My favorite aspect of the app is how natural and iPhone it feels. We took inspiration from apps we really liked– Calendar.app, Twitter, and Yelp, just to name a few, and made Plannr feel like Apple shipped it with your iPhone. The calendar view looks and acts like the built-in calendar. Plan creation feels exactly like writing an email. My favorite feature, sharing your location with all the invitees on a plan, is easy to find and pleasant to use.

Since its release, Plannr for iPhone has been downloaded several thousand times. It spent its first week in the store spotlighted in the New & Noteworthy section, which drove downloads to the brink of what our servers could handle. I’ve always wanted to make software that had scaling issues, and working on scaling is exactly as fun as I thought it would be, which is to say, very fun. Even more enjoyable, I’ve gotten lots of emails from Plannr users– some asking for help, some requesting features, and some just saying that Plannr is a cool thing that they like.

So, what’s next for Plannr? Keeping things quick and stable takes up a good amount of time, but there’s lots else to do. The third version of Plannr for iPhone, with more polish and a few oft-requested features (swipe-delete, GMail contacts sync, and a no-account option), is awaiting app store approval. We’re considering other mobile platforms, both Android and HTML, we’re building new features across all platforms, and we’re starting work on a pretty kickass way to monetize our products. everythingIsTheBest, LLC, has still gone without funding up to this point, but that’s also an option we’re considering.

If you have an iPhone, please do try it out. I’d love to hear your feedback.

At Microsoft, I started using Outlook in its natural habitat: a large, structured corporation. As the 8-ball says, “Outlook not good”, but it really nails scheduling in the corporate world. I used the put-a-thing-on-someone’s calendar feature (called an “S+” after some ancient tradition) for every meeting that was less formal than stopping by someone’s office. Even as a generally unscheduled person, my Outlook calendar became authoritative for my work life. And it was good.

My real life continued on less scheduled than ever; I haven’t been a scheduler since I was in college. This presented an obvious inconsistency– the S+ makes me happier and more productive at work, but I have no remotely analogous tool in the real world. My schedule is maintained in my head and coordinated over emails and txts.

Obviously, Outlook is the wrong tool for coordinating my real life. It’s hyperformal because it grew up in the business world. And I don’t need a tool at all for the least formal events in my life. Nothing will ever replace a txt that says “hey come over and watch a movie”. But there’s a wide range of semi-formal, semi-scheduled stuff going on in my life, and I think PencilYouIn is the tool for those.

PencilYouIn puts things in your calendar and coordinates the details of your plans: time, place, and who’s coming. It’s lightweight. It stays out of your way. It syncs to your phone and your calendar. It txts you updates. You never have to sign up to use it. You can just cc it on an email. It gives you an easy way to contact everyone. You can share your location when you’re running late. It’s private until you make it public. It’s not an evite.

My calendar is social, just-in-time, and push. So why are iCal and Google Calendar just 1995 versions of a wall calendar? PencilYouIn is how I want to use a calendar in 2010.

More on the features of PencilYouIn later. For now, I encourage you to check it out.

I thought the talk went really well. The most difficult part of it was to hit the right mix of technical detail– enough to understand the whole picture, but not so much as to make the important ideas inaccessible to those without a technical background. My co-presenter for the night was Kascha, with her shiny new PhD, speaking on the meaning of life. Thus my talk had to appeal to a crowd just as ready to discuss Arendt as DNS.

Like every Salon I’ve been to, I was amazed by the level of discussion that followed both presentations. If there’s anything like it in your city, you should find it; if there isn’t, you should start one.

I’ve posted my slides and notes. If it’s something you’re interested in, don’t hesitate to talk to me about it.

We’ve been poking around with location-based apps for a while and this is our first to be released. The most fun part of it was something highly reusable that helps quickly decide if two locations are ‘close’ in a practical sense, as in if you went to one would you mind going to the other on the same trip.

The project has already gotten a bit of press on TechFlash and Publicola. Thanks especially to Todd Bishop from TechFlash for talking to Ben about the launch. New media > old media by a long shot.

I think graphics is an interesting example of combining functional and imperative aspects of Scala. The program is all about the side effect of putting pixels on the screen, but functional tools help me get there. Check out this method I used for testing:

  def drawLine(pts: List[Point2D]): Unit = {
      def drawLines(p1: Point2D, p2: Point2D) : Point2D = { line(p1.x, p1.y, p2.x, p2.y); p2 }
      pts.reduceLeft(drawLines);
  }

This is a little hacky but, in my opinion, fairly elegant. Reduce does the work of giving me consecutive pairs and then I use line() to draw to the screen.

I’ve put up all the code here.

I tried using an app called ted to automatically download torrents, but it needed constant tinkering and ultimately wasn’t worth the hassle. So yesterday between 9:01am and 9:11am I hacked out a python script to fetch me the Daily Show and Colbert Report off of mininova. To use the script you need python and a torrent client that can watch a directory for incoming torrents; I use Transmission.

To use the script, download it and edit it to put torrents where you want them. Configure your client to watch the same directory, and run the script. I recommend you schedule the script to run every morning using launchd. Notice that the script has no error handling whatsoever and might totally not work for you. It’s worked the past two days for me, so, you know, it works on my machine.

Download script