photo by: Jim Urquhart | The Salt Lake Tribune

Apple rolled out the slogan “This Changes Everything” when Steve Jobs introduced the latest edition of new iPhone in June. Fine, but that’s the trademarked slogan for a Utah company.

Apple used the phrase to promote the iPhone 4 as a game-changer in the realm of smart phones and their capabilities. Kynetx (pronounced KIN-NET-IX) of Lehi believes it has a game-changer that may revolutionize your use of the Internet.

How? Imagine being able to rearrange Google search results so that companies or products with which you get discounts rise to the top. Picture searching for a book on Amazon, and a note pops up saying your branch of the local library or a bookstore has it available right now. Imagine that when reading about the latest news on your local sports team you can see all the Tweets and Facebook messages commenting on it.

To read the entire article

Posted 06/02/10 at 09:16:31 AM by Alan Fackler, Alex Castle, and Ambika Subramony

Sweetter by Kynetx
Find like-minded folk

People who don't understand Twitter think it's all about sharing what you had for lunch, or other miscellaneous trivia. The truth is, it's about having conversations about the things that interest you, and Sweetter helps you find people on the web who are talking about the things you care about. If you like a certain website, or a certain blogger, just go to that content, click the Sweetter bookmarklet, and you'll see the 10 most recent tweets about the site.

Read entire article.

Installing the Gem

You can find the complete installation instructions here, but this is the basic process:

1. Install Ruby (version 1.8.7 or later).
2. Install the KRL gem (leave off sudo if you're on Windows):
   sudo gem install krl
3. Use OAuth to connect to the KNS servers:
   krl-connect
   This will start a server on localhost:3009 that will walk you through the OAuth ceremony. Once that's all finished, you can kill the webserver (with Ctrl+C).

Once the gem is installed, you're ready to get started.

Basic commands

First off: krl help is the definitive guide to the gem. The command will list all the possible things you can do, along with their syntax. (Tip: the text is easiest to read if your terminal is at least 90 characters wide.)

Check out your app

Run krl apps to get a list of all your apps. That displays the ruleset ID and name of each app, along with your role on the app (owner or developer).

Note: Until you save your app in the new AppBuilder or with the command-line gem, its name won't show up in the list. You can see that in the screenshot--the third app in the list has only been edited in the old AppBuilder, so the name doesn't show up yet.

Once you know which app you want to work on, a krl checkout command with the ruleset ID, like this:
krl checkout a163x2

This will create a new folder in your working directory with the ruleset ID as the name. (You can rename the directory to something more descriptive if you like.)

Editing your app

You can edit the <rulesetId>.krl file with any editor you like. Near the end of this post are some plugins for common editors to do syntax highlighting and integrate with the command-line gem.

Committing your changes

Once you've made changes and want to commit them, simply run krl commit in the same directory as your .krl file. If your code had any parse errors, these will be displayed to you. If everything passed, the gem will tell you what version was committed:

If you (or another developer) makes some changes later on AppBuilder and you want to pull them down to your local copy, simply run krl update. Note that this will overwrite your local copy of the code; it doesn't do version-control-style conflict resolution for you.

Generating endpoints

The gem will let you create both test and production endpoints. Here are the various commands:

• Test bookmarklet: krl test
• Test Infomation Card: krl test infocard
• Production bookmarklet: krl generate bookmarklet
• Production browser extension: krl generate [firefox|chrome|ie] <name> <author> <descr>
• Production Information Card: krl generate infocard <name>

Viewing older versions

If you ever want to go back and look at an older version of your app, simply run a krl show <version number> command. This will print out the KRL from that version to your console. You can even pipe it to a file to open in your editor (although you'll have to remove the first line, "KRL for version XX," if you want to use the file as a valid ruleset).

Running the krl versions command will list all the versions your app has been through, along with the timestamp, the developer who made the commit, and any notes associated with each version. That list will also tell you which version of the app is currently in production.

A note on the commands

Most of the functions must be performed inside a directory where you've checked out your app. commit and update are good examples of commands in that category. A few functions can be performed anywhere, since they're not specific to any particular app. Those are apps, checkout, create, and info. Refer to krl help for more information about where you can run the various commands.

Integrating with your favorite editor

The command-line gem is platform- and editor-agnostic, so you can create plugins for any editor or IDE the offers a programmable interface. Here are a few of the ones that have been developed so far:

Emacs

This Emacs mode provides syntax highlighting for KRL. Find the .el file here.

TextMate

This TextMate bundle maps Cmd+K to save the app and then commit it. Find it here.

Vim

This Vim plugin enables syntax highlighting and intelligent indentation of KRL files. Get the .vim files here.

Growl and libnotify integration

You can have bash notify you when the krl commit command finishes running. See the solution here for Growl (Mac OS X) or here for libnotify (Linux).

Other editors and IDEs

Have you created a package for any other editors or IDEs? Leave a link in the comments!

The gem is open source

The Ruby code for the KRL command-line gem is open source. You can find it on the Kynetx github account.

If you have any issues with the gem or if you'd like to offer improvements, please do! You can submit bug fixes on the Issues tab on github. Or (even better) you can fork the code, fix the bug you found, and then send us a pull request.

Logging in

AppBuilder now uses OAuth authentication for long-life logins, meaning that you won't have to log in again every time you visit the site.

Application list

When you first log in to AppBuilder, you'll see a list of all your apps with their ruleset IDs. Clicking on the name or ruleset ID of an app will open the app so you can edit it.

You can now easily duplicate an app with the link in the right-hand column.

Another cool new feature is searching--you can filter the list by app name, ruleset ID, or by your role in the app (owner or developer).

Editor

The most salient feature of the editor in the new AppBuilder is the beta Bespin embedded editor. It provides a lot of the functionality you'd expect from a full-fledged text editor. Syntax highlighting makes it easy to see that your code is correct, allowing you to catch errors even before going through the parser.

Even if you've never used Bespin before, it will be pretty familiar to you. It behaves quite like a desktop code editor: you can type as usual; it will handle indentation (including the use of the tab key); you can select and scroll with the mouse. And of course syntax highlighting, a must-have for any serious coder, is built in.

Saving an application is as easy as Ctrl+S (also Cmd+S in Firefox on the Mac). It's all done through AJAX, so you can keep working on your code while it saves.

If your code has errors in it, you'll see en error icon below the Save button, and the error log will pop up at the bottom of the window. It describes where the error occurred in your code. If you want to close that log so you can get back to coding, click on the X in the corner of it or press Ctrl+E. Clicking on the error icon also toggles the error log, so you can show or hide it as you like.

If the save was successful, you'll see a green check mark below the Save icon, as well as the timestamp of the last successful save.

Bespin uses the HTML5 canvas tag, so any browser that supports it will be able to run Bespin without any trouble. If you're using Internet Explorer, you'll be redirected to an old-style (less feature-rich) editor.

Production and development versioning

AppBuilder gives you an intuitive, simple way to manage production and development versions of your app. The Deploy tab shows you a list of all the versions your app has been through. You can "deploy" a specific revision, meaning that it will be the production version that is run on the endpoints your clients use (browser extensions, InfoCards, etc.). Your development branch is the most recent revision of the code that you're using to test.

You can give each revision a label to make it easier to identify. That way if something breaks, you can easily go back to an older stable version that you are sure works.

The Deploy tab also lets you see the KRL for any particular revision. Simply click on the version number in the left-hand column.

Testing and distributing your app

The Test and Distribute tabs let you work with various test and deployment endpoints for your apps, such as browser extensions, bookmarklets, site tags, and InfoCards.

The other cool new feature here is integration with the Kynetx Marketplace. You can list your app in the Marketplace with just a few clicks. Choosing the "Marketplace" option from the Distribute tab will take you directly to the Marketplace and pre-fill all the fields that AppBuilder already knows about.

AppBuilder Ruby Gem

The new AppBuilder is an open source Ruby on Rails application, and it's built on top of an open source Ruby gem we created. What this means for you is that if you'd prefer to write KRL in your favorite desktop editor, you can! The Ruby gem allows you to access the majority of the AppBuilder features right from the command line or your IDE. Keep your eyes open for a blog post all about that, coming soon.

Where do we go from here?

Below you can watch the Kynetx Webinar that walks through AppBuilder for a more in-depth introduction:

You can also watch Mike Farmer's presentation of AppBuilder from Kynetx Impact 2010 (a series of 7 videos beginning here).

Try it out today! Log in now with your Kynetx account and get started right away.

If you have questions about using AppBuilder, feel free to ask them on DevEx. You can also send support requests to support@kynetx.com.

The B&N App is featured as a sidebar. The B&N App is transmitted via proxy making it appear on every browser on any web-enabled device using the B&N wifi. In the promotional section of the sidebar, promotions cycle through so customer would be able to see all of them. In the events section of the sidebar, clicking on an event brings up a new page in the sidebar where the customer is able to choose which B&N store they are at and see events for only that store. Items in the cafe are also featured in the sidebar. Throughout the sidebar, customers are encouraged to become members. Incentives for becoming a member are featured on the sidebar as well as a link at the top of the sidebar.

The KRL for the app is very simple. It uses the sidetab() action to display the content. Because there are several different pages, a few JavaScript functions are emitted to load the various panels into the sidetab. Besides that KRL and JavaScript, the rest of the app is composed of HTML and CSS to attractively display the various panels. While this demo isn't actually running on live data (all the panels are composed largely of images), it would be trivial to connect data feeds from B&N for the calendar or weekly deals in the cafe, for example. It would also be easy to integrate with their existing account management systems to provide more personalized content.

Barnes & Noble App Source Code

ruleset a163x22 {

meta {

name "Barnes & Noble"

description <<

Location-aware app created for the KynetxCodeRun contest. Uses proxy technologies.

>>

author "snay dgd bjw axw"

// Uncomment this line to require Markeplace purchase to use this app.

// authz require user

logging on

}

dispatch {

// Some example dispatch domains

// domain "exmple.com"

// domain "other.example.com"

}

global {

content = {

'cal_STM':  '<select onchange="KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel(this.value);"><option>Layton</option><option>Midvale</option><option>Murray</option><option>Orem</option><option value="cal_STM" selected="selected">Sandy</option><option>Salt Lake</option><option>St. George</option><option value="cal_SH">Sugarhouse</option><option>West Bountiful</option><option>West Jordan</option></select><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNeventsSTM.png" />',

'cal_SH': '<select id="cal_location" onchange="KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel(this.value);"><option>Layton</option><option>Midvale</option><option>Murray</option><option>Orem</option><option value="cal_STM">Sandy</option><option>Salt Lake</option><option>St. George</option><option value="cal_SH" selected="selected">Sugarhouse</option><option>West Bountiful</option><option>West Jordan</option></select><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNeventsSH.png" />',

'login': '<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/My_BN.png"/><div class="loginForm"><div>EMAIL ADDRESS:<div><input /><br /><span class="text">Update email address</span></div></div><div class="login">PASSWORD:<div class="input"><input /><br /><span>Forgot password?</span></div><br />(cAsE&nbsp;sEnSiTiVe)</div><input alt="Sign In" src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/MyBNsignin.png" class="signIn" value="" onclick="KOBJ.a163x22.loggedIn();"/><br /></div><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/MyBNsignup.png" />',

'home': '<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0" width="250" height="206" align="middle"> <param value="sameDomain" /> <param value="false" /> <param value="BNpromoflash.swf" /> <param value="high" /> <param value="#ffffff" /> <embed src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNpromoflash.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" width="250" height="206" align="middle" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" /> </object> <a href="#" onclick="KOBJ.a163x22.showCalendar();"> <img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNfooter.png" /> </a>',

'loggedIn': '<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/MyBNpanel.png" />'

};

css <<

#sidetab_border {

background-color: #a99e82;

padding: 3px 0 3px 3px;

height: 100%;

}

#sidetab {

background-color: white;

height: 99%;

}

#cal_location {

float:right;

margin-right: 15px;

}

#sidetab a img {

border: none;

}

.loginForm {

font: xx-small Verdana;

padding-left: 20px;

padding-right: 20px;

width: 210px;

}

.loginForm .login {

font-weight: 900;

font: xx-small Verdana;

width: 100%;

height: 35px;

margin: 10px 0;

}

.loginForm .login .input {

float: right;

}

.loginForm .login .input input {

width: 120px;

height: 20px;

}

.loginForm .login .input .text {

color: #899b82;

cursor: pointer;

}

.loginForm .button {

margin-top: 0px;

}

>>;

}

rule content is active {

select when pageview ".*" setting ()

pre {

home = content.pick("$..home");

sidetabMessage = <<

<div id="sidetab_border">

<div id="sidetab">

<a href="#"><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNheader.png" /></a>

<br />

<a href="#" onclick="KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel('login');"><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNnav1.png" /></a><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNnav2.png" /><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNnav3.png" /><a href="#" onclick="KOBJ.a163x22.showCalendar();"><img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNnav4.png" /></a>

<div>

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000"

codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0"

width="250" height="206" align="middle">

<param value="sameDomain" />

<param value="false" />

<param value="BNpromoflash.swf" />

<param value="high" />

<param value="#ffffff" />

<embed src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNpromoflash.swf" quality="high"

bgcolor="#ffffff" width="250" height="206" name="BNpromoflash" align="middle"

allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="false"

type="application/x-shockwave-flash"

pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" />

</object>

<a href="#">

<img src="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/BNfooter.png" />

</a>

</div>

</div>

</div>

>>;

}

emit <<

KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel = function(panel) {

$K('#sidetab_content').html(content[panel]);

};

KOBJ.a163x22.showCalendar = function() {

KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel('cal_STM');

};

KOBJ.a163x22.showCalendar2 = function() {

KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel('cal_SH');

};

KOBJ.a163x22.loggedIn = function() {

KOBJ.a163x22.changePanel('loggedIn');

};

>>

{

sidetab() with pathToTabImage = "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1882021/tabBN.png"

and message = sidetabMessage

and tabColor = "none"

and imageWidth = "44px"

and imageHeight = "204px"

and tabLocation = "right"

and topPos = "0"

and width = "256px"

and backgroundColor = "white"

and divCSS = {"z-index":"9999", "min-height":"100%"};

}

}

}

From Phil's Technometria blog

Saturday was my birthday. About a month ago, I told everyone at Kynetx that what I wanted for my birthday was some cool Kynetx apps. Opn Thursday at noon, we shut down normal work and everyone broke into teams. They had 24 hours to program an app that would impress their competition. We called this the Kynetx Code Run; it’s loosely modeled after Atlassian’s FedEx Day.

The rules were pretty simple:

1. Teams can consiste of 1, 2, or 3 people.
2. Remote employees are encouraged to be at KWHQ for the event.
3. Apps that can be listed in the Marketplace get extra points.
4. You may form teams and talk about ideas before June 3, but you may NOT write any code until we start.
5. You may work any number of the 24 hours.
6. People who aren’t Kynetx employees may participate, but each team must have at least one Kynetx employee.

There was also one rule that was specific to our platform: You may only use emits to work around limitations of the runtime and then only if you can present a short plan of how the new feature will be incorporated into the runtime later. KRL has the ability emit raw Javascript and I didn’t want people building apps that didn’t primarily use KRL for a few reasons:

1. I wanted any Javascript that was used to be something we could roll into the platform for everyone’s benefit
2. I wanted people to explore the boundaries of KRL itself, both it’s limitations and the features they might not have ever tried

The exercise was a rousing success. I was very pleased with the efforts of all five teams; they came up with some good apps and all of them surprised me in different ways. Here are the results.

Web Treasure Hunt - This app used KRL to create a treasure hunt across multiple Web sites for children’s books. The purpose could be educational or merely fun. What surprised me about this app was the backend that allowed anyone to create a treasure hunt of their own.

Baseball - This app places a single baseball image in the upper right hand corner of certain Web pages. When you click on it, you get a modeal window that gives you baseball news and statistics from other sites as well as a schedule of upcoming games. What surprised me about this app was the great eye candy and the feature that added games to your Google calendar when you clicked on them.

WALLet - This app takes your Facebook Wall off Facebook and onto other sites where you might want to see what your friends are up to. Just want to take a quick peak at your wall without going to the Facebook site? Just tap the tab on the side of your browser and a tray slides out with the most recent posts. It even removes the posts about games so you don’t have to waste your time seeing who’s gathering eggs or needs fuel. What surprised me about this app is the ability to comment or post right there.

Mantones - This app starts with the premise that you some guys might like certain ringtones on their phone that are, shall we say, less than manyly. After noting the Bluetooth IDs of your friends phones, this app will switch out the ringtone on your phone for something more manly when you are in their vicinity. Of course you could also use it to silence the ringer in a conference room or your boss’ office. What surprised me about this app was that it used KRL in a domain completely outside the Web: programmatically controlling your mobile device.

Barnes and Noble - This app is designed to be run as a proxy inside a BN store. The app showed specials and upcoming events. What surprised me was the ability to search events at nearby BN stores and add them to your calendar. I loved that this app was ready to demo to BN or any other retail establishment that offers free WiFi to show how Kynetx can augment that experience.

There were also a few apps written outside the game itself: Cid wrote a stand alone app that kills posts about Facebook games from your wall. I use that one now. Sam and Dave created an app that shows you where your flight is (on flights with inflight Wi-Fi) and lists Wikipedia articles about nearby places or features. Sam also created an app that uses the HTML5 geolocation information to do that same thing for HTML5 aware browsers.

In the coming weeks, we’ll document each of these with a video and code, where we can, so that you can see them in more detail. Watch for them on Kynetx Code.

All in all, I was very happy with my “birthday presents.” All five teams shows ingenuity and pushed the envelop in different ways. The goal of a Kynetx Code Run is for everyone to have fun and to gain some experience using our platform to build real apps. We weren’t disappointed. A big thanks to everyone at Kynetx for making my birthday one to remember!

Poor decisions in language design are tough to hide because fixing them is akin to changing the API of your library. You can hide all kinds of sins below the covers, but errors in the syntax and semantics can only be fixed by confessing those sins to the world. Consider this a confession.

One of the niggling little details of Kynetx Rule Language has been comment treatment. The parser we user, Parse::RecDescent, does not include a lexer—tokens are specified as regular expressions in productions. That works fine for everything but comments. Because there’s no lexer, you can’t flag a token as a comment and then throw it out. There are a number of ways around that; the method I’ve used is to strip comments from the source using a regular expression before they go into the parser.

Comments in KRL are like those in Javascript: a double slash starts a comment and it goes to the end of the line. If I were designing KRL over again, I’d definitely rethink that because it makes stripping comments from code that contains URLs problematic. The regular expression for matching comments is not trivial. Nevertheless, Javascript-style comments are what we’re stuck with for now.

The problem of stripping comments from code without stripping code was made even tougher by a poor decision I made regarding extended quotes a few years ago. (Extended quotes in KRL start with << and end with >>.) For some reason, I decided that stripping newlines from the material inside an extended quote was the right thing to do. It’s not. Quoted material ought to be left alone. That’s why the developer quoted it; they want it to stay the way they wrote it.

Lately there have been some problems that have caused me to dive into this and rework it. Consequently, starting with the next code release, we will no longer strip newlines from extended quotes and not remove anything—even things that look like comments—from inside them. When material in an extended quote is used for a Javascript emit, it will be emitted unchanged. When it is turned into a Javascript string we will escape quotes and newlines so that they remain in place when Javascript evaluates them.

This will normalize some things in KRL, but there may be code in applications that relies on the fact that we’ve been stripping newlines. In particular, Javascript won’t let you split strings across lines. Since we’re escaping material that gets turned into string, there shouldn’t be any problem there. But emitted Javascript that hasn’t been careful about this will break.

Another fallout from this change is that any Javascript comments you’ve been putting in your emits will remain whereas before they’ve been stripped. That means you shouldn’t be putting company secrets in your Javascript comments since they might be seen by users. On the positive side, the fact that were now leaving newlines in the Javascript source will make single stepping through your code more fruitful.

As always, we’re happy to work with you to help you through this transition. I anticipate that this code will roll out Tuesday afternoon. We’ll put notifications in the appropriate places beforehand.

Steve Gillmor, a widely respected tech pundit, talked at Spring Impact, about how my generation is “built” to collaborate. As I sat there and listened to Steve talk about my generation, something struck me.

There is a difference between collaboration and projection.

If you are anything like me, when you log into Facebook, your news feed is consumed by the latest happenings of your “mainstream” friends and colleagues.  Now look really carefully at those status updates, are you noticing a pattern?

If you aren’t, I’ll tell you, and it’s pretty obvious, most status updates are centered on us. We are projecting our lives to the world with the intent of having others respond to our status updates. This is simply not collaborating. Most websites encourage people to project themselves with the intent for people to respond, Facebook being the prime example asking, “What’s on your mind?”

Steve Gillmor is, in my opinion, skewing the concept of collaboration. Collaboration is working together, and there is no work from third parties involved when you project yourself through various services on the web. This is why products such as Google Docs and Wave, while useful, simply aren’t going to be used by “the masses”. It takes a lot of work to collaborate, but not to project, and as I said in my last post on the Kynetx blog, mainstream users are inherently lazy, and this situation is no different.

So what does this all come down to? I suppose in essence, I respectfully disagree with Gillmor. While I am quite aware of his tenure on the web itself, I believe in this case I have the upper hand. After all, most of my friends and people I work with on Facebook are the mainstream users that Facebook attempts to please every day, with both Steve and I being the least of their worries. My lack of tenure on the web is to my benefit, because in all honesty, I am forced by my “mainstream” friends and family to get a clearer picture of how services such as Facebook are truly being used. Facebook,  and most other social services are simply not encouraging collaboration, but projection.

When it comes right down to it, my generation is not the collaborative generation that Steve Gillmor thinks he is seeing, and to be frank, I don’t think we will ever see that collaborative in the near future. Mainstream users of any generation are simply too lazy to pursue such things, and to be honest, maybe we are too self-centered as well. I have yet to see a social service that is meant for collaboration, rather than projection; have hockey stick growth such as Facebook, Twitter and even Myspace.

But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

We simply need better, as well as easier, tools to encourage collaboration amongst our generation. Right now we are in the process of perfecting projection with Facebook, Twitter and WordPress leading the way.  These are the companies that have embedded projecting content in our lives. So how do we embed collaboration into peoples lives?

Kynetx may have the solution.

Kynetx applications by their very nature upon install are embedded into our web lives. While many of the apps that are currently offered through the Kynetx App Marketplace are not geared towards easy collaboration, the beauty of the platform is that anyone can make that happen. Kynetx is built for developers to enable easy, quick and embedded collaboration tools into our daily lives with just the click of a button from a mainstream users stand point.

Is this a huge opportunity in the Kynetx platform simply being glossed over, and do you agree with Steve Gillmor or not about my generation?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.