Developing Upwards

As of my first hour playing around I was able to share and synchronize play of any MP3 between multiple users with a simple drag and drop interface. Things were going pretty well for my project, but I had some work to do getting from there to the collaborative playlist I had in mind. I was already just assuming we were only caring about one file, because that worked well to get things up and running fast. My next step was to remove that assumption and start keeping a list of songs. This was pretty easy, in fact. I started writing a simple list of songs as they were downloaded, each with a play button which performed the <audio> tag set and play that previously done automatically. Each user could now play any song that was shared and to restore the previous synchronized playing that happened when they only dealt with a single done I incorporated broadcast changeTrack messages. I added two other broadcasts, pause and play, which would allow any users to pause and play the songs ...

Today was one of our very fun Ship It! Day  events at Caktus Group and the first in our new office. It snuck up on a lot of us, what with the busy move we're still settling down from, but it also is a great chance to unwind and to really enjoy our new shared workspace. I'm going to start ending these events with a personal post-mortem on what I worked on. I decided to learn about WebRTC by building a tool I'd love to have with friends: a shared music player. The problem is simple: some of us think the room is to quiet and some of us like quiet. What we need is a way to play music together with headphones. The goal was a simple app that can play MP3s. Everyone with the app open should be able to play songs and everyone connected would listen at the same time. We all hear the same thing. If someone leaves, they'll take their music with them. So, I set about this yesterday afternoon (when our Ship It festivities officially begin) and I had a vague idea where I wan...

The following is an excerpt from a press release between my employer and our partners at UNC and Duke on a new project: The web application development company  Caktus Group  has teamed up with researchers at the  UNC Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases  and the Duke Global Health Institute to develop a mobile phone app that may help patients better adhere to their medication regimens. This is my exciting new project and I'm hugely happy to be able to talk about it publicly! We've been hard at work in conjunction with our great partners at UNC and Duke, and its been a very rewarding project even so early in the lifecycle. I'm very confident about our success in really being able to help people, and really that  is the whole reason I want to build software in the first place. It has been a very rewarding project, and an amazing opportunity I've been given. As it happens, this is also our first mobile app. I've been doing a lot of resear...