Ben and I released a little project we’ve been working on over the past two weeks: ridepenguin. It’s a mobile webapp for finding cab shares from SeaTac Airport to Seattle/surrounding areas. And I think it beats shouting at a crowd outside the airport.
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 wrote a small iPhone app called Recurrences. It fills a niche that I’ve been needing– a todo list for things that never get done, they just get done for now. Like calling your mom or emailing friends. When you finish a task, you hit done and it moves to the bottom of the todo list. And every task always tells you how long it’s been since last you did it. Super simple, but it took me two days to write (and learn CoreData, which is pretty cool) and I’ll be happy if anyone else finds a use for it besides me.
While thinking about how to route messages for a project I’m starting, I decided to flowchart every method of electronic communication I engage with on a daily basis, how they are routed, and how they get to me. Not sure what to glean from this yet. There’s definitely a lot more polling than I’m happy with. The only direct push is via txt (and phone, but I don’t talk on the phone regularly). Everything else goes through at least one tight polling loop. We can do better, internet!
My friend Ben and I built this webapp, pleasexpla.in, during our first organized hack day in Seattle. With pleasexpla.in, a user creates a discussion and can share it with others via its URL on twitter/facebook/reader, etc. You can also subscribe to a conversation in RSS. Ideally, I see this as enabling conversations in places where they can be difficult at present– inside of an RSS reader or on twitter for anything that doesn’t fit in 140 characters.
We’re hacking on it a bit in our nonexistent spare time, so we’ll see where it goes.