Reviews | Software Development in the Real World

January 7, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 26 Comments

Xobni Makes Outlook Better

When I first heard of Xobni through Michael Arrington, I was insanely excited to see a tool with this much power coming out for Outlook! As a software developer / software manager / software tester / software architect, software visionary, I have an unbelievable amount of email! And it never seems to stop! But what emails are the most important to read? Who sends me the most emails? Or how about that thing I know you all have asked yourselves at least a hundred times “Hey, didn’t you send me that file the other day? What day did you send it?”.

The Power of Xobni

What makes Xobni so powerful (software developers out there, take note!) is that you can continue to use Outlook exactly as you do today, however you get additional functionality and data intelligence added to your user experience. I’ve used other tools for Outlook (A ton, like some of you) and I always end up removing them because they slow down my system, or just plain don’t seem to add the value for the cost. Cost vs. Value, that’s a great title for another entry later on! What makes your users switch, upgrade, pay maintenance fees. I won’t diverge into that topic here.

Xobni focuses on three issues that make Outlook seem ancient. Fast Search, Finding Attachments Easily, Navigating Outlook by People, and creating Threaded Conversations.

Finding Attachments from someone that sent you a file a few days ago will be as simple as looking to the right of the email, and just finding the file you wanted! It will literally take you seconds!

Having a conversation about budgets with your boss? Can’t seem to remember who else was involved, and what files were shared? No problem at all! Just use the Conversations With xyz option, and watch a whole new world open up in front of your eyes!

Context at Your Fingertips

Even if you don’t click a single thing within the Xobni Insight panel, you will love Xobni. By creating various profiles for all the contacts you have in your e-mail, you finally get fantastic context to all your emails extremely easily. This is a powerful feature for me. For example. I can quickly see what rank a user posses when I get an email from them. How much weight does this user really have? And who is connected to this user anyway? Anybody important? Maybe I should CC them on the email? When was the last time we talked about this, I thought we just did last week? When is a good time to send them an email so they read it? All these questions are answered almost instantly by just glancing over at Xobni Insight’s panel.

The Genius Behind Xobni

The real genius behind Xobni is that they realized that they can give users more information, and allow users to interact in whole new ways with their email, without asking them to track any more information at all! Most new programs you use, ask you to enter more information for tracking purposes. Applications like Xobni are the way of the future my friends! I can’t believe more people are not jumping all over ideas like this. Instead of asking users to track more information, do more work, and try and convince them to enter more data up front in order to provide them with new features and reports, why not let them install an application, that analyzes the data, and then gives you a ton of cool features! What a concept!

This is what Google figured out, this is what Facebook does so well, and this is what Xobni does phenomenally well. I’m curious how long it will take before the company is snapped up. Sadly it probably won’t be to sell Xobni, it will probably be to acquire the talent behind the tool. Just look at what Microsoft did with Lookout. Lookout was a fantastic product, but it has yet to be integrated into Outlook. Sure we have a new Search option in Outlook 2007, but come on, it is the slowest thing I have ever used.

Xobni is full of so many features I don’t even want to get into them here. If you want fast search, awesome data mining capabilities for your email, Xobni is the tool for you. I can’t remember the last time I used a tool and within minutes ran to people sending them screenshots of my new Outlook Experience! It definitely lives up to its branding of effortless email management!

If you would like to try out Xobni, visit the Xobni site and sign up for the closed beta. You will be impressed! Xobni was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Adam Smith and Matt Brezina.

Xobni – It’s Inbox Backwards

http://www.xobni.xom

Filed Under: Reviews, Software Development

August 8, 2007 By miguelcarrasco 119 Comments

Best Web 2.0 Web Sites – July 2007

We have a returning Web 2.0 champion this month, facebook! We also have a few other awesome web sites that you have to check out! Improve your web experience today by checking out the top 10 sites, and seeing which ones you love the best! Let us know your comments by using the comments below the posting!

For the second month in a row, Facebook is ranked at number one for Web 2.0 companies and web sites. With traffic growing at a ridiculous rate, new users signing up by the thousands every hour, Facebook is perfectly poised to be the reigning king of Web 2.0. While myspace still has the most traffic on most accords, facebook with launching its new development platform has really propelled itself ahead of the competition.
One of the world’s largest social networking sites, Fotolog is an ever-evolving global network where members communicate and connect through photographs. A simple and fun way for anyone to express themselves on a daily basis, Fotolog allows members to easily publish an online photo diary, or photo blog, and share it worldwide.

What makes Fotolog special is not just the ability to post photos, but the ability to connect with people. While many people use Fotolog to stay in better touch with their friends and family, others use it to explore the wider Fotolog universe, discover the photos of new people from around the world, participate in group projects and, perhaps most importantly, receive personal feedback on their photos.
As flickr’s tag lines states, flickr is the best online photo sharing application on the Internet today. It by far has the best tools for uploading your photos, organizing your photos, and sharing them with your friends and family. You can use your browser, mobile phone, PDA, and literally any device that can take pictures, to upload your photo’s to flickr. flickr then takes it to the next level by allowing you to share your pictures in a million ways!

Friends and family can search the pictures on the web, subscribe to an RSS feed to be notified of new pictures, sending emails from the site, and other crazy ways that you might want to suggest! If you want to share pictures, flickr is your tool!
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.
In the old days, Google Maps would still be the new kid on the block, however, in Web 2.0 days, Google Maps is ancient. However, there is no better way to help you get from A to B quicker. Sure there are other tools on the market, some of which have been around even before Google itself, but they are terrible in comparison to the speed and ease of use!
Because everyone shouldn’t see everything. What a great slogan, and a great way to compete with YouTube and other clones. vimeo is extremely clean and easy to use, and I love it and enjoy the experience much better than YouTube. If I want to see ridiculous videos, and read comments with people bashing each other, I use YouTube. But when I want to share a video with my family, I use vimeo. Check it out today, I guarantee you will love the site and visit it daily!
People have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. But most of us never get around to making a list. 43 Things is great for that! Make a list on 43 Things and see what changes happen in your life. Best of all it’s a way of connecting with other enthusiasts interested in everything from watching a space shuttle launch to grow my own vegetables. So the next time someone asks you, “what do you do?” you can answer with confidence, “I am doing 43 things!”. Check out 43Things.com today!
Zillow is an amazing real estate site! It not only provides you with actual housing value for millions of homes across the country, but it also provides an extremely visual and easy to use interface for finding the data! With its integrated mapping capabilities, you can even zoom in on the area the house is located in, and see visually the location!

Zillow really gives you the edge and a great high level overview on homes and their values. If you are in the market, or just curious to what is going on in real estate, check out Zillow.com. You won’t be disappointed.
Chances are you haven’t even heard of Farecast. Too bad. It’s awesome! Farecast.com is the first airfare prediction web site. They help online travel shoppers save money by answering the question; should you buy now or wait? They offer airfare predictions from over 75 U.S. departure cities to top domestic destinations. So next time you start wondering, should I buy my ticket now, or later, and what timeframe, just go to Farecast.com!
Do you love podcasting? Do you love finding new and exciting podcasts to listen to? Are you a publisher of podcasts? If you answered yes to any of those questions, this is the site for you! What they are trying to build here is the ultimate podcast center on the Internet, and from the looks of things, they are succeeding! If you need to find fresh content to listen to on your iPod, or want to promote your own new podcast or music, check out Odeao.com today!

Filed Under: Popular Articles, Reviews, Web/Tech

August 6, 2007 By miguelcarrasco 34 Comments

Check Website Uptime Automatically

When you start managing hundreds of web sites, it becomes critical to ensure your web sites are live and performing well. Even if you only have one Blog that you care about, it’s nice to know if the site is actually up and running. In an ideal world, your data center, or web host would be up and running 100% of the time, and in case of a failure, inform you. Unfortunately this is not the case.

How much does it cost you to have a site down? How unhappy do your customers become when they try and access their site, and its down! One solution is to write a ping tool on your own, and monitor your sites. This actually works really well, however there are some free tools on the Internet, and some paid services, that actually do a great job these days.

monitorus is a wonderful service similar to pingdom, however it is free! One plus side to pingdom is the ability to do internal monitoring as well as the external monitoring. This means you can also monitor disk space, CPU usage. With monitorus you can also monitor your VoIP Gateway, E-mail servers, and other Network Devices and Servers.

Installing the Smart Agent is extremely easy, simply download from your control panel, and install on your server. You will be emailed an activation key, which is simply entered into the new system tray application, and you are up and running.

Figure 1 – Install Smart Agent

Once you have installed the agent, you can easily create reports and tests to run on your server.

Figure 2 – Create Tests

So you now have external monitoring of your site with information on if it goes down at all and its response time, you also have the ability to find out if your memory is running low, or your CPU is being hammered. There is more! This package also lets you track your visitors via a basic Web Analytics Package. Setting it up is again very simple!

Figure 3 – Visitor Tracking with monitorus

monitorus is a fantastic tool, and best of all, most of the features are free! This one gets my recommendation.

Pingdom offers everything from simple to very advanced server, network and website monitoring services. Pingdom offers you the ability to monitor your servers and infrastructure 24/7, all year long. They have a multitude of monitoring servers placed all over the world with just one goal in mind: To alert you as soon as any of your servers, networks or services fail. Pingdom gives you full control over your infrastructure.

The best part about pingdom is it only takes 5 minutes to set up and you’re up and running. Everything is done through their custom interface, and no code needs to be added to your website. No software is needed to be installed and you will be monitoring your websites instantly.

Unlike monitorus, pingdom is $9.95 per month. However I find the reports you get from pingdom are much better quality than competitors.

Filed Under: Reviews, Web/Tech

June 10, 2007 By miguelcarrasco 46 Comments

Java Not Worth Building In

Steve Jobs with iPhone

“Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain…”

Those were the exact words of Steve Jobs in January of 2007. You have to keep this statement in context. Jobs was talking about the portable device market, and the desktop market. In 2000, Jobs actually made a valiant effort of bringing Java to the desktop with the launch of Mac OSX. The harsh reality for Java supporters out there is that software developers don’t want to write desktop application in Java.

I mean sure they want to write games, and small applications here and there, but for the most part now, desktop applications are ruled by C, C++, or .net. For every one (1) Java application released, there are 10 .net, C, or VB applications released.

Java does have its place still in the enterprise market, but they have lost the desktop battle. The only other “desktop-ish” battle they had a chance to win was the browser battle, but on that battle field, Flash is the master, hands down. Adobe made a brilliant move in acquiring Macromedia.

When the iPhone is released at the end of the month, it will sport the most sophisticated, well thought user interface ever written for a portable device. It will not run Java. This will make the device a hundred times more stable as it will protect people from going to download badly written Java applications onto their mobile phones. It will force anyone that wants to write an application for the iPhone, to go through Apple. Here is where many will call fowl, however, I call “hurray!”. It will start forcing application standards and performance requirements on people! And this of course is only if Apple decides to open this up. And they will, once they own the cell phone market and make it the platform for cell phones.

Listen to the D 2007 Conference and watch Steve and Bill chat. Steve Jobs knows that the mistakes he made in the past were partnerships, or lack thereof.

“We weren’t so good with partnering with people. Bill and Microsoft were really good at it.”

Look at facebook, they own the social network market (There are others, but for usefulness and most avid users, they win hands down), and have now opened up the development via the facebook API. This was sheer genius on Mark Zuckerberg’s part! This will surely catapult facebook into the stratosphere! Steve Jobs will make the iPhone the cell phone. Sure there will be others, but the iPhone will capture market share you would not believe when compared to other phones.

At the end of the day, people want great software that is fast, easy to use, and performs the way they expect it. The iPhone will do this, as the iPod did.

Now what if Apple decides to sell the iPhone “Operating System” to phone companies once they smell defeat… This could be Apple’s chance to take a road that was once not taken, and saw Microsoft become what Apple could have been.

Filed Under: Application Reviews, Current Affairs, Popular Articles, Reviews, Software Development, Web/Tech

May 3, 2007 By miguelcarrasco 22 Comments

Top 10 Reasons Silverlight Will Change the Web

Microsoft Silverlight is a XAML based WPF technology for vector graphics, video, design, and development of applications for the desktop, as well as the web. It is cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that is less than 2 megabyte in size! It will change the web as we know it, finally creating a feasible, professional platform for building the most rich user experience websites out there. Silverlight is not a competitor to Flash as some would have you believe. In fact, Silverlight and Flash work extremely well together! Here are the top 10 Reasons Silverlight will change the web!

Highest Quality Video Experience
Prepare to see some of the best quality videos you have seen in your life, all embedded in highly graphical websites. The same research and technology that was used for VC-1, the codec that powers BluRay and HD DVD, is used by Microsoft today with its streaming media technologies. Video overlays, custom menus, all become possible!
Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser
Finally build web applications that work on any browser, and on any operating system. At release, Silverlight will work with Mac as well as Windows! The Mono project has also already promised support for Linux!
Developers and Graphic Designers can play together!
Developers familiar with Visual Studio, Microsoft.net will be able to develop amazing Silverlight applications very quickly, and they will work on Mac’s and Windows. Developers will finally be able to strictly focus on the back end of the application core, while leaving the visuals to the Graphic Design team using the power of XAML.
Cheaper
Silverlight is now the most inexpensive way to stream video files over the internet at the best quality possible. Licensing is dead simple, all you need is IIS in Windows Server, and you’re done. Currently if you want to stream Flash video files, you would need to purchase Flash Media Server and license a few components.
Support for 3rd Party Languages
using the power of the new Dynamic Language Runtime, developers will now be able to use Ruby, Python, and EcmaScript! This means a Ruby developer can develop Silverlight applications, and leverage the .net Framework!
Cross-Platform, Cross-Browser Remote Debugging
If you are in the need to debug an application running on a Mac, no problem! You can now set breakpoints, step into/over code, have immediate windows, and all that other good stuff that Visual Studio provides.
The best development environment on the planet
Visual Studio is an award winning development platform! As it continues to constantly evolve, so will Silverlight!
Built to allow Mashups
Microsoft spent a lot of time enabling Silverlight to easily consume web services, and easily consume various services and data from around the web. Silverlight supports LINQ and LINQ-to-XML. All of this data can be easily accessed via RSS, POX, REST, and JSON.
Silverlight offers copy protection
Have you noticed how easy it is to download YouTube videos to your computer, and save them for later viewing (If not, read here.)? Silverlight will finally have the features enabling content providers complete control over their rich media content! Streaming television, new indie broadcast stations, all will now be possible!
Extreme Speed
There is a dramatic improvement in speed for AJAX-enabled websites that begin to use Silverlight, leveraging the Microsoft .net framework.

Silverlight is the biggest launch since Microsoft .net 1.0. My guess is a lot of people will take it as a Flash clone, and not understand its true power until it takes over the web. This is not a Flash clone at all. This is the new web development platform for a whole new era of Web Applications.

Filed Under: Popular Articles, Reviews, Software Development