Why the hype?

Silverlight may not be the best choice

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:10:00 GMT

Super Bock, a portuguese beer brand launches a new search engine for movies and cinema sessions. And does it using Silverlight, probably “sold” to them as “the new, oh so cool technology for the web. Better than flash.”

According to Rich Internet Application Statistics, 30% of the browsers they analyze have Silverlight, which is oh so little when compared to the 98% of Flash.

There’s definitely an “asshole in charge” situation over here. Probably, nobody in the agency said “only 30% of the web will see this a-lot-of-thousand-euros-website you’re paying for” to the manager at Super Bock, so there’s our asshole. If they did, the asshole is obviously working at Super Bock.

That’s like selling their beer only to people born between January and April. Yes, that dumb. That’s just one of the problems with Web agencies forgetting about Strategy and doing just Development and Design; they forget about 70% of the people browsing the web.

That’s also the problem with companies that still don’t get the Web. For them, it is a playground where they can run a couple of experiences and choose to have a cool website, instead of a functional one that can reach to more clients.

EDIT:
Some made me realize I was being too harsh with my third paragraph. Yes, I am. It isn’t intended to insult no one, it’s just one of the ways I have to explain my opinion.
If it is too hard to read, skip it or read this version instead:

Someone’s made a mistake here. If the guys over Super Bock specifically asked for a Silverlight website, probably they weren’t aware that they were preventing 70% of the users visiting the site. The mission of the agency is alerting the client about these problems and not only accepting the work and getting paid for it.

Again, sorry if someone felt insulted by my words.

Your turn, Mozilla.

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:39:00 GMT

So, the European Commission decided that the next version of Windows shouldn’t include Internet Explorer. Consumers should be able to choose a browser, they say.

I think it’s Mozilla’s turn to get a bigger user base in Europe. If, somehow, they manage to give people a way to install a browser by telling them “copy this text and paste it on the window that opens when you do Ctrl+R (or whatever the shortcut is)”. The problem is, how do you get to someone that’s not in the Internet yet.

That’s a good problem to solve, get on it Mozilla. Me, I’m to busy to think about it.

Oh, and please do read more about the issue here and here.

Goplan 2 is here!

Sun, 17 May 2009 03:06:00 GMT

The last months of work at Webreakstuff were entirely dedicated to the second version of Goplan which we just launched yesterday.

Despite the stressful day, full of last things to complete before the great opening, the whole team is very happy with the result and I’m personally proud of our work.

Goplan isn’t really “done” and probably it won’t ever be. In the next weeks we’ll focus on fix small bugs that may arise with the mass use of the app. Along with this bug-fixing period, we’ll start working on the iPhone app for those who want to manage their projects on the road.

Give Goplan a spin (by signing up here) and send your feedback over. We love hearing from you guys.

BarCamp Portugal 2009 - Spring Edition

Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:19:00 GMT

We’re now a couple of days away from the next Portuguese BarCamp. It’ll be held at DEI (the Computer Science Dept.) in Coimbra.

You can find more information about the event at BarCamp PT’s home at http://barcamppt.org/.

If you’re portuguese or happen to be in Coimbra the next weekend, do drop by, but don’t forget to sign up.

Btw, you may have noticed whythehype.com down — I just changed the hosting provider, everything should be back to normal now.

iPhone Push Notifications

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:19:00 GMT

I just read Dan Moren’s (Macworld.com) article on Apple’s iPhone Push Notifications system and how Apple seem to stopped talking about it. I guess thousands of developers are waiting for a solution, but push notifications may just not be it. I mean, that would be something, but it won’t solve all the limitations an application has by being allowed to run only on foreground.

The iPhone is a great platform and it surely means, above all, Cocoa in your pocket. Although, there’s a lot on the background that Cocoa apps are missing.

I hope Apple didn’t bury this feature. Push, over-the-air, notifications can be useful and I can surely see where they can be put into use. Still, I guess everyone wants more: sending an application to background while the user checks his email or text someone—and keep downloading something on your app, for instance.

[Look Around You] The first in a series

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:13:00 GMT

I’ve been looking more and more around myself, looking for interesting things. Some of them amaze me, some bore me and others sadden me.

This is not something I have done for long. Fred got me into this “experience” thing. Working (and having dinner almost daily, and shopping, and getting bored) with a design and experience addict taught me a sense I never knew I had: minding small details. Now I find myself observing instead of just looking. Often I take a second, deeper look at things, think about them, and sometimes take pictures of things like weird messages, great interfaces or poorly-designed objects.

Today, to start off this series, I have a picture of an eating place on a mall that got me confused for an instant:

Where do I put the parenthesis? Does this mean that I should:

a) choose a juice OR a soup - and have the dessert in both cases: (Juice OR Soup) AND Dessert;

b) pick either juice OR the soup and the dessert: Juice OR (Soup AND Dessert)?

Although the former seems more likely to be the correct answer, to me always having a dessert seems as odd as having to choose between “just juice” and “soup and dessert”.

There’s a solution to this ambiguity through design: breaking the sentence into two lines would make it much easier to tell what the choices here really are.

“Look around you” is the name of a brilliant TV series from BBC: The website, The wikipedia entry

Sad feeling

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 03:20:00 GMT

I was just thinking:

Sometimes, browsing the web without a path or an end, following link after link after link, I stumble upon a blog that I found interesting and I subscribe it. This happened with new bands and lots of other things, obviously.

The problem starts when I realize that:

I will never read all the blogs I’d find interesting. I bet they’re out there and they’re a lot. I just don’t hit them.

I will never hear about all the bands that exist out there and that I’d like if I knew them. I will never know of even half of them.

I will never know of lots of eBay auctions that I’d win if I knew about them. Probably, items that I don’t even need, but that I’d buy just because.

And this is so sad. So much good stuff being done all over the world and I will never know of.

Barcamp Portugal 2008

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:41:00 GMT

For 3 years now, we at Webreakstuff have been organizing the portuguese Barcamp. Every year the audience is bigger and we’re glad to see all this people coming to , our town, Coimbra for 2 days of networking, information sharing and to meet other guys that are doing the same they do.

If you’re interested, come on in and prepare a session. We’ll help with everything we can.

Visit the site we crafted for Barcamp Portugal if you’re joining us or to read more about the event (portuguese).

TotSpot: What I've been up to lately

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 01:24:00 GMT

We, at Webreakstuff, just gave birth to our youngest baby: TotSpot (yeah, pun intended).

TotSpot is a publishing platform designed to make it easier to parents to organize and share their tot’s life. Dads and moms of the world can write up journal entries about the toddler’s day-to-day life, upload pictures, link to videos on YouTube and Vimeo and document “firsts” as well as “favorites”. You know, kids’ stuff.

It was built on Ruby on Rails and uses MySQL. On the presentation layer, we use Yahoo!’s User Interface Library on a couple of things including the grids CSS and the little calendar widget for date picking.

Don’t take this for granted, but I think sometime soon we may end up writing a couple of technical posts either on TotSpot’s blog or wherever else about decisions we took or problems/solutions we found while working on TotSpot. Stay tuned.

Oh, and if you happen to have a baby, give it a spin.

Command line trends

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:48:00 GMT

It seems that this is hitting the web all over again and since I don’t have a lot of time to write about something useful right now, I tried the magic line just to find out something I already knew:

I love Ruby, Rake and Textmate
We still use Subversion over here – slowly moving to git, though
Rails, Rails, Rails: script/server, script/console, svn and rake are the tools of the trade

The raw output:

[tpinto@brokenbones:~] history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  80 ruby
  78 svn
  58 cd
  41 ls
  35 rake
  33 script/server
  19 sudo
  16 script/console
  15 ssh
  15 mate