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A year and a half ago I wrote about OpenFeedback, an open source Cocoa framework for gathering feedback from your users. Initially, it was a sister project to Appcaster, my indie dashboard web app. Since then, Appcaster has grown up and morphed into Shine, but OpenFeedback remained unchanged. Tonight, though, I took a few hours … Read more

I’ve been wanting to switch my online store away from PayPal for quite a while now. Although there are a bunch of PayPal horror stories floating around the web (here’s a recent one), my main reason is to make my life simpler. As much as I like rolling my own solutions, it’s too complicated to … Read more

Two years ago, shortly after I released VirtualHostX 1.0, I wrote about Appcaster – a web dashboard for Mac developers I built that manages my application updates, payment processing, etc. With the release of VHX 2.0 and Incoming!, I decided it was time to rewrite Appcaster as the original code was hurried and hastily patched … Read more

Sosumi is a PHP script that scrapes MobileMe and exposes Apple’s Find My iPhone functionality to the command line or your own web application. This lets you pull your phone’s current location and push messages and alarms to the device. Like my previous blog post that dealt with AT&T’s Family Map service, my goal was … Read more

Location Based Services are hot. They add an extra layer of usefulness on top of the web sites and products we’re already using. The trick is keeping your location updated in the cloud as frequently, comfortably, and securely as possible. Fire Eagle fulfills the security requirement — brokering your whereabouts only to parties you’ve authorized. … Read more

Last year I posted a PHP script that lets you dial phone numbers using Grand Central. I updated it this morning to support Google Voice as well. The syntax is the same You can grab the code from my google-voice-dialer project on GitHub.

Tonight I pushed a new project to GitHub called yui-app-theme. It’s a generic, skinnable layout designed for web applications — particularly admin areas — built using YUI Grids. In other words, it’s a starting point. Usually when doing freelance work for clients, unless you’re building on top of an existing CMS like WordPress or MiaCMS, … Read more

Earlier this month I wrote a quick PHP wrapper for Yahoo!’s GeoPlanet API. It’s a super useful service for querying geographical information about nearly any place on earth — addresses, landmarks, colloquial locations, etc. Or, as the official description says GeoPlanet helps bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds by providing an open, … Read more

I’ve written twice about using Amazon S3 to host your website’s static content. It’s a great solution for small websites without access to a real content delivery network. And now that Amazon has launched CloudFront on top of S3, it’s even better. But there are still ways we can improve the performance. The trick is … Read more

iLife ’09 was released today. And with it came a much improved version of iPhoto with facial recognition, geotagging, and Flickr and Facebook support. With so many new ways to slice and dice my photos, I wanted to start over with a clean slate and get everything organized in iPhoto before re-exporting my library back … Read more