weRead Amazon Exporter
This is a Greasemonkey script for Firefox. It inspects the weRead book shelf page for Amazon products and displays a list of ISBN or ASIN.
Cell Phone Tap-to-Pay Micro-site
Sprint NFC payment service (ISIS) launching this year. Nice to see my work online.
Animated with jQuery. Custom lightboxes. Custom JavaScript carrousel. Gets about 22,000 hits per day.
Starbucks is banking on tap-to-pay technology and so far it seems to be a good bet.
Escaping the Walled Garden With Javascript
I actually enjoyed the hours I spent logging my favorite books into the weRead app on Facebook. Reminiscing about those quirky scifi novels I read when I was younger was nice. The promise of seeing what my friends have read and how we match up with ratings was good motivation. I’m thinking even if this app is clunky and slow, the database is huge (thanks, Amazon) and the potential for social value is gigantic.
Unfortunately, I got sufficiently frustrated with this app and wanted to try the Google Books Library feature. Google asked me to paste a comma-separated list of ISBNs but it turns out weRead doesn’t support exporting the book shelf. Looking forward to more hours of searching and adding books to a new library? No. I have bugs to fix and beers to drink.
weRead has a comment in the FAQ which reads “We are working on a feature that will allow you to take your book list with you wherever you go.” The feature they’re talking about is called Take Your Bookshelf With You and basically just links to apps they’ve built for Facebook, Yahoo, Orkut, Myspace and hi5. Once you allow the app access to your profile their API lets you interact with your book collection through one of these interfaces. Not exactly what I would call an “export” feature.
Enter Greasemonkey. The free add-on for Firefox allows me to write a Javascript app that will export all the books from my weRead book shelf in ISBN or ASIN format.
Try it out
Javascript calendar date picker
This is my first stab at a light-weight popup date picker in Javascript with calendar view. It should be easy to add to an existing form control and low impact to the formatting of the page. To satisfy these two requirements the script should be self-contained in a single js file with a single css file for styles. Triggering the script should be event-driven so it can be bound to a form element inline or with another library like jQuery.
Next step: port to FBJS to implement in my latest Facebook project.
Climate Tracker
Ascentium, an interactive web design agency, asked me to design a dynamic interface for their Climate Tracker project. The tool was an ambitious set of data capture, unit conversion, carbon emission estimation features. My task was to make one of the most complicated features (data capture) simple and logical even for a user who was not trained in climate science. Understanding the data and what it was used for was key to completing my goal and I certainly learned a lot about Co2. The results were satisfying: a feature which had been rejected 3 times was accepted and development moved forward.
Cool features:
- Fully globalized for multi-language support
- Predictive input and dynamic wizard-style interface
- Plugin architecture to allow 3rd-party extensions
- Science!
Twitter for Teachers
While working at Microsoft I had the opportunity to work on the Text My Class project in the education product group. Modeled after Twitter, this app was designed to help teachers to manage the ever-changing list of contacts in each class. After subscribing to a text message request students would receive short messages from their teacher about upcoming tests, study assignments and anything the teacher wanted to share. Student’s replies appeared in a threaded message view where teacher’s could manage the conversation from a computer or iPhone web browser.
Cool features:
- Hosted on Microsoft’s cloud services Windows Azure
- Integrated with SMS system Upside Wireless
- iPhone web app
- Live update feed built with jQuery AJAX (just like Twitter!)
- Tested at Seattle-area public and private schools
Facebook Fitness Tracker App
Did you workout today? This Facebook Fitness App wants to know.
This application is currently in development and the client prefers to remain anonymous until after launch. I will keep you posted.
