Showing posts with label Idea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Idea. Show all posts

Friday, April 26, 2013

Alternative UIWebView to Objective-C communication paths

WebViewJavascriptBridge (and similar libraries) rely on loading a custom URL scheme in an iframe and intercepting the request in shouldStartLoadWithRequest. Other approaches include embedded WebSockets and HTTP servers (see LinkedIn.

One alternative to consider is modifying document.cookie for some magic cookie name value, and then listening for those changes on the iOS side via NSHTTPCookieManagerCookiesChangedNotification. That might have fewer side-effects that triggering a (sub-)frame load.

Monday, January 28, 2013

Screenshot Uploader App

Minimal iOS app that uploads screenshots to a designated folder in Dropbox. Once configured, it should just be a matter of briefly launching it once the screenshot is taken (background HTTP completion service can be used to finish the upload).

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Commute Tracker iPhone App

iPhone app that automatically keeps track of your commute and helps you detect patterns. Using geo-fencing, it could keep track of when you leave your designed home/work spots, and then do a continuous GPS track along the way. Once data is gathered, it could be visualized (e.g. by day of week, or by departure time), displayed on a map to show alternate route rates (e.g. Grant Road vs. 85) and with enough smarts, turned into a (local) push notification that tells you which way to go today.

Commute Tracker gets pretty close to this (it's automatic), but it's buggy (I had a 1 second commute), tracks too much (I want to exclude days where I make a grocery store detour) and is on the ugly side. Daily Commute is prettier, but it's too manual, requiring commutes to be started and stopped.

Feed filtering Stream Spigot tool

Build a Stream Spigot tool for filtering of feeds. Unlike Feed Rinse or Yahoo! Pipes, it wouldn't involve taking a feed URL, giving it to the tool, and getting a filtered URL to subscribe to in return. Instead, it would work by connecting to your Google Reader account and then marking matching items as read, so that they don't show up (if using new items only view).

This would have the advantage of not having to re-subscribe when deciding to filter something, benefiting from the regular crawl speed (vs. filtered feed URLs generally having only one subscriber and thus being in the slow crawl bucket) and having item metadata be preserved (though that matters less now that likes and shares are gone).

The filtering could either be done periodically, or for feeds that are PubSubHubbub-enabled, it could be triggered by PSHB pings. It does mean that there is a window during which items that should be filtered our are visible, but the filtering is likely to be cheap enough (get items since the last check, apply a read tag) that it can be done quite frequently.

In addition to the read tag, a "filtered" state tag should also be applied to the items, so that these items can be differentiated during subsequent API calls.

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

App Reload Helper Chrome Extension

To make the Chrome Apps edit-reload cycle faster (especially when there's a build/compilation step), a helper extension could be written. It could reload the app using the management API. More importantly, it could have a custom hook to trigger the re-build/compile step before reloading the app. This could be as simple as an HTTP request to a local server, or something fancier with native messaging once that's available. This could all be triggered via a keyboard command using the commands API.

Chrome Extension Reloader Macro is something along these lines, albeit targeted at extension developers. LiveReload could also be extended to support this use case.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Code Explorer (Packaged) App

Turn Source Quicklinks into a packaged app. It can use <browser> to embed the Chromium code search and have a custom toolbar that allows switching to SVN history, blame, etc. It can also log recently pulled up docs in a sidebar, support looking up files by name.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Credit card reader Chrome extension

The Square card reader converts the magnetic stripe on a credit card to audio. Using the getUserMedia() API from WebRTC, it should be possible to get at that audio data (via WebAudio). mslib is a library for decoding this magnetic stripe data (blog posts with more details). It could be incorporate via NaCl. Rhombus is another project that does this (albeit Java-based).

One possible application is in a Chrome extension that implements payment form filling out by swiping a card.

Friday, April 27, 2012

Lights Out

iPhone app that lets you put nearby Macs to sleep (discovery can be handled via Bonjour). Unlike iShutdown or Control!, it shouldn't require installing a special daemon on the Mac that's to be controlled. iSleep claims to do this via Remote Login (i.e. ssh), but the reviews seem mixed. If remote Apple events are still possible, then it should be feasible via that. If not (or as an alternative), whatever mechanism Apple Remote Desktop uses could be used here too.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Freeze inactive background Chrome tabs

In the vein of the Firefox extension Dormancy, build a Chrome extension that frees up resources used by background tabs that haven't been accessed in a while. Using the chrome.tabs.onUpdated event, an LRU list could be maintained. Inactive tabs would have a screenshot taken via chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab, and the tab would then be navigated to a chrome-extension:// URL that shows that screenshot (thus making all inactive tabs live in the extension's process, instead of separate renderer ones). When the tab is re-selected, history.back() could be used to back to the live page (by using history traversal, form/scroll position restore is invoked, retaining as much of the state as possible).

Optionally, there could be a browser action that displays the total/live/frozen tab count, in the same way that Tab Count does.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Pretty-print inline diffs in emails

Rietveld (and presumably other code review tools) inline diffs in emails. Even if they don't, they generally have a URL that points at the review. A Gmail gadget could be written that inlines the diffs (if not already inline), and pretty-prints them (with syntax highlighting).

GitHubDiff does something like this for GitHub emails.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Aleph

Google has shut down Code Search and the Social Graph API. Replicating those services outside of Google is hard; they presuppose a scalable, well-oiled crawling/indexing/serving machine. Only Google has been able to release interesting n-gram data (from books too).

Along the same lines, the HTTP Archive tracks 55K URLs (with a goal of 1M by the end of 2012). W3Techs also only looks at the Alexa top 1 million. Presumably this is because crawling is hard. If Foursquare wanted to know how many pages have a link to a foursquare.com URL, would they want to crawl the whole web?

"Aleph" would be an infrastructure company that offers a few services:

  1. Large (billion and up) archive of sites on the internet. This would include not just raw HTML, but the full set of resources necessary to recreate that page (think crawling with headless WebKit and capturing all HTTP requests).
  2. Ability to do quick (semi-interactive) analyses over the crawl data that has been pre-processed (think regular expressions, or Dremel-like queries for attributes).
  3. Ability to run arbitrary MapReduces over the data (see ZeroVM for a way to do this safely).
  4. Ability to import new datasets (whether web-like or not)

For the web index to be useful for some applications, it would need to have a PageRank-like attribute per page to expose importance (and/or a number of visits/traffic).

In theory the Internet Archive has a lot of this data. They make their data available "at no cost to researchers, historians, and scholars," thus their willingness to license is unclear.

As for the name, the Aleph was a MacGuffin-like device from Mona Lisa Overdrive that a large copy of the Internet stored.

Update on 5/7/2012: Blekko appears to offer basic grepping functionality.

Update on 2/24/2013: CommonCrawl is a non-profit with 6 billion pages indexed and available for MapReduce.