I’ve recently been involved in a discussion about what makes a rockstar developer for a startup. This has always surprised me- the reality of the matter is that there are no rockstars, only people who think of themselves as rockstars, and those are the last people you want in charge of your product. So I [...]

The executive summary of this post goes something like this: If you are trying to launch a service, product or other technologically “innovative” web presence, your idea either has to be absolutely stellar (which I will guarantee to you it isn’t), or you have to rip the covers off your technology and let your users decide how to use it themselves.

I’ve finally gotten around to fully open source my various applications, factoring and debugging the code, commenting and applying all the necessary licenses and other miscellaneous logistical duties to get my two AIR applications up and out there.

Practical Desktop

Practical Desktop appears to be a simple timekeeping application, though in reality it’s an open source widget framework that allows pretty much anyone to build a deployable block of functionality that can start interacting with other widgets. The wrapper’s there for you, go nuts. The source is here

From a personal perspective, I use it as a beta and explorative sandbox, because there are a lot of interesting things coming out in the near future that I’d like to offer some guidance on development best practice, and to do so I will have to figure it out myself first. Rest assured that the widgets I build will be functionally complete, though perhaps limited in feature support.

Pandora

The Pandora Desktop application is really just a customized webkit browser that’s hardwired to the Pandora mini player. I’ve fixed the application so minimization works in Windows, and expanded it to include the player’s html wrapper as well. The reason I did this is because Pandora’s a free service, and I’d like to make sure that I’m not ripping them off by stripping out the ads. Optimally I’d like to help them convert their existing player to AIR, but until I have free time (or they pay me ) that won’t happen.

More blog neglect, but this time I actually have some interesting things to report.

First of all, in an effort to deal with blog neglect I’ve shifted my usual authoring time to before work rather than after. Afterwards there are simply too many distractions- mental, physical and… ahem… social for me to really get focused on my thoughts and get them down. Whether I can keep it up is anyone’s guess, but for now I’ve got a nice cool morning, a full battery and a patch of sunshine to write in. What else could you want?

This week I made cheese. This is otherwise not something of particular importance that needs to be reported, however it was one of the longest/oldest things on my todo list, and the fact that I’ve actually done it means that I’ve made a significant dent in all the things on that list. Baby steps in reclaiming my free time, as it were, and I’m starting to feel a little more liberated in that regard.