In any event, this proved a little tricky when using Google App Engine for LocationFu. Google’s deploy process has the option of excluding certain application files from being sent up, but it can’t exclude any files that sit within a directory marked as a static path. The solution is simple, but took me a while to figure out. Previously, I had my static path set up like so in my app.yaml file (note that this is for Python App Engine):

That will map any file starting with /static into the static directory in the app tree. Instead, you can map individual files, and limit the extensions you want to serve:

That tells App Engine to grab the file name requested and map it into the static directory, while the upload parameter includes a regex to match only selected file extensions (.min.js, but not just .js, for example). This won’t stop your app from serving any file while running on the local development server, but when pushed to production, your JS and CSS files will only be accessible in minified form.

Fact is, they are missing a key feature of Google apps that lets you sync to a lot of places, including the iPhone, directly and with push updates – Google supports Microsoft Exchange for both contacts and calendars.

With the Exchange support, you can get push updates to any device or application that supports Exchange, including Outlook on the desktop and the iPhone with v3.0 software and above. It doesn’t get around syncing to iCal (unless you’re already on Snow Leopard, which supports Exchange out of the box), but it’s damn good for mobile devices.

Here are the instructions for setting it up on the iPhone, and you can use the server settings from there to set up any other device/app that supports Exchange.

Fever List View

The premise of Fever is simple: your current RSS reader is full of unread items that you’ll never get through, you can’t keep up with the volume, and you don’t want to add more subscriptions for fear of compounding the problem. Clearly, Fever is aimed at RSS ‘power users,’ and people with only a few subscriptions should probably save themselves the effort and stick to a simpler solution like Google Reader or NewsGator. That said, can Fever really live up to the premise of saving you from second inbox overload?

Fever is the latest endeavor from venerable designer/developer Shaun Inman, creator of the renowned website statistics package Mint. At it’s core, Fever is a regular RSS reader, with the ability to group feeds and read through each feed, group of feeds, or all of your feeds in an attractive river-of-news style view. Like Google Reader, Fever has nice features like endless scrolling (loading more unread items as you approach the bottom of the current list automatically), but unlike Google Reader, Fever is self-hosted, meaning you must have a web server to run it on. Also going against the grain of online RSS readers, Fever costs money – US$30 to be exact. That’s a fair chunk of cash considering most other readers, desktop and otherwise, are free.

Fever Hot List

Beyond simple RSS reading, however, Fever’s banner feature and one thing that could make it worth the purchase for some is it’s Hot list. To use the Hot list properly, Fever asks the user to split their subscriptions into two categories: Kindling, which are your must-read subscriptions, and Sparks, which are less important and higher volume feeds. Once this is done, the Fever Hot list becomes essentially an automatic, personal Digg. Fever uses the sites that the Sparks link to in order to ignite the Kindling, bubbling the popular and active items to the top of the list. This means you can always see the most important items from your subscriptions at a glance, and leave reading the rest until later (or not at all).

This feature does have a few limitations though, most notably the fact that it can’t determine what is a link to a real news item, and what is a link to a home page, privacy policy, or other non-news pages. For example, if you subscribe to many Weblogs Inc. feeds, you will find that the Weblogs privacy policy hits the top of your Hot list very quickly, since it’s linked to at the bottom of every Weblogs post. Similarly, sites like the Twitter homepage, which seem to get linked to everywhere these days, will also run to the top. Thankfully, Fever has a URL blacklist, so once you spend a bit of time blocking these types of things, the Hot list becomes a pretty damn useful feature, showing you the news articles that are most popular amongst your subscriptions

Fever iPhone Item View

One feature that is very important to me is a mobile version of the reader. Google Reader has a great iPhone compatible site that I use all the time, it’s a solid UI and quite fast, but Fever one-ups Reader’s mobile site by not only looking a whole lot better, but also bringing across the infinite scrolling from it’s full version. This means that when you are flipping down the page on your iPhone and nearing the bottom, it’ll load up more items in the background so can can keep on scrolling, making reading feeds very fast.

Fever iPhone Frame

One thing I don’t like about the iPhone UI is that if you try to open an external link in a feed item, it adds it’s own frame to the top of the page, which would be fine if it didn’t mess up the view port every time you tried to go back to the reading list. This can be fixed with a quick change of orientation of your phone, but it is annoying none the less. This feature is necessary because of another Fever feature, the ability to be used as a chromeless web app. If you bookmark Fever on your iPhone home screen, it get’s itself a nice icon and starts up without the Safari UI over the top of it.

On the technical front, Fever was very easy to install. After setting up a database for it to use and running the compatibility checker, you need only enter your activation code  for everything to be set up and ready. Updates to Fever are pulled automatically, and you can automate the fetching of new feeds via a simple cron job on your server. It doesn’t seem like you can automatically fetch feeds at less than 15 minute intervals with the cron job, though the Fever UI has a refresh button you can hit at any time to reload feeds from the browser.

Fever includes a few niceties like a bookmarklet so you can easily subscribe to feeds while browsing, which is handy since Fever cannot be set as a default feed reader for your browser or operating system. Keyboard shortcuts are fully supported, and are actually more logical than those in Google Reader, and a pretty effective search feature is available.

Overall, Fever is an extremely slick, fast, and well-featured RSS reader. The Hot list feature is it’s main differentiator from Google Reader and other online RSS readers, as well as the ability to control the feed refresh interval instead of relying on whatever schedule the developer has chosen. It’s also a hell of a lot faster than Google Reader when browsing a lot of items – I find Firefox slows to a crawl with Reader after about 500 items, but not so with Fever. Is it worth $30? No, not when the RSS reader market price has bottomed out at $0, but for people with a lot of subscriptions, it is a great package. If you don’t mind parting with your $30, I can highly recommend Fever, but I think it would get a lot more users if it were priced at about $15. I’d also like the option of turning off the Fever header when clicking links on the iPhone version when running in full Safari, but otherwise Fever is almost perfect.

Google is full of creative, smart, and innovative people, but above all else, they are a fantastic PR machine. Sometimes it’s because of a carefully executed PR plan; sometimes it’s just because they are such a household name; either way, anything the giant does becomes news.

There is discussion at the moment about Google stealing the up-and-coming competition’s thunder, and I’d be lying if I didn’t feel the same at times. Take Cuil’s recent launch of timelines, followed just a few weeks later with Google’s News Timeline launch, and inclusion of it’s experimental timeline result view into the normal search results days later. We tweaked our related searches to make them better, then Google did the same thing a short time later (there are others doing related searches as well, it’s just a good idea).

But you know what? We get over it.

Competition is good for the industry, and we welcome it from competitors big and small. Google wouldn’t be the successful company it is if they didn’t notice what was going on around them and react accordingly. Any company looking to catch up to Google is doing the exact same thing.

Cuil is largely written off in the press, so we never expect to get the same reaction when launching new features. That’s not going to stop us: we’re going to keep innovating and trying to make discovering information easier and more enjoyable. If Google wants to implement some of our ideas, they can go right ahead – the difference is in the execution, and every search engine needs to learn that ideas are only half the equation. You need to take these ideas and make them into features that average people enjoy using. We try to create a human-focused search engine, easing exploration, instead of being a dull list that amounts to a popularity contest.

We’re not as big as Google yet, but we’re still here, and we’re not going to stop bringing a fresh perspective to search.

• Craigslist: This is the No. 1 thing I’d miss if I moved back home. Fast, easy, super simple online classifieds. In Australia, you have to turn to eBay or Trading Post, which aren’t nearly as quick and easy. There is a Sydney Craigslist category, but that’s as far as it goes – the beauty of Craigslist is in the refined localization.
• Threadless: Yes, almost my entire wardrobe is made up of Threadless shirts. Sure, you can get them shipped, but it takes forever and can be costly.
• Amazon: The entire online department store scene in Australia is horrible, bring Amazon in please.
• Google Voice: I could care less whether it’s from Google or not, but the GrandCentral/Google Voice model is a winner and should absolutely come down under.
• PhoneTag: Short of a full Google Voice style system, voicemail-to-text services are almost as awesome.
• Fandango: Online movie ticketing just makes sense. Buy online, pick up at the theatre with a swipe of your card.
• Public WiFi: It’s starting to pick up in Australia, but there is a heap of public WiFi in the States. Not all of it is free, but at least it’s there at a pinch if you need it.
• Hulu: I don’t use it all the time, but online video streaming is great. NetFlix to the Xbox 360 and other TV-connected gear is a great idea too, I just hate NetFlix’s implementation of it.
• Mint: This is by far the best way to manage your money. Awesome on every level, from the elegant and information-rich web interface, to the handy SMS notifications and savings tips via email.

And a few offline things that rock too:

• Unlimited bus transport for $1.50: Muni might be dirty, but the price rocks, especially with unlimited transfers for four hours.
• ZipCar: Car sharing is awesome. I hear that it’s just starting in Sydney, but it needs to be everywhere.
• At home snail mail postage: you can just leave letters in your letterbox, and the postman grabs them when he does his rounds
• Bikes on public transport: more a San Francisco thing than a general USA thing, but CityRail needs bike cars like Caltrain has.
• Bike lanes: San Francisco still doesn’t have enough, but it at least has some bike lanes. These are sorely missing in Australia, and really do encourage people to leave the car at home.

Obviously, this list isn’t exhaustive, but could someone please bring them to Australia? Thanks, I appreciate it…

Sites like these detect when Google is crawling their site and show the full content, but don’t give regular people the same luxury. Sites generally detect this by looking at the user agent, which is a string that identifies what kind of browser/device is requesting the page. Therefore, if we change our user agent string to match that of the Googlebot (the system Google uses to find content on the web), we can see the content that was indexed to make the search result we found.

There are various ways to change the user agent that your browser is reporting, including the great User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox, or the IE7Pro plugin for Internet Explorer 7.

Whichever way you go about it, you want to change your user agent string to:

Googlebot/1.0 (googlebot@googlebot.com http://googlebot.com/)

You may have to restart your browser for the change to take effect, but after that you should be able to go back to the site you were trying to access and see exactly what Google does – the content!

Cuil has a very flat management structure, and as such everyone has to be very good at a variety of things. There are some incredibly talented people here at Cuil, including ex-senior Google, Internet Archive, and IBM employees (our VP of Engineering was the architect of Google’s large search index, TeraGoogle). Not only is everyone smart, but they are all focused on a very exciting goal, and moving toward it in logical and defined steps. We all share a vision, and that isn’t to be a direct competitor to Google right now – ask anyone here, we know we aren’t there yet, but we have some amazing technology that is set to really change things with time.

I strongly believe that Cuil is the evolution of search. This doesn’t just extend to the magazine-style search results presentation we use now, nor the interesting relevancy and multimedia data we’re splicing into search results, but also to the very cool things that are on the road map. I’m in a very good position to direct the next generation of information presentation, I have a ton of ideas, and am very excited about the future.

Technology, people, and ideas – three things that all add up to a very exciting opportunity.

To begin, tools for managing the development process:

Beanstalk (SVN)

SVN is an obvious requirement for any company doing development. The problem is, SVN takes time to set up and maintain properly, and smaller companies just can’t afford to spend this time taking care of it. Beanstalk provides a simple solution to the problem with off-site SVN server hosting, but the real beauty is not in just the stock SVN server – Beanstalk have a great web interface to enable you to manage your repositories and users/permissions, as well as see the latest activity in any repository and browse the source tree. The web UI also allows you to easily diff revisions and download files at specific revisions, and you can configure Beanstalk to send you emails for every commit in pretty HTML format with a full diff. With it’s reasonable pricing and great features above and beyond standard SVN, you really can’t go past it.

16bugs (Bug Tracking)

16bugs has a few bugs itself, but overall it is a great, simple, ‘web 2.0′ style bug tracking system. 16bugs has a fairly basic feature set when compared with some of the more mature products like Trac, but its hosted, web-based nature makes it a snap to maintain.

Google Sites (Wiki)

Google Sites provides a great, simple wiki solution. Sites was created out of Google’s purchase of Jot, and while I prefer the layout of the Jot version, Google Sites is almost as good. Both products take care of the core feature set for a wiki. I’ve used MediaWiki and PmWiki for various purposes in the past, but they can be a pain to set up and I’ve really only used the most basic features of them, which Google Sites easily takes care of.

The key thing you will notice about the above is that they are all hosted solutions. In a small, fast-moving company or for personal purposes, hosted solutions are often the best option to cut down on the time needed to maintain the various systems. Had I not already vested myself in the above, I would have loved to have checked out Assembla, which groups all these things into a single product (SVN, wiki, and Trac for bug management). Though if I did go with Assembla, I’m sure I would miss Beanstalk’s great web UI.

Now, a couple of tools for the development itself:

Aptana Studio (IDE)

Originally based on Eclipse, my IDE of choice for the web is Aptana Studio. Aptana Studio was built for developing AJAX web applications, includes code highlighting and completion for HTML, Javascript, and CSS, and has plugins for PHP and Ruby on Rails. Plugins are also available to ease development for AIR applications and the iPhone.

MacFUSE (Remote Access)

Google’s MacFUSE, cutting through the highly technical descriptions, is a way for you to mount a bunch of file systems on your Mac computer. I use it to mount remote file systems on development machines via SSH, meaning I can work within my home directory on the server as if it was just another locally connected hard drive. This is invaluable when you don’t have a totally self contained local development environment, saving you the effort of having to transfer files back and forth to the server.

In a similar situation? What are your tools of choice?

While the other contributors and I don’t have a problem with derivative works (the code is released under the GPLv2 license), we would appreciate it if you instead thought about contributing back into the project. If you would like to contribute code, make a wiki page or contact me to become a member of the project so you can check-in using SVN. If you do choose to use some of the code in your own projects, please provide prominent attribution and a link back to the Google Code page and/or the web version of the script.

The code is pretty hideous at the moment, and there are quite a few bugs to work out, but please bear with us – we will be making enhancements and bug fixes very soon.

After viewing this video in particular, one can see that at this point in the development cycle, it appears as though Google is looking to pull in the best features of Windows Mobile and the iPhone UI. On first inspection, Android looks most like Windows Mobile, especially the home screen. Once the device is in use, however, a very ‘smooth’ quality reminiscant of the iPhone can be seen. The browser especially is obviously modeled off Apple’s efforts, though there is a lack of finish at this early stage.

The most interesting and exciting part of Android is the level of openness. The iPhone is a great product, but like many Apple releases, it is basically Apple’s way or the highway. Sure, Apple has now announced an SDK for third party applications, but it is an afterthought, rather than Google’s release of an SDK months before devices are in the hands of customers.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone, but should Android provide the same slick UI elements on an open platform, I will switch in a second. Many features demonstrated on Android so far are available on other handsets, such as Google maps, but with Google’s announcement of a $10 million competition for the best applications, I am looking forward to seeing what can be done. Particularity, I am keen to see where developers go with the built-in OpenGL support. Already Google has shown some pretty cool features, though, like Street View in the Maps application.

What I am really curious about is where this leaves the Apple/Google relationship. Google is basically releasing the best competitor to the iPhone, despite Eric Schmidt serving on Apple’s board, and Google taking a large part in the development of the iPhone. I was surprised at Google’s involvement with the development of the iPhone originally, considering its love of all things open, and this proves my point in a way.

Indeed, if Android shapes up to be the open version of the iPhone as it is appearing as at this early stage, there might just be an iPhone for sale out of my place.