Category Archives: development

Sprint & terrible UIs

Posted on February 2, 2010 by abe

I’ve never liked Sprint – and here’s another reason. I use the Ovation U727 3g card for my laptop, and was just prompted to install an update. “No thanks” I responded. “Are you sure, we really think you’d like to … Continue reading →

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SeeMonkey: DIY Photobooth

Posted on August 31, 2009 by abe

Close family friend, fellow rocket monkey James Yoneda recently launched SeeMonkey – his DIY Photobooth (or DIY Photo booth for Google’s benefit).  So cool!  I had the privilege of setting up the very first SeeMonkey photo booth at James & … Continue reading →

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I want The Economist on my iPhone

Posted on August 27, 2009 by abe

Whenever I can, I read from my iPhone. Email, blogs / RSS, books – everything. (I am a Google Book Search PM, it’s kind of my job – but my interest in this pre-dated the job – check out my … Continue reading →

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Even Apple fails the test

Posted on July 1, 2008 by abe

Apple is held up as user friendly and simple. In many ways it is. However even Apple fails the test when it comes to abstracting technological underpinnings from the user. I love my iPhone, but frequently am unable to take … Continue reading →

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Technology has far to go

Posted on June 27, 2008 by abe

Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just … Continue reading →

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Confused about Google Image Search

Posted on March 6, 2008 by abe

Shirley Bell Designs has hundreds of beautiful images. And Google Image search isn’t indexing them. Why not? Apparently it doesn’t like dynamically generated pages (ie with URL parameters and the like) in between the crawler and the image. No problem … Continue reading →

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Shirley Bell Designs v2

Posted on March 5, 2008 by abe

Allow me to (re)introduce Shirley Bell Designs! Shirley is a longtime neighbor and family friend, and it’s been my pleasure to help appropriately showcase her beautiful artwork online. New site features include an improved image gallery, better information about the … Continue reading →

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Full Steam Ahead: doodleboard

Posted on October 18, 2006 by abe

We are pressing ahead on doodleboard. Check out the blog and public alpha! Tijan and I have been working on this since the mid-summer update post below. I solved some tricky tech problems with drawing lots of things in the … Continue reading →

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Information Markets Sidebar

Posted on June 6, 2006 by abe

Information markets are quite interesting. (Also known as prediction markets, depending on which academic you want to make happy). The academic literature is fun to read and intellectually quite interesting. The general idea is that a diverse crowd of humans … Continue reading →

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Image Management Screenshots

Posted on January 28, 2006 by abe

Following up on our idea for digital image management software, Francesca and I developed an alpha version in Java that allows the user to quickly rename large numbers of photos, adding keyword, title, caption, and date tags, which are then available in the filename as well as the image metadata fields. We are very excited for this, and have been working on organizing our collection of 3,500+ images, as well as scanning many more of the family treasures!
Screenshots with some descriptive text as to how the program works today follow in the post body. Continue reading →

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