simplicity

For drivers who already share movies via Netflix and stream music rather than buying CDs, the idea of sharing a car is the natural extension of a hip, financially smart, and environmentally conscious urban lifestyle.

After all, drivers who give up their cars and switch to Zipcar say they save an average of $600 per month. Car sharers report reducing their vehicle miles traveled by 44%, according to Susan Shaheen of the University of California at Berkeley, and surveys in Europe show CO2 emissions are being cut by up to 50% per user.

via Car-rental, auto industry react to Zipcar’s growing appeal – Aug. 27, 2009.

A good read about where the car ‘borrowing’ market is headed. I think it’s got a huge set of legs as long as it’s simple and easy. That’s where I think Zipcar really excels, it’s incredibly simple and cheap. Not to mention it’s wireless technology is pretty effective. My friend who does this a lot can’t stop talking about how great it is and how easy it is.

If the plan is to go public next year, I bet a large amount of investors are salivating over the potential of getting their hands into this pot. I do have to mention though that the best part of the article is this:

Griffith’s hard-charging manner has alienated some of his nonprofit competitors. As Zipcar was preparing to launch in Chicago in 2006, he asked Sharon Feigon, I-GO’s CEO, for a lunch meeting. She says that when Griffith asked her what her exit strategy was, she replied she didn’t have one; I-GO would keep growing and serving Chicago. Then she remembers being taken aback by his next comment. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘You can’t expect to survive. We’re going to crush you.’”

I’m pleased to announce that Power Hour Plus Power Tunes Plus 1.0 officially went live [iTunes link] on the App Store.

The application plain and simple let’s you play the popular Power Hour drinking game on your iPhone or iPod Touch using the music library on the respective device. Besides the ability to play a song every minute for a set amount of time, we’ve included some interesting functionality such as integrating with Facebook and keeping track of music statistics, which will come in handy in future versions.

More information regarding the various features and additional screen-shots can be found at the application Power Tunes Plus website.

The application took a few months longer to build then I originally anticipated, mainly because it was my first foray into iPhone development and Objective-C. Also, the first few betas of the 3.0 firmware were absolutely horrendous in their�support of the music library and the music player. Even the release version isn’t completely up to snuff, as there are still issues with keeping the screen active when you’re playing music and issues regarding performance when performing queries on the music library. With that in mind the application was completed from a technical perspective and a testing perspective in early June and submitted for review prior to the 3.0 firmware going live in mid-June. As has been the case with many of the other developers we ran into issues and had to go through two rejections and had to wait two months before the application finally got approved. Personally, I still don’t understand why the rejections occurred. The statement was that our application was encouraging excessive consumption of alcohol, this coming from a company that approved ’101Drinking Games’ and ‘iDrink’ along with plenty of other drinking applications. Encouraging alcohol consumption on the App Store should be the least of Apple’s worries, at the time of our first rejection Apple had a top 10 application supporting school shootings and had previously approved the now infamous ‘Baby Shaker’ app. As you can see I’m still a little temperamental over the whole situation. I’m hoping Apple really improves the review process and makes it far more transparent and helpful for all of the developers.

While I’m pleased with the final product, I believe there is more work that needs to be done. Because this was my first attempt at iPhone development and Objective-C I took some liberties and the code is… how you say not object-oriented, clean, or readable. As such I need to do some major clean-up in that department. There’s also a performance impact that I’ve just recently noticed with incredibly large music libraries. While I could say that this is probably the SDK, I can’t clearly confirm that until I do some further testing. Other than the previously mentioned issues and some minor bug fixes most of the development time going-forward will be spent on enhancements from a feature and UI perspective as well as on development for the Facebook application. I’m really confident that the new features we have planned will make this application more enjoyable from a social and party perspective.

We really hope you give the application a try. �Any questions, concerns, feedback, and or ideas are more then welcome � overthink.apps AT gmail

Making some much needed changes to the blog over the coming weeks. I’ve implemented a ‘Lifestream‘, which I will be messing around with. Also, I will be implementing a digest of my shared items from Google Reader. I’ll be configuring that and some other things over the next few days to make sure everything is on the up and up.

I bought a Macbook Pro back in 2006. There is this little feature, which I assume all Macbooks have but which is rarely promoted, that does something so minor but makes so much sense that I can’t understand why no hardware company (I’m looking at you HP) hasn’t yet adopted it. It’s minuscule, but brilliant. What is it you ask? It keeps a memory of your headphones and internal speaker volume independently and it adjusts the volume based on whether the headphones are in or not. So for example, I usually have my headphones at a reasonable volume but keep my internal speakers muted. If I’m out I can plug in my headphones and not worry about turning mute off my speakers. At the same time, I can take my headphones out at any time and not worry about some large audible noise randomly escaping from my Macbook in public.

This would make sense for a lot of PC makers to implement within their hardware. It’d be really helpful at work when you remove your headphones take your laptop to a meeting but forget to turn the speaker volume on mute.