I was speaking with Richie from Taboo and Sean from Cocoaheads about how it would be awesome to tap into Melbourne thriving mobile development scene – and with the help of Sensis, the hackathon was the perfect outlet to let developers battle it out in a much heated platform battle!

Overall, we produced some great apps by the end of the weekend, Sensis has written up about each app and their team here http://developers.sensis.com.au/blog

Since I was judging the end results, I couldnt compete which was a bummer – instead I thought i’d hack together a quick live blog and try to keep it updated during the day.
Just turns out I’ve been out of blogging for so long, I was struggling to think of anything interesting to write. Here is the archive of the live blog – this won’t be up live for much longer, probably another month or two
http://dev.jamesgiang.com/sapihack/

Finally just a thank you for everyone that got involved – as the organiser of the Android Australia User Group, its great to see so many Android devs come out to spend a weekend in the basement grinding some code :)

John Milton – Paradise Lost (Book 1)

The phone version of the app displays the information via a popup message. Tablet version will make use of the space under the cam selection list.

Check it out if you haven’t already!

(lol @ the Nokia E6 ad)

Picture got photobombed by actual Androids (how awesome is my makeshift non-keyboard shoebox stand?)

I was always under the impression that to establish ADB you needed a USB cable – turns out that’s not true.

If you have a rooted device – simply installing something like ADB over WiFi enables you to connect to your device from your PC

I’m now no longer running low on USB slots.

Recently watched a TED talk by Matt Cutts on trying something new every 30 days.

I’ve nearly been continously blogging for 30 days, so I think I’ll set myself up for another challenge next month.
And of course… blog about it! (duh, that’s a given)

Since then, I developed a site which lists social events happening in Melbourne. Providing an alternative to finding events via newsletters, meetup.com, twitter, etc.

After using the site for a few weeks and further building on the idea of sharing social events – I soon noticed the theme wasn’t working out.
The idea socialflux was trying to achieve felt hindered by the very theme which started the idea – therefore it was evident to keep the site going, I had to redevelop it somehow.
(not to mention the site had become a ghost town with zero hits over the last 2 months)

I realized this a month or two back, but never got around to doing anything to fix the problem – finally, after playing with some new plugins, I’ve rebuilt socialflux to take on a completely fresher spin.

Would love to hear your thoughts on the new socialflux.

Vincent Freeman – Gattaca

Had a relapse session last night thinking about studying Gattaca back in year 12. Long story short, I ended up watching the movie at 4am- love it!

I can’t believe it’s already been 2 weeks since I got my Google+ invite.
I’m already starting to feel like life without G+ would leave a slight social void in my life.

For today’s blog, I thought I would share some observations based on my experiences with Google+

Note: If you are not on G+ yet – drop me a message/comment/DM and I’ll send you an invite.

***

1. G+ for blogging

Beginning to notice that people are using G+ as their blogging platform for its social functions such as resharing, +1′ing and commenting. Key example is Kevin Rose redirecting his website kevinrose.com to his G+ profile.

I dual blogged some stuff last week, and noticed how much more engaging my content was on G+, engagement I could only dream of on my little humble WordPress blog.

However, as a blogger, I would love to have Google Analytics integrated with G+ to allow me to track my traffic on my G+ profile. I think this would be a great selling point for Google once they decide to get businesses onboard G+

***

2. Use G+ to avoid pointlessly short emails

We’ve all sent short, once-off emails to people we don’t have on IM but need to communicate to, I found that using G+ provides a powerful asynchronous method of communicating without locking yourself to an IM session or cluttering your inbox with short once off emails.

***

3. Comment spam from prolific users

When prolific users post, they get hundreds of responses. They are great to read at times however the problem is, once you click to view more comments, the stream loads all the comments and generally takes up all your screen and more. I wish G+ had a mechanism to hide all the comments. Lodged this as feedback, hopefully it materializes into something.

***

4. Linking to your profile

A few services like gplus.to floated around providing vanity URLs which forward http://gplus.to/jamesgiang to my Google Plus account. Cool and all, but I’m almost 100% sure Google will have vanity URLs soon based on the fact that the old Google Profiles is now automatically linking to G+ – http://profiles.google.com/james.l.giang

This method uses your gmail account name, and it’s much safer, cleaner and consistant. I would suggest people use this instead of gplus.to

***

5. Sparks is the next hashtag

Sparks seems extremely pre-mature to me right now. Ideally I would love it if Sparks incorporated some sort of hashtag indexing system. So if my friends put up a status update on G+ with a hashtag (or some unique identifier -plustag?) – that post becomes a part of a spark group. The benefits of using a hashtag on Twitter has proved it’s worth, its time for Google to implement a system which leverages that social (networking) norm :)

***