Just two stops down the line.

Not content to write a semi-boring web app that brings the world the top trafficked sites tagged for your pleasure, I am toying with the idea of creating an app for the iPhone. It's no big secret I fell in love with Apple Mac's nearly a decade ago. Since then I've seen the aqua interface come a very long way. From the buggy unfinished version 10.0 that didn't even work "properly" to Leopard that makes a mockery of the 5 plus years Microsoft spent dawdling on Vista, it's grown stronger than I'd ever dare imagine at the time. Now, with Cocoa Touch, it's gone where no OS has gone before, in my mind. (Hey, it's just my mind).

Before the iPhone I started learning Objective-C and Cocoa but soon became disillusioned through viewing the wonderful efforts of teams of developers at places like Panic software and The Omni Group. How am I going to compete with that? Not very successfully I concluded. There are a zillion and one apps for the Mac's these days, and I'm delight there are. It's quite nice to see Apple promote 3rd party apps on their site. They're quite fussy, and hopefully that brings a sense of quality to what they endorse. OK enough rabbiting on about the download area of their site.

Why an iPhone app? It's leading the mobile networking revolution and it's the most revolutionary phone ever created. Is that enough of a reason? Not really. The idea came to me, to provide a means to manage written content locally while offline. Content downloaded via subscription to publishers that provide access to digital archives of thousands of articles available to subscribers.

One area of online life that I think is stalling is the personal management of  what we find online.  My del.icio.us tag cloud  is more like an overcast sky these days. del.icio.us/zoostation Impossible to use. What annoys me about del.icio.us is that there is no concept of grouping tags. Before you scream "Bundles!" at me. Think about this: why can't I apply a Bundle to a bookmark? Why can't I create Bundles of Bundles? Del.icio.us doesn't seem capable of learning from my past actions. It doesn't remember what tags I used in my last post. It should. It makes sense. If you spend the morning researching something online, there stands a good chance of the links you save, all having a common thread. (Yes, I know, I've used the word thread.) Can we represent those in a group "Suggested Tag Group"?
It would be nice.

So collecting online articles to your phone, for reading offline I think is a good idea. Take the beta product to major online publishers, make the app interface via SOAP, allow publishers to develop plug-in's to encapsulate this interface and Bob's your auntie so to speak. 

The funniest thing I've seen today was the headline above in my TechCrunch news feed this smorning. I'm not gonna get into the details because you can read them for yourself on Tech Crunch, but basically a company called Blowtorch have released a Facebook app called Blown. If you wanna create your own short length film and have the chance to get it viewed across cinema's in the US, then Blown is for you. Blown is also for people easily amused by things that suck. And no, I'm not talking about hookers. Read the TechCrunch article here.

What am I still doing up? Good question. I don't really know. Going to bed seems like quiting. This is supposed to be a tweet so I'll keep it short. Right now I am working on the site, possibly contemplating other activities because my mind is just as excited and unfocused as it has been all day.

NOT. Hard to put into words how I'm feeling right now. Slightly pissed off maybe. I think I need to buy a new watch. Hey, if that's the way it goes, so be it. Life goes on, even for CC DeVille, even for me. I went into London today. It was cool for the most part. Excited, happy, alive, thrilled then mildly crushed. Till I saw an angel on the underground. White glow, world stops, slow motion focus. Gone.

Calzaghe's had a better week than me ha! But that's cool, it's only Monday. Plenty of time. Plenty of time to, write shitty code and, practice debugging it :o) he said with wry smile.

Thedirt

I'm tempted to get creative and add a picture to this post but, hey I know what... I'll show you what I bought on the way home! The Dirt by Motley Crue. Their autobiography is a New York Times best seller, so I'm sure it won't disappoint. Started reading it on the way home. Written by all four members of the band, so it should be quite well balanced. I think I'm gonna enjoy this as much as Slash's autobiography!

Hrmm... my first attempt at Blog-It didn't seem to pan out the way I thought it would. Maybe this one will work. Although I can't imagine why I'd choose to use the Blog-It interface and not the Vox one.

I just installed Blog-it on Facebook, between undercard fights on the Calzaghe Hopkins bill (I promise I wont mention it again tonight. Maybe.).

Keen to see if this post makes it's way into my Facebook mini-feed or wherever the hell it's supposed to end up. Can you tell I don't really know how Blog-it works? Observant.

So I worked till about 2am last night. Didn't quite finish the first collector. Got stuck into it this morning and it's now working brilliantly! I'm ecstatic! I fired it up for a long run and let it purr away for a while. Of course it stopped collecting data shortly after leaving to get some lunch. Why didn't I see that one coming? But I got enough of a run to do some testing and it's working well.

I've noticed errors before from the data source, so hopefully that will clear up soon. Then I can get on to doing some heavy collecting. It's a bit odd the source site has so many errors considering it has such a following. you'd think someone else would have noticed/complained.

Anyway, I'm totally stoked for the fight tomorrow morning. Oooo it's gonna be awesome! Now the whole damn source site is down. Even the home page won't load. hrmm... something tells me it's time to do something else.

So anyway, it's been 2 days of neglect here on Vox from me. I feel ashamed. I can't believe it's been that long! Where does the time go? I'm busy with my new site. I think I should come up with a code name for it. Something lame like Albany haha. Sorry Bill, or should it be Steve. Project IX. That's a good code name. So it is written, and so it shall be done.

So I've started writing some controller threads to collect the tagging info for IX. Initial coding is going well. I'm throwing in as many design patterns as I can. Just kidding! It's going to be interesting letting this first controller run wild for a day or so and see what data it pulls in and just how much it pulls in too. Very excited about that. I guess I better stop blogging and go and finish coding it up!

Before I go, I am watching the Calzaghe, Hopkins weigh-in tonight. Can't wait for the fight. It's gonna be another whipping in the same magnitude as the Jeff Lacy fight *grins*

Well, I guess this is home, for now. We'll see how I enjoy it and hopefully the service will be expanded beyond just blogging to allow us to add pages and widgets with time. That would be the ultimate, along with being able to customize the css design.