Marklapwood.com now live

Finally, the cat's out of the bag. It's been a long time in bringing this baby out in the open.

We are really pround of what we've been able to do for this project. Mark has been an exceptional client. Only if all clients were like him.

You can view the site in all it's glory here:

www.marklapwood.com

enjoy.

{ Filed in:  Blabber }

  Shashwat Parhi
12 Dec, 12:50 PM 

Bad Karma catching up?

I just read a blog post at AppleMatters title "Is It Me, Or Has Karma Finally Decided To Settle Up With Apple?" I also went through the comments there and found it strange how so many people seem to be thinking anyone hacking their iPhone being a looser. And that their whining is uncalled for.

What no one there seemed to mention is that until now, NEVER has a software hack rendered your hardware useless. Using undocumented toolbox APIs or finding clever work arounds, does not make your Mac useless in the next software update. Why then with the iPhone?

Apple could also have chosen the path to virginise a hacked iPhone via an iTunes restore. That way all hackers, including myself would be happy. No real hacker is complaining about Apple not doing the right thing by not releasing an API or "supporting" 3rd party applications as of now. Heck, it is perfectly acceptable that every software update even wipes out installed applications, forcing us to reinstall everything.

But to render the phone useless by applying a software update? And for Apple even, not to be able to fix it? Man, something must be wrong?

I fully agree with the article at AppleMatters. Bad PR move Apple. You might be on the clear legally. But you are losing the goodwill of some of your most loyal and vocal supporters. Release an iTunes update that "restores" an iPhone completely to factory defaults including the baseband firmware.

The iPhone Dev Team can take it from there. :) Way to go IPDT.

{ Filed in:  Apple }

  Shashwat Parhi
12 Oct, 02:45 PM 

LooseStitch First Impressions

Thank you Amy for reviewing LooseStitch. You are, as far as we know, the first one to write a review on LooseStitch.

Amy in case you are reading this. We have taken into account your 2 issues. I found a stray CSS declaration that was collapsing the "vertical spacing" on your blog. It should now be fixed. Regarding inclusions, thank you for bringing it up, it's a great feature and we will definitely be implementing it in the near future.

Yes, we do plan to be very involved with developing LooseStitch further so stay tuned.

Thanks for the encouraging words. It gives us the impetous we need to keep moving forward with this little project.

{ Filed in:  LooseStitch }

  Shashwat Parhi
09 Jul, 03:19 PM 

LooseStitch Coming Soon to an iPhone Near You!

Ok. We are just shy of moving LooseStitch out of beta and to version 1.0. We thought this might be a good time to also look carefully at our code and clean up things. Also, we felt it would be great to have LooseStitch work like a real app on the iPhone, now that it is out and people are really digging it.

So we have begun work on redesigning the pages and we should have something ready in a few days. Looking quite nice already.

Anyone out there with an iPhone and time to spare? We would be thrilled to get any help in making LooseStitch work on your iPhone.

In case you haven't tried it out yet, please check it out.
thanks

{ Filed in:  LooseStitch }

  Shashwat Parhi
05 Jul, 11:00 PM 

LooseStitch, the new web-based outliner

When I bought my Powerbook G4, a couple of years ago, Apple did a very thoughtful thing of installing a copy of Omni Outliner on my hard drive. Of course, I didn't know then what an outliner was, but it didn't take me much time to figure out what it did and before I knew it, I was hooked.

Starting from sitemaps for web projects, calculating estimates, creating proposals for clients, I was lost without my trusted Outliner. It has secured a permanent place in my already crowded Dock and I have come to believe that for many, Omni Outliner could just be the reason they need to switch to a Mac.

And herein lies my biggest gripe concering Omni Outliner. I can't share my outlines with others. I can't for instance shoot off a mail to a client asking them to take a look at the draft sitemap I have been working on and to modify/comment on it. That is, short of asking them to get a mac.

So during a brainstorming session at crossroad solutions, Arpan and myself thought to ourselves, what if we can build a tool that could work as seemlessly as possible with Omni Outliner and yet allow others to participate in the creation process of our outlines.

And so LooseStitch was born. We made an outline of all the features we wanted to include in version 1.0 and started coding. Just like that. In a couple of weeks we had most of the pieces in place. Things were already looking pretty and most of all it was great fun working on a project in an absolutely ad hoc fashion.

We are really proud of what we have achieved in just three weeks of intense coding. We wanted it to be fun for people to create outlines, invite others, and once done to be able to share the outlines in as many ways as possible.

Do check it out and let us know if you like what we have done.

Cheers

{ Filed in:  LooseStitch }

  Shashwat Parhi
27 May, 04:22 PM