Graphsy Blog

I have been debating this with myself for quite some time now. On one hand, it seems that writing code, or at least understanding enough about code to edit it, is quickly becoming a skill most people will find helpful to have.  Something like knowing how to put together IKEA furniture, not completely necessary to do, but helpful if you know how. On the other hand, however, developers are doing a good job creating tools that abstract the code via some visualization. At the end of the day, these tools still produce code, but the user never has to see it.

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TechCrunch50 is streaming all of the presentations this week.  I was able to catch most of them yesterday.  If you are not watching them, you really should, they are not only informational, but good examples of how to and not to present. Check them out here. I have found them very educational so far and got to see some really cool products. I wanted to share a few of my favorites from yesterday (this is in the order of appearance).

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I had an update ready a few days ago.  Originally this was going to add undo/redo functionality.  I know I said layouts were going to be next, but then my wife played with Graphsy for a bit and pointed out that there was no undo and yet there was an auto-save.  That made it difficult and punishing to try out different things.  So I put together the undo feature, which was surprisingly not that difficult.   That was a few days ago.

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Just downloaded the WordPress plugin for the iPhone. Figure I’ll give it a try on the train. So here is my quick review of the plugin.

The WordPress plugin allows you to save the post localy for later upload. You can also edit posts already online. Basically you get all of the expected functionality when it comes to text editing. You can also add images, from the library or take them with the camera. I’ve added a picture of the neo cube I took earlier this week.

All of this functionality is great, but still has its limitations. First typing a post on the iPhone is not a lot of fun. It’s workable for small pieces, but at this point I am already tired of making mistakes. Second I am a terrible speller, and while the iPhone fixes most of my mistakes I fixed a few others by hand, which makes me think there are lots more mistakes here. Finally the preview option seems to be slow, but that could be because my connection is going up and down. When it did finally work everything looked terrible.

Basically I’m saying that the app is good, but limited by the iPhone. I can see my self using this for small, quick posts about something interesting I found, but isn’t that what Twitter or FriendFeed is for?

Just wanted to give everyone lots of options to keep track of what’s happening with Graphsy. First you can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog or Graphsy’s main news RSS.  If you have twitter you can follow me at www.twitter.com/xmerer.  Or if you prefer friendfeed, you can track me at www.friendfeed.com/trool.  Trool was already taken on twitter.  If people are interested in Graphsy only feeds on twitter and friendfeed let me know and I’ll set it up.  Also if there are other services that may be useful post them here.

OK, so here are some things about me and why I’m making Graphsy.  I the real world I am a PhD student at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  You can check out my personal research page.  My interest are in software engineering and development.  The research group I am a part of believes strongly in iterative design with a moto that “code is all”. Read the rest of this entry »