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While none of my friend were actually using the first version of Path (being fully honest, a few but rarely and I wasn’t using it anyway), I now see lots more activity since they released Path2.

The old app was focused on 50 friends max, and photo sharing. Once when visiting their office and seeing if they were interested about my profile I told them it’d be more “bally” to even limit to 10, but not counting family members. This way people could actually add as many people as they wanted, but the baseline would have more impact (Note: In case you wonder they told me they had nothing for me, either because Dave Morin – CEO of Path – is super good friend with Joe Green – CEO of Causes – which I was leaving, or either because I suck).

I guess that didn’t work too well as they pivoted a bit to be a full featured facebook like sharing (locations, photos, music, status, and even when you go to sleep). I now see way more activity than before, and more friends joining (but that’s because I’m a geek with geek friends, you might actually see none). The iPhone application is really slick, and some people starting coping their UI (objective-c or even CSS based).

The feeling I have is there is still room left for improvement on mobile iPhone applications, even on busy segments like social networks. It’s funny to see Facebook hasn’t been that good on mobile (seeing how long it took for an iPad application – I heard some people refused to work on it unless they could ditch three20 from the app), Path2 seems way slicker and not as busy. Thinking about it the way I use the Facebook mobile app on the iPhone is exactly the features giving by Path, no more – no chat, etc. Using Path2 I remember how I should remove features from mobile apps, focusing on what matters the most.

So when is someone releasing a Facebook Path2 like application, as slick? This way at least I can use it with my friends.

My popular iPhone app Push is now available as a lite version : Push Lite. It’s free, has advertising, and is not limited in any way. If you need push notifications for RSS feeds, Twitter, Emails, Facebook, or if you want to use an API to send yourself notifications, this is it.

The original Push application has about 50,000 users, hopefully the lite version will boost it even more. Spread the words, and send me feedback.

Note: This is a cross post with my other San Francisco blog.

A few weeks back I was at WWDC (San Francisco), the Apple conference. Something strikes me, every time I hear French I usually say a few words asking where they’re from and so on, and 50% of the time they patronize me.

They look at me as I’m a little student who came from Paris, for a week or two, I only worked since my 18 (I’m turning 33). It usually comes to a point where I say I actually live in San Francisco (well not for long now as I’m thinking of not coming back after my Parisian vacation in July), the discussion suddenly changes, but not all the time. They then want to know how I’ve managed to be here, and how they could achieve the same.

A few days ago I was at Summit (better than coworking space to my opinion), a great Coffee shop in San Francisco with lots of developers hanging around on day time, working on startup ideas. I heard 2 French guys, obviously Engineers, and talked to them. They patronized me (again!) and didn’t even say hi, they just didn’t want to talk.

American Engineers very rarely have that attitude, they’re always very happy to meet new people, and I’ve met numerous people at Summit and other places while not going there for that purpose. Even non Engineers love networking, and San Francisco is the only place where I can wear a short, t-shirt, flip flops and talk to a CEO with a $400 shirt without him patronizing me. Engineers are the people making startups happen, and they’re very aware of that.

A French friend of mine actually noticed the same and don’t talk to French people anymore while going to conferences. If you’re French, don’t do that. Network is important.

I’ve spent the last weeks asking around to my fellow developers friends why they use the git command line tool instead of a nice GUI. Years ago when I was using Linux some people were just against GUI tools, but today they’re not anymore. The reason they don’t use a GUI is there is no current application good enough for replacing the git command line.

The existing tools like Gitx, Tower, Gitk, Sprout, Gitnub are all very similar in the way they do things, they are only improved tool of a basic Gitk but nothing than actually makes you want to use it full time.

I know, you think this is a useless application, git in command line is good enough. But you’d probably say the same thing about Github 4 years ago, as you had your own servers, but it still became the de facto standard for Git source hosting today. Most of all because they added features noone thought about git at the time (easier pull, social coding, etc).

Questions coming to mind about a GUI Git application:

1. Why you don’t use a GUI?
2. Why such a tool doesn’t exist yet?
3. What would make you use this tool?
4. How long would it take to make such a tool?
5. Would it be sustainable?

My answers:

1. You don’t use those GUI because they suck, if you use git you probably know what you’re doing. Adding features slower to use in GUI than command line is a bad idea. You then basically run a GUI only to view branches and do visual things, once a week.
2. A better tool doesn’t exist because it’s tough to develop, a new one need to find a new workflow, using complete different workflow than the existing bad ones.
3. You would use the new tool because it saves you time, and allow not so advanced git user to do tricky things without knowing git as well. It also needs features for small groups, like push notifications when someone push code, local gitjour similar feature (share your git locally and discover others through Bonjour) for quick hackathon. You’d want a nice branch visual like the ones from github, and a commenting system similar to github. You’d want full Github support, a live activity feed similar to BaseCamp listing commits, new comments. You’d want a light chat to reply live to commits, only for developers. You’d want more than just a git GUI.
4. I think a beta version of such a Cocoa tool would take 3 months full time to get a beta, 6 months to get something working on a daily basis, for a team of at least 2 very good developers. There is a lot of thoughts to put in the design first.
5. I can’t say, but seeing github is bigger than Google Code and Sourceforge, and everyone in San Francisco has a mac laptop as a development laptop, I have the feeling such a tool, if popular, would be sustainable for a team of 3 people full time. San Francisco is a lot about trends, if you can make such a tool popular among a few top developers, there is a big change the others would follow.

(Note : this is cross posted with my other San Francisco blog)

A little less than a year ago, I started to work for Causes, a great experience overall. First time I’ve worked full time for a US based company, and the best users/employees ratio you can imagine. Causes.com announces 150 millions users (fact is it’s a little more), run by less than 10 Software Engineers. The last months I’ve worked:

• A lot on the Facebook Open Graph
• On the Email infrastructure (emailing all those users without being flagged as SPAM tis more difficult than you think)
• Improving test run, using decentralized methods (hydra, but don’t use hydra really, just upgrade to rspec and use other tools)

The Engineer team I’ve met at Causes is probably one of the best I’ve met so far, I’ve learned a lot about:

• Scrum and Sprint jobs
• Pivotal Tracker which I ended up liking a lot
• How Git commit messages are more than more important for your team
• Ruby, yes I’ve learned more about Ruby and the more I use it, the more I like it.
• More stuff I’ve forgot as I’m typing this.

I you ever get the chance to interview or join Causes, you’ll have a lot of fun and join a great project, not to say an amazing office. But tomorrow will be my last day there, and I’ll be free for the next weeks to meet you.

I’m flying back to Paris on July 8th, and don’t plan to come back for now unless I get a good opportunity in San Francisco before leaving. I do iPhone and Rails development but really like doing iPhone applications overall. I’ll also work on tweetsell.it and Push4 on a side.

If we haven’t met yet, please contact me I’m free and look for amazing project to join. You’ll find my linkedin profile and my online résumé (PDF) if you care. I’ll also be at WWDC next week and will try to show up in a few events this month.

Comme je pars à l’étranger pour longtemps, je me sépare de mon superbe DELL 3008WFP pour 1300 euros TTC ( 1100 euros HT ), je peux fournir une facture et vous pouvez récupérer la TVA.

Il est à passer prendre à Bastille, il est état neuf, avec une fixation murale si vous la voulez. Il coûte actuellement 1800 euros TTC environ.

What’s your thought about the raise of Android compared to the iPhone? They now sell 200K devices a day.

As a user, and as a developer? My feeling is users buying iPhones are more willing to buy applications on the appstore than Android users, which only buy… a phone. But I may be wrong.

As a user, I like the fact I’m connected all the time to IM like gtalk.

I’m now part of Causes which already has nice success stories, but what is Causes?

Causes was founded on the belief that in a healthy society, anyone can participate in change by informing and inspiring others. The most successful movements have always been born out of and held together by the bonds of real world relationships, and online social networks present never before seen opportunities for organizing. We strive to build tools for people to mobilize their friends for collective action, spread the word to friends of friends and acquaintances, and eventually launch movements that span local communities or even the globe.

Causes is also one of the largest current website using Ruby on Rails, and is recruiting developers. So get in touch with me if you’re looking and feel like a Rails hacker, and feel free to follow @caretopia.

TweetSell.it allows you to see what’s being sold on Twitter, in real-time. You can also see what’s being sold near you, or search for specific items like the iPhone4. I’ve had the idea for a long time, but I only released the service a few days ago.

What do you think? How do you like it? What should be included? Let me know here or through my twitter @fabienpenso. There are more features to come later like online payment.

I’m working on a service using the streaming API from Twitter, a great feature as it gives you instant access to Tweets. But then you get overloaded by Tweets, and because I’m looking for Tweets talking about money, I get lots of noise.

Looking at TwitBlock, I filtered out lots of it :

1. Ignore tweets from recent users (if created less than 24 hours ago)
2. Ignore tweets from users with default profile image
3. Ignore if fewer than 10 followers
4. Ignore if user description and name are blank
5. Ignore if followers fewer than 100, and friends count is > (2*followers_count)
6. Ignore if followers count over 100, and friends count is > (5*followers_count)
7. Ignore if the user sends more than 20 tweets per day in average, since its creation

Some of these is working for me, but might not work for you at all. However, I think there could be a better way for a mass use. I ran mail servers for years, a very reliable way to handle this is to use DNSBL (also called RBL). You could have different RBLs for different use, and any twitter client could implement this very easily. Please note this could probably not work for Direct Messages except if Twitter grant specific access to the service, which they would probably never will.