Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Dan Wood Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his older weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming. Go visit the current blog here.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Business · Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Mon, 09 Jul 2007

Tech Support Help Wanted

permanent link · Topic/MacOSX
/MacOSX

From The Karelia Blog:

Are you a savvy Mac/Sandvox user with a couple of hours of spare time each day to help other Sandvox users? We're looking for a friendly person to work as a contractor to perform front-line technical support for Sandvox.

Prior experience with technical support is not necessary; we have procedures in place that will make it easy to do the job. What is required is a thorough understanding of Sandvox, consistent time availability (about two hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week), problem-solving abilities, excellent English communication, and good skills dealing with other people (over email, using our web-based support system).  Communication with the other Karelia folks would be done over email, chat, and voice; the support work can be performed at home or anywhere!

If you are interested in becoming a part of the Karelia team, drop us a line.

iPhoneDevCamp report

permanent link · Topic/Cocoa
/Cocoa

I spent the last weekend at iPhoneDevCamp, meeting some nice folks and working on our TeleMoose project, an iPhone web-based application that makes it easy to browse and shop Amazon.com.

It's been a fun side project to work on. We're still putting most of our Karelia resources into Sandvox of course, but the idea of this project (which came to us during the WWDC week) made so much sense, considering that I had done something very similar for Watson many years ago, then did it again for the port to Java that never saw the light of day other than some demos; we have also used Amazon Web Services for Sandvox in the inspector for one of our many pagelets.

There has been a huge vacuum of information so far, and it's been a process of trial and error in many cases to figure out the best way to get an iphone-specific web application built. Sven has been working with me on some CSS issues and has documented some annoying limitations in iPhone support. At iPhoneDevCamp, I learned a lot of new techniques, and I discovered a lot as well. I've documented my iPhone discoveries in a quickie website I put together, TeleMoose at iPhoneDevCamp. Due to a lack of WiFi connections there, we wound us using the slow EDGE network for access from our iPhones; this gave me an opportunity to explore bandwidth-saving techniques; I gave a presentation on this topic; the slides (a PDF from keynote that ironically take up a lot of bandwidth!) can be found on that site, along with a few other notes.