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Tweetflow Language Design

May 22nd, 2013 by Martin No Comments

I took a small dive into the language design pond, after I stumbled over a paper by Linda McIver and Damian Conway that discusses Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design. After years programming, I almost forgot how difficult it is to learn a programming language; let alone designing one :-) .

In his blog post Andrej Bauer also explains a few (bad) programming language design decisions that have survived from the ancient past, i.e., the Seventies:

If this were the year 1972 we would talk about efficiency first and forget about the programmers, because 37…

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Tweetflows and JSON

May 21st, 2013 by Martin No Comments

We’ve been working on the Tweetflow notation for a while now and after we’ve integrated Tweetflows into Push Notfications, we came up with the idea to represent Tweetflows (more specifically: the Tweetflow service requests) in the JSON format. Each command is a triple and consists of the command (the verb), the object and the data where the object comes from. The latter is typically represented by an URL that points to the actual object (we call this COD notation – Command Object Data). This approach lets us easily encode sequences of Tweetflow commands in JSON. The example…

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Testing a Mobile Process Syntax

May 17th, 2013 by Martin No Comments

In our last post, we introduced an alternative syntax for describing mobile processes. Now, we are facing the challenge of getting feedback from users. We are contemplating two directions. The first one is to create a Amazon Mechanical Turk Task and ask Turkers what they think about the syntax. We have done this in the past with the basic Tweetflow syntax and we got results really quick. The second one is to built an actual editor and include it in our app qlauncher. The second alternative is to implement an editor (which is a lot of…

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RFC: Mobile Process Syntax with ASCII Art and Sheet Music

May 15th, 2013 by Martin No Comments

Designing a lightweight syntax for mobile processes/workflows is an interesting challenge. In particular, if you want to design the process ON the mobile device, especially on a smartphone.
There are several constraints that need to be taken into account, but the most important one is certainly the limited screen size of smartphones. We have experimented with a free form editor prototype for Tweetflows in the past and presented our work at SAC 2012:

A graphical notation with circles representing activities and arrows connecting to connect them is certainly very attractive for…

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Strange Days

May 3rd, 2013 by Martin No Comments

Do you remember the movie Strange Days from 1995?

The movie tells the story of Lenny Nero (ex-cop) who deals with data-discs (yes, they still had them in the 90ies and they were really cool :-) ) that contain memories and emotions of other people. These so-called ‘squid’ records are made directly from the cerebral cortex of a person and allow the viewer to relive the experiences of other persons as if they were his/hers. In the movie, Lenny’s records contain all kind of memories, like memories of a girl taking a shower or people…

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Dear (Austrian) Funding agencies, don’t complicate life for Startups

May 1st, 2013 by Martin No Comments

If you decide to start your own business, you run into a lot (a whole lot) of problems. The biggest of your problems is MONEY (yes, we know, money is ALWAYS a problem).
If you are like us working for a year on a project and happen to be practically broke (we am not kidding: we keep asking our families to lend us money for basic living costs like food and apartment rent) while applying for money from funding agencies, you’ll eventually reach a point where you think: is this trouble really worth it? And we are precisely…

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