sobees is the perfect desktop companion for online social networks. sobees offers an easy unified user experience to get, organize and share information from the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, Flickr and Youtube directly on the desktop.

So ok, this sounds like a pretty cool application. Obviously the people that this software will appeal to is more than your average Facebooker, but let’s admit that over time as these sites have come out, a number of us have signed up for flickr accounts, have started “tweeting”, and are incessantly updating our status on Facebook (usually via our tweets) or otherwise stalking talking with our friends.

Enter my issues on computer number 1. After ensuring that I was up to date with the .NET Framework (v3.5 SP1 required), I install the program which takes an amazingly long time when compared to the relatively small file size of the install program. After finally installing, the taskbar shows the “sobee Login” window but… no window. Nothing, anywhere. I check behind other windows, I try to Minimize All (that trick sometimes reveals otherwise-hidden applications), nothing. I open Task Manager and find one application and one process running. If I try and “Switch To” the application, TaskMan minimizes itself. Oooookay. I write to their info@ email address which they indicate in their FAQ you should email if you have trouble – I got a fairly prompt response, the first of which was roughly “that’s strange – we are trying hard to clear up any and all bugs, but we’ve never heard of this one”. 15 minutes later I received a second reply stating they had released a new installer to the website which should solve my problem. Interesting. I uninstall, re-download, re-install (again, a painfully slow process; I’m really not sure what this installer does), and still have the same errors. Uninstall and give up.

Computer #2, running Vista. .NET Framework is up to date, download installer, install (still slow), woohoo I have a login screen! I sign in and am greeted with a bar which takes over the entire top of my monitor – which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if it had just resized the rest of the viewport for me. Having the application on top of my browser tabs in Chrome isn’t really what I would call convenient. That aside, I try and start configuring the connections to my social networks. The Facebook profile seems confused, as it only asks for my username but no password – same for Youtube. Friendfeed, stangely, does ask for both. Regardless as I try and connect with my profiles the entire program seized on itself and I had to mercy kill the application just so I could get my computer to respond again. Start the program up after checking TaskMan to ensure that no processes associated with sobees were running, and I get both the login screen AND a popup which warns another copy of the application is already running and the one I just tried to start would be shut down. Um, ok then. After logging back in, I try and set up my profiles again. Another seize, another TaskMan kill, and I’m back to reinstalling the application.

Unfortunate since the idea had a lot of promise, but wait – in my Googling I came across an application called 8hands. (Who knew there was a bona-fide market for cross-social-network applications?) From their website…

8hands is a service for the social networks users that want to always stay in the know but don’t want to waste too much time on checking their blogs and profiles. The 8hands Desktop application will organize all your social networks into one place and notify you upon new events.

Sounds pretty similar, so let’s give this one a go. Install goes well enough, and on starting the application I am asked for the account credentials to any of the networks I wish to connect to, any RSS feeds I want to subscribe to, etc. After entering it all the program enters a lengthy initial sync process – to paraphrase the message in the program, “Grabbing all your info – this could take a few minutes. Want a sandwich?” Once it was done I was connected and it began to pull data from messages and wall posts on my Facebook account, as well as comments on a YouTube video I had posted, from the past 30 days. I thought that was a little much (do I really need the last MONTH?) but it wasn’t the end of the world.

Then came to playing with the app. Admittedly my primary focus was on Facebook since that’s the “big one” in my opinion. It is really neat that you can see your friends from FB, and post to their walls right from the application. You can also post on your OWN wall from the application – do people actually do this? I comment on my own postings, but a wall post to yourself? That aside, everything seemed pretty slick other than missing out on some data from the main “Feed” page – I would get notifications in 8hands about some things but not others. Perhaps this has something to do with their supposedly-super-special-uber-cool-ultra-l337 algorithm which tells you specifically WHICH of your friends, across all of your networks, are your “best friends” who interact with you the most and you only get info on those people, but I didn’t play with the feature enough to find out. What I DID notice, however, was that certain things (like viewing more info on a particular friend) required me to actually go to FB in my browser – I could tell because I would click on a link in the program and suddenly my browser opened a new tab for the link.

The problem here is not the separation between the program and added functionality, but the fact that Facebook will log you out in one location if you log in from another. Let me elaborate… If you happen to be logged into Facebook in, say, Firefox, and then open 8hands, Facebook will say “hey, you just logged in somewhere else, I’m going to log out that first user”, which will render your session within Firefox moot. If you click on something in 8hands to go to Facebook, this means you will NEVER be logged in – unless you have “remember me” checked off, you are going to need to re-enter your credentials every time. The worst part is that while surfing Facebook, 8hands may cycle back around to ask Facebook once again if there any any updates that you should know about. Guess what happens in your browser when 8hands does this? Ding-ding-ding.

Overall I liked 8hands – certainly it was miles ahead of sobees in my opinion since I could actually get the program to run. (Also, 8hands continually spells their own name correctly on their website. I’m not one to make fun of people when English is not their first language, so I won’t pick on translation and grammar errors from the sobees crew: BUT, when you have “download sobess” on your own download page of your site? Poor form, guys) The interface in 8hands was a little more Instant-Messager-like, which was slightly more palatable than the “take over your machine” feeling I got from sobees, and any time a new update occurred in one of your networks you would see the small box pop up just above your system tray letting you know what was going on, just as if you’d received a new IM in MSN Messenger or new mail in Outlook. That said, it seems the concept is still just a little too unformed and the software just a little too early in its infancy for me to really recommend with any strength. It’s interesting to poke around in but for now I’ll stick with manually checking my sites, thanks.

I would be interested to see how the 8hands Mobile application works for cell phones, but alas my phone isn’t supported. Anyone out there feel like giving it a shot and letting me know what they think?

Another thing I felt that most tutorials lacked was the explanation that you should really, honestly, truly WATCH what you are doing when attempting to learn how to solve the cube. Personally, I don’t learn well by seeing R U R’ written down and say “oh, ok, no problem”. I need to see that move in action on the cube, and even if I don’t fully comprehend what exactly is happening, I can see what is happening which helps my brain remember what my hands should be doing so that my eyes see the same thing next time. 

I also ran into a few cases where the person explaining the solve either underestimated the person wanting to learn to solve the cube, or greatly overestimated them. “This algorithm should be real easy for you to learn, it’s only 18 moves long.” Oye. Or, the flip side of that coin was “Try this algorithm to do what you need to do next. Depending on the state of your cube you may need to do this 1, 3, 5, or 39 times in order to get the cube to look like what you want”. (I may have slightly exaggerated that, but the point stands). What I would prefer, myself, in a Beginner’s Method is to be given some basic instructions on what I should be looking to accomplish, what I should do in order to reach that goal, and be given not only an explanation of what is happening when I do that but also be presented with one or two alternatives saying “hey, if the first thing isn’t working for you, maybe this will help instead”. To me that seems like a fairly basic teaching method which would help a lot of newer cubers. 

Before I do start into my own ideas on what may help beginning cubers on their way to solving the cube, I do want to give credit to the two primary places online which helped me as I learned how solve the cube myself.

CubeStation - http://www.cubestation.co.uk/ – DanH has a lot of great information on here for beginning cubers and is probably the most well-thought-out tutorial that I found. The Java applets also really help for watching some of the algorithms in action for when you’re unclear on what exactly the notation in the algorithm means you should do. 

Badmephisto on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/badmephisto – A personal hero of mine for making extremely well-made video tutorials for many aspects of solving the cube, including a great 3-part series for beginners as well as more advanced concepts for once you start to get more comfortable with the cube such as intuitive F2L (if you decide to learn the Fridrich method later), advanced cross techniques, commutators, and more. 

So anyway, that all said and done I suppose without an further adieu I present my effort at teaching others how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. 

update 3/3/09: this series of blog entries is actually going to become separate pages within the site to accomodate the addition of some Java applets to help illustrate the points. This post will be updated when the entry point to the series has been created. I do know of at least two of you who have been actively asking where this tutorial is, and all I can say is “soon”.

I was developing a web-based “FTP” application for one of my clients, with Job 1 being “it has to work on the Mac”. The previous application that had been developed for this client by a third-party was clunky to use, both from a front-end and management area perspective, oftentimes would not work quite right, and many times outright fail – and 95% of the system errors occurred on Macs due to the way the code was written. Cutting out a lot of the details, the new system proposed would work like so… a front-end user would log into the system, be able to manage their previously uploaded files or view files that my customer had sent to them via the application, or upload a new file. If they uploaded a file, the page they looked at contained a few form fields which would be inserted into the database, which mostly helped track which Job Number the file belonged to and some other relevant data, a comments field, and the file field itself. The page also included two iframes, one hidden and one visible; we had decided to go with a simple remote scripting solution because we felt in the interest of the client’s budget that we wouldn’t try and implement anything fancier. In order to keep the user looking at the page they were currently on, the form had the target attribute point to the hidden iframe where it could process the information but otherwise keep the user in “stasis”: the second iframe would load a fairly standard progress bar upon form submission which would reload itself to allow user feedback for the user uploading the file, letting them see how their upload was doing as they waited. Once the actual processing script was complete, with the file written to the server’s hard drive and the database inserts all doing what they needed to do, an alert would be raised to the user letting them know the upload was successful and they would be redirected back to their main view.

All well and dandy, and this didn’t take too long to implement either. The management forms and reports along with dealer/user management functionality took longer than getting the critical functionality to work. Once it was all done, it was sent off to my client in a staging location where they could kick the tires a bit and see what they thought after I gave them the on-the-phone walkthrough of what their users would be going through, and how to use all their new tools for their side of the application as well.

Things went great and the client was extremely pleased… but one minor bug came up during our walkthrough. Apparently when my client clicked to upload her file, a popup window came up to execute the form processing script. What? The application had been tested in Windows IE6, IE7, Firefox2, Opera9, and Mac Firefox2 and Safari3 – we had figured we covered our bases pretty well, even if wasn’t EXHAUSTIVE testing for everything out there. She reported she was running Safari 2.0.4, and so began my joys of tracking down why exactly this may be happening. Google was surprisingly unhelpful, as many of the people asking for help with similar issues in online forums were being greeted with “have you tried this?” responses which were all pretty boilerplate stuff – nothing that really explained the issue nor any real definitive answers. Then I started finding some interesting suggestions after a lot more digging. Move the iframe above the form (or link) referencing it via the target attribute; apparently some browsers will not recognize the target if it did not exist in the DOM before it was referenced. Ensure your iframes have both id AND name attributes (mine already did). Don’t use display:none on your iframes… wait, what?

I believe the issue here comes from some confused implementation of the Permissive Policy that Safari 2.0.4 has in place – especially since the linked document says that Safari 3 also institutes the Permissive Policy, yet that version of the browser works just fine. Long story short, if an iframe has display:none set on it, Safari refuses to acknowledge the iframe as part of the DOM. As such, if you attempt to target a “hidden” iframe, Safari 2.0.4 will create a popup window the same way any browser will create a popup window if you set the target of an anchor to a name it does not recognize – it simply believes you are trying to create a named child window. How we get around this problem is as simple as it is stupid. Don’t try and hide the iframe, but give it width/height values in its style and ensure you have the border set to zero as well (side note: in my experience I have still found it always best to not only set the border in the style but also continue to use the frameborder attribute since some browsers don’t properly recognize the border style on an iframe; which means setting a border of “0px” may still leave you with a border). Once I had my iframe styled with a 1px-by-1px size with no border, I called my client to once again give it a shot. Lo and behold, the problem went away and the page functioned the way it was intended.

I understand some of the security in place per standards that have been set either by the W3C or other groups/organizations that exist to look out for the greater good, but especially when a simple workaround like this exists I still can’t tell if this is a bug or an intentional “feature” that just happens to be easily circumvented. With Safari in version 3 I don’t imagine Apple will be releasing an update for this issue anyway, even if it is a true bug, but it’s still something that I have shared with multiple other developers I know and not a single one can believe what I have told them. I guess you do learn something new every day.

Overall, the browser is fairly painless to use. The resolution on the DS is the biggest limitation, especially in terms of content width. But even such fairly intensive web apps such as gmail are usable from the browser, even if they do become slightly more complex to navigate.

I am half tempted to try and use the browser without the RAM Expansion afforded to me by the 3-in-1 (see my previous post about that), but I just don’t see it running very well. As it is, a little bit of sluggishness can be found on some sites, and I’m sure removng the expansion certainly wouldn’t HELP screen render times.

Using a browser like this and not having much experience with portable web browsing before now, I do wonder about the future of web standards and how long it may be until MOST sites either have WAP-friendly versions or simply all become coded to a proper standard that the content is displayed in a format specifically tailored for these types of web clients. In some ways I’m pretty late to the “mobile web” game, but really it’s still such a novelty that most developers that I know aren’t really thinking about it when they program a web site/application.

I guess we’ll see in time how long it takes before this type of surfing goes beyond something only the technophiles and the Blackberry/iPhone owners are doing.

So next step, do what I can do get K2 back up and running. I decided that rather than try and repair the current installation I’ll just back up the current one and install RC4. Which worked to an extent, but yet there was still some “set in WordPress but somehow affects K2″ settings that were still throwing some behind-the-scenes errors when trying to reference a small handful of files. All told from the “oops” point, it was probably 20 minutes of back and forth with me trying to fix things in the admin side and my buddy reporting on what PHP errors were still being thrown by the site. Good times.

Next time we do an update, K2 is being safely put on the shelf and reinstated once things appear to be all patched up. I still have some minor tweaks to make to the new install of K2, you may notice that things are a slight bit different on the site than they were before (a little less black, no HTML sidebar in the rightnav…) but I’m going to have to find the time to make these little adjustments. Soon.

I’ve known about meetup for the longest time, but as social networking sites go I’ve never really spent a lot of time looking that way. Tonight for some reason I decided to do a little google searching for local groups that may, perhaps, meet up and discuss topics that apply to webdev stuff; lo and behold, the first link sent me to meetup.com. Granted my original search term didn’t come up with any hits (I guess hoping for web standards was a little too specific?) but the “CT Web Designers and Developers” works for me!

Currently there are no scheduled meetups happening in the near future, but at least I signed myself up so I’ll be kept in the loop in case anything ever does come about. It would be really interesting to sit down with people that are within the industry, that aren’t my coworkers, who aren’t my friends, and jam out on some topics related to what we do. It never hurts to hurt new people and exchange ideas, you know?

Make sure you don’t have a POS machine that dies due to running flash for long periods of time: but this website has singlehandedly saved my sanity for trying to figure out how to play decent mixes of music while I’m at work. Fire it up, and presto. Want to change it up, make a new station. Occasionally you’ll get it stuck in a fairly limited genre of music (I punched in Nirvana and listed almost exclusively to them, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, and Live that day) but overall it’s just… awesome.

While they tout the fact that the file specification of DPG is open to the public, at the end of the day I don’t really care about that or the rest of the technical “blah blah blah blaaahhhhhhh” that seems to be the bulk of the information out there on using it. So here’s the very short list of what you need to get this bad boy up and running. (The .NET Framework 1.1 is also a prereq but I’m assuming you already have that, right?)

• AVISynth – Prerequisite to installing BatchDPG.
• BatchDPG – The encoding GUI I used for making the DPG’s.

Trial #1 was the latest episode of Family Guy which I grabbed online. The original AVI file was 178.8M, and the DPG file was a slender 49.2M. Then again the movie does get a bit neutered when encoding for the DS since programs like BatchDPG know that it doesn’t make sense to encode anything higher than a resolution that you can watch on one of the DS screens anyway (256×192 is max res), and I didn’t use the max audio bitrate either in my conversion. End result: I was pretty happy with the results. There seemed to be just a little bit of visual lag but I couldn’t tell if that was a result of frames being dropped (DPG movies are 24 FPS according to one source I read) or perhaps if the audio was ever so slightly out of sync. Whatever the issue was, my brain auto-adjusted pretty quick and it wasn’t more than 3 minutes in that I didn’t notice any issues at all.

Trial #2 was a full-length live-action film. I wanted to see how the encoding process went on a longer piece of video, plus I wanted to know if there were any sync issues here because I felt it would be much more noticeable with real actors (and potentially make the entire experience unpleasant). On a throw of the dart, I picked Casino Royale. 802M turned into 411M… not quite the 4:1 ratio I got off of Family Guy but still smaller. That said, the 2:1 ratio was totally worth it. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the source feed of the film (which was a DVDRip) compared to a recording off the television airwaves, but the image looked a lot cleaner and even the sound didn’t seem as muddled. Overall nice conversion, even if the letterboxing was so prominent on the film I picked that watching the full movie probably would have proved painful on this size screen.

I don’t see myself using this feature all the time, especially when this single full-length film takes up just over 20% of the capacity on my MicroSD card: I’d rather use that storage for games/homebrew/music. But if I have something like jury duty, or a flight, or any other point in time where I know I may have a good amount of time to kill and I’d rather just “veg” instead of playing a game? At least now I have the tools at hand ready to prepare some mobile entertainment. Since I don’t own a laptop or a portable DVD player, I’ll work with what I’ve got thanks.