Posted in Company News, Products | December 12th, 2009
By Spicer Matthews
We are very pleased to announce that Cloudmanic Labs has a new website. This website overhaul is long over due!! Since, Cloudmanic Labs spun off from Matthews Etc. Internet Services we have been operating with a very poor web site and brand identity. Thanks to the hard work by Josh Hemsley at http://www.thevisualclick.com (@joshhemsley) we have a fresh new look and feel. We also want to thank Amber at http://www.amberweinberg.com (@amberweinberg) for her hard work putting the site together. Without these partners “redo public site” would still be sitting on our todo list.
The reason the new site was so important is many of our products are getting very very close to becoming live and functional. Elevation Fitness (http://www.elevationfit.com) is days away from being live and ready for public use. Mealstub (http://www.mealstub.com) should be launching sometime in January. RentalBooks will be launched during the first quarter of 2010. While CloudCrm (http://www.mycloudcrm.com) does not have a planned launch yet, it is very close. We recommend visiting these sites and signing up for our news letters.
Let us know how you like our new site!!! We are very excited!! Thanks again to our partners that help launch this site.
Posted in Bussiness, Industry, Products, The Future | November 19th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews
Below is a quote from Techcrunch’s coverage of the Google event highlighting their ChromeOs. We at Cloudmanic Labs are so excited about ChromeOs. Google is taking computing to a place we have been cheerleading for for years. There is no reason to ever store files locally or have some beefy file server in the back of the office ever again. Great work Google!!!!
“In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.”
Posted in Industry, Programing | November 17th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews
Web Programmer To Iphone Developer
At Cloudmanic Labs we have been playing around with iPhone development since the release of the Apple SDK. We all have many years of programing experience, computer science degrees, and an overall love of programing. However, our love is in scripting languages such as php or javascript. Objective-C is just not a fun language to program. We are web dudes!!! Overall, our conclusion was we are not going to write Objective-C code that we would be proud of and at the same time continue to maintain our web programing skill sets.
Don’t Feel Like Becoming An iPhone Doob
With the boom of the iPhone we saw a lot of web development firms drop everything and start programing iPhones. While we don’t blame them, the money is good, I think many of them made the switch way to quickly. We are seeing way too many poorly written iPhone apps and you can tell they were written by someone with a web programing background not an Objective-C background. We saw this issue early on and did not want that to be us, a company that jumped on the bandwagon way to quickly. So we started to looking at subcontractors to partner with to write our iPhone applications. At this point we have worked with a few and have not been very happy. All our applications interact with our web services. We need to hire a team that understands both sides. While we are sure there are many subcontractors out there that fit the bill, of the subcontractors we have hired there was a strong understanding of one side or the other (Objective-C Vs. Web Services). Frustrated, we started looking around for a solution that would allow us to deliver a rich and powerful iPhone app that interacted with our web services, without us losing our core knowledge base of web programming. We recently found a solution that we are really excited about…….
Drum Roll Please…….Appcelerator’s Titanium Mobile
A well funded start-up called Appcelerator has a product named Titanium Mobile. Titanium Mobile allows you to write mostly native iPhone applications using javascript libraries that any decent web programmer is already an expert at, such as jQuery. The good folks at Appcelerator have created a javascript API to create native iPhone UI elements like table views, buttons, switches, sliders, and more. They also provide a javascript API to interaction with the hardware such as; camera, gps, touch screen and more. With this framework you can develop rich and powerful iPhone applications that can be submitted to the Apple App Store only using javascript/css/html. We have rewritten some of our Objective-C applications using Titanium and the development process was twice as fast. It was faster for two reasons. One, we know javascript way better then Objective-C. Two, programing in Javascript is way faster then Objective-C anyway.
Titanium Mobile is not for everyone. If we were writing a game or something I would not use Titanium. Titanium, in its current form, really nails down allowing a web app developer to create a mobile extension of their web application. If you are not doing anything ground breaking on the iPhone just building an application with normal native SDK controls Titanium will knock your socks off.
As of this writing Titanium version 0.8 is days way from being released. The product has been in beta for about a year now and they will have a full public release when they get to version 1.0 (or so I understand). With the the release of 0.8 we believe they have plugged all the holes. In our eyes this product is ready for real production use
Posted in Company News, Products | October 11th, 2009 By Spicer Matthews
After about two years of planning and development we are very close to releasing our Elevation Fitness Product (www.elevationfit.com). Elevation is a web based / software as a service offering for fitness professionals.
The Product will be sold to fitness and wellness professionals to help manage their clients. The product will assign, monitor, and report on a person’s over all wellness. Upon release the product is targeting the fitness industry, but will be moving into other wellness industries quickly. We are scheduled to launch in early November. Keep an eye on your blog for updates.
Posted in Bussiness | October 2nd, 2009 By Spicer Matthews
Great Blog Posting about business and the value of any idea. Business is about execution not talk. At Cloudmanic we are always getting people to try to get us to work for equity. We love working for equity. If we can share in the upside of a truly great company or product we are interested. We are not interested in doing all the work. We want to be a partner in the success of a company, but partnership means shared risk.
