Week 292 - Interesting links

Sandstorm - Personal Cloud Platform

This project is aiming to make it much easier to host web apps on your own server:

No command lines, no configuration files. Apps are installed through an app-store-like web interface. And, most importantly, every app runs in a separate secure sandbox, so an evil app cannot take down your server.

They’ve already lined up a decent list of apps - WordPress, Etherpad, Ethercalc, ShareLaTeX, Mailpile, Roundcube, Ghost, Tiny Tiny RSS, and even Apache Wave!

The project’s lead developer is an ex-Google engineer, Kenton Varda, the primary author of Protocol Buffers, so it’s got a bit of credibility. I really like the sound of it and so I’ve backed their Indiegogo project. — JM

Guacamole

An open-source client-less remote desktop gateway, supporting standard protocols like VNC and RDP. They call it client-less, because it’s all based on HTML5 i.e. no browser plugins are required. — JM

iOS WebKit Debug Proxy

This allows developers to inspect Mobile Safari on iOS devices via the Chrome DevTools UI using the WebKit Remote Debugging Protocol. This sounds as if it would be particularly useful for investigating scenarios where Safari crashes. — JM

Not Just Code Monkeys

I’m probably a bit late coming to this video, but I think Martin Fowler makes a number of good points about our responsibilities as developers. He covers a broad swathe of topics - from over-the-wall engineering and bad UI patterns, to Datensparsamkeit, social justice, and diversity.

I often struggle to make it through videos of conference talks, but I found this very engaging and I happily watched it to the end. — JM

How to hire a bike in London

Tom’s little rant against the appalling user experience of hiring a TFL bike is very amusing and it’s a prime example of a dark pattern as mentioned by Martin Fowler (in the video above). — JM

Hextris

I quite enjoyed killing a few minutes playing this little Tetris-like game. What I mainly enjoy is that it’s written entirely in JavaScript! — CR

Great Train Journeys: London Bridge to Charing Cross

I really enjoyed reading this post shared by Paul. The title suggested to me that it was going to be a bit of a joke, but it actually contains some useful pointers to areas that people may not have noticed. I certainly didn’t known about Lower Robert Street before reading this. — CR