I have now been using the macbook for over a month now and I can confidently say that it’s the best computer I have owned so far. There are things about the mac that make it the best development machine ever. One of the best features for me is the fast sleep and wake up. You almost never have to wait for the laptop to wake up. As soon as you open the lid, its back up. There is a nice battery level indicator on the left side that you can use to query the battery status even with the lid closed. Also, the battery lasts for a long times so you never have to really shutdown your laptop (and lose the workspace)

The hardware is really top notch. The trackpad is the best I have seen so far and mouse gestures are really useful. The sound quality is awesome and the screen super crisp. It works really well with external keyboard, mouse and displays and so when you are in office, you can use it as a desktop. Apple desktop keyboards have the same layout and spacing as their laptop keyboards so you will never feel any difference.

On the software side, it comes bundled with iPhoto and Garageband so you have some good apps to begin with. The inbuilt pdf viewer is very good too. Also, there are some really good free applications available for mac, especially for developers (for example GitX)

I think macbook is totally worth the money if you can afford it. Its a little expensive but no other laptop comes even close. They can probably match up or do better on the processor speed or RAM but as a package (hardware + software), nothing beats the macbook. If you want , you can read more 15” apple macbook pro reviews

I was expecting to see something like Bangalore but I was in for a total surprise (and a pleasant one at that). The city is big, not as crowded as Bangalore and hundred percent fun. First thing that you notice is that the cabs are very efficient here (if you follow this advice and get a good one) and as a result its very easy to get from anywhere to anywhere any time of the day. I have used the cabs as late as 4 AM and I have always had a very pleasant experience. Another thing that I loved about the city is the different kinds of cuisines that you can sample here. So far, I have tasted Vietnames, Korean and Japanese food and desserts and everything has been really good and reasonably priced. I never thought I would say this but the vegetarian food here is exceptionally good. Here are a few pictures from MoF (Ministry of Food), a japanese dining and desserts place

This place has a great night life and a lots of live music. A lot of restaurants have live music and there are some great places for rock lovers. Most places are open till 2 AM. There are a lot of cafes and clubs which are open all night and you can get some great food all through the night. Here is a picture of a place called Q-Bar which serves coffee and drinks till about 3 AM in the morning.

Thats all for now. I will post more pictures and updates/info in another blog post. So long!

Camera

The iPhone camera is only 3 MegaPixel but it takes great pictures. I have not played around with the video recording much but here is one shot that I took using the iPhone

App Ecosystem

I downloaded a few apps and was blown away by the number of apps available on the platform. There is an app available for every need. Here are some of the apps that I use almost daily now

• Twitter for iPhone
• Google’s App (for muziboo mail, google reader)
• Notes (comes bundled with iPhone)
• Clock (comes bundled with iPhone. You can add clocks for different timezones and see them at once)
• Safari (comes bundled)
• Facebook

I also downloaded and tried out a few racing games. Even though I am not a gaming freak, I was very impressed by the games available on the iPhone. The responsive accelerometer makes most games on the iPhone a lot of fun.

SMS/Push Notifications

I liked the fact that you don’t have to unlock your iphone to view short sms and push notifications from apps like Facebook and Mail. It’s very handy and saves a lot of time if you are a heavy messaging user (who isn’t?)

The not so great things

To keep it fair, there are somethings I did not like about the iPhone.

• Even though there is 16GB built in storage, you cannot use iPhone as a USB drive (something I could do with Nokia 5800)
• Slide to answer call
• Need to use iTunes to transfer music and videos
• The not so great battery life (its better w/o wifi but still not as great)
• Some apps which don’t change orientation, forcing me to type on the smaller keyboard (Gmail for example)
• A common cable for usb and the charger, forcing you to buy an expensive accessory or unplug the cable from your computer everytime you wanna use the wall charger

Overall its a great phone and a great investment. I think the iOS4 update should make it an even better phone.

I will be giving a presentation on basics of Facebook Connect and a small tutorial on developing a simple application using FB Connect. This is the same talk that I gave earlier in ACM’s compute event. However, unlike the ACM event, this event is free to attend.

See you there!

In simple terms, Facebook Connect lets you provide a ‘Login with Facebook’ functionality on your website. Once users login with their Facebook credentials, you can help them post the activity they perform on your website back as news feeds on Facebook. You can see Facebook Connect in action at Muziboo. In fact, our implementation was the winner in Facbook Developer Contest India.

If you want to implement FB Connect on your site, there are plugins available for some blogging tools and popular CMS packages. However, if you have your own platform, you need to use their Javascript library to integrate the functionality. I will be doing a hands on tutorial at the upcoming Compute 2010 conference in Bangalore on building applications using Facebook Connect. Here is what we will go through:

• What is Facebook Connect and what are the benefits of using it.
• A simple application for logging into a site using FB Connect, perform an activity and post a news feed on Facebook
• Advanced capabilities of Facebook Connect (ex. sending email to the user)
• Integrating with your login/signup mechanism
• A note on the terms and policies of FB Connect

Prerequisites: The tutorial will assume familiarity with Facebook platform and working knowledge of Ruby and Javascript.

Hope to see you there! If you are a startup, you can apply for some free passes. More information here.

The first one is a review of the Nokia 5800 xpress music phone that I got in August. I had an imate (windows mobile) phone before and though it had some good features, it had a very tough interface and wasn’t very usable. Also, I was not very happy with the build quality and spent a lot of time gluing the parts together every time it fell down.  Apart from decent build quality, this time I wanted to buy a phone which had the following features

• Wi-fi, Email and a decent web browser (atleast usable enough to login to some web consoles and perform admin tasks for Muziboo in case of an emergency)
• A usable music player with decent headphones  (I generally look for good bass)

I wanted to upgrade to an iphone but found it to be damn expensive (in India and US). I then ran into some reviews of 5800 and decided to buy it as it offered great features for its price. Since there are a lot of detailed spec reviews of 5800 on the net, I will just post what I personally liked and disliked after using the phone for a couple of months

The Good

• Wi-fi is very easy to setup and works great. You can easily select if you want to connect to Wi-Fi/ GPRS everytime an applications wants to access internet. The web browser is also pretty usable and supports Javascript (and more importantly flash)
• Comes with a 8 GB memory card (upto 16 GB supported)  so you can load hundreds of songs on it. It has a pretty decent music player and the video playback is great too. The bundled headphones are good quality and it supports a standard 3.5mm phone jack so you can use better desktop headphones too. The headphones come with controls for next/previous/stop/play/pause and volume so its very easy to change tracks while you are on a treadmill. It also comes with lots of preloaded music (both Hindi and English).
• There are some pretty useful apps available for symbian (such as putty)
• There is a 3.0 megapixel camera that takes decent pics. Not as great as a cybershot phone camera but good enough to capture memories. You can see a pic I took here
• It has a pretty big screen (bigger than iphone screen)
• Comes with maps and GPS (3 months free trial)
• Its currently priced at 13.5k so its pretty cheap (I got it for around 16.5k). strongly recommend checking out offersforshoppers.com for 5800’s coupons

The Bad

• Does not charge through a USB cable. You need to carry the stupid Nokia charger. I find this pretty irritating
• The touchpad is not as good as that of an iPhone (However its still pretty usable)
• There are not as many apps available for 5800. iPhone clearly is a winner here

Overall I find the phone good value for money. Let me know if you have any questions.

I will be at BCM 6 on Oct 11 2009. If you are around, I would love to catch up. Please email me at prateek AT Muziboo dot com if you are planning to attend and wanna catch up. See you there!

I wonder why a company like Facebook has such a misleading invitation mechanism. When Facebook says that you have X contacts that you can add as friend and shows their photo next to their names, anyone would assume that these are people already on Facebook. Turns out a lot of these people are not on Facebook and there is no separate list of contacts who are not on FB, but can be invited (which is a common two step invitation practice followed by sites like Twitter/LinkedIn etc).

If you have received an invite to join Facebook from me, please accept my apologies and ignore it. I did not mean to send even a single invite. I have never even invited all my contacts to Muziboo, my own startup so I particularly hate being labeled as a spammer when FB spams on my behalf.  Thanks so much FB for breaching my trust!

Muziboo @ XtremeStartups | Music Upload

If you liked this talk, you can subscribe to XtremeStartups’ RSS or iTunes feed  or visit XtremeStartup’s Muziboo page. If you have any feedback/questions on what we spoke, please leave them as comments.

On a related note, I would be very thrilled to see more events/people use Muziboo for sharing podcasts or lectures. We provide RSS/iTunes Feeds/Follow By Email along with detailed stats on usage. Pro Account holders can upload upto 30 MB per file (which is about 1 hour of 64kbps audio file).

Pick the right projects

Of all the things that I have learnt about consulting, this is the most important one. Here are a few guidelines that can help you pick the right projects.

• Charge by the hour and never opt for fixed budget projects however-much enticing they are. All software projects tend to get delayed. The delays don’t mean much if you are in the consulting business, but if you are trying to raise cash for your startup, every extra day lost  reduces your product development runway. If billing is by the hour, you can make sure that such delays don’t hurt you. It also makes sure that you get only relevant change requests (since the client is paying for every hour spent).
• Pick projects that you like working on and teach you things that can be applied to your own idea. For example, if you are planning to work on an e-commerce portal (or want to add a payment gateway to your existing product), you can pick up a similar project and learn relevant stuff there.
• Don’t mind dirty maintenance jobs as they are short and well-paid. As engineers, we tend to love working from scratch and hate fixing bugs in someone else’s code. End-to-end product development cannot be delivered in a few sittings unlike a well defined back end work. Also you will make big bucks  in projects that are already live, because  your contribution as a subject matter expert  is extremely important for the company in fixing its product.
• On a related note, avoid projects that involve working on the UI. These jobs involve talking to the designer, taking the CEO’s viewpoint on buttons/boxes and cross browser hell. Compare this to backend work, where you can work all by yourself, whenever you want and finish the job much more quickly. You want to avoid any sort of job that has too many stakeholders.

Don’t grow your consulting business

Once you pick up a project, there are inevitably more such project offers coming your way and most often you will be tempted to hire a couple of freshers and a manager and spin off a consulting business – an amazingly self sustained money generating machine of a business that requires minimal effort  that can keep funding your product development. If you go down that Utopian path, before long you would realize that most of your time is spent in business development, following up on payments, motivating your employees and other mundane activities. If product company is what you want to build, do not shift focus. Take up just as much  as you can do than sinking into the quagmire of a services business. The cash reserve that you build should be just enough to give a decent runway for growing your startup.

Get Paid

While this looks like the most obvious one, many people make a mistake here. As engineers, we tend to charge based on our needs and not our skill set and its value in the market. Talk to  few of your peers and figure out how much to charge before you quote. Don’t charge lesser than the market rate and make sure that you get paid. Sometimes, your clients are too busy and paying you may not be the top priority item in their to-do list. Follow up and get paid. If possible, take an advance payment before starting out and decide on milestones for remaining payment.

You can’t always balance it right

One more setback which is not quite obvious on first glance is the time-sink that can happen due to continuous context switching between consulting projects and your start-up idea. Consulting is going to take your focus away for a while and your startup’s growth may suffer because of that. The idea is to accept that upfront and not let it bring you down. The last thing you wanna do is to end up demotivated. If you are working all day on consulting projects, there is no point  forcing yourself to work on your startup at night. There is only so much one can code every day and any spare time should be used to reflect upon your  start-up’s growth and strategy. If you are adventurous, you can also use this break to catch up on your reading or hang out with friends :)

In the end, figure out what works best for you and do it. Idea is to make some money, learn something new and have some fun. When you get back fulltime to your startup, you should be richer and invigorated!