Posts tagged idea

Serverless chat to reduce office distance

Jan 31st

Posted by Detro in IT / Comp-Sci / Code

6 comments

This idea comes out for an old university-time idea: to write a serverless chat application. Of course, I’m aware of the complications and the problems that using Broadcasting could create, so this problems would be took in consideration by design.

Office

But why now? I was thinking of a way to reduce the “office distances”: making easy to connect with a person who works in your own office. I know, it sounds a bit “creepy” to depend on an application to do that. After all you could just stand up and go to the colleague’s desk. And that’s what I’d normally do: nothing impossible.

But I can see that this is not always the case for every personality, and, sometimes, I fall in the same “shyness” (since in UK, no one believes me when I say “I’m shy”, but I actually am: I just use jokes to relax and break-the-ice). So months passes by, you never learn the name of some colleagues and so on. After all how many times you work in projects where more than 10 people are involved?

Acceptance-less

A system like this could explicitly avoid concepts like “accept a contact in your contact-list”: the contact list would be the list of all the clients connected to the network, no one excluded. I know you could probably do this kind of stuff configuring accordingly some server chat, but you need:

  • Infrastructure, set up by an IT department
  • Maintenance, provided by an IT department

Both this things are normally very rare resources to have in a classical office environment. IT is always evil ;-) . Am I not right?

Cross platform by design

I have in mind Qt as the framework to build something like that. It already covers the most of the desktop environments, and it can be set to integrate nicely. Not like Java. :-P

Features? No, for now brainstorming

Yeah, I could start to write a long list of all the features I think such software should have, but this post was more to ask the micro-crowd that reads my blog “what do you think of such an idea?”. Any idea will be took in consideration.

Features

Ok, that’s what I have in mind for now:

  • Acceptance-less contact-list (I believe that’s a core one)
  • Chat layout built into a WebView: styling through plugins of CSS(3) files
  • Drag and Drop file-transfer (no-passthrough-server: imagine the speed on a lan!)
  • Encryption: communication can be encrypted, encrypting the socket traffic one has opened with another client
  • Position: this could be like a “status” info, but allowing the person to pin him/herself on a Office map, so that can be easy to find

Please advice for more ;)

And after this chat?

Just stand up and go there: it’s not like your colleague is going to harm you or something. ;)

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iPad Simulator in Video and Comments

Jan 30th

Posted by Detro in IT / Comp-Sci / Code

No comments

I would have just posted it on Twitter, but I have some comments about this video.


One of the first video of the iPad Simulator
  1. Watch it in Full screen at 720p: it help “feeling” the proportions used by Apple in the UI
  2. It clarify how it does execute iPhone apps: they most probably implement the iPhone API as is: indeed even the Keyboard that you get in an iPhone application is the same (no super large/super cool keyboard of the iPad
  3. I feel that 4 icons per row are too few: there a kilometers between an icon and the next one
  4. I feel that the hardware home button doesn’t fit very well proportionally: they should have used a rectangular button way larger: given the size of the device, is too small
  5. The amount of free space in the top bar (the one with Battery, Time and Signal Strength) is A JOKE. In there nice little icons of the services running in background, or tickers of latest emails… or something else SHOULD fit
  6. Integrated Spotlight is a proportional abomination: why the search bar in the TOP has the fixed size of the one used by iPhone? I mean, it takes not even half of all the width it could
  7. Notification Modal Dialogs (used to ask stuff like “Are you sure you want to delete this app?”) is SO SMALL, that in the middle of the screen looks like you should do something else around it. EVEN with the background faded in black: I believe such effect of “prioritization” works as long as the user can’t have something else to look at.
  8. File Sharing!!! It misses a proper Finder Mobile to share files through Bluetooth, USB, Wifi, as well as management of those files! I don’t want to email me stuff! And I don’t want to pay for an extra software that is not well integrated or it has always some limitations.

That’s my first set. But surely I’ll have more. I need to collect reasons to stick with my position: iPass. ;)

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Typewriter: an Idea just popped into your mind

May 17th

Posted by Detro in Art

No comments

From “Who’s Minding the Store“, by Jerry Lewis

From “Decameron – La Macchina da Scrivere”, by Daniele Luttazzi (blog)

“Ciccotti e la Macchina da Scrivere”, by Tommaso Ciccotti

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I don’t hate the Americans neither the Jews

Jan 8th

Posted by Detro in Personal

2 comments

A dear friend of mine made me think about what I wrote in this previous post about the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Christmas Speech.

USA Flag

I’m sure that, who follows regularly my blog, knows, or at least has an idea, of what are my Political beliefs. But, just for the sake of being sure that no one gets insulted, I’d like to specify few simple facts:

  • I don’t hate the American People, I actually like them very much
  • One of my oldest, but not doable, desires is to get a Master in USA
  • I hate the America’s Politicians and their decisions of the last years
  • I think it’s fault of those politicians if the World has now as major fear “Terrorism”: they needed it to make more money out of the status of perpetuals fear
  • I don’t hate Jews and I believe that a big part of the Israeli People are against the War
  • I believe that Israeli politicians are nothing but just controlled puppets in the hands of America’s Politicians, who tries to get more and more control over the Middle-East through Israel
  • I believe Israel creation is a crime made by the British, despite the world was just going out of a terrible war: the lesson was never really learnt
  • I believe Jews that lives in Israel are, for the majority, not involved in the “willing” of doing any war against any race: most probably Muslims and Israeli would live in peace easliy if they were not ruled by criminals
  • I do have hope in Obama: I hope this man can, leap after leap, bring USA to a change

Hope this clarify my position: the only people that should get upset for what I say are too powerful to care about me…

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