Tappister, weaving remarkable apps since 1997.
My name is Jonathan Karon. My background is in software -- artificial intelligence, geospatial, data visualization, forward-looking web and mobile applications, and video games. For the past 15 years I've been distilling ideas into clever and useful products and services.
I am presently engaged building the future at New Relic and provide entertainment as an advisor to various emerging software-driven businesses.
Send me an email (jonathan@tappister.com) or find me on Twitter (@fightingmonk) if you'd like to get in touch.
~jonathan
It's been quiet around here, cricket chirpin' quiet. I've not been idle though, let me tell you...
It's really hard to estimate how long it will take to build software, especially if you are not an experienced builder. Here follows my lame analogy.
Some thoughts on Wells Riley's great article about design and how it fits with startups.
What happened to NetJunky? Well, let me tell you -- NetJunky is now Tappister. Same great taste, new even greater box.
My research on tsunami evacuation and survival simulations is featured in a Daily Planet special on Discovery Channel Canada. I have a few thoughts and comments leading up to the show.
Some friends on Facebook were missing the old days of unix servers and DEC terminals. I took the opportunity to start experimenting with Human Computer Interface ideas.
TL;DR: using query_dict = urlparse.parse_qs(query_string, True) and query_string = urllib.urlencode(query_dict, True) will round-trip query strings the way you probably want them to.
A quick quandry.
>>> import urlparse ...
As an application designer I try really hard to look at the first-time experience of the people who use what I build. While it seems obvious, think about how non-trivial ...
Tappister developed a comprehensive tsunami evacuation simulator for Cannon Beach, Oregon. Read our report on bridge vs. tsunami evacuation building placement and watch videos of our simulation results.
Excerpt from recently-received correspondence from the USPTO:
A SHORTENED STATUTORY PERIOD OF REPLY IS SET TO EXPIRE 3 MONTH(S) OR THIRTY (30) DAYS, WHICHEVER IS LONGER, FROM THE MAILING ...
I have a project I’m working on that involves a group of federated web sites that share functionality provided from a “hub” web server. The hub maintains a centralized ...
It was a simple idea... we've been Crushing Your Head and Squishing Your Head for decades now. Why is it so hard to do it on Facebook? Or blog ...
Don Norman has a great article in Core77 called Design Without Designers.
He very lucidly covers the differences between incremental improvement of existing products and creating fundamentally new, disruptive products ...
The topic of protecting data on computers comes up repeatedly in the news and has come up for us personally twice in the last month. There are two needs to ...
I've got patents on the brain: I just finished authoring one for my latest startup, one I authored at Higher Function is under examination, and the US Supreme Court just issued their ruling on Bilski, probably the only case on the fundamentals of Patentability that they'll hear for a decade.
In which our hero calculates the volume of gooey pizza goodness per dollar; and they asked what we'd ever use geometry for.
While developing WeetWoo! for iPhone we spent an extraordinary amount of time putting ourselves into the shoes of our children. Of course, since they are OUR children, we didn't hesitate to ask them what they thought at every turn. And being children, they didn't hesitate to tell it like it was. In fact, some of the most valuable lessons we learned came from plopping an iPod Touch down in front of 3 and 9 year olds and letting them go.