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Build your own app

Been inspired? We’ve put together a step-by-step guide to building a Windows Phone 7 app. You will find helpfull tips, tricks and free downloads to get you started.

Firstly, download the free tools here

Step 1: Designing your App
Step 2: Laying out elements in Expression Blend
Step 3: App styles
Step 4: Adding the glossy elements

]]> http://www.ubelly.com/2011/11/inside-windows-phone-apps-facebook/feed/ 0 http://www.ubelly.com/2011/03/facebook-improving-comments-across-the-web/ http://www.ubelly.com/2011/03/facebook-improving-comments-across-the-web/#comments Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:49:20 +0000 Luke http://www.ubelly.com/?p=6561 Last Wednesday, Facebook announced a new addition to their social plugins, the Comments Box plugin, which allows users to comment Continue Reading]]>

Last Wednesday, Facebook announced a new addition to their social plugins, the Comments Box plugin, which allows users to comment on pages around the web using their Facebook login. Now, while this sounds innocuous enough, the service also posts these comments to that users Facebook page, with the feature being opt-out rather than opt-in. This could prove to be quite a powerful traffic driver. In fact, the Independent put the Comment Box in place on their site and saw a 700% increase in traffic.

We thought we’d have a bit of a play with the plugin and dive in to see what you can do with it (and possibly have a think about putting it on Ubelly)…

Implementing

The first thing that struck me when I installed this plugin was how simple it is. Facebook provide a simple little form where you choose how wide you want the box to be and how many comments you want to be visible.

Once you’ve hit ‘Get Code’, it spits out the following two lines:

Well, kind of. If you haven’t set your site up as an app, then you’ll need to do that as well. However, another extremely short form later and you’ll have that done too.

Plug you app id into the above code and you’re almost ready to go.

All you need to do then is update your template files to include the code. If you are using WordPress, this will be in your single post page. Find the point where your comment box goes, and paste in the Facebook code. You can then choose to delete the existing comments box or have both running side by side.

Page or Person?

One of the cool things that you can do with the plugin is the ability for users to post as either yourself or any pages that you are admin on. For example, if there were a Ubelly page, I could choose to comment or reply to comments using either my personal Facebook account or as Ubelly, providing I was an admin on that page.

If you choose to post your comment to Facebook, it will then appear on either your personal page or the wall of the page you posted with.

Moderation

One of the concerns I had as a blog owner was the moderation. After installing the plugin, there is no indication that you can  moderate the comments at all. Instead, I had to do some digging to find out how to do this. Hidden away is the moderation dashboard (only works if you’re logged in as a developer), which provides you with the settings to control how your comments box works.

From here you can specify admins, as well as whether comments are automatically published or need to be approved. They also provide an option for Blacklisted words and a grammar filter. Also you have the option of being able to sign in using other services, although this feature doesn’t work quite yet.

This brings us to the comments box first problem… If you aren’t on Facebook, you can’t comment.

Privacy and Data Ownership

Another potential problem is in who actually owns the comment stream. Because this is effectively an app that sits within the Facebook servers, it would suggest that Facebook actually owns the content. While this won’t pose a problem for most people, it may make other people a little uneasy. Will they share this information with other people? Will the comments always be there or will they disappear one day? Will there be a way to export your comment feed in the future?

Also, one thing that I noticed when I tested out the commenting feature was the information that it surfaces next to your name. Because I’ve made my job title public, it puts my job title and place of work next to my name. However, a colleague who hasn’t publicised this information instead has her next piece of publicly available information… her age. This might make some people squirmish,  however it also provides context to people’s comments, as these seem to be based on a hierarchy of information. For example, this same colleagues comments appeared to me telling me that she is friends with a mutual friend. At most, this will make people reevaluate the information they make public on Facebook.

Should We or Shouldn’t We?

We here at Ubelly are considering implementing the Facebook comments box. However, because of the closed nature of it we’re not sure whether we should, or how we should choose to do it. Should we place it alongside our existing comments system or entirely replace it? Should we reply to comments from the Ubelly writers’ personal accounts or create a Ubelly page to respond via? We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.

I used to work in the UK MSN Messenger team way back in the day so I have an interest to claim here, but I am loving Windows Live Messenger at the moment – specifically its Facebook chat functionality. Prompted by this post outlining how Messenger powers over 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat, it brought back some IM loving.

About 15 years ago it was all ICQ, then it was MSN or Yahoo!, now it’s a combination of Facebook, chatting from your inbox in Hotmail or Gmail, or just texting from phone to phone. In a corporate environment the enterprise IM solution is more a way of seeing who’s online or in a meeting – or acting as the bridge for VoIP/video calls. But if you think about user behaviour of staying logged into an IM client throughout the day, it makes sense to use that screentime as a snapshot of “what’s going on with my friends or family – regardless of whether it’s on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace or other…”

Personally I’m not a fan of IMing from a web service: it’s slow, cumbersome and far too feature-restrained. But what I do love is being able to see when my Facebook friends are online – and chatting with them from my Messenger UI.

For websites, you can make it more social by plugging in Messenger Connect and letting people chat or share your content with their buddies – or use Windows Live ID as authentication. Sound complex? Not really – it’s a pretty simple implementation using REST APIs, Controls and JavaScript library.

Get more info on the Windows Live & Facebook partnership here or download the latest Messenger here. Or add me to Windows Live andyrobbwork@hotmail.com.

Andy

Windows Phone 7 for Developers Q&A

(Charlie Kindel, Microsoft)

“Why should I develop on your stuff?” was the very simple question Charlie needed to answer. After ‘”Missing a cycle” and “not executing”, Windows Phone 7 has it all to answer for – do we really need another phone OS when iPhone has seemingly won the hearts and minds of consumers, and Android pictured to have won over developers? I was secretly hoping Charlie would come out fighting and end up knocking everyone off their feet; what I saw was a very realistic, understated display of assurance in the device. Yes we can talk sales numbers a month after launch, or focus on the industry’s perception of what the forecasts will be but let’s focus on a device that has an open marketplace for developers to feel confident that no overtly stringent policies will be in place, and balanced with a consistent enough consumer experience that people will want and love the device. I felt pretty proud there and then to whip out my WP7…

Browsing the Platforms

(Mitchell Baker, Mozilla and Robert Scoble)

Not my vote for best hairstyle at the conference, but an interesting take on how we interact with the web, where we’ve come from and where we’re going. Mozilla has undoubtedly added plenty of innovation into the browser space (“I don’t like the word Browser”), but the latest blurring in web apps and native apps (I personally love pinning websites to the taskbar in IE9 and Windows 7) and how we’ll have a more personalised experience across got my mind ticking. Do I develop against an OS, a device, or is HTML5 the place to go? Watch the great video/website and see what you think.

Spooner

Facebook for Developers Q&A

(Ethan Beard, Facebook and Michael Arrington, TechCrunch)

A standout session for me was this uncomfortable interview between Michael Arrington (Techcrunch) and Ethan Beard (Facebook). I wasn’t sure if this was funny or embarrassing, watching it was a little like a bad X-Factor audition. Arrington asked questions like, ‘Is Facebook evil or amoral? Do you guys care? Is it just about the money?’ and on the subject of privacy, ‘Some people see it as exceptionally not good. What’s going on, it’s confusing, you keep changing the defaults? Are the mess-ups incompetence?’. They were valid questions, but it was the way they were posed that felt unnecessarily confrontational, and with this being the first Q&A session of the conference I was surprised. Yet Beard’s replies were calm and he seemed honest – I came out liking Facebook, not Techcrunch which isn’t what I expected. Props to Ethan Beard.

Browsing the Platforms

Matt Mullenweg, Founder & Toni Schneider, CEO, Automattic

Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider from Automattic talked about WordPress. It was a comforting technology tale to listen to that told of WP’s progression from a personal project (because Matt wanted a blog) through to the massive community that supports it’s growth today. How WP became a CMS used by 30 million people (10% of websites run on it) and areas they see for future development. Whilst discussing the challenges of building a viable business from an Open Source project, Matt and Toni came across as genuine enthusiasts who were not necessarily driven by revenue and who seem to have a sincere passion for their product and the community who have helped it (and them) become what WordPress.org and WordPress.com are today.

Luke

Media Panel

(Adrian Monck, World Economic Forum; Julio Alonso, Weblogs SL; Pierre Chappaz, Wikio; Kenneth Estenson, CNN.com; Gabe Rivera, TechMeme; Ben Rooney, WSJ Europe)

One of the hottest topics of Le Web 2010 was around the recent controversy with wikileaks posting some rather confidential documents, and the resulting global crackdown on the website and the founder. While this panel was originally supposed to be around blogging and media, they decided to completely refocus their discussion to what they see as a turning point with the internet, global censorship and freedom of the press. What resulted was an honest, enlightening and revealing talk, covering both sides of the argument(although with a slight lean towards wikileaks). It was a brilliant experience to see some of the top names in media and internet publishing talking about an issue that could truly affect us all.

Thought Controlled Computing

(Ariel Garten, Interaxon)

It seemed at about three o’clock in the afternoon on the second day, a time when most people started to flag after the long party the night before, I drifted off to sleep. I assumed that the presentation on thought controlled computing, where you manipulate computers with either focussed or relaxed brain waves on technology that starts at about US$150, was something my brain had conjured up from watching too many sci-fi films. However, when talking to colleagues later, apparently I wasn’t dreaming. That’s right, people, the future is here. We can control computers with our mind. These are not the droids you are looking for and all that. It was quite refreshing to see something so completely out of left field compared to the other sessions offered at Le Web, and yet this could potentially change computing in the next ten years. In addition, Ariel had her own brain waves live streamed to the screen throughout the entire session. Awesome? Yes it was.

One of my favourite things is when technology is used to create stories. Just in case you were curious, pina coladas and getting caught in the rain are also on my list. Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens also rate a mention.

On a productive morning spent staring at Twitter last week, I noticed A Life on Facebook come through on my feed and it warmed the cockles of my heart, so I thought I’d share below some of my favourite examples of storytelling through technology (including A Life on Facebook)

Have you seen any other great examples of storytelling using technology? Let us know…

In other news, I think we definitely win the awards for outstanding random connection between an image and an article…

A Life on Facebook

A LIFE ON FACEBOOK from maxluere on Vimeo.

Photocopy Romance

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2amn5PivuM4

You probably use Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Messenger, Buzz – all the social media tools you need to keep in touch with your friends and family. But how do you integrate all those different tools and contacts into your website? How on earth do you manage the community you’re building and still have time to get your regular work done? How do you protect people’s privacy and ensure your site’s security?

The essence of social media is about communication and building relationships – the technology is simply the means to assist communication. We’ll show how you can use a variety of open and closed source software to optimise communication between you (as website owner) and your audience.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be following Iain Eccleston & The Blue Horizon through his gigs and promotional activities to show real-life examples using social media tools to engage with your visitors and set up a sustainable community. The series will include how-to’s and guidance to show you exactly what you need to do and all the techniques we show can be applied to any type of business - just choose what you want to adopt and run with it.

If you’ve not already seen the video below, take a look – the stats are amazing.

Sheffield company Technophobia has two important mantras it keeps in mind when developing applications: 

1. Use the right tool for the job, and 

2. YAGNI (You ain’t gonna need it) 

These mantras were key for them when working to create a map based community website (I could tell you who it was for, but then I’d have to kill you. Sorry). Built in just 12 weeks with a small team, the site is built on the Microsoft platform but Technical Architect and Development Team Lead Jamie Hinton cherry picked the best tools and software (open source and closed source) to optimise the end result: 

“We did lots of research into whether to use Google Maps or Bing Maps, but Bing won out in the end despite the client wanting to stick with Google. 

This was mainly due to how we were using that map and the constraints within Google maps as to how we could add markers. Bing maps allowed for arbitrary HTML to be added to a pin whereas Google maps needed the HTML to be within a pin bubble. There are ways around this with Google maps and an earlier API version but that is where the client decided the risks were too great at this point in the project. 

The problem with Google is it can be a dangerous solution – if they change their API, however small a change, everything on the site could break and it would cost time and resources to fix it. We presented the risks to the client and eventually they understood they risked potentially annoy all their customers and waste time and money putting it right. The Bing API was much nicer – faster and more flexible, more developer friendly, so we were pleased we’d been able to persuade the client.” 

The application pulls together a number of familiar features you’d find on many other community sites. The difference with this site is the ease with which it brings all the elements together to make a truly pleasurable, simple user experience. The site uses geo location based on the user’s IP address and geo tags every piece of content on the site, which ranges from the user’s profile, photo and video galleries and discussion threads to dealer information and local events, all relevant to where you define your ‘spiritual home’ (to maintain privacy and avoid would be car thieves finding out where you park your brand new beloved vehicle). Administrators don’t need to sign in and out of the application – one click and the admin view appears providing extended privileges (i.e. more buttons!) allowing them to moderate posts and discussions in context. The application integrates with parent company authentication so users manage the same credentials whichever sister site they’re on. All activity is tracked with a custom built service managing guest invitations, user reputation and number of posts, for example. 

The architecture is service orientated (SOA) so each module is a service in its own right and therefore also pluggable. The team used Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) although it wasn’t necessarily their first choice: 

“Creating a service orientated architecture was crucial to allow us to deliver the application to the client quickly. Each of the modules (discussions, gallery, content control etc) are pluggable and a third party could build a Twitter service which could easily be consumed by the website on the front end. It also means the application is scalable and if something goes wrong with one of the modules it won’t take the whole site down. We really wanted to use nServiceBus to make the services totally independent but ended up using WCF as it’s standard technology. Plus, it would have complicated the design at this stage (remember YAGNI!)” (Jamie, Technical Architect and Development Team Lead) 

The Chat Challenge 

The website is completely open, so once you register you can chat to any other member (rather than just those you’ve accepted as friends per Facebook’s model) – and this presented a huge challenge for the development team. Jamie used standard protocols using a Jabba server called Openfire (a Java OSS) running in the back end. However the contact list was not scalable with Jabba. For the system to work it was crucial to know when users were online and when they’d signed out, so the team ended up using the .NET framework to add authenticated users to a huge dictionary of users and if they logged out or the session ended the system would automatically remove them. It was a simple solution to a potentially nightmarish problem. 

The search feature on the site is multilingual and uses Soundex with SQL Server 2008 to take advantage of the multilingual capabilities of SQL. It saved the team lots of pain (their words not mine!). 

“We intended to start simple with the search and as demand for more complex queries grew to start using Lucene but still use the existing database implementation as a fall back – but mainly to persist the search index as Lucene index can go wrong! Again it all comes back to keeping things simple and YAGNI!” 

Here’s a list of the technologies used: 

· .NET MVC 1 (2 was in Beta) 

· C sharp 

· Castle IOC 

 · jQuery 

· Linq 

· Mozilla Firefox 

· MSBuild 

· NHibernate 

· NUnit testing framework 

· Quartz Scheduler 

· ReSharper (‘the best plug-in in the world’ according to Jamie) 

· Selenium Grid 

· Selenium IDE 

· SimplyVBUnit for functional testing 

· Spark view engine 

· SQL Server 2008 

· TeamCity

· Visual Studio 2008

· Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)

· Windows Server 2008 

“We used text editor, a Mac and Photoshop as the design tools” (Richard Jones, Lead UX Web Designer). “We needed a more rapid wire framing method so we used HTML and CSS so we could re-use the wireframes quickly and easily. We swapped out the .NET engine for Spark as this helped the designers so they didn’t get most of the set tags in the mark-up. Spark cuts out all the blocks and iterators and lets non-technical team members make substantial changes using the same logic. Spark revolutionised our development process as it was so rapid to develop to.” 

At the end of our meeting I managed to grab Jamie on camera for a quick chat about how he finds working with so many different languages and tools on a day to day basis. 

Want to be able to allow users to upload pictures to our site without having to sign in first? Take a look at Yogile – a dead simple photo sharing site with a collaborative twist 

SugarCRM 6 Released, But Is It Open Source? Latest version splits offering for paying versus open source user, encouraging community to ‘Go Pro’ by providing new features to enterprise and professional users only

Joomla 1.6 Beta 5 Now Available – fixes 65 issues – but this version is for evaluation purposes only!

Microsoft Launches Outlook Facebook Integration – Facebook and Microsoft worked closely together to create a new social experience – the new Outlook Social Connector also allows users to connect with Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Windows Live Messenger contacts

Hotmail overhaul fixes spam issues, adds new features, giving better integration with other Microsoft services like Windows Messenger, Bing, and Office Web Apps

Integrated systems management suite RHQ 3.0.0 final has been released – features include pluggable alert senders and improved search capabilities

Next stop Facebook – Facebook Buys NextStop, Shutting Down Site and API. The city guide and restaurant review site will shut down 1st September. Existing users must export all guides by 1st September

GWOS Gets Revamped Java Monitoring – the enterprise network monitoring and management software releases GroundWork Monitor Enterprise 6.2 bringing a new Java monitoring agent, improved VMware ESX and vCenter monitoring, and new dashboard customization options