Irish Web Developer

With all the snow around at the moment, roads in Ireland are treacherous. Now the government has told us that there are only 2 days worth of grit available. Going to work is rapidly becoming an extreme sport.

Imagine though, if you didn’t have to leave your house. Imagine if all your work was available to you where ever you have an internet connection. That is the power of cloud computing. You can access your data anywhere. Not only that, you can also work on it.

There are loads of applications that are solely based on-line. In fact, you can do pretty much anything in web based applications. The only limitations seem to be video/imaging editing although even that is changing.

For business applications salesforce.com is definitely worth a look. If you are involved in sales, marketing or services having a salesforce account at the moment could be a life-saver.  The ability to log on from anywhere, even from an iphone or blackberry, offers a huge advantage over on premise software solutions, especially in the weather conditions we have at the moment.

Not to mention the fact that the TCO is lower for cloud based solutions. No need for expensive hardware or the staff to maintain it.

So if the climate (economic or meteorological) is bad, maybe you should be working in the cloud.

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Well it’s January again so I’m going to start a personal project. The project I have in mind is really ambitious so I don’t want to go into details but it will be built in Django and hosted on Google App Engine.

The reasons for using these technologies are many-fold. I really want to learn Django and today I found app-engine-patch which allows better integration between Django and Google App Engine.

Anyway, back to my project. I think that the way people consume news is going to change in the future. I think that people like @marklittlenews have recognized this. I don’t think for a second that 6 0ne or newspapers are going away any time soon.

I do however think that the way we, the public, view the news is changing. The crash-landing on the Hudson in 2009 is a good example. It was all over twitter before it was on the news. Photos included. With a video camera included in nearly every phone. For example, my phone (the HTC Hero) has a video camera built in. I can even post videos directly to youtube. I can even stream videos live using a service like Qik. Photos are the same. Soon any news event will be broadcast on the web as soon as it happens.

Features will also be online. The excellent site Pictory is an example of the direction that I think features will go in.

So what does this mean for Journalists? Even with news events being captured as they happen, the background information, the meat of the story, will still be important. Usually, this comes from a built up network of contacts that comes from years covering stories.

And  so, the project I am planning to build is a platform that brings the on the spot user generated news together with the experience and skill of journalists.

It’s an ambitious project, but what is the point of aiming low? There is a good chance that nothing will come of this, but hopefully I will learn something along the way.

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It appears that the long-awaited Apple tablet may be coming on the 26th of January.

This is Apple’s traditional time for big announcements. The big Apple convention MacWorld used to be on at this time of year.

Apparently, back in 2007, Apple registered the domain iSlate.com. That, with the rumors coming from Chinese screen manufacturers seem to point to a 10 inch tablet.

It will be interesting to see if Apple can do for tablet computing, what it did for the mobile.

Personally, I don’t see a future or tablet computers. I think a touch-screen would be really difficult to type on long term. I think tablets are more suited to graphical type applications. I don’t think there will ever be a novel written on a touchscreen.

Who knows though? Apple have surprised us in the past.

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I got a HTC Hero a few months back. So far it’s been great. Fantastic apps and everything you would want in a phone. The one thing that really annoys me is Android Market. What possible reason in the world is there for not allowing me to install certain apps?

Google Goggles, for example. Why can I not find that in Market? It is available in Ireland, but seemingly only if you work for Google.

Come on Google, it’s Christmas, where is the love?

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Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

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Google have released a sync app for the iphone and windows mobile. It will also support some Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones.

Basically, what it does is keeps your calendars and contacts the same over your devices. There are other apps that do the same thing, like Apples mobile me and Microsoft Exchange.

The main advantage of the Google app is that it is free. Of course, it’s also in Beta. Read all about it.

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Mac Book Pro £1,369.00 sterling which is (according to xe.com) €1,553.10. Mac Book Pro in the Irish Apple store? €1,799.00. A difference of €245.90.

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Step 1: Make quality content
Step 2: Give it away for free
Step 3: Profit

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Kieran over at http://www.newchemicalhistory.com has revamped his online exhibition site. I definitely recommend you check it out. There are some really good exhibitions.

It also has some cool features including a dynamic colour scheme driven by Adobe Kuler.

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This video explains what twitter is. Why not follow me http://www.twitter.com/aonghusflynn ?

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