rigoneri's blog

Turn a light bulb ON with every new user or download

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 21:26:00 -0500

About a year ago, maybe two I saw a tweet from Ben Milne, CEO of Dwolla that went along these lines: “I once wanted to light a light bulb every time we had a new transaction, today that light bulb would be on all the time” At the time I thought it was a really cool idea and wanted to do something similar, but the idea just got locked up in my head and I end up not doing anything about it.

A few weeks ago I met Ben at Big Kansas City and we talked about that idea, he said he did end up working on it at one point but the only thing left to finish was actually going out and buying the light bulb.

The next day I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It would be really cool if every time we had a new myHomework user or a new download a light bulb would light up. So I went around the internet trying to figure out if there was a way to control a lightbulb via USB. I end up finding this instructable that shows a step by step guide of how to control AC devices with your computer. So I decided to build it.

In the video every second counts as 1 new user or 1 new download. Every 30 seconds the program calls our private stats api and if there is a new user or download it turns the light bulb on.

To build it you need a USB Relay Interface called U451 made by http://www.usbmicro.com that you can only order via internet via http://www.circuitgizmos.com. Even though their websites look like it was made in the 90’s I was able to order it and have the U451 delivered after a few days.

The instructable does a good job explaining what you need to do step by step. The problems were that it was hard to get the exact same materials and the the programing they show in the end was to be run in some Windows 95 computer. So I had to improvise:

UPDATE: Please be very CAREFUL when hacking on AC devices. 110V current is extremely dangerous and can potentially kill. Read carefully the instructions and do never touch the U451 when it’s turned on. Use the blue shallow box to cover it up (with screws) before turning on.

Materials

Here is the full list of materials that I used, I was able to get them all at Home Depot:

1 - U451 USB Relay Interface
1 - 12x7 wood board
2 - Keyless Lamp Holders
1 - black 16 gauge wire
1 - white 16 gauge wire
2 - 60 watt soft white light bulbs
1 - 110V extension cord
2 - Wire nuts
4 - Spade Vinyl 16-14 AWG, Stud 4-6, 10/Clam
1 - Cable clamp
1 - Shallow box
4 - #4 screws
4 - #8 screws
4 - small stand offs (couldn’t find it, used something else)

Also make sure to have some wire crampers & strippers and a tiny screwdriver (the smallest you can find, to open close the relay terminals).

Programming

So since I couldn’t use their programming instructions to control the light bulb I had to figure something else out. I first tried using Python (pyusb) but the problem I was running into was getting full access to control the USB port, even trying as root I couldn’t get access.

So while troubleshooting I found a USBMicro library using C & Objective-C, since I’m pretty familiar with those I decided to just use it and went smoothly from there.

I end up creating a project called Light-U451 and put it on GitHub. The project allows you to control the lights with the push of a button on the screen, you can use this as a base for your own project. All I did differently from this project was call a private api that returns the count of new users and downloads and turn the light on every time I get something new.

Conclusion

It’s really awesome to visualize the number of users and downloads you get during the day with a light turning on. Usually those are just numbers you see on your analytics tool and after some time doesn’t mean much, just a number. But with a light turning on it makes that action alive! Sometimes you forget that there are actual people out there trying and using your products, when you see that light turn on it reminds you that you are actually touching people lives and not just making software.

We’ve been bootstrapping Instin (myHomework and Teachers.io) for about a year now (a post about that to come), we don’t have an office, we usually work from our homes, so when that light turns on it’s just me seeing it. So when we do have an office I will want this to be where everyone in the team can see it, so when they do they can feel the same way as I do. Having these light bulbs introduced me to a new goal of having that light on at all times.

Ryan, my co-founder gave the idea that I should get a red light bulb and if there is ever 500 error in the server or the servers are down that red light should turn on.

PPS

If you like it give it a up on Hacker News :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5630125

SoSummit 2013 & Big Kansas City

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:41:00 -0500

It’s been a few months since I wrote my last post and a lot happened since then. In this post I’ll highlight 2 events that I attended during that time, so here it go:

SoSummit 2013

Last month I attended the Startup Weekend Organizers Summit which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil! I’ve been organizing Startup Weekends in Kansas City for about a year now and I was fortunate to have the opportunity to go for free!

It was an awesome experience meeting SW organizers from all over the world where most of them share similar goals as me, such as making better startup communities where we live. It was really cool to see how different some startup weekends are specially overseas. For example in Morocco they sell out startup weekends over night for 1000 people, compared to KC where we cap at 100 and some events we don’t sell out. After talking with some of the organizers came to find out that the event is free because of the amount of sponsors they have.

Another cool part of the summit were the speakers, who are somewhat well known in the startup world!

Marc Ecko - He gave a talk about on how to build your personal brand, which was a lot different than what I expected, instead of talking about your brand on the outside he was talking more about your brand on the inside and around how things make you feel an makes you act. Mostly around his new book Unlabel which will come out later this year. He will be speaking at Big Omaha in a few weeks, I wonder if it will be a similar talk.
Dave Mcclure - His talk summarizes to this: F**K. As you may know he likes that word a lot when speaking. His talk was about startup weekend in general, pointing out the bad and the donts. Although I initially thought it was disrespectful, It seemed that he was the most honest person up there. I do think that all of the f bombs are more of an act and part of his brand, I didn’t get a chance to talk to him but I’ve heard from people that knows him well that he is not always like that.
Brad Feld - He was only there for the last day of the summit which was the first day of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. His talk was around Startup Communities and how in order to succeed it needs to be lead by entrepreneurs rather than entities. It was kind of the exact same talk he gave at Thic Iowa (Now Big Iowa) last October around his book ‘Startup Communities’.
Paul Kedrosky & Brad Feld - They had a pannel that was really entertraining to watch. There was big argument about how to measure successful startup and from Paul’s perspective in order for a startup to make an impact it needs to make more than 100M a year. Which Brad didn’t agree. There was also a big analogy of dead startups and dead bodies in the swamp which just added to the argument. But the most entertaining part was that Dave Mcclure was watching from audience and had some big opinions. I just wonder how awesome it would be if he did have a mic.

Overall the summit was great. I was able to meet some really cool people from all over the world, most that offered a place to crash if I ever go by where they live. I hope I get to go again next year, I’m sure it will definitely be worth it.

Big Kansas City

The week after I came back from SOSummit I volunteered at Big Kansas City. Big KC is part of a series of 3 “Big” events in the Silicon Prairie organized by Silicon Prairie News. The other two you probably seen me write about it: Big Omaha and Big Iowa (formally Thinc Iowa). It’s usually a 2 day event where mostly successful entrepreneurs from all over the US come give a talk about some experience they had while inspiring the audience.

This event was our first Big series event in Kansas City. Some of the big names speaking were: Scott Harrison (Charity Water), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Dan Martell (Clarity), Micah Baldwin (Graphic.ly), Mike Macadaan (Science) and etc…

Since I was volunteering at the event, my task was to take care of the slides and make sure it was all working. So I was mostly backstage while the event was going. The cool thing about it was that I got to see how nervous some of the speakers get before going on stage and what they do to calm themselves down. Each one does something different, some pace back and forth, some do some breathing exercises, some go over their deck and some speak to the wall :)

Another cool thing was that as soon as they got off the stage I usually had a question for them which sometimes got them to talk a little further than just the Q&A they give on stage.

One of the cool things about Big events is that the speakers stick around for the parties. This time close to the end of the closing party I got to play Warewolf with some of the speakers. Micah Baldwin was the one that put it together and I’ve heard that he did that when he spoke at Big Omaha a few years ago.

Overall Big KC was just like the other Big Series event: very well organized, an impressive attention to detail, great speakers and great parties. Can’t wait for Big Omaha in a few weeks!

Introducing Clash Tactics

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:41:00 -0600

For the past couple of months I’ve been playing a game on my iPad called Clash of Clans. An addictive iOS only combat strategy game that allows you to build and defend your village while battling with people all over the world. Clash of Clans has become really popular, to the point that it has been the top grossing app in the App Store for several weeks, with millions of downloads.

In order to succeed in this game you need to have a strong defensive village so that when you get attacked you don’t lose a lot of resources needed for upgrades. However there are numerous ways to layout your village based on your level. While playing I found myself going around looking at other villages to get ideas on how to make mine better. That took time and most of the time the village I was looking at wasn’t in the same level as mine.

So I thought to myself “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app where players could upload screenshots of their villages and vote up which ones are the best, so it’s easier to find the best layout for your level? Maybe since there are a lot of people playing this game people will use it…” So I decided to build it!

If you didn’t read my last blog post, during the holidays I spent 1 month with my family in Brazil where I took 2 weeks off and worked 2 weeks. During those 2 weeks that I worked I built and launched Clash Tactics. It was a pretty fast project. I ended up learning and using a few iOS libraries that I haven’t used before. I also decided to put ads (iAds and Admob) in the app so I could learn more about it and see if I could make some extra money for my company, instin.

It’s been two weeks since the app was launched. I haven’t announced until now because there were some bugs that I had to fix, but even with those bugs (fixed in version 1.0.2) the numbers are already showing the time was worth spending on it. Without any promotion, the app has been downloaded over 63K times, with over 7K registered to upload and like layouts. During that time there were over 2.6K village layouts uploaded.

The app is available for both iPhone and iPad. The functionality is really simple. You sign in with facebook and upload a screenshot of your village layout. You can vote up which layouts you like, and you can see top layouts voted by level, recent layouts, favorite layouts and uploaded layouts.

If you are a Clash of Clans player and are looking on how to setup your defense, download the app! It’s FREE!

2012 Year in Review & 2013 goals

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 08:57:00 -0600

Every year I like to look back at the year that has passed and reflect upon it. This year is no different but I’m a little late. I spent the holidays with my family in Brazil and just now I’m getting back on computer/work mode.

The year started I was still at Cerner, working 9 to 5 and coming home and working on side projects. My role at Cerner was good, I had been promoted few months back, now reporting to a director being somewhat the lead front-end web dev trying to put in place a standard that could be used among different teams inside our group.

March came around I went to SXSW for the second time, however this time it wasn’t as great as the year before. There were too many people and the weather didn’t help much since some of the sessions were in different buildings. However every time I go there it seems to be something that ignites the entrepreneur bug that crawls in my blood. When I came back I was pumped about the work I was doing on the side but not about the one that I was doing during the day. Things weren’t the same anymore, our group had gotten even bigger, and instead of working towards building a product I was working on things that other developers would use. I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t passionate about it anymore, and came to find out that Keith and Ryan (my co-founders) weren’t either so we begin to explore other options…

In April instead of participating I volunteered at Kansas City’s Startup Weekend, the atmosphere around startup weekends are just amazing and this time I was able to hang out with people that were part of the KC startup community instead of working on a project during the weekend.

Close to the end of April and beginning of May both Keith, Ryan and I quit our jobs at Cerner to work on Instin full-time. It was a big step for us, going from the comfy corporate job to work at our own startup. I even wrote a guest post for Silicon Prairire News about us leaving our job.

In May Keith and I went to Big Omaha a conference about innovation and entrepreneurship. There we met several entrepreneurs and watched some pretty cool talks including: Philip Rosedale (@philiplinden, Second Life), Jim McKelvey (@2000f, Square), Seth Goldstein (@seth, turntable.fm), Brian Wong (@brian_wong, kiip) and Sahil Lavingia (@shl, Gumroad)

In June the Kauffman Foundation was going to have their first demo day where startups from the region are invited to present to a room full of entrepreneurs, investors and advisors. We were fortunate to be one of them. That day felt like it was when we finally introduced our company to the Silicon Prairie startup community, which to me has grown immensely this year! Here is the video

Also in June I started a new side project to rebuild my personal website. However didn’t want it to be just a blog, I wanted to do something different, I wanted to plug in all the social networks I was part of. I called it Syte, and when I build it I decided to make it open source so other developers could use it, turned out that developers all over the world loved the idea. Syte hit the top post of Hacker News twice!! I has 2155 stars/watchers and 562 forks! Never thought it would get as big as it got and the dev community is enhancing it even further!

In July I decided to take a week off and me and my wife went on a Caribbean Cruise to celebrate our 1 year anniversary. That’s definitely one the most enjoyable ways to go to 4 countries in a week and we are definitely doing it again. We went to Haiti, Grand Cayman, Jamaica and Cozumel - Mexico.

In August we launched Teachers.io to friends and family, which allows teachers to have a beautiful public profile, manage their classes and share class information with students using myHomework.

Also in August myHomework was nominated for Silicon Prairie app of the year and I was nominated for Startup Technologist of the year. Even though we didn’t win on both categories it was really cool to be nominated!

Close to the end of August I launched a second side project called Better Nest which is a Chrome plugin that enhances the twitter.com website experience. It tells the people that had followed and unfollowed you, it shows your tweets from the current day on previous years, and saves the scrolling location when loading new tweets. Although it didn’t get very popular I still use it every day :)

In September we were approached by Microsoft to build myHomework for Windows 8 that was going to launch in October. After a demo meeting with them we decided to do so. However we had to wait until October to do build it so since we were busy finishing the myHomework integration with Teachers.io. 3 weeks before the deadline we finally had some time to build it so we did, we finished in 2 weeks. Ryan wrote a nice blog post about that as well.

In October Ryan, Keith and I attended Thinc Iowa (Now Big Iowa) which is conference similar to Big Omaha focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. There we met even more entrepreneurs and watched some pretty cool talks including: Steve Case (@SteveCase, AOL & Starup America), Brad Feld (@bfeld, Foundry Group) and Antonio Neves (@TheAntonioNeves) My favorite talk was actually Antonio Neves’ “Three steps to create your own luck”

Close to the end of October we launched a complete redesign of myHomework for iPhone, iPad and the Web. We also launched myHomework integration with Teachers.io, which enabled us to launch Teachers.io to the rest of the world. This was another big step for us, at that point Instin wasn’t just about a student planner, now it was becoming a classroom tool that integrates teachers and students.

In November I was part of the group that organized Kansas City’s Startup Weekend 6. That was a pretty cool experience going from participating, to volunteering, to organizing. KCSW was really cool I got to meet even more entrepreneurs and in some way I feel I got to help the KC startup community.

The year ended I went to Brazil, where I’m at right now. Turned out that one of the great things working for yourself that you can work from anywhere. I’ve been here almost a month I took 2 weeks off to hang out with my family and 2 weeks to work.

I feel like 2012 was a great year! Lots changed in my professional life, I got to meet some amazing people throughout the year, and I’m finally working towards something I’m passionate about. I hope 2013 is just as amazing or better!

Last year I put together a list of my 2012 goals here is what was accomplished:

Get 1000+ twitter followers (FAIL, only got to 600 this year, maybe I need to build more cool stuff like Syte or start speaking at conferences to get more followers)
Blog at least once a month (SUCCESS, I’ve blogged a lot this year and between rigoneri.com, blog.instin.com and blog.myhomeworkapp.com I got it done)
Make $1 million dollars (FAIL, yeah haven’t got there yet, but I’m not giving up)
Have something I create/created in a top tech news site (SUCCESS, Syte got on Hacker news twice and on Smashing Magazine, and myHomework got on HLN even though it’s not tech site)
Meet more entrepreneurs, developers, investors etc… (SUCCESS, If you read the full post above this year I definitely did that!!)
Make 5 new apps or websites (SUCCESS, I built Teachers.io, myHomework for Win 8, Syte, Better Nest, and some while still at Cerner)
Go to 5 conferences or events (SUCCESS, I went to SXSW, KCSW 5, Big Omaha, Thinc Iowa, KCSW6 and a few others…)
Go to 5 concerts (FAIL, I only saw FUN at SXSW before they were a big thing. I had AVICII scheduled to go but it was canceled :( )
Go through the full Insanity workout (FAIL, I almost finished this one I did a month and a half and got tired of it)
Secret (SUCCESS, the secret goal was to quit my job and work on my startup full time, I couldn’t reveal this in the beginning of the year)

And here are my goals for 2013!

Start a family (Yep, we want to get pregnant this year and hopefully have a baby as well, this is the only one I can’t control)
Make Instin grow (Hopefully by the end of the year we have an office, some employees, with millions of users and making a lot of money)
Get 1000+ twitter followers
Make $1 million dollars (I’ll never give up!)
Blog at least once a month (Still want to keep this as a goal)
Get 2 or 3 mentors (It would be nice to have some folks that already been in my position that I can bounce off ideas and help me grow)
Speak at a conference or event
Go to 5 concerts
Travel (To US cities or other countries)
Build 5 new apps or websites

myHomework's History & Design Evolution

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:31:00 -0600

We just finished releasing a major update to myHomework where students can now join a Teachers.io class and automatically receive assignments, tests, syllabus, attachments and announcements directly on their devices. Every major release I rethink the design and try to make it look better than before. This time was no different. myHomework has been around for a couple of years now, so I’ve gathered enough assets that I think it’s time to write about its evolution, where it came from, what it means, etc…

It all started with the iPhone app in 2009. I was still in college, the iPhone SDK had come out, people were starting to write apps and become successfull, so I decided to do the same. I thought to myself that even if the app didn’t become successful at least it was a great thing to have on a resume. So I went out to B&N, bought one of the first books dedicated exclusively to Objective-C and started learning. A few days later I started to get the hang of it and started thinking of what kind of app to build.

Since I was still in school my biggest problem was staying organized. Even though my school used to give student planners for free I would always forget it in my dorm room, or lose it. I remember going to the App Store searching for a student planner app but the ones available were all ugly and you had to pay for it. So why not a student planner app that was free and looked cool? Well that’s what I decided to build…

While looking for some design inspiration I noticed that some apps were trying to mimic real life objects. I remember thinking that those apps looked really cool, so instead of making it look like any other app in the store with a blue navigation bar and a black toolbar I decided to make it look like a notebook. So I whipped out my basic tutorial, learned photoshop skills and started designing. I remember having some issues with the navigation design, I really didn’t want to add that black toolbar for navigation. So my girlfriend (now my wife) had this amazing idea of having the navigation look like sticky notes, so I decided to do it.

After buiding the app I had to come up with a name. Instead of coming up with a new word in the dictionary I wanted a name that actually meant something. Around that time a lot of apps were following the Apple wording trend of putting the letter ‘i’ in front of a word. I remember seeing iHomework, iStudent, iStudy and etc… I also couldn’t use just the word because they were already claimed. So I thought to myself: I’m building this app for me, so I can keep track of my classes, so I can keep track of my homework so I decided to use the word ‘my’ and I called it myHomework.

I launched myHomework, graduated from college, joined a really large corporation in Kansas City (Cerner) as a software engineer and left myHomework to the side. I then created a few other apps just for fun during my free time, such as the simple kids game called Touch Boom! and a 2010 world cup app called my Goal.

In 2010 I joined a team at Cerner to do web development for a new consumer product. While on that team I learned a lot about web development, especially from two guys: Ryan and Keith. Towards the end of that year the execs wanted a new product, but they wanted it to be built in only two weeks! So they put me, Ryan, Keith and a designer in a room and we got it done. After that we noticed that the 3 of us could work really well together so we started looking at some side projects to work on. Around that time myHomework was doing well, it had close to a million downloads and students were loving it, so we saw an opportunity there and decided to join forces and start a company and we called it Instin.

When that happened we decided to rebuild myHomework from scratch. I removed the sticky notes metaphor but kind of kept the notebook look and feel. The navigation was moved to a launcher view which kind of mimics the iPhone launcher. We noticed that worked really well and allowed us to add in new pages and features when needed. Around May 2011 we launched a new version of myHomework for iPhone, a website and an Android app.

During 2011 we got a lot more students using myHomework, a lot of feedback on how to improve it and a lot of requests for an iPad app. That’s when a new redesign of myHomework came to be, I ported the iPhone app into an universal app, improved the design to have a better texture and gradient and nearly the end of 2011 we launched myHomework for iPad.

2012 came around we noticed that by launching the iPad app we got a lot more downloads and users passing the 2 million download mark. While working on myHomework as a side project for nearly a year we learned a lot about the education space and how there is an opportunity to increase education with the use of technology. We also learned that the current offerings weren’t great and how students and teachers were not happy with what they had/have. So in May 2012 Keith, Ryan and I decided to quit our jobs to work full time on our company Instin and myHomework.

If you are wondering what Instin means, it stands for Einstein but without the ‘e’s

Since May 2012 we’ve been busy! We launched a Windows 8 app which you can read more about it here. We also launched a completely new design of myHomework’s website, iPhone and iPad app that’s a lot more crisp, clean and easy to touch. We also launched a new product called Teachers.io which is a place for teachers to organize their classes, assignments and resources and for students that are using myHomework to automatically download the teacher’s content on their devices and be reminded of when things are due.

With this new version of myHomework we are taking it to a new level. We are no longer just a student planner. Along with Teachers.io, myHomework is starting to become a classroom tool that hopefully will improve the experience that students and teachers are having in class and the current frustations will go away. With this new version we also have a more beautiful logo. The blue background represents the cover of the notebook where the pencil and eraser are placed on the top.

I’m extremelly exited about how far myHomework has gone and about what is yet to come. As we grow we are commited to making the life of students and teachers easier. Hopefully one day we will be able to look back and see what a great job we’ve done.

- Rigo

Designing for Windows 8 Metro

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:56:00 -0500

We’ve recently finished building our cross-platform student planner app, myHomework for Windows 8. It will be available for download when the Windows 8 Store launches October 26th. I recommend you reading the blog post my co-founder Ryan put together about us building the app: From Zero to Windows 8 Store in Two Weeks.

Towards the end of the summer we got approached by Microsoft into building myHomework for Windows 8, we were really impressed by their demo so we agreed to do so. After playing around with the OS and some of the pre-built apps we’ve learned that designing a Windows 8 app is a lot different than designing an iPad app or a Website. In this post I want to outline some of the things we learned.

Layout

The first thing I noticed when playing with Windows 8 is the clean layout. Everything is composed by tiles that most of the time takes you to a detailed view of an item. These tiles are placed vertically but grouped horizontaly, so unlike an iPad app or a Website were most of the scrolling is vertical, on Windows 8 most of the scrolling is horizontal. For example here is a screenshot of the (all) Homework page of myHomework:

In iOS or Web these homework items would be placed one below the other where you would have to scroll down to see more. In Windows 8 once the tiles reach the bottom of the page the next tile is placed on the column to the right and whenever you need to see more you just scroll to the right.

But there are also some special occasions such as when you have some long text inside of a detailed view of an item or when you are in a snapped view (more about snapped views later) those usually scroll vertically.

Navigation

The second thing I noticed when playing with Windows 8 is the navigation. Instead of relying on a menu/tab bar, your most important items are somewhat already preloaded but grouped in different sections. For example here is the home screen of myHomework, or “hub” in Microsoft’s verbiage.

Notice that we have 3 sections “Important”, “Homework” and “Classes”. In most cases these sections would be buttons in a menu/tab bar or links in a navigation bar. In Windows 8 we display that information already when the app is loaded. However we cap the amount that is displayed so the user knows that there is more sections to see. For example when a student has a lot of homework we limit the homework section into 2 columns, but we add a load more tile that loads 2 more columns in that section.

Also notice that under “Homework >” and “Classes >” there is a right arrow next to the word. This is a Windows 8 standard that indicates that there is a more detailed group view for that section, which you can see an example in the (all) Homework section picture under Layout up above.

Semantic Zoom

But what if there are multiple sections and a lot of tiles in one page? Scrolling all the way to the right to get to another section must be really annoying right? Well, Microsoft’s answer is Semantic Zoom. You can pinch out the main area and a grouping of all available sections appear. Once you touch on a tile you are automatically taken to that section. For example here is the (all) Homework page under semantic zoom.

Notice that we also add the count of how many items are under each section.

Snapped View

Windows 8 allows you to “snap” an app to the side, which scales the app to somewhat of a mobile view. This allow users to have 2 apps side by side, in our case the user can have the list of homework due snapped to one side and be doing their homework or taking notes on the other. When in snapped view the layout changes to be vertical rather than horizontal, similar to an iPhone or Android app.

Since we built the app using HTML, CSS and JavaScript (WinJS) all we had to do to support snapped view was to use media queries. Similar to someone doing responsive UI on the web.

App Bar

Windows 8 also has an app bar, which is the place where you put most of your commands and actions relevant to the context of the current page or selection. The app bar is usually hidden, all the user has to do is swipe from the bottom and the app bar appears.

Data Entry

Data entry is pretty straight forward just like any platform, they provide some builtin controls that you can put it in a form. The question is where to put the form. Should we put it in it’s own page? Should we put it in a light box that appears on the side or in the center? Should it be in a popover like some iPad apps? Microsoft’s suggested approach is to put in it’s own page, however I’ve seen some apps putting some small login forms in a centered light box.

We had some problems with optional date pickers. Right now they don’t provide any date picker controls that are optional, you either have to write a custom one or change the UI to have an extra step to show the date picker, we chose the UI.

Search

Search is something that I find really neat in Windows 8. Instead of the app having its own search field that only works when the app is open, in Windows 8 search has it’s own place and is available everywhere, even when the app is closed. All the user has to do is swipe from the right edge and a search button will appear which will allow the user to search any file, app or content within an app. Here is how search looks with myHomework.

Sharing

Sharing works similar to search, sharing is available everywhere. That way the developer doesn’t have write its own sharing functionality to a social network, email or another app. All the user has to do is swipe from the right edge and a share button will appear which will allow the user to share using any installed app that supports sharing.

Conclusion

I personally believe that Windows 8 metro style is amazing! It’s simple, clean, easy to understand and adapt. I’m really impressed by what Microsoft put together in this version of Windows. I especially love that we can easily build Windows 8 apps using web technologies. As a developer and designer for iOS and Web, developing and designing for Windows 8 was fast and fun! I hope other developers experience the same.

If you want more information about designing for Windows 8, they have a lot of documentation and examples available:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh779072.aspx

If you want more information about developing for Windows 8, their documentation and sample code is available at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br229565.aspx

Cheers,

Rigo

Introducing Better Nest: A better twitter.com home experience

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 22:21:00 -0500

I’ve tried all kinds of Twitter clients for my Mac and didn’t find one that really satisfied me, so when Twitter created the #NewNewTwitter I decided to stick with the website version. But that still wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to know information such as: who unfollowed me, my past tweets and etc… So since I’m a developer I decided to write some code to enhance the twitter.com page and some of you might find it useful as well.

I would like to introduce Better Nest a Chrome extension that modifies the current twitter.com page by giving you features that you really care about.

Followed/Unfollowed Me

It adds two lists “Followed Me” and “Unfollowed Me” that shows me quickly who followed or unfollowed me, without having to wait for an email or having to click the connect tab to show me just who followed me.

Me on This Day

It creates a new list “Me on This day” which shows my tweets from this exact same day from previous years. This works really well if you’ve been using twitter for a couple of years now.

Fixes ‘New Tweets’ Scrolling

Every time I click on the “X New Tweets” link the list scrolls all the way to the top and I always lose the spot that I was when I read the last tweet. This feature fixes that, it shows the new tweets above the current one, similar to the Twitter iOS apps.

Better Nest also gives you the ability to hide the “Who to follow” and “Trends” lists that I never use.

Go ahead! Try it out! Better Nest extension is available for Chrome.

PLEASE NOTE:

Twitter only allows up to return 3,200 of a user’s most recent statuses, so if you have a lot more than 3,200 tweets those tweets will not show under ‘Me on this day’
Twitter only allows 150 requests per hour, so if you share internet in a big network, things might not work perfectly for you, better results at home! :)
If twitter ever changes their website this extension will need to be updated

UPDATE:

Better Nest is no longer available for Firefox. They have a really annoying review process and creating firefox extensions is a pain in the a**, I had to refactor the whole code in order to make it work for Firefox and they still rejected it. Use Chrome it’s a much better browser!

We've been nominated for the Silicon Prairie Awards!

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 22:42:00 -0500

We so excited! Silicon Prairie News announced last week that we were nominated for 2 categories on the inaugural 2012 Silicon Prairie Awards! Which are awards given to companies and individuals for their outstanding products, strong leadership and noteworthy contributions to the Silicon Prairie community (Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri and Kansas region). If you are familiar with Techcrunch’s Crunchies Awards, it’s the same thing but for companies and individuals in the Midwest.

I was nominated for Startup Technologist of the Year which description follows:

This team member, freelancer or consultant made a significant contribution toward development of a startup’s product. (Contributed to startup product active between July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012.)

And our app myHomework was nominated for Mobile App of the Year which description follows:

This app featured a notable design and user interface, broke the mold for what we’d expect from a mobile app or reached a high number of downloads.

So, If you think myHomework and I deserve to get an award, vote for us!! Voting closes August 22nd.

A new swimming sport? Underwater Rings

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 23:31:00 -0500

Last night I was watching the 2012 Olympics swimming and after some time I noticed how every race was pretty much the same. Each race was one of the 4 different stroke types: freestyle, butterfly, breast stroke and backstroke. The only difference being the distance or a mix between the 4. Now, I know that they try to make these races really exciting (which some are) but after some time I started to get bored, so I started to daydream a little…

What if there was a new swimming sport? I know that they have other swimming/water sports such as synchronized swimming, water polo, and diving (which btw is really cool to watch)… But it hasn’t been a new in-water sport since the beginning of the 1900s.

One game I used to play when I was a little kid, and I’m sure other kids did as well, was to see If I could go underwater from one side of the pool to the other. What if this new sport had that rule in it? You would have to be underwater at all times. I know that might be too easy for some of these olympic swimmers, but what if we turned the difficulty up a little?

It would be a time based sport which the fastest win. There would be rings of different sizes at different locations that the swimmer had to go through in order. If the swimmer touched a ring, a penalty time would be added to the swimmers’ time. It could be just like the traditional races with different lengths 50m, 100m, 200m and etc…

I put together some sketches to make it easier to picture the sport:

After some googling I found that in the 1900 Olympics there were both underwater and obstacle races and after that year it never happened again. I wonder why…

I’m not sure how sports used to get started but I feel that some innovation need to happen, we’ve been playing the same sports for a long time, it’s time to change, some of these sports are getting boring and I think it’s a perfect time to try…

Syte's Unexpected Traction and Numbers

Sun, 24 Jun 2012 16:11:00 -0500

It has been 2 weeks since I launched Syte with the expectation that just some of my closer developer friends would use it for their personal websites, but it went a lot different than what I expected. Here are just a few compilation of numbers that I gathered about Syte so I don’t forget in a few months.

Syte currently has 781 watchers and 239 forks on Github, since launch Syte’s github page had over 7,000 unique visitors, and 26 people who have successfully deployed their own Syte and issued a pull request with their colors.

When I blogged about Syte I decided to put it on Hacker News first to see how it works and maybe get a few more users to use it. 2 hours later my Hacker News post hit #1 and was being commented by a lot of people, after a day or two my post got out of the tops and accumulated 309 points, which is kind of unusual for most posts.

Overall my tweet’s bit.ly url had 1,268 clicks, 39 saves and 3 shares, which is a lot higher than what I usually get.

Hacker News bot on twitter which has over 20,000 followers auto-posted about Syte and had 12 retweets and 22 favorites.

Silicon Prairie News which is one of the biggest startup/tech news blogs in the midwest posted about it, you can see it by following this link http://spne.ws/i3. The post also got featured on the top of SPN.

Smashing Magazine which has over 575,000 followers on twitter posted about Syte and had over 58 retweets and 205 favorites. Smashing Mag’s bit.ly link had 1,591 clicks, 68 shares and 10 saves.

Overall the OSS community has been awesome! They let me know about some issues they found which I was able to fix it quickly. Some folks issued some pretty cool pull requests like Denis Kirenbuhl who added the Disqus integration. A few are working on some interesting forks such as David Sivocha who is working on a Node.js version of Syte.

Below are few things I still want to get integrated to Syte but not sure how soon I’ll be able to get to it since I’m focusing a lot of my time in business Instin, if anyone want to take a stab on any of these just send a pull request and I’ll review it:

Wordpress Integration
Facebook Integration
Foursquare Integration
LinkedIn Integration
Youtube Integration
Netflix Integration
Flickr Integration
Picasa Integration
Last.fm Integration
Rdio Integration
Spotify Integration
Etsy Integration
Fitbit Integration
etc…

That’s it, I’m really happy that Syte got some traction and people are using it. If anyone has any suggestions on how to make it better let me know!

Introducing Syte! An open sourced personal site that has social integrations

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:12:00 -0500

I know a lot of people that should have a personal web site but they don’t. Some of them are developers and some are designers, both that should be capable of putting one together but they don’t. Some do but lack the other side, some developers lack the design skills and some designers lack the developer skills. This bothers me! These people are so talented that sometimes they are held by the other side. They should have a place where they should be showing their work and what they learned so other people can learn from it.

I would like to introduce Syte, an open sourced personal site that has social integrations such as tumblr, twitter, github, dribbble and instagram. You can see it for yourself throughout this site, rigoneri.com is using Syte.

Tumblr Integration

Syte uses Tumblr for blogging, which means that you can create your posts from tumblr and they will appear within your Syte, like this post.

Twitter Integration

Syte integrates with Twitter, which means that when someone clicks on a link that points to a user’s twitter profile the profile is loaded within your site along with the user’s latest tweets. Try it out, checkout mine or Justin Bieber’s twitter profile within this site.

Github Integration

Syte integrates with Github, which means that when someone clicks on a link that points to a user’s github profile the profile is loaded within your site along with a list of the user’s repos. Try it out, checkout mine or Facebook’s github profile within this site.

Dribbble Integration

Syte integrates with Dribbble, which means that when someone clicks on a link that points to a user’s dribbble profile the profile is loaded within your site along with the user’s latest shots. Try it out, checkout my Dribble profile within this site.

Instagram Integration

Syte integrates with Instagram, which means that you can show your instagram pictures within your site like a profile. Currently the only way to display your pictures is through their iPhone and Android apps, this is not even possible through their own website. Since instagram is a little restrict on that area you can try it out by clicking on the instagram link on the left navigation.

Responsive UI

Syte is responsive, which means that it scales down to a mobile device screen size.

You can learn something from it!

Syte uses the Django web framework to handle requests and call the integration apis (with python). On the frontend Syte uses HTML5 and CSS3 while using the LESS CSS preprocessor.

Syte also uses several JS libraries listed below:

For static compression and minification Syte uses some Node.js libraries:

For deployment Syte uses Heroku since it’s free for 750 dyno-hours per month.

There are a lot of documentation on how to put your Syte together, hopefully while you are at it you will be able to learn something from it!

Syte’s design is pretty simple and was inspired by the Svbtle Network. The social integrations was inspired by about.me.

Fork it away!

So that’s it, you can fork Syte on Github and start putting your personal website together! There is only one rule: You must choose a different adjacent color as the people currently using. So hurry up! and start putting your Syte together!!

My new office, at home

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 15:59:00 -0500

It’s been a week since I made the jump and been working full time on Instin. Here is where I’ve been spending most of my time, my home office. I just finished decorating it by adding some of my favorite quotes on the walls.

The first quote from Steve Jobs is part of the his 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech which is really inspiring. The other two quotes I have no idea when and where it was said, if anyone knows let me know.

These quotes are stick on letters that I got from Hobby Lobby and put it on the wall. I wish they had other font types, but these ones actually doesn’t look that bad. If you want to put together one yourself I used these 3/4” black stick on letters and these 1” red stick on letters.

Making the Jump: How we did it

Fri, 25 May 2012 10:37:48 -0500

This post was written as my announcement for leaving my full time job at Cerner and it was posted as part of Silicon Prairie News’s Founder Friday series. You may chose to read the article on Silicon Prairie News or continue reading.

Picture is part of the video: Venture to the Eiger by Blake Byles

Today marks the last day at my corporate day job. That’s right people, I’m making the jump. I’m leaving my safe and comfy job to work on the startup I cofounded called Instin! But hold on, it wasn’t that easy, for the past 15 months I’ve been planning for this day. If you read last week’s post by Bo Fishback, I’m part of the group of people that “Side projects turn into companies”.

15 months ago me and my co-founders Ryan and Keith, who also made the jump, decided to devote the majority of our free time to work on a side project I started called myHomework. myHomework is a student planner app that helps students stay organized on their classes by receiving notifications of when assignments and tests are due. Today myHomework has been downloaded over 2 million times, with over 400,000 active students this past semester and 25,000 who have paid for the extended features.

Having a side project is easy, I have several friends that have side projects, some are great ideas that can become companies as well. What makes the difference is how serious you take it and how much time you are willing to devote to it. Gary Vaynerchuk during a really inspiring talk at Web 2.0 Expo 2008 once said:

If you want this, if you are miserable or you don’t like it, or you want to do something else, or you have a passion somewhere else… Work nine to five, spend a couple of hours with your family, seven to two in the morning is plenty of time to do damage!

That’s what we did! Every day from 9 AM to 5 PM we worked really hard at our day jobs, then we would go home and work really hard on our side project until we went to bed.

You may say “I don’t have time, I have a wife, I have kids”

Guess what? We do too! Ryan is married and has 2 kids, Keith is married and has 3 kids, I’m married and have a really cute but annoying dog! One trick that I learned is how to multitask and be productive! This helps when balancing family and work.

I’ve watched all those popular TV shows like: Dancing With The Stars, The Bachelor & Bachelorette, Glee, Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Biggest Loser, American Idol and etc. The time I spend watching those shows, I’m sitting next to my wife, with my laptop on me and working. Every now and then I make a comment about the TV show, which shows her that I’m somewhat paying attention and that’s enough to make her happy!! On weekends I wake up early, go to a coffee shop and work.

I’ve also learned that I need to take at least one day/night a week to devote all my time to my family, it’s usually Friday nights, it also helps me relax and recover.

You may say “My job expects me to put extra hours!”

Our jobs expected that too, but most importantly our jobs expected to get the work done by the time expected to be done. My co-founders and I all came from a technical background, something we noticed while working on our side project is that we learned a lot of new technologies. Technologies that we brought back to our day jobs which made the work inside the company better and more productive, which also helped us get promoted faster.

We also noticed that our executives were getting really excited about side projects and started encouraging other employees to do the same. Side projects helps companies innovate in ways usually not available on typical job routines, which turns into creating better products. In the end both sides win!

You may ask: “Why didn’t you guys make the jump earlier?”

Well, we didn’t know anything about: running a business, raising money, validating an idea, marketing a product. We just knew how to build a product and build it well, however we were really committed to learning about it.

I started following people expert on the subject matter on twitter such as entrepreneurs and investors, I started listening to entrepreneur focused podcasts, I started watching Kevin Rose’s Foundation videos. I started reading books and blogs. I attended Kansas City Startup Weekends, I attended startup conferences like (SXSW and Big Omaha).

But most importantly, I started getting involved with the Silicon Prairie startup community. If you live in Kansas City I recommend you signing up for the Startup Digest newsletters, attend a Startup Weekend and come to a KC Geek Night.

Overall If you are part of a big corporation, want to learn more about entrepreneurship and always had the “what if” question, I believe side projects are the way to go. After some time you find out if the project you are working on is actually getting anywhere, while still keeping the nice benefits of a corporate job. Hopefully soon you will also have the opportunity to make the jump!

#BigOmaha and 3 little stories I will never forget

Mon, 14 May 2012 12:41:00 -0500

Keith and I on Big Omaha’s photo booth

If you follow me on twitter you probably already know that I went to Big Omaha this year, and just like I was expecting it was the best conference I’ve ever attended. I’ve been 2x to WWDC (Apple’s Nerd Conference) and 2x to SXSW (The Spring break for geeks) and still this one was the best. If you don’t know what Big Omaha is you are missing out. Just like their twitter description says Big Omaha is the Nation’s Most Interconnected Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and is produced by the Silicon Prairie News.

2 days, 1 big room and 14 Kick Ass speakers including Philip Rosedale (@philiplinden, Second Life), Jim McKelvey (@2000f, Square), Seth Goldstein (@seth, turntable.fm), Brian Wong (@brian_wong, kiip) and Sahil Lavingia (@shl, Gumroad). But most importantly Big Omaha had an attention to detail “Steve Jobs like crazy”, which is awesome:

Perfect Days (Thursday and Friday). When the conference was over I still had the whole weekend to recover.
1 Big Room. Instead of having to worry about where to be on your next talk (like sxsw and wwdc) everyone is in one big room.
30 Minutes Breaks. Every 2 or 3 talks we had a 30 minutes break to get something to drink or eat, but most importantly network!
Standing Ovation. Every time someone gets on stage everyone gives a standing ovation. At first I was like “wtf, why do I have to stand up” but that’s so freaking cool, it reenergizes the crowd!
Badges. You write your own name on your badge, and on both sides so now worrying about having it on the right side. And it’s perfectly sized so you can put your business card in it.
Size. Only 600 people attend Big Omaha, so no huge lines and long waits.
Bathrooms. The bathrooms had a little container that had gum, medicine and some other cool stuff which it was awesome since I’m always looking for gum.

Here are 3 little stories that happened during Big Omaha that made the experience even more awesome!

Meditating at a bar with speakers

One of the coolest things about Big Omaha is that the speakers stick around for the whole conference and go to the same parties and happy hours that you go to. Unlike sxsw that you have to be invited to the VIP parties and only get to see them on stage, at Big Omaha you actually get to talk with them afterwards.

In the picture above I’m laying down on the floor of a the Urban Wine Company bar along with @philiplinden, @seth, and @shl. I don’t remember what started or why but it just happened, even though it sounds crazy it was really cool.

I Made $150 and Got a Free Brunch

Close to the end of the party at Urban Wine Company I met Jeff Pfaff of mtbmobile.com who was freaking out about a promise he had made to some design students from JCCC of turning some of their design prototypes into an app for their exhibit on Friday. The app sounded simple enough for me to build so we agreed that he would pay for brunch on the next morning while I hacked some code up. Friday morning came by I hacked the iPhone and iPad app within an hour and off he went.

A few hours later Jeff came back and asked for a favor, he had to leave early to go back to KC and give the app to the students, if he did that he would miss the opportunity of networking friday night, so we set down and I figured out how to send the app over the air (using testflightapp.com) without having to have him there. Jeff was so excited that he didn’t have to go back to KC early that day that he end up giving me $150 dollars for the work! Hahah, I never thought I would make money going to a conference, thanks Jeff!

Zaarly’s $100 Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Bet

Friday evening Jonathan Whistman (@jwhistman, founder of LiveOn), Keith Entzeroth (@keithentzeroth, my co-founder at Instin) and I went out to dinner at a really good mexican restaurant downtown Omaha. While we were sitting at a table on their patio we got into a discussion about Zaarly and if it really works or not. So Jonathan proposed us to Zaarly for a Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to be delivered within an hour and he would pay $100 for it. His bet was that it wouldn’t happen, specially since Zaarly is not really active in Omaha.

So 5 minutes left on the clock, us not expecting that it would actually happen, some lady called Jamie on a little scooter drives over with the ice cream! It was hilarious, she was really excited that it was actually true and she got $100! She said that she was needing the money for her upcoming trip to New York and that she had just signed up for Zaarly the day before. She also said that the reason she signed up was because some of the guys that work at Zaarly were staying at her apartment during the conference.

Now the interesting thing we were wondering is if Zaarly only works when crazy amounts of money are involved. If we had offered $20 dollars for some ice cream instead of $100, would it have worked?

KC peeps at Big Omaha

Keith, Nate, Me, Chris, Jeff, Willis and a random guy’s arm

That’s it! I also got to give a voice interview that might be going on the next big omaha video, so watch out for my Brazilian accent!! :) Overall Big Omaha was worth every penny! Kudos to the Silicon Prairie News for putting such a great conference together. Keith and I are definitely planning on attending again next year! If you have never been you should consider as well!!

Naruto! Inspiration! Motivation!

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:50:00 -0600

As I mentioned on the last post, this year I’m going to try to blog at least once a month. At first I was thinking about blogging about code and technical stuff but I could always do that later… Instead, I decided to put together a really important but cheesy post! :) So here it goes…

“Have a dream and have the confidence to make that dream come true.” - Naruto Anime

I’m pretty sure that a lot of people I know don’t know this but for the past 6-7 years, every week, once a week for 1 hour I stop everything I’m doing to watch and read a new episode of a Japanese Anime and Manga called Naruto. As weird and silly that this may sound this anime is sometimes a source of inspiration and motivation to me.

The story is about Naruto an orphan boy that has a massive destructive power sealed inside him that his ninja village hates. His goal in life is to be acknowledged by the village and to become the Hokage, the most powerful ninja of all! The story and episodes are about him growing and achieving his goals. It shows him learning to become a ninja, training and controlling new techniques and along the way making friends and changing people lives…

“People become stronger because they have memories they can’t forget. that’s what you call growth” - Naruto Anime

I really don’t want to get into details but I’ve learned and I’m still learning a lot by watching some of these episodes. I’ve never thought a “cartoon” would teach me anything, but the life lessons that these episodes show is pretty amazing and are similar to real life with the only difference being the actual context… Some of these lessons are mainly around how things are not easy in life; how he has to train really hard to become better; how he is always optimistic; how he enjoy helping people and protecting his friends; but most importantly how he never gives up during his battles and training!

Hopefully one day when I have a kids and they are grown enough to understand what some of these things about life mean I can introduce them this show to inspire and motivate them as well. Maybe we would do what I’ve been doing of staring at episode 1 and watching only 1 episode a week, I think doing this can create a really special bond and maybe start a family tradition, will see…

My 2012 Goals

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 19:02:00 -0600

Last year I put out a post about my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions, this year I decided to change it to ‘My 2012 Goals’ since they are more like goals than resolutions…

Get 1000+ twitter followers (This one is a carry over from last year, I have some thoughts on how I can accomplish this and I will write a post about it…)
Blog at least once a month (This one is also a carry over from last year, however I narrowed down to at least once a month but hopefully more)
Make $1 million dollars (Haha, this one is another carry over from last year and everyone knows it’s hard, I think the only way I can accomplish is if something I create make millions of dollars or someone wants to acquire something I created as well for millions of dollars)
Have something I create/created in a top tech news site (I would love if every tech site talked about the stuff I do but the one I’m shooting for is TechCrunch since it’s the one I read the most)
Meet more entrepreneurs, developers, investors etc… (I would like to meet everyone that share similar interests as me, so ping me if you want to chat)
Make 5 new apps or websites (This is what I do! I want to create at least 5)
Go to 5 conferences or events (Last year I attended SXSW and KC Startup Weekend, this year I want to attend a lot more, maybe not just 5)
Go to 5 concerts (Last year I think I just went to Foo Fighters and it was the best concert I’ve ever been to, I definitely want to go again this year)
Go through the full Insanity workout (Last year I went up to until half of the second month and lost motivation, it’s kind of hard to find time for this as well)
[secret] (Got a secret goal, maybe I’ll reveal it by the end of the year)

I know some of the items are hard, but I think it’s always good to be a little ambitious… What are your goals for 2012? Let me know…

2011 Year in Review

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

I can’t believe 2011 is already over! What a year! A lot happened in my life and I’m thankful that it was all for the good!

The year started pretty basic: engaged and living together in an apartment with Britt, me working at Cerner full time and starting the talks with Ryan and Keith of taking myHomework to the next level on our free time.
Around January/February me, Keith and Ryan decided to get serious on working on myHomework and started a small company called Instin, LLC We decided on the name Instin because I had already bought the domain a few years back, and it stands for Einstein without the “E”s
In March I went to the SXSWi conference for the first time, which was a pretty awesome experience since you get to meet a lot of people in the “tech & business world”, and unlike other tech conferences that I’ve been to you get to relax and party a lot.
In April we launched myHomework for Android, to match the so existing iPhone features.
In May myHomework for iPhone got a major redesign and code upgrade and we launched myhomeworkapp.com with the sync features.
In June Britt and I had 1 month before the wedding so we had lots of planning to do, we also started looking into buying a house around town (KC)
In July Britt and I got married!!! And we bought a house!! We went to Hawaii for our honeymoon; We went to the island of Oahu where we got to relax, surf, kayak, snorkel and etc…
In August we released myHomework sync for Android and started a partnership with Hanover College to sponsor free accounts to myHomework students in the Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky tri-state area.
In September Britt and I got a 9 week old Morkie puppy (maltese + yorkie) and named him Duke (I wanted to name him Dude but that was the closest I was able to get)
In October I started working on a second side project with Joe Stump and Graham Blache called Sprint.ly. Joe put out a tweet looking for a frontend developer and I was able to help.
In November we released a myHomework widget for Android. That month I went to Kansas City’s Startup Weekend where I got to meet a lot of KC entrepreneurs and work on a new product over a weekend. The product we created is called Merry Plate which we end up getting 3rd place, after the weekend I decided to not join the team that will continue working on it.
In December Sprint.ly was launched as a invite only beta which due to Joe’s famousness got a lot of people talking about it and made Tech Crunch on the same day.
Also in December we released myHomework for iPad and the ability to connect myHomework accounts with Facebook. Also on that month a great article was written in the Silicon Praire news about me and the work I do, which was pretty awesome!

Overall I think it was a great busy year! A full time job at Cerner and some awesome side projects :) I hope 2012 is just as great or better!

————————————————————————————————-

Last year I wrote a 2011 New year’s resolution, here is an update on what was accomplished:

Get Married DONE
Buy a house DONE
Blog more often (twice a month) NOPE, I did blog a couple times on myHomework’s blog but it wasn’t twice a month, so a big fail.
Get more twitter followers (1000) NOPE, Not there yet :( got to figure out how to become some more, any ideas?
Start a small company DONE
Build 5 new apps or websitesHMMM, If I count the ones I did for work (Cerner) and the ones on my free time I think I got this one, but that’s cheating:
- myHomework for iPad
- myHomeworkApp.com
- sprint.ly
- merryplate.com
- cernerhealth.com
- cernerhealthwins.com
Go through the full P90x workout without missing a day NOPE, I actually attempted to do the Insanity workout instead but I gave up on week 2 of the second month :(
Make $1 million dollars NOPE, not even close, I’m still trying to figure this one out as well, any ideas?
Run a half marathon NOPE, running is hard. I ran a 10K with britt and a 5K with Sam, I also started a running club at work but that ended once winter started.
Go to 5 concerts NOPE, I went to 1 concert last year and it was the best concert I’ve ever been too FOO FIGHTERS

Well, it was a pretty hard one. I’ll post a 2012 new year’s resolution soon!

Happy New Year!

2011 New Year's Resolution

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:22:00 -0600

Below is my to accomplish list for 2011. This next year is going to be pretty crazy specially because of item number 1!! I know some of them will be really hard but it’s always good to aim high!!

Get Married
Buy a house
Blog more often (twice a month)
Get more twitter followers (1000)
Start a small company
Build 5 new apps or websites
Go through the full P90x workout without missing a day
Make $1 million dollars
Run a half marathon
Go to 5 concerts

Happy New Year!!!

uCern iPhone App

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:00:00 -0500

As many of you already know I work for Cerner Corporation as a Software Engineer. Last year I worked on uCern which is a collaboration platform where people across the Healthcare Industry can share thoughts, ideas and make connections. This year I’m working on a completely different project but still making some contributions to uCern. We just released the uCern iPhone App, which is a compacted but still effective version of uCern. This app was definitely the most complex app that I’ve ever created, because not only I had to write the services but still make the front-end UI and functionality.

Within the app you can:

Start and respond to discussions, documents, and blogs posts
Join healthcare social groups and spaces
Search and view user profiles
and much more…

Overall the app works similar to Facebook’s app but directed to uCern’s features and capabilities. uCern is still not opened to everyone and you do have to have an existing uCern account to use it so here are a few screenshots:

myLauncher - Open Source

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:43:00 -0500

I’ve been working on a iPhone app that will have a lot of different features. If I put all those features within buttons in a tab bar it would make my app really clumsy and really hard to scale out. So I decided that I want to have a layout similar to iPhone’s home screen that separates all the apps within icons in a page and allows you to reorder them as needed.

So I searched around to see if there were any open source libraries out there that would allow me to replicate that feature easily. I found that Facebook has an open library that has an iPhone like launcher called three20, however three20 is a lot more than than just a launcher, three20 is a full blown library/framework and if I were to add it to my app it would make my app really heavy. So I decided to create my own iPhone like launcher.

myLauncher is an open source lightweight iPhone like launcher that allows you to easily add a launcher into your app. The project is hosted in github and it’s open to everyone to use it or enhance it. Some of the features include:

Available on all orientations
Ability to reorder icons on multiple pages
Ability to delete icons
Persistence (icons and order are saved)
iPhone 4 retina display support
Bounce effect when editing

You can find myLauncher by going here: http://github.com/rigoneri/myLauncher

Here are some images of what you get on the sample project of myLauncher: