Brightkite iPhone App

October 17th, 2008  |  Published in Technology

Brightkite recently announced it’s iPhone App coming to the iTunes App Store soon. Here’s the video demo of the application:

I have been using Brightkite along with Twitter for couple of months now since James has invited me to the service. It’s a darn impressive social networking application that uses Yahoo’s Fire Eagle which allows users to manage their location.

The features that are planned for the Brightkite iPhone app are:

  • Auto geo-location including Place Snapping and Pick a Place
  • Notifications (nearby friends, posts, friend requests, comments & mentions)
  • Posting photos and notes to locations
  • Nearby people and activity feed
  • Friends lists and activity feed
  • People, places and posts search
  • Threaded messaging
  • Profile streams
  • Place steams
  • Placemarks
  • Commenting on posts

The only drawbacks that I currently forsee are the following (at least w/ Brightkite.com web app):

  • You must have the discipline to “check in” to your current location. I’m hoping the “auto geo-location” can address this with no sweat.
  • Sometimes, the syncing between Brightkite and Twitter does not work. I think this is more on Twitter’s end (from what I heard following @brightkite).
  • There were a couple of times an emailed photo would appear late (2-hours late one-time) from the time it was taken.

All in all, it’s a great service. I can’t wait to use that iPhone app vs. going to Safari every time to check-in. I just hope the syncing (Brightkite to Twitter) get’s polished.

Read the rest of this entry »

Try Ruby!

November 29th, 2005  |  Published in Uncategorized

No, not the stone. I’m referring to the programming language.

Ruby is the interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming. It has many features to process text files and to do system management tasks (as in Perl). It is simple, straight-forward, extensible, and portable.

Anyways, here’s a nice interactive demo on what Ruby can do. Good job whytheluckystiff on this project. Very entertainting. I’m sure this will open some eyes and get some people to learn more about it.

Note: For those non-technical people, don’t be scared to try the demo. It’s clear enough to follow. Just read the tips below the command-prompt area and you should be good to go.