Ankit Ahuja

I am a big fan of Twitter. Unfortunately, almost all of my real life friends are only on Orkut. Most of them haven’t even heard of Twitter. Thats how I came up with the idea of creating something like Twitkut.

I update on Twitter a lot. So, I thought how cool will it be if somehow all my Orkut friends can also recieve frequent updates on my tweets as well as be able to read them from Orkut itself. That means they don’t have to be registered on Twitter to follow me and get updates.

Twitkut displays your recent tweets on your Orkut profile page. Besides, it also shows you which all of your friends are using Twitkut so that you can follow them. It shows you their combined recent tweets too. This way you don’t have to follow them separately on Twitter. You can simply read their tweets every time you visit Orkut.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

It makes use of Google’s OpenSocial API as well as Twitter’s Search API to access the tweets. I made use of OpenSocial’s JavaScript API.

OpenSocial is still pretty nescient, especially if you have seen the Facebook API. I was pretty dissappointed at times with the lack of features in the API. For eg., a chief functionality of my app would have been to update the status of the Orkut user with his/her latest tweet. But, the API didn’t allow it.

Another feature OpenSocial currently lacks is that there is no way for the developer to keep track of who or how many users are using his application. I feel this should have been one of the first features that should have been implemented in the API, to allow developers to see analysis of their app usage from within Orkut.

There was one more thing that made me cringe. The Orkut sandbox allows using opensocial 0.8 api whereas prod.sandbox.orkut.com as well as orkut.com only allow opensocial 0.7 at this point of time. Nowhere did they mention this loud and clear. So, I ended up making the app using opensocial 0.8. Then I got to know that I had to use opensocial 0.7 if I wanted to submit my app to Orkut ( ofcourse that’s the reason I am developing the app ) and so I had to make some gruesome changes all over again.

On the brighter side, I was very happy with the response at the Orkut Developer Forum. Jason and others helped me along the way and were kind enough to answer all my queries. Without their response, I would have certainly been unable to develop this app. It also cleared some of my concepts regarding Caching, etc.

All in all, I am pretty happy with the result. I have had nice feedback from people who have already started using Twitkut.

So, if you use Orkut and you are a Twitter crazy person and want to share your tweets with a wider world, you can add the application by going here.

PS: You can follow me on Twitter here -> http://twitter.com/ahujaankit

PollBol is an exciting web app that adds a twist to conventional polling by adding an additional social aspect to it. After making FriendCompare, which was a mashup making use of the Last.fm API, I wanted to make a more independent app that maintained its own data.

Even so, I fully support the idea of making use other apps’ APIs’. It makes it easier for the users to use and it is easier to convince them to use the new app since it builds on the functionality of the more popular webapp. And so, FriendCompare has had comparatively far more visitors as compared to PollBol due to the popularity of Last.fm.

With PollBol, I had to think of a development platform that would allow me to complete the project within my summer vacations. And what better for agile development than Ruby On Rails. It was exciting to use Rails as it divides the entire project into three parts: Models, Views and Controllers. And this makes it easier to plan on the various modules of the project.

I started out with the basic models of Questions, Answers and Users and then added modules as I started getting more comfortable with Rails. It makes it very easy to create Models through migrations. You don’t need to know much of Sql in order to be able to manage data in a database.

Rails also makes it dead simple to create Views for your app, though eventually to make your app look better, you need to have decent CSS skills. Controllers and Views are interrelated. So, for each Controller, there is a corresponding View. The Controller performs all the programming part whereas all the formatting information is contained in the View. Rails also provides Helpers, which help to make Views even more simple and less complicated.

Google Charts API came in handy to display the results of polls.

Though PollBol hasn’t had as many users as FriendCompare, only a handful of people who I really had to convince to help me test the app :p ( thanks Sameer, Neha, etc.), it was a fascinatingly learning and fun experience developing it.

Some of the unique features in PollBol are:

1. You can add additional answers/choices to a poll if you don’t like the available ones

2. You can be friends with other users so you can follow their activity

3. RSS Feeds for public activity, latest polls, popular polls, etc.

4. Commenting on Polls

PollBol hasn’t been tried by too many people yet. Maybe its because I haven’t tweeted or blogged about it. Also, unless its an app as popular as twitter or last.fm, with the social webapps overload, people normally cringe at the thought of registering at a new website ( including me ). Maybe in future, I will allow non-registered users to participate in polling as well as integrating it with OpenID.

Meanwhile, here are a few screenshots for you to chew on:

You can try PollBol at http://pollbol.icedlabs.com

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I just felt like writing today on a hot Sunday evening. A lot has happened over this week and it has proven to be a pretty hectic one for me.

It started off with the boring and passive college, where hardly anything of significance ever happens. You just sit there idle all day and do assignments or talk pointlessly or listen to whatever little the lecturers have to offer. Not only is it enervating, but its also spiritually draining to think that you are spending your entire day doing nothing. The only thing that keeps you going are your friends there.

Then in the middle of the week, my internet connection gave away and it worked like a snail all week, until today. 

And then, yesterday, the bomb blasts took place in Delhi by a group that calls itself the “Indian Mujahideen”. There were 5 of them, though of low intensity, at the busy market places of Cannaught Place, Karol Bagh and Greater Kailash. Though bomb blasts took place sometime back at Bangalore and Ahmedabad as well, these were a little more terrifying as they were a lot closer. 

As of now, 30 people have been said to have died and more than hundred are injured. One really feels sorry for the ones who lost their loved ones to this inhuman incident of terror. This does raise the question, ” Are we doing enough to stop terror ?” I don’t think so. 
What these blasts have done is that they have brought the people closer if anything. It was heartening to see people helping the ones affected by the blasts. 

I have been reading a lot lately. Whether it is weblogs or new words [to improve my vocabulary] or for that matter, course books [really], so I thought, maybe, to be on the opposite side for once. 

Now that my internet is working fine and I have already slept for more than a dozen hours on the weekend, sanity seems to have been restored and my mind is at peace again.

Yes, its called Friendcompare. To describe it simply, it basically lets you compare your musical tastes with your last.fm friends and neighbors.  You just enter your last.fm username and it brings up a list of your friends and neighbors with whom you can compare. Once you choose to compare, it shows you the top tracks, artists, albums, tags, friends as well as recently played tracks that are common between both the users.

Though it isn’t anything huge, I am happy with it. It took some effort, probably more on the design front than the development front :), to get it somewhat pleasing to the eye and yes, functional. But it was a fun, learning experience. On the way, Sameer gave me some brilliant ideas and criticism, for which I am grateful to him. Also, a couple of people at my favorite IRC channal, #think-digit, who gave me criticism and a third-person point of view, and also appreciation :)

As I went on coding and adding new little features, I learnt a lot on creating CSS layouts and programming with PHP. I learnt a lot more CSS tricks which are definitely going to help me out in my next webdesign project ;). And while coding with PHP, I eventually got hints about its object oriented nature and that how it could make expanding the application a very simple task. In future, I would probably like to make use of AJAX to make it a little more web 2.0 :)

You can have a look at this app’s programmableweb profile here.

I have this idea of probably building a facebook or orkut application for it, will it be useful? You can let me know in the comments.

Meanwhile, we move on to bigger and better things :p

Now before you come to any conclusions about my beliefs and logical understanding of life, hear what I have to say.

I have always believed in astrology since I was in school. Maybe, it was because I was sometimes in a bad mood and it gave me a sense of consolation to know that my horoscope said that I will have low energy levels today.

But the truth of the matter is, I have always been able to connect with my horoscope in one way or the other. It may be because they are so generalized that you can relate to them from several perspectives. But, whether they actually have any meaning or not, they generally do give a sense of optimism and happiness. Thats why I like reading them.

Why am I suddenly talking about astrology? I jumped on to this website, Astrodienst, and was really impressed with its horoscope prediction. Since, I have actually read quite a few of my predictions. They have really neat Personal Daily Horoscope section.

Here’s an excerpt from my prediction for tommorow and I quote here :

Matters of love and affection are uppermost in your mind today. You are conscious of your loved ones and your feelings for them. If other testimonies agree, you might fall in love with someone new. In any case, you are more concerned with love and your relationships than with your own ego. One manifestation of this influence is a pleasant daydreamy mood in which you are not disposed to work, other than creative activity.

Now, you see why I like reading them ;). Now the daydreamyness and love matters might be because my exams just got postponed a couple of days and I am possibly not going to study tommorow.

Read more…

I personally hate Windows. And there is no one reason for it. The registry hiccups, the memory leaks, the startup jams, etc. I don’t think the list will ever end if I sit down and seriously think about it. But this is not what this post is all about.

It’s about the applications that give us a quaint little feeling that somehow using Windows is after all justified ;) These applications range from web apps to utilities and tools for windows. They don’t occupy much of the memory and prove to be very useful many times.

Its important that you choose which applications are more useful to you for 2 reasons :

1. You don’t want to be clogging up your task bar with a no. of icons which not only eat up space but also take up memory ( unless you have a widescreen 19″ monitor and 2 gig memory like me :D. And even then I have to be careful. )

2. As if the startup in windows wasn’t already slow enough, they can make it even more painful for you, that is, if you don’t keep them under a check.

Here is my list of my favorite 10 apps that I can’t live without :

1. Instant EyeDropper

This is especially useful if you are a designer of some sort, whether a web designer or graphic designer. I used to find it exceptionally painful to copy hexadecimal color codes from any website on the internet to use in my own design. And this really helps out. I use Adobe Kuler. And there are more websites out there which help you make your own color schemes. All you have to do is click on its icon in the taskbar and then just drag your mouse pointer to any element whose color code you want to copy to the clipboard. As simple as that.

2. WordWeb

One of the most useful applications which I think everyone should have. Whenever you come across a difficult word, all you have to do is select it and press ‘Ctrl+Alt+W’. You can also assign your own shortcut. Its window crops up and instantly gives you the meaning along with a list of synonyms and also the word’s pronunciation. I personally have never even required to consult the ‘Web References’, since its quite sufficient on its own.

3. Wakoopa

So are you crazy about sharing everything and anything you do ? This is a great web app that tells you what applications you have been using and for how long. This has a social aspect to it, as you can find people who are using the same applications as you are.

4. RescueTime

This does the same job as Wakoopa but has entirely different utility. It provides you with an insight into how you have been spending your time on your computer. It has nice graphs and you can see data for the day, week, month or year.

5. Zscreen

I recently discovered this opensource application. Great for bloggers as you can easily assign a shortcut key to take the screenshot of the current application, entire desktop or a specific part of the screen. It automatically saves the screenshot in your chosen directory in any format you please ( png, jpeg,etc. ). It also gels well with image editing applications like Paint.NET or Adobe Photoshop.

If you are interested in some other cool opensource applications, go here.

6. NetMeter

Though one might argue that it doesn’t have that much of utility, but still I think it provides a nice little nifty look into your broadband upload and download. It also provides a nice total of all your download and upload. So sometimes it provides this overwhelming feeling that you have already downloaded 10 gigs of data this month :D

7. FlashGet

Best download utility ever. It easily downloads torrents as well as any other file. You can pause and resume and it definitely provides the best speeds. Better than utorrent and others for me.

8. Last.fm

Another social app which scrobbles the music that you hear whether in any of your media players or its own client. It comes with plugins for practically all popular media players including Windows Media Player, foobar2000, Winamp, etc. In its client, you just enter an artist or song you love, and it plays you similar music seamlessly.

9. AutoHotKey

Great for those who love scripting. I personally haven’t played with it a lot but I feel it has scope to do a lot in a jiffy. You can assign any combination of keys or clicks to do practically anything you want. Go here to find some cool ways to work with it.

10. AVG

Everybody keeps screaming about antiviruses so I feel its better to have one. Though I hardly update it or anything :). But still the free edition of AVG is nice, it doesn’t consume much of your memory and works quietly in the background.

Well, that about sums it up. If you want to share your fav. taskbar apps, feel free to share them in the comments. It would be great to know what other little nifty apps are out there ( And I am sure that there are many many more ).

After all, they do make us feel more optimistic about Windows. ;)

Have you ever had that feeling when you felt like you were in a place or situation in which you have always dreamt of being?

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Before I say anything about my first real post on my blog, I would like to present to to you the following Nazm called ‘Rasm‘

“Haal Pooch Kar Mera, Intezar to Karte, Mera Haal Sun-ne Ka,

Haal Pooch Kar Yun To, Aap Chhedh Sakte The,
Jaise Ghar Tattayon Ka, Phir Bhi Ain Mumkin Hai,
Aap Se Na Keh Paata, Naagawar Sach Batein,
Aur Ram Dohraata, Muskaraa Ke Yeh Kehta,
‘Aap Ki Inaayat Hai’

Phir Bhi Sochtaa Hun Mein, Haal Pooch Kar Mera,
Intezar To Karte, Mera Haal Sun-ne Ka
”

Read more…

Patience is a virtue.