Thomas Fuchs
Hi, I'm Thomas Fuchs. I'm the author of Zepto.js, of script.aculo.us, and I'm a Ruby on Rails core alumnus. With Amy Hoy I'm building cheerful software, like Noko Time Tracking and Every Time Zone and write books like Retinafy.me.
   Want me to speak at your conference? Contact me!

Bridging desktop and web apps: Twistori Desktop

March 31st, 2009

We’ve just launched the beta of our Twitter exploration app Twistori Desktop for Mac, that we developed in conjunction with IndyHall Labs.

What’s really cool about it is how it integrates WebKit into the actual Desktop Application, and makes it possible (in the near future!) to have user-styled themes (by means of a set of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files). We ship the beta with a set of several themes. Prototype and script.aculo.us are no longer for web applications only. 🙂

Watch the video and get a free 14-day trial at http://twistoridesktop.com/.

Visualizing SXSW with script.aculo.us

March 14th, 2009

Amy and me (slash7) worked with PepsiCo to bring you a visualizer of all things going on at SXSW.

We’re using an army of twitter bots to pull in tweets from conference-goers with our very own super-sophisticated natural language processing tools (read: a couple of simple regexps), and present the data in various actually useful forms, including party watch, which tells you what parties are hot and if you’ve to expect to wait in line, a map view of where peeps are going for drinks, popular keywords, topics and trends and, just for fun, stuff that people overheard.

It’s built with all my favourite web development stuffs, which are Ruby on Rails (for the database handling), script.aculo.us 2 (for the effects) and Sprockets for fast, fast JavaScript delivery.

Partywatch is also available as a an iPhone web site—bookmark it for quick and easy access on the go!

Questions? Meet me at SXSW Interactive, I’m around the conference—follow me on twitter @madrobby.

If you like it, don’t forget to digg us!