The app store is broken, and we all know it.

The mobile/smartphone space today is where personal computers were back in the 80′s. Multiple platforms (Amiga, Tandy, IBM PC, Apple Macintosh, TRS 80, Commodore 64) and little standardization. The market is ripe with innovation and people have a lot of choice, which is great for the consumer. But it makes it hard for app developers.

How do you decide what platform to build for and what application to build? Once you build an application, how do you spread the word so that you can get it in the hands of as many people as possible? How much do you charge for it? Most of just scratch our own itch, pick a number and leave the rest to Cthulhu.

Right now, it is hard for an app to stand out amongst the hundreds of thousands out there, and this has led to the crazy pricing that dominates the top 50 lists in search of a hit.

Earlier this summer we realized that what was needed was a cross-platform out-of-band solution to allow users to not only discover and promote the best apps for their platform, but also to bring apps from other platforms and from other cities to their city and their platform.
Effectively, a central meeting ground for developers and their users, that lives on the open web and outside the proprietary platform stores.

So, today we launched the Appify Developer Preview. Danny puts it very well when he calls appify a marketplace, discovery platform and innovation engine.

Appify will allow app developers to set up their own app pages on the open web and get them in front of a much bigger audience, even those that aren’t on their platform of choice. It will allow users to look at and get the apps offered not just for their device or city but around the world and on every device. It will also allow users to help promote the apps they think are worthy and to participate better in the app development process.

As a developer, you could still set up a webpage for your app, and you should, but then you have to promote your app, build an audience and spend time doing everything other than writing code. Why not let appify do all of that for you so that you can focus on what you do best, build awesome products? Do you want beta testers? We’ll find them for you! Do you want early-adopts who will find and spread your app? We’ll find them for you! Feature requests? Feedback? Exposure? We’re going to do all of that, and a whole lot more.

Currently, appify focuses on just local apps, although we’d like to encourage every app developer to create their app page. We’re building a community and since we’ve done local before, we decided that was the best place to start. Also, there’s been an explosion of mobile apps that help make cities work better and we’d like to give these apps as much exposure as possible.

So if you’re an app developer, go create your app page right now! If you have questions, concerns, suggestions, or flames, direct them to developers@appify.com

So, you know that you can use ^R to search your command history, right? (Well, if you didn’t, now you do, go ahead, try it, it’s possibly the best shell tip EVER)

For the longest time I had no idea how to go forward, and ideally ^S should work but ^S is interpreted by zsh, or readline, or OS X Terminal (and perhaps ubuntu as well) as a way to stop input. (More here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bash/+bug/48880)

So, after some co-workers brought it up here yesterday, I googled and found this awesome post: http://nathanpowell.org/blog/archives/632 which shows you how to enable ^S by doing this:

stty stop undef

Once you do that, you can press ^R to search back and ^S to search forward.

I hope this delights you, as much as it delighted me.

PS. Of course you can always use a different keybinding for forward (^F) and backward search (^B), with zsh you can use:

bindkey ^F history-incremental-search-forward

bindkey ^B history-incremental-search-backward

but ^R and ^S just feel better to my muscle memory.

If you haven’t seen this post from Chris yet, you have to check it out. Awesomely inspiring!

Ever see a book on amazon or bn.com and have the urge to buy it, but not sure if it will be worth buying? I do – all the time!  Hence my wishlist keeps growing!

But I just found the lovely LibraryLookup tool which grabs the ISBN from any web page, and looks it up in your local library.

For some reason the New York Public Library link in the Innovative library list doesn’t take you to the place where you can reserve books.

A bit of poking around and we have a new link, so this is how it works:

1. Drag NYPL Library Lookup to your bookmarks bar
2. Find a book on Amazon or BN.com or any other place with an ISBN on the page.
3. Click the NYPL Library Lookup bookmark, and watch it find the book at the NYPL in a new window!

…magic.

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Tags: books, hacks, technology, library_lookup, amazon, library, knowledge

Recently I’ve been running into a lot of silliness that appears in files exported from MS applications (Word, Excel, etc.) called ‘Smart quotes’.

Basically MS uses higher level ascii characters to represent quotes that mean more than regular quotes (whatever for?!). You see this weirdness in vi as <93><92> etc. which are the hex values of these characters. I had to hunt a bunch on google to find out how to fix this, although the fix is very easy.

For each value that you see in your file, just do a string substitution, like so:

:%s/<93>/\’/g

of course, you can’t just type that <93> in there, so to get it in there you use (via: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/usr_45.html)

CTRL-V x 93

which inserts hex 93 in place.

In recently exported CSV’s from excel, I’ve seen hex 91-97.

Quite annoying, frankly.

–

You could also use perl, like here

perl -pi -e”s/\x92/’/g” myfile.html

and use it on multiple files.

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Tags: smart_quote, vim, ms_word, ms_excel, string_replacement, substitution, windows_unix, export, import, decimal, hex, 92, 93, <92>, <93>

Not as painless as installing it, but the upgrade instructions here work pretty well.

1) wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

2) cp -aR blog/wp-content/* wordpress/wp-content/

3) cp blog/wp-config.php wordpress/

4) disable all plugins http://example.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?action=deactivate-all

5) mv blog old-blog && mv wordpress blog

6) make sure you hit http://example.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

7) and manually re-enable all your plugins.

and you’re done.

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Tags: upgrade, wordpress, blog, painless, wordpress_upgrade

Started a tumblelog: http://sublucid.tumblr.com to keep this space clean of re-posts like the one right below this one!

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Tags: tumblr, web, expression

Not that anyone uses Orkut anymore, but….

Too little, too late?

Maybe they should work on fixing the scalability issues first?