7syntax blog

great times ahead on handivi

Vitor Domingos — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:19:44 -0000

What great times we've been living here at 7syntax!! Oh boy! We have awesome news for you, and don't even know where to start with!

For these past weeks, since our public opening, that we've been working hard on one of our goals; to have your handivi content pushed to your favorite social network. That was one of the most requested feature by you, and we've made it happen. For now you only have integration with Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, but we're working on others, so bear with us and suggest your favorite network to hello@handivi.com.

For the premium users, you can see on the address book backup web service which friends already are on handivi and for those who aren't, you can invite them directly or add someone that you didn't knew that has using handivi, as you too.

That's not all, we have a bunch more features to share with you; friendly profile urls, RSS for your public timeline and phone configuration to help you setting your phone for correct network use of internet. We'll detail each one of these features on the handivi blog (that's new too!), where it will be the place to have all service updates, news, features or failures (we do screw up sometimes, you know); check it out here http://blog.handivi.com

handivi twix

Vitor Domingos — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 15:06:29 -0000

You might've notice that with this upgrade you'll have two handivi installations. That's because we changed to lowercase all "handivi" product name, so, your system has the current "Handivi" application and another new "handivi" version 0.10(26). The lowercase handivi is the new version and you should delete all other versions.

Sinatra and Capistrano Workshop

Ruben Fonseca — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:25:59 -0000

Last Friday, I gave a Workshop about Sinatra and Capistrano. These are two beautiful technologies that I learned recently, and since I love both of them, decided to spread the word to more people.

The slides used on the presentation can be downloaded here.

The code written during the workshop can be found on Github.

now open; welcome to handivi

Vitor Domingos — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 10:50:46 -0000

What a journey this has been for us!!! Uff!
We've launched handivi into alpha on 29 August 2008. After almost 6 months of hard work and serious development, with bumps along the way, handivi is finally ready to public use.

This is a major milestone for us internally, since we're now going to expand handivi supported platforms and open the service to others (think API, think integration, think widgets), but for you, "handividual", it's a full stable service now. handivi is still free for most common usage, but between these versions we've pushed some nice features and packed them as a premium service; like an address book backup and restore, unlimited space for photos or friends and credits to send external messages (think messages to friends that are not on handivi yet).

For those who got thru the alpha versions without no problems ;-), congratulations! you're now premium users. It's our way of showing our huge gratitude for your help by testing handivi. Thank you!

So, jump in, learn more and meet us on handivi: Vitor Domingos, Celso Pinto, Ruben Fonseca, Nuno Loureiro and Hugo Reis. You can register on the website to get the application or if you have access to GetJar appstore, find us there.

Press release available here for download: http://7syntax.com/blog/media/7s-h-pr001.pdf

Buggy smartphone software is the "new reality"

Ruben Fonseca — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 12:58:54 -0000

I was shocked when I read this article on Engadget. I actually had to read it twice after realizing that the words came out from the mouth of RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie:

Now, instead of pleading for mercy at the feet of disgruntled consumers, RIM co-CEO, Jim Balsillie, calls the post-launch scramble part of the “new reality” of making complex cellphones in large volumes.

Let me get this straight: it’s not just RIM’s Blackberries who suffer from this problem. I still remember iPhone’s 2.0 firmware problems, and at my work at 7syntax, I fight every single day with obscure and undocumented bugs on the J2ME platforms.

Is it becoming a standard? I really hope not.. And before I start to rant, let me just say that I still dream that the current trend of opening the mobile platforms could help us a little.. (android: hint hint)

Guitar Hero MetallicA

Celso Pinto — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:20:11 -0000

Ladies and gentlemen the set list is out! Although I'm not a big fan of, oh, Metallica's last 7 albums I can spot many personal favorites in there that I'm dying to try out. But I keep wondering: is Cliff Burton a hidden character that we'll be able to unlock and use in Expert mode? This would hit a very sweet spot with us, older fans.

Anyhow, my personal set list is:

Battery
Disposable heroes
Fight fire with fire
Master of puppets
Orion
Seek and destroy
Whiplash

The songs from the other bands seem adequate enough, but no Danzig?! Come on...

developer's best friend - pencil and paper

Ruben Fonseca — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 21:39:58 -0000

I have to admit it: I can’t do any kind of development without my trustworthy pencil and a good amount of paper.

It’s not just to have something to scratch while I think how to solve the problem at hands. I find it very difficult to write some code without first drawing the idea and the pseudo-algorithm behind it.

To do that I use my own sub-set of the UML: boxes, polygons, arrows and labels. This allows me to quickly specify the exact behavior of the solution before writing any actual code.

Other method I often use after drawing the algorithm, is to define the set of tasks I need to finish the implementation. It is often required to refactor or change some other code or structure, so I write a set of labels with an empty checkbox at the front. As I write the code, I start checking the boxes, and that gives me a warm feeling that I’m getting the job done.

So, which methods do you use to be more efficient while writing code ?

wm5 + webkit + handivi = win

Vitor Domingos — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:54:25 -0000

Torch Mobile Iris Browser is based on WebKit rendering engine for Window Mobile devices, like my old i-Mate Kjam, a HTC Wizard clone. I've doing some tests and it's a damn small, mean and interesting implementation of webkit. It renders all those web 2.0 goodies nicely, like ajax, javascript et al. I couldn't help getting some memory alerts - one problem of having only 10mb available - but overall it's a nice browser, replacing all other existing options; Internet Explorer and Opera. handivi obviously runs on Iris quite fluid and with all javascript support. Here's some pictures from the "blurry camera man" :)

On AppStores and m-billing

Celso Pinto — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:10:37 -0000

Last week Apple announced their AppStore had reached the number of 500 million application downloads. This is a really impressive accomplishment, even more because Apple launched this service at a time when most people were claiming that web applications were the only way to go on mobile, something I can't simply agree with because it depends a lot on what you are developing.

Following Apple's footsteps, Google launched the Android App Market - which appears to be evolving a bit slower than expected - and there have been lots of rumors about others creating similar services for Windows Mobile, etc.

What I'd like to see though is providers enabling m-payments through their AppStores. Like for example being able to pay for an Evernote subscription through my Apple iTunes account without needing to provide any credit card information to Evernote Corp.

The flow I see is my downloading Evernote and the application asking me if I'd like to subscribe to a premium account. By acknowledging it, an iPhoneOS billing wizard should popup, allowing me to authorize the service to charge my iTunes account for a yearly subscription of the service. This flow should also apply to Android or any other mobile devices that provide access to such services.

With this, 3rd party developers should be able to avoid splitting revenue with mobile operators who, on average, keep 50% of the charged value: say you charge $1 USD for a virtual gift on your customer's phone bill. In this case the operator will keep $0.5 USD and you'll get the remaining 50c.

Knowing that Apple, Google, etc. all have activation processes in place that require use of a credit card I think it should be relatively easy to experiment with this concept, what do you think?

The microblogging client frustration and Gwibber

Hugo Tavares Reis — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 10:20:28 -0000

Since I started to use Twitter I feel some insatisfaction with the available desktop clients. The balance of pros an cons of each desktop client always tended towards the negative side, which made me continue to use the web interface... until yesterday. Yesterday I met Gwibber.

Gwibber is powered by python and webkit, so far supports brightkite, digg, facebook, flickr, identica, jaiku, laconica, pingfm, pownce, rss and twitter.

Take a look at the default theme:

I like to hack and customize things to work the way I like most. The simplicity of Gwibber's internals are like 'hack me, please'. Gwibber delegates all the boring tasks to webkit+html+css+js, so there is no complex and boring python code to render messages and support themes. If an user wants to create a new theme, he just needs to edit html+css, couldnt be easier. Creating a new plugin to support a new microblogging site/service is also trivial.

Try it yourself: http://launchpad.net/gwibber