March 11

Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments (via AndrewBragdon)

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

March 10

March 9

about:linkroom

**tl;dr: linkroom is my latest creation and it’s in private beta. Read the second paragraph to learn what it does. DM me if you’re interested. **

Here’s something I’ve been working on for two weeks now: linkroom, yet another web app built on top of Twitter API. It was inspired by laterstars, and obviously involved with links.

So what the hell is linkroom? To put it simply, linkroom stores latest links from your Twitter stream. linkroom reads your timeline, finds all links and imports them into its database. You can then have a glance at those links, decide which ones to read and which ones to ignore. And that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why would you need linkroom? Frankly, I don’t know. I only know for myself. I need linkroom because my Twitter timeline is a gold mine. I read nearly all tweets, click on a large portion of links and enjoy repeating this process every day. Sometimes I was left behind by the sheer number of tweets and miss some breaking news, like those about Microsoft Courier. So I want an automated way to put all links in front of my eyes and help me catch up with things I care about.

linkroom was built to help me cope with information overload, not to make my situation worse. So linkroom doesn’t automatically import links. It only does so when I explicitly tell it to. I could Do this as frequently or rarely as I want. To linkroom, only the latest links are relevant. Those buried deep down in my timeline are ignored.

linkroom works like this: For each link in your Twitter timeline, it displays the title and the person who posted this. Hover the title and it shows the full URL. Hover the person’s screen name and you could read the tweet containing the current link. From these factors, you decide whether you want to read the article this link leads to or not. You know you don’t have time to read every link, so be selective. Mark it as interesting to add it to your reading list, ignore it to make the link go away, or if you can’t make up your mind, add it to the end of your reading list so that you could check it out after finish reading other stuff.

When you’re done with this task (it generally takes me less than five minutes to go over a screenful of links), your reading list is ready for consumption. If you like reading on the screen, click linkroom’s bookmarklet to access the first item in your list. Click one more time to read the next one. Rinse and repeat until you’re done. Or, if you prefer reading in Instapaper, subscribe to your account’s RSS feed.

Some fancy stuff I’ve implemented in linkroom:

  • Short URL expansion: Admit it, those convenient bit.ly or is.gd links are cryptic when it comes to guess what they are about.
  • Fluid.app integration: Growl and sound notifications.
  • Visited links detection: Guess which links you have read and mark them as such.
  • Customisable rules: Choose to whitelist or blacklist those you enjoy or don’t bother checkig out.

Still there’re some stuff I haven’t covered. But those 500 hundreds words are enough to make my hands hurt (I’m typing them in Writeroom for iPhone like usual). So, TTFN.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, DM me or reply to this post.


  From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now… (via iA » iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned)

From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now… (via iA » iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned)

March 8

March 6