like clouddb, particulary around authentication. There already exists a couchdb oauth module, but afaict, it’s for authenticating against couchdb, not for creating a couchdb account against a twitter or facebook account.

I had some issues getting couchdb to work correctly behind Apache. The big problem I was getting was that cross-domain requests were being “preflighted” where the browser sends an OPTIONS request to the server, which was being proxied to Couchdb - which was returning error 405, since couch doesn’t support the OPTIONS method.

I’ve been using the backbone couchdb connector by Jan and I’ve been impressed. The real showstopper is realtime updates using the changes feed from couchdb.

I’m back from a week on the Australian beaches (I recommend surf lessons at Coolum and the breaks down at Burleigh heads) and at a wicked little festival (Blah blah blah is a highly recommended party), so it’s time to fix up a few issues that were raised while I was away.

I’ve had the good fortune to have had a co-founder in both of the startups I’ve been involved with. Given the option, I would always elect to start a business with someone else.

It’s time to drink a beer and write a blog post. This week I worked on diaspora-x squared, an xmpp client written using javascript. It uses strophe.js and backbone.js. I had a few issues that needed attention with backbone:

Bwahahaha the bbc. The world media is really doing a great job of acting like fucks at the moment. My favourite quotes from this video: “There are allegations you were rolling your wheelchair towards the police” and (to the cerebal palsy sufferer) “There were people throwing chunks of concrete at the police. Were you throwing things at the police”.

I’ve been working on capt for a few days now, so I wanted to write an introductory post. Capt is a tool for generating and serving backbone.js projects in development mode. It’s currently tooled for my personal toolchain: