petersteinberger.com

The Great App Bubble?

2 Sep
2010

My app library–littered with exactly 87 apps I used once and never touched again–now reminds me of a graveyard of defunct company logos from the dot com boom. Like the go-go days of 1999 when everyone had to have a Web site, today everyone wants an app. iPhone, iPad, Android apps for all, plus Blackberry for the very ambitious.

– The Great App Bubble

While it’s true that there are many “shitty” apps on the AppStore, some really are beyond useful, total life-savers. The article totally ignores that yes, people are curious and yes, the download many apps, and just like on the pc, you use some of them only sometimes. Or never again, if you finished the game or it’s just gone boring.

But the “social” app category like facebook, twitter, qype will never be boring. Or news-apps.webradio. weather apps. camera tools. maps. calendar. todo-apps. roadmap scheduler. dropbox. money tracker. traven apps. new games …

But I totally agree on the following:

What’s needed are apps tied to real business models that have real ROI. And,companies should build apps with their eyes open about what they should realistically expect to accomplish with what they develop. Having an app for an app’s sake is not enough.

Don’t just make an app for the app’s sake! Always ask yourself what THE USER’S BENEFIT is. After all, there’s already enough advertising in the world…

In: iphone

10/GUI

2 Sep
2010

The new Tweetie for iPad is truly inspired by the ideas of the 10/GUI project. I like both of them a lot. DDR-Tetris can’t be the future. This maybe is. And i’m sure we’ll see some bland of this in Mac OS 10.7…

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

In: Design

Switching to homebrew

1 Sep
2010

Finally @MSch convinced me that homebrew is the future on mac os package manager, and i switched. It was surprisingly simple, and i was able to clean up all those (around 200) installed ports from macports.

sudo port -f uninstall installed
sudo rm -rf \
/opt/local \
/Applications/DarwinPorts \
/Applications/MacPorts \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
/Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
/Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
/Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
/Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
/Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
~/.macports

So, after you are clean from MacPorts legacy, give homebrew a kickstart with smeagol!

git clone http://github.com/atmos/smeagol
EDITOR="vim" \
GITHUB_USER="fightclub" \
GITHUB_TOKEN="..." \
EMAIL="tyler@paperstreetsoap.com" \
FULLNAME="Tyler Durden" \
rake smeagol:install

Now u’re ready for node.js, ruby and co!

In: Mac OS X

a NOSQL Summer

17 Aug
2010

I’m organizing the “a NOSQL Summer” meeting in vienna!

Join vienna’s noqslsummer with beer, mate and the CAP-Theorem! We’ll meet at the famous metalab in the heart of vienna. If you enjoy discussing scaling challenges, data modeling or have no ideal but would like to learn and hang out with fellow geeks this is your place!