Over on the Cohaico blog, I wrote about some things I learned during the first months of working on a new startup: Products that succeed? They are the ones that got the crazy distribution by getting people to use their service, other companies to partner with them etc. On the outside, this often looks like “destiny” or “force majore”. You built such a kick-ass product that people are just magically drawn to it.…

Google Chrome (and now also Firefox 4) have the useless little feature of allowing the user to resize any on a page. I’ve found the perfect use case for it: 1. Go to a page in your website that contains a , like my Delver profile page: 2. Drag the corner of the until reaching a particularly obnoxious appearance: 3. Now make a screenshot and send an email to your favorite QA person.…

.code {background-color: rgb(205, 205, 205); font-family: lucida console;} Here’s a c# example of consuming the Twitter Streaming API. Suppose you want to take all Tweets mentioning a country and save it to a database. I will be using the Twitterizer c# library. Let’s first look at the complete code and then walk through it: private static bool streamEnded = false; public static void HandleStream() { DateTime end = DateTime.Now + TimeSpan.…

Here are some tips for creating more useful software specs that I gathered from my experience working on Delver. Note: these are mostly relevant for specs that deal with user-facing features, but some apply in general. Tell a story Try to structure your document as a story that describes what the user does in the same sequence users are going to do it in the eventual system. This conveys the experience better than just describing different pages and functions as standalone objects.…

Out of the few Twitter API libraries for .net out there, the ones that seem most complete are: Twitterizer and TweetSharp. I’ve been developing with both in the past couple of weeks and both are generally stable, complete and provide a clean one-per-one wrapper for the Twitter API methods. Which is great news (tm). TweetSharp currently does not support the Streaming API, which is a major drawback and the reason why I am sticking with Twitterizer for now.…

I hate saying “I told you so”… ;) 5 months ago I tweeted: And yesterday it was announced that Google is buying fflick.…

Well, this is just too lame. This little window was just hanging around my desktop: “Peculiar” I thought. But you can’t fool me. I dragged the edge of the window to *resize* the window (yes, just like they taught us): An “Invisible Window”?! Oh, the lords of secrecy and the gods of international espionage: this is the shit! Whoever coded this crap: you should poke your eyes out and hang yourself I hope there is a really good reason for this!…

Reading http://dev.twitter.com/pages/rate-limiting, here are the major points: REST API Anonymous calls (things like users/show - get a user’s info) are limited to 150/hour, that’s 3,600/day. This limit is IP-based. Authenticated calls (like a user’s home timeline) - 300/hour. Limit based on your app key. Those rates are useful for a single-user app (something like TweetDeck), not useful for something like an app that crawls Twitter. You can ask to be white-listed using this form: http://twitter.…

UsabilityHub is a great tool to quickly test your application UI and flows before writing a single line of code. Here are some tips from my own experience using this tool: 1 Use variations When you’re testing various versions of the same design - use the “add variation” feature on an existing test instead of creating a new test. This will ensure that users who did the previous version of the test will not do the next version of the test.…

Yesterday I met with Omer Perchik who told me about his new startup Any.Do. Honesty, I amazed with what he and his partner are doing. I am usually a critical person and I dismiss ideas very easily but I have to take my hat off for these guys. What is awesome about it is the combination of: Great product idea How smooth execution looks Super solid business model How crystal clear the vision is…