Blogglenecked again? Jeez, how has it been three months since I’ve posted? The world was robbed of my wonderfully profane reaction to this little nugget of Fail.

It’s a shame, really. You’ll just have to imagine all of the obscene, over-the-top alliteration I would’ve used.

Quick recap:

• The car2go 24 hour project was a ton of fun. Got to meet with their CTO and hear about what they have planned for the future. Since car2go.markphillip.com launched, Austin CarShare died. I’ll let you read between the lines. More importantly though, I now have a little blue car2go USB drive that I like to chew on. Win.
• My HVAC died back in June and I was AC-less for almost a month. Any discomfort for those few weeks is overshadowed by the awesomeness of the new cooling system. I’ve never been so thoroughly obsessed with a home appliance. Two-stage HVACs, ftw.
• Twitter is still dumb.
• Through some dumb luck and quickly-written emails, Are You Watching This?! was on ESPN.com and Deadspin. RUWT?! momentum is really good right now.
• I’ll be travelling a lot over the next six weeks. Get your airport abbreviation dictionaries out, kiddies.

I’m done. And exhausted.

Night, kids.

car2go.markphillip.com

I’m going to P. Terry’s.

Thought you’d like to know.

Three hours and change to go—it’s the home stretch.

Build #2: car2go.markphillip.com

This build is start to look a whole lot more like a mobile app. One big question though: Who exactly are we building for?

iPhone/Android/Palm are of course at the top of the list, but what about Blackberry? Sure, it’s the odd-man out when it comes to a Webkit browser, but I rock a Blackberry. Am I really building something that I can’t use?

Yes and no.

I definitely won’t see the hawtness that the iPhone/Android/Palm triumvirate will enjoy, but with graceful degradation I’ll still accomplish the overarching goal: a super fast app that can get me to my car2go when I’m on the go. And the good news? With their next OS, Blackberry will finally join the cool kid Webkit club.

So all is peachy, right? Instead of building a native app on four different platforms with four different languages, I’ve built just one using the ubiquitous HTML. Not exactly.

While wrapping these pages into native apps and posting them to their respective stores is trivial at this point, I’ll never have access to core features like GPS detection. For this app, more than most, is an important feature. We worked around it by remembering recent location searches, and squeezing all the performance we could out of the app, but it will always be brought up up by the native app purists.

And that’s really, really too bad. Many in the tech community will rail against the evil that is the closed, proprietary Flash, yet will happily spend months learning Objective-C to build an app for the most closed-off platform we have.

Peter-Paul Koch had a great post last year (Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid.), but sadly backed off it the very next day (Native iPhone apps vs. Web apps).

Truth is (and admittedly this is excessively blunt because I’m tired), native app developers on any single platform are stupid. And it’s not just the smartphone developers—I’m looking at you, Seesmic and Zynga.

Jeez, this post has taken me a long time. I’m gonna cop out, end it there, and get back to work. Trust me, it was gonna get even more boring.

Build #1 is up!

car2go.markphillip.com

I really enjoyed building a mobile-friendly site for CapMetro, but let’s be honest–it was ugly as sin.

Not wanting to repeat the same mistake I called in my go-to designer (and fellow, car-less, scooter rider) Tara to make it worthy of car2go’s clean, modern design.

She’s already paying big dividends.

Well that was frighteningly easy. I needed to double back a few times for some schema changes, but Milestone 1 is wrapped: Full lat/lon data for each available car imported by automatic script.

There are always bugs in software development. Nothing is scarier than doing a code read of a big mess of work, and not being able to find anything wrong with it. No typos, no comments to be updated, and nothing to optimize. There are always bugs. Always. And if you can’t find one, it just means you’re not looking hard enough.

Things are going so well that I’m due for a whopper.

First wrinkle.

Looks like the Google Geocoding API will have to make an appearance sooner than expected. Their daily limit is 2500 requests per IP. Normally that’d be a ton, but with almost 200 cars, I’d whip through 2500 requests pretty darn quick.

I had planned an in-memory address/latlon cache, but if I don’t persist the results in the database, my fatfingered coding stylings might put me in a world of hurt.