qream

The Qream Platform

To start the year on a high note, I wanna introduce everyone to our new project: The Qream Platform. As some of you might already know, I no longer work for a certain eBookstore company, so this particular project is something a handful of techie friends of mine came up with.

You can say it’s our own startup.

The platform is more of a scratching-an-itch type of project. We wanted to integrate physical documents with softcopy versions of them. I remember when I worked for a certain company years ago that I had to haggle for the photocopying machine just to give physical copies of the project plan I did for a client. Since then, I wished there was some way for people to read documents online and won’t have to bother asking for a hardcopy of them.

Dropbox came into the scene and it was good. In fact, it’s awesome. The only problem I have with Dropbox is that if I were a non-techie and don’t appreciate documents as mere files in my computer, but actual business intelligence assets, I won’t bother organizing documents the way you organize (or disorganize) files in your Desktop. I’d rather look into a log or a diary of the dates I got my documents and see their facsimile copy. It can be done using actual hardcopies of documents and organize them by category or by date. Of course, as we all know, physical documents tend to make finding them quite sad, as well as tedious. Basically, you can’t simply do Ctrl-F on all of those file cabinets.

Now that the iPad came in, opportunities opened up for documents-based applications, and we, the Qream Team, want to take the opportunity.

The Qream Team will also participate in the first ever Joyful Frog Digital Incubator Bootcamp to be held in Singapore later this month. We’d like to think that this is also a Filipino representation thing for the event (as if the pressure weren’t high enough, haha). After almost a month of planning and deliberating the architecture and resources needed, we will be starting our first codejam today, considering we’ve done a lot of code and research already for this. You can think of our first codejam as our first formal code-athon to integrate what we’ve learned in building a huge platform like Qream.

Hopefully this will also serve as our first diary entry for our long but superbly thrilling ride towards making the Qream Platform a reality. We’ll let you know later what it does specifically and hopefully we can tell you how it actually works without overpromising things (we want to keep user expectations aligned with our actual implementation progress).

Untitled

Happy 20th Birthday, VIM Editor

I know VIM is old, but never thought it was like almost my age!

Kidding aside, VIM has been my lifesaver when it comes to editing stuff from a remote server, especially those ugly bugs that can be squashed by either removing a line, or just changing spellings. For those who don’t know what VIM does, VIM is a commandline-based text editor with a cool TUI (text-based user interface), sporting tons of features and supporting almost all programming languages. If you started in DOS like me, you might remember using Wordstar or the “edit” command in your DOS prompt. VIM is similar to these, in which all of these programs run in that blackened screen called the command prompt.

I remember my mentor teaching me VIM, and all I can think about is why would someone make colons as menu shortcuts? Those were my first days learning Linux and I can barely mount a floppy disk from the terminal.

Still, VIM played a huge role in my entire career, and I always tell my students and colleagues that if they don’t learn VIM, they won’t survive pro Linux.

For more history about VIM, go to the Ars Technica birthday tribute article to appreciate it more.

iPadLovesGMail

GMail Launches Its New iOS App

Everybody’s favorite tech company, Google, has just recently launched (and pulled out) the very much rumored GMail app for iOS. It’s a hurray, and then halfed!

A lot of our Android friends (including me) have already enjoyed using the GMail native app, and we all loved its simplicity, less distractions, full labels support, and, of course, local searching. With iOS now being blessed by good ol’ Goog with a new mail app, I wonder what other apps they still have in store for the Apple platform…

Below are screenshots from GMail’s blog:

iPhone Screenies

Photo Attachments

GMail Message Menu. Notice the "Report Spam" and "Mute" choices.

Labels show up when screen is swiped to the right

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

iPad Screenshots

iPad Screenshot with Thread View

Real awesome stuff since you get to have full features of GMail in a native speedy way. As exciting as it may seem, Google unfortunately pulled the app from the App Store due to “a bug which broke notifications and caused users to see an error message when first opening the app.” 

I would love to have a clean and speedy (also, free) version of Google Reader inside my iPad, so it could compete head on with Reeder, sort of the top-selling Google Reader client for iOS. If they could do it the Flipboard way, the better.