3 To Grow On - Episode #48 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places; unidentified voices are shown as "Speaker N". Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 48th episode of CloudFocus Weekly. For the third week of June 2011, this episode is titled, Three to Grow On. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus, Cloud Community experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood. And joining me as the co-host of 48th Time is Justin Edelstein. Justin, how you doing? Big stretch.

Justin Edelstein: Big stretch here in Times Square Studio.

Jason Atwood: It's supposed to stretch before the podcast.

Justin Edelstein: What are we going to do for our 50th? It's kind of a big deal.

Jason Atwood: 50th podcast or episode?

Justin Edelstein: Webisode, not cast, if you will.

Jason Atwood: We'll wear the same shirt.

Justin Edelstein: We're already doing that.

Jason Atwood: So we won't do that.

Justin Edelstein: We're literally wearing the same shirt today. Little scary. A little scary.

Jason Atwood: So we got a light agenda today, I would say. There's lots of little Cloud newsy things out there. We could put them in a random bucket and then spend two and a half seconds on each one of them, but we're not going to do that. So we're going to talk about, there's a new blog post up, kind of interesting, about the three products, App Exchange products, that we can't live without at this point, which I think could have some interest to it. There's sort of like three picks. I think we've picked all of them at some point.

Justin Edelstein: I have to believe we picked all three of these.

Jason Atwood: But we've been using it for so long that it's kind of a way to go back and say these are things we still use every day, can't go without. Google Chromebooks are available after the big Google announcement at Google I.O. I.O. a long time ago, or I guess a month or two ago. And they're available now, but do we still care? And Mobile Cloud App Development Framework from Aperio, and we'll talk about that and what that means and what it might mean in the future. And then, of course, we'll end up with our Cloud Focus App pick of the week. So let's get going. First up, the bloggy post from the unmentioned.

Justin Edelstein: The partner that shall remain nameless.

Jason Atwood: Yes. And it is entitled, Three Salesforce App Exchange Products We Cannot Live Without. Yes, it is. So true. So why don't you give me a sense of those three, and we'll talk about them. All right.

Justin Edelstein: Let me give you all three of them, and then we can talk a little bit about how we use each of them. The first one is, we're mentioning Appirio quite a bit today. The Appirio Calendar Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps. The second one is the Super Follow Buttons for Chatter by force.com labs. And the third one, which is the mother of all add-on applications, the Conga Composer by AppXtreme. So let's go one by one through these and talk about how they make our lives a little easier. So the Imperial Calendar Sync for Salesforce and Google Apps. Clearly, we are a Salesforce shop. We use Google Apps for all of our productivity needs, email, chat, calendar, contacts. Google Wave. I was waiting for you. I was going to let you do it. Google Wave, all integrated, single sign-on. Very nice. All in the cloud. Travel anywhere you want. You have your stuff. It's great. We have two-factor authentication turned on.

03:20 Justin Edelstein: We are very secure.

Jason Atwood: Unlike Citi. Don't mention how secure we are because then people.

Justin Edelstein: We're in the cloud. We're secure. We did not give away all our customers' data.

Jason Atwood: We don't put any of our customers' data anywhere near the cloud. No, just kidding. Just, yeah. I just feel like if you say it, then net, you just paint a big target.

Justin Edelstein: So I couldn't put that on the agenda in the Google Wave, but we can sort of mention it. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: Well, I didn't mention it.

Justin Edelstein: Anyway, I think we're a little unique, because we actually use our Salesforce calendars as our main calendars at Arcus. The truth is in the cloud. The truth is in the cloud. And it's in our calendar. And it's in our Salesforce cloud calendar, not our Google cloud calendar. But we use Google Apps, and we want that calendar to be in both places. We don't want to double enter it, because that's a waste of time. So we use the product from Aperio, Calendar Sync, and essentially you log in with your Google credentials inside of a tab within Salesforce. You choose how often you'd like them to sync, which direction, one way or two way, one way Salesforce out or Google in or bi-directionally, and you pretty much set it and forget it. And it does a really nice job of syncing. It used to do some things here and there, but I don't know, all of a sudden it doesn't do that anymore. So it works flawlessly now.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's not say flawlessly. It works really well.

Jason Atwood: It works if I think you obey the rules. The rules are pick a direction and stick with it. That's not true.

Justin Edelstein: It works. I now throw things. Well, here's the thing. We all are Apple users. We're all on our Macs. And I don't think any of us actually go to the calendar online. Yes I do. I do to accept events. That's correct. So we do have some rules. That's what I'm saying. So but we do use our iCals on our machines to view the Google Calendar. Yes. So rules, if you get the calendar invite, accept it inside of Google Mail on the web, which will jump you out into the Google Calendar and accept it for you. Not in Apple Mail or or in iCal. Do not do that. Don't do that. Or on your phone, don't try to do it. On your phone, don't do that. Do it on Google. Now you can add events right into your iCal. Yes, absolutely.

Jason Atwood: You can. Don't invite people. No, it's a risk. No, it's not a risk.

Justin Edelstein: It works all the time for me. Every time. 35% of the time. Well then you and I have set it up differently because it works perfectly for me.

Jason Atwood: You will get exceptions on it. I would say it's not a good practice. It works. I'm telling you that I've looked at it. I've gone on the forums. It is spotty. Because you're basically syncing two times up. You're syncing iCal to Google, which is great, using CalDev, and then, which is pretty robust.

06:27 Justin Edelstein: And that happens instantly. It does.

Jason Atwood: And then there's the Google Calendar to Salesforce sync, which works. I will say it works, but I find there's more problems. If I add something to Salesforce, 99% or 95% of the time it'll get down. If I add it, iCal, 75, 55, it can have problems.

Justin Edelstein: You and I have different experiences with that. Because it works for me every time. It really does. I add stuff on my phone, I add stuff in my iCal, and it gets to where it needs to go every time. And it doesn't do. Now our main thing is we like to put the events inside of Salesforce because we like to relate

Jason Atwood: them to things.

Justin Edelstein: That doesn't come down to the relationship. That's why we treat the Salesforce calendar as the gold source because we like that relationship.

Jason Atwood: We run all our projects out of Salesforce, we run all our stuff, so we want to have that

Justin Edelstein: opportunities, whatever it might be.

Jason Atwood: We want to have that relationship and if you're adding them to your iCal, then there's the chance because it's on a two hour sync. You won't even show up there for, at a maximum of two hours, a minimum of whatever, five minutes or so. So that's why I say best practice to put it into Salesforce first, because then you do the relations, you do the right thing, meaning you invite the right people, you connect it up, and then you know it'll flow down and show up. Otherwise you put it on the other calendar, and then there's a chance it'll make it up there. You have a better percentage chance than I do, but then it's always remembering to add people.

Justin Edelstein: Although I do think we're a rare case. I think most people who would use Salesforce in Google Apps, their Google Calendar is their main calendar, and they use that to see free, busy time across their company, as opposed to us, who use Salesforce to do that.

Jason Atwood: No, well, I don't, you're right. I use it to see free, busy time, but I use what I love about the whole connection, and we can then move on, is that, for the first time in my life, after working for companies for millions of years, what feels like millions of years, as I turn another year older tomorrow, It feels, it's the first time I can look at any calendar wherever I have it, or I can look at, sorry, I have views to calendars where I can mash up as much information as I want. I can mash up my Arcus life, my home life, I even do, as we talked about before, I share a mobile meet calendar with my wife that we track our sort of family events. And so I can always look and see whatever's going on. One of my, you know, at least the iCalendars I have on my iPad and iPhone and the iCal, the truth and they really will tell me what's going on and I don't have to go, oh do I have that thing at work or do I have that thing at home or does my wife have that PTA meeting? It's like there's a place I can go or a couple places where I get that truth. I even so much as publish my personal calendar back up to Google so I can then look at the Google side and see the same truth. So go four different ways from sideways. Anyway, so that's a period of counter-sinking.

Justin Edelstein: It works for us. Free.

Jason Atwood: I think the problem is that it's not well supported. Meaning, I think it either works or it doesn't work. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. And that's it. And they don't care. They've hidden it. I don't know what that means on the App Exchange when something can't be found through search anymore. And it kind of has a private label on it. Yeah, so it's an interesting little thing. is it means that they're moving it away eventually. There is a pay version, but even the pay version is hidden now. So, enjoy it while it lasts.

09:59 Justin Edelstein: Yeah, we're gonna keep using it.

Jason Atwood: Until someone rips it out of our cold, dead calendar hand.

Justin Edelstein: So our next product that we use all the time, which may or may not continue to be needed to be used, but for the time being still useful, still very useful, the Super Follow buttons for Chatter. So the Super Follow button can be put on any list or search view for customer standard objects inside of Salesforce. And it's a mass action button. So if you're on a list of, say, open opportunities that are due to close within the next 30 days or something, and you want to follow all of them, you can use the Select button, or you can select individual ones.

Jason Atwood: New of Summer 11. I think we're going to talk about that next week.

Justin Edelstein: Right, so I wasn't mentioning the Summer 11. I was mentioning the check box that sits next to the list to say, I want to select this one, this one, this one, this one, this one. He's talking about the features. Sorry. And then you could click the Follow button, and it will execute some script and essentially make you follow all of those records in the list. Now in Summer 11, it has been released where there's a new column in Lists that shows you if you're following a record not and allows you to one by one check off whether or not you want to follow which is why I introduced this product by saying it may or may not be around for a lot longer because Salesforce just enhanced quite a bit of its list chatter right you can see chatter on lists right you can follow things from a list one by one this allows you to do them in mass so you can have like a hundred things in a list check all hundred hit follow and you'll follow on it needs to have a

Jason Atwood: super unfollow button with a 500 object limit, 500 record type record limit to follow, which I hit up against all the time, although less now with Summer 11, because I have views where I just go into that view called like paid invoices or closed, lost opportunities, and I'll just go click, click, click, click, click. But even that, it should be select all, unfollow. So hopefully those are going to be built in. But for now, force.com labs has a solution. So use the Super Follow button. Super Follow. Doesn't have an Unfollow. No Unfollow. Needs a brother. Needs a brother.

Justin Edelstein: And last, but certainly not least, as the partner who shall remain nameless called it the mother of all add-on applications, Conga Composer by App Engine Streams. We talked about this as something that Salesforce should really acquire. They still do. It's such a great product. And I mean, we've talked about it many times. but just to give an overview, Kaga Composer allows for, and it's so hard to talk about in three minutes because it does so much, but then do it in two, I'll do it in four. It allows you to take data that is sitting within Salesforce and get it out of Salesforce in more visually appealing ways than a Salesforce report might do. It allows you to do more than just a printable view a record because you can take reports that are related by one thing and essentially do the outer join, the thing that everyone wants to do, show me a contact with all their cases

13:22 Justin Edelstein: and their opportunities that they're related to. And through a series of reports you can get to that. You're always telling somebody, well that's two reports, that's three reports. And they're like, well why is that two or three reports, it's one contact. Well with Conga you could put a button on the contact, have it point to all those different and have the output be a Word document, a PDF, a PowerPoint, an Excel that is in the format that you want to have it formatted in with the fields that are included in all those reports and you can go even further than just getting the document out. You can email it, you can attach it to the record, you can log the activity, you can send it to an echo sign or a docu sign and have it have the document that you created go off for e-signature. Whole slew of features.

Jason Atwood: Almost comes up. It's rare that we meet with a client who doesn't come up in conversation. And it's not because we're lazy. It's because basically it's the thing that you want to do with data once you've started capturing it is I want to have it come out, not in the cell and not just as a printable report, but I want to look a certain way. And then I maybe want to go off to someone else so they could look at it, but I want it to look a certain way. We have two use cases right now. One is the running from an opportunity, turning it into an agreement. The agreement goes into echo sign. Echo sign then goes sent out as a PDF, gets electronically signed, come back, does stuff. Like, all great workflow. We've talked about that a little bit before. But I have a client now that's doing, or we have a client now that wants to do a massive one that pulls in, I think, seven or eight custom objects. and then activities and notes and we'll put them all in one big thing. The master. The master, like this one big report that they want to run off the counter object.

Justin Edelstein: I mean that's the great thing about Conga is that data is in the system, lots of it, but it's only really useful if you can look at it in the way that's useful to you and Conga allows all that rich data that's in Salesforce to be viewed in a way that is meaningful to you, the user. like how is this most useful to you? Well, it's modeled and it's in Salesforce and it sort of could potentially be in a bunch of different places. And if you need to look at something that's across three different reports, well, that's not so useful. And that's where Conga really comes into play. That's a great job.

Jason Atwood: So we love Conga, love this. Those are our three that we really can't live without. None of them.

Justin Edelstein: Let's give some examples of what we do with Conga in our org, because we say, we use a period of calendars. We use SuperFollow buttons. Conga Composer, we just talked about it in sort of general terms in how we use it for our clients.

Jason Atwood: But we use it for contracts. So we can, on opportunities, we have a button to generate a contract with everything filled out. We use it for NDAs, where if you want to, again, generate an NDA between us and our clients, click a button, it does it. The big use is our proposal system really heavily uses it and generates a proposal that reads in a bunch of different stuff and reads from, I think, three or four different reports and builds a seven to eight page, really nice looking, well, we like the way it looks, but proposal that's easy to read, that's well organized, that has everything we want in it, and does it, I have a click of a button, and then sends it out. So click of a button, add in your own note, and send it out in a PDF, which is great. And then we use it for our projects, which we run all our projects out of Salesforce, obviously, because we're Salesforce people. So we built our product management, which we've talked about before. So we use it for project status reports that we generate weekly. We use it also to generate a sort of product timeline that will go to Excel, which Excel then uses the fields that we

17:10 Jason Atwood: have a built-in chart that builds a camp chart in there. That's kind of cool. And then we use it for, I guess, we have all our status reports come out of PDF form. But again, very easy to do. Looks good. Clients like it. Just millions of users. And then there's stuff like, we were talking with someone the other day, a client, because I guess there's new regulations coming up about employees signing off on things yearly, and so they have to sign off on certain regulations or sign off on books or things that they did or didn't do. And we said, well, that would be a good use of Conga, because you could then generate these pre-filled out, pre-Dear Jason Atwood, this is your 2011, 2012 yearly sign-off agreement, blah, blah, blah. Have it go out to something like EchoSign, have people sign it, and you can track all that activity as opposed to printing them out and sending people however they did it back in the day. Or hiring some other company to do it. You can build it all in your system, especially if you're running your HR right there.

Jason Atwood: So, okay, that's the three things. So a good article, good blog post. on blog.archisinc.com if you want to read that and other ones that we've done. I think we're almost up to 100 blog posts. We're coming up on the one year anniversary of the blog. So the next one was the Google Chromebooks are now available. So Chromebooks, what we talked about from Google I.O., their annual user or annual conference. I don't know if it's user, developer, whatever. It's a conference. They have lots of people there. It usually makes noise.

Justin Edelstein: DAN GALPIN I think it's a developer conference.

Jason Atwood: We could have waited, because two years ago they announced Google Wave at their conference. So this one, there's lots of news. The big one really was we're going to put Chrome, which Google Chrome is kind of a, there's an OS version of it, and there's a browser version of it, which we talk about a lot. But they now have a product, which is going with Samsung and, what's the other one? I don't remember. But whatever, there's some other manufacturer.

Justin Edelstein: And what is that other one? Acer.

Jason Atwood: Wow. It's like he did reading on the wall. because it wasn't in the Google Wave. It wasn't. So they're putting it in. So it's a built-in. It has 3G built-in. There's a couple neat things. It's optional.

Justin Edelstein: 3G optional, like an iPad.

Jason Atwood: But it's a cloud OS, in essence, built into an operating system that's running on a piece of hardware that's cheap, that's easy to buy, meaning you can subscribe to the hardware. So like $20 a month or $25 or $30 a month. Comes in with support. But it allows you to do all the stuff that you do, which is web stuff. Because everything's on the web, and everything's on the cloud, and everything's on the internet. And I think when we first saw them, I was like, we both said, I think we're going to get one. Now they're available. All right, here's the thing. And I haven't bought one yet.

Justin Edelstein: Here's the thing. When we watch Steve Jobs on a stage, and he talks about a new product, and we say we're going to get one, we then go wait in line the day that it comes out for five hours and we actually buy it.

20:16 Jason Atwood: For six, six or seven.

Justin Edelstein: Whatever it is, we then buy it. We are that stupid. Or impressionable. Both. Okay. We did not do that for this.

Jason Atwood: This doesn't have, there's no sexy factor to this. This is a utilitarian thing. I had the use case to use it yesterday. Yeah, you did. So I came to the office. I watched it. Yes, I came to the office yesterday without my laptop, my trusty MacBook Pro, which I love very much, because we were going somewhere else and I was just, it was just sort of stopped to come in for an hour. Had a call, whatever. So I came in with my iPad, I'm like, I can rock an hour on my iPad and do some work or check an email or two. But you couldn't. But we had a WebEx, I joined on my iPad. I connected up my keyboard to it and I was all like, good. But then someone needed a PDF and it needed to come down this way and I needed it from, and it just turned into like, wow, I can't do, I did some things I can't do. So I had to take out this older computer we have sitting around, kind of like the, I think yesterday I said, welcome to 2002. And use it, and it worked fine, great. But I was thinking at that point, that would have been a very good use case to have one or two Chromebooks sitting around that we could just use.

Justin Edelstein: Would the Chromebook even work in that scenario? You needed to fax somebody something, didn't you?

Jason Atwood: No, I needed to take a PDF, and I needed to take it from one email and attach it to another email. And something I could have done on the thing, but write a couple emails. Obviously, we do tons of WAV, tons of, it would have worked for everything I wanted to do. But is that use case, since I've used that computer once since it's been here for the last three, whatever, a month and a half, is that use case enough just to go get one of these things and stick them out of office?

Justin Edelstein: I kind of wanted to get one to futz around with, just to have it.

Jason Atwood: Yeah. I'd like to see how it works, if I'm a thing.

Justin Edelstein: I might go play with one in a store or something.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that one day. Let's do that.

Justin Edelstein: Where can we go, like a Best Buy?

Jason Atwood: Anyway, they're available for $300. Where can we get them? Amazon? They're about $500. I think that just is, is it fast enough to do what I want to do? And is it, you know, I do want one. I just don't. You're right.

Justin Edelstein: So we're going to go to Best Buy one day and play with them.

Jason Atwood: The factor of the iPad and all that stuff comes out and the way they present it. And also, the use of those things always seems like there's so much more. The iPad has things in it that I now don't do anywhere else. But this thing seems like it's.

Justin Edelstein: Like playing NBA Jam?

Jason Atwood: Like playing NBA Jam.

Justin Edelstein: Because that's about 75% to 80% of my iPad usage. Watching stuff. My pick of the week will cover about 5%. Oh, 5%. All right.

Jason Atwood: Well then, let's keep going so we can get there. We're not there yet.

Justin Edelstein: But speaking of iPad apps.

Jason Atwood: So do you care about Chromebooks?

Justin Edelstein: Oh, I was doing a sugooey. I care about Chromebooks in the long term. I don't care right now.

Jason Atwood: OK, do you care about them as much as iPad apps and development frameworks? Or iPhone apps and development frameworks? Well, good news, because it's close. It's close.

23:19 Justin Edelstein: You did bring it back.

Jason Atwood: Mobile Cloud app development framework is announced by Aperio. So lead us through this. You had this story, so I can read it up on his website.

Justin Edelstein: So Aperio announced, I think it was just the other day, on Monday. So we're recording this on Thursday, on Monday the 13th, that Appirio's mobile practice has introduced this app development framework. They've essentially made it supposedly very easy to build and manage native iOS apps for salesforce.com. Okay, so connecting salesforce.com and database.com to a native iOS app. So not like just running in the browser, right? Something that Salesforce hasn't come out with, like an iPad app for Salesforce. They have the Chatter app but not the Salesforce app. But supposedly there's some very easy to use pre-built templates for just snapping together these applications and you don't really need any iOS skills.

Justin Edelstein: Programming knowledge. Programming knowledge. It's a lot like... Whatever it is. I would say it's a lot like building a force.com application if you weren't to be writing APEX and Visualforce to be configuring clicks not code. This is the clicks not code for snapping together iOS specific applications that work with a Salesforce.com backend.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, I mean, love it. Love the theory of it. Can think of great examples for it. I think it's always easier to say things are easier to do than it is to do them.

Justin Edelstein: Totally, totally.

Jason Atwood: But yeah, do we have an availability date? Can I download it? Where can I put it? When's it? That type of thing? Or is it more of a announcement?

Justin Edelstein: It's more of an announcement. Yeah, I mean, they've announced that they've been using it internally to do things with different clients. They've announced that they've built some apps, pre-built existing templates for field surveys, location-based apps, time and activity tracking apps, as well as search and display apps, they built an app already to check in at client account sites, like a mobile app where you check in at an account. I'm sure it was just a proof of concept. Like a Foursquare check in. Hey, I'm at this account.

Jason Atwood: And it check in and it must chatter it or something along those lines.

Justin Edelstein: So just a proof of concept type of app.

Jason Atwood: Do you think it'll make enough noise that it'll be rolled up into what's coming up at Dreamforce? It may.

Justin Edelstein: I mean, when you think about just Salesforce's huge push into mobile, the tablet and smartphone marketplace is booming, and what this could potentially mean for specifically certain marketplaces like, I could think of health care, education. Some big things can happen if mobile device application development becomes as easy as clicking.

26:32 Jason Atwood: So they can already connect to database.com, but database.com isn't even out yet.

Justin Edelstein: Aperio seems to be able to connect to things that don't always exist.

Jason Atwood: Don't exist? That's a great space-time continuum thing. I can connect to stuff that doesn't exist. They're Aperio.

Justin Edelstein: They get to connect to things. All right.

Jason Atwood: Well, I mean, again, when you said it, I could think of five or six examples off the top of my head that I would want to do and build out. Database.com as a platform looks really cool. If I could build a mobile app that talks to it, geez, you could do some neat stuff. So it sounds good.

Justin Edelstein: And that's really all I want. If you have our, think about just our org and our project

Jason Atwood: management application.

Justin Edelstein: If we were able to very simply port that to a native iPad app, we would do it. Totally. If this really makes it that simple, that would be very cool.

Jason Atwood: That would be very cool. That's sort of the big news. We could do potpourri. Google announced a lot of new features including you can now send up an image to say search images like this image. That's kind of neat. That's kind of neat. We've announced new sync stuff where I guess now, although we've never run into this problem, I guess now with regular Google Mail you can now sync, you can now search across all your inboxes. That sounds cool from your iOS device.

Justin Edelstein: On the server.

Jason Atwood: On the server, right. What else is potpourri? More iCloud, so there's more questions and less answers about iCloud and what it means and what it is. We had a discussion about iDisk and all that. No one seems to know. One of the big debates is, is there going to be some sort of web interface to this? Because there's a web interface to MobileMe right now. Right. John Gruber.

Justin Edelstein: I don't think it's a very good web interface, by the way. I think it works. It works great. I think it's terrible. I just never use it. I think it's extremely slow. Oh yeah, it's a little heavy. It's heavy. It's really sluggish. It looks really good, though. Looks nice, very sluggish. Never use it. To me, be fast. Yeah.

Jason Atwood: The only thing I like about it are the galleries, because you can easily come publish the galleries.

Justin Edelstein: The mobile me galleries look very, very nice.

Jason Atwood: They work great. And so John Gruber of Daring Fireball has said that there will be, because I've got a basically almost a year from now to come out with something.

Justin Edelstein: I got the email from mobile me telling me

Jason Atwood: that I had until June something, 2012, to basically deal with it. But of course they didn't tell you what you need to migrate.

Justin Edelstein: What I'm migrating to, how I need to migrate it. I'm hoping it just works. And my existing account just continues to work.

Jason Atwood: They know some stuff's not going to work. iWeb is no longer going to work. They're going to get rid of that. I don't care. Yeah, I don't care either. I don't care. Which was actually interesting. A poll went up on read-write-web cloud side. Read-write cloud? Read-write cloud, which was asking, does the iCloud really have anything to do with cloud computing? And we had this debate last week. Well, I think it is a great synchronization mechanism and it's in a big data center and they're probably using, you know, yes, it's multi-tenant, yes, it's virtualized. One of my concerns about it is it seems to be very platform specific and that's one of the tenants, I think, of cloud computing is that it is not as platform specific as installed software, which is very, very platform specific. So I know Apple, I'm a big fan of theirs, like the stuff they do.

30:19 Jason Atwood: You're a big fan of Apple? Yeah, a big fan. Can you imagine?

Justin Edelstein: For those who haven't heard this podcast before, I mean... That's just shocking. They would never know. They would never know.

Jason Atwood: So, but as also a big fan of cloud computing, it does kind of... It's two tastes that don't taste great together, because I think that they're kind of going against cloud computing.

Justin Edelstein: Like toothpaste and orange juice.

Jason Atwood: Oh, that's not good. So speaking of things that do taste great together, it's Cloud Focus at Picks of the Week. Let's get your pick of the week. My pick. And let me know. All right. What is it?

Justin Edelstein: So my pick is called MyPad for Facebook by Loiter Inc.

Jason Atwood: I think this is one of the top. I see this up there on the top. It totally is. Yeah. You're a follower.

Justin Edelstein: Not super new, but it's fairly new. There's also, I'm picking just MyPad for Facebook, there's MyPad for Facebook Plus, which is without ads. My version's free, it has some ads in it. Just started using it within the last week so that I can pick it this week. It's a Facebook app for your iPad. So if you like using apps instead of going to websites on your iPad, here's an app that lets you do pretty much everything that you can do in Facebook just inside of an app. So I like the Twitter app on my iPad. I don't go to twitter.com on my iPad. I really I actually rarely go to twitter.com if ever.

Jason Atwood: Very rarely. Except sometimes the data points on twitter.com are more recent.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah they're just a little different and I don't really go to facebook.com either. I do a lot of my Facebooking on my phone so I figured if If I had an app on my iPad, I would do maybe a little more Facebooking or I'd... More Facebooking. Yeah, Facebooking. And I like it. It does everything. It has a nice interface. It reminds me of kind of like the Twitter app. It looks very similar. Things slide in, things slide out. There's a pane on the left, navigation, photos, people, new stream, you know, the basics.

Jason Atwood: Does it have interaction with it or is it just for reading?

Justin Edelstein: No, you can post things to it.

Jason Atwood: You do your status. It's Facebook. It's got chat.

Justin Edelstein: It's got everything in it.

Jason Atwood: It is interesting that they have not really built one yet. Facebook hasn't. Facebook has not built one yet.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, there's this one by Leuter.

Jason Atwood: But they have one for the iPhone. The one for the iPhone, while it works, there's some quirky stuff about it. Like if you go off a list and come back, you're at the top of the statuses, it doesn't keep where you were. There's some stuff that I just...

Justin Edelstein: I'll tell you, I very rarely go to Facebook.com if ever. I am just on the phone. On the phone, right. On the phone.

Jason Atwood: Well, interesting, good one. So free, my pad for Facebook.

Justin Edelstein: There is the Plus version. By Loiter. Right, the Plus version is $0.99 if you want to pay for no ads. OK. The same thing, though.

Jason Atwood: But interesting, I wonder how much they're using the API.

33:22 Justin Edelstein: They've got to be using it quite a bit because you're interacting with Facebook.

Jason Atwood: So mine actually varies some more. I kind of, I have a list that I keep of all of my ones, but this one kind of popped up on my list this week because it got mentioned in the news. I guess we could have called this the Facebook podcast, because this came up in, as Facebook was looking at this browser that we had talked about back in episode 18. Yes, I looked it up. It's a browser called, it's a new browser called RockMelt. It's built on top of Chrome. So it has Chrome ability.

Justin Edelstein: I'm downloading it right now.

Jason Atwood: OK, good. I could have sworn you maybe switched computers since then.

Justin Edelstein: I switched computers since then, but this computer is, I never downloaded it. Downloaded when we talked about the Sparrow. I started using Sparrow a little bit as an experiment.

Jason Atwood: I actually went back after you said it and tried it the other week and was good.

Justin Edelstein: I'm no longer using Sparrow. It's good. I'm just no longer using Sparrow.

Jason Atwood: It just doesn't have as much. It's not full featured. It's great, lightweight app. It doesn't have as much that I want in my app. So anyway, so RockMelt is basically the concept that you take the browser that you're doing all this social networking stuff and kind of, I would say, encapsulate you. I'm looking at it now. And so where you have a normal browser window, it's in the middle, you got your bookmarks on top, you got your browser stuffing in the middle. But you're all over the place. You're surrounded by social networking. So you sign into it. And even along the top, it's kind of like put Made Facebook. So on the top here, you see that I'm logged into Facebook in my browser. So it tells me that I have a new friend request, and there's new stuff going on. So kind of very much built into the browser itself, including pictures. And then on the side, the left-hand side, you have all your Facebook friends that are, you can see their online status, you can chat with them, but they're kind of listed along the side and you can move the ones you want to the top.

Jason Atwood: Then the other side, you can connect up to all sorts of sources like Twitter sources and stuff. And then of course, obviously, sharing is built into the browser. No longer do you need a plug-in, right? Because sharing is...

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of like the iOS having Twitter at the core level.

Jason Atwood: browser has these logins at its... So it's been updated in fact I updated it two days ago and I looked at it and I just opened it up again and it's throwing a growl notice saying there's another update so it's they're actually putting more time into it and apparently it's um it's very uh it's being looked at by Facebook because I'm sure Facebook would love to have a browser that was you know theirs and theirs alone um that they could sort of put time and effort into sort of of like Safari, you know, Apple has its own browser and Google, which used to be a search company now, has their own browser.

36:23 Justin Edelstein: I will say, this does remind me a lot of Flock.

Jason Atwood: A thing that you forgot until I reminded you today.

Justin Edelstein: Well, I said that browser that disappeared and you said Flock. And I remember using Flock, I don't know, four or five years ago and thinking, oh, this is interesting, they've made a social browser or a web 2.0 browser, right? connected to your Flickr and it connected to your Delicious and your Dig account, your Reddit account. I just wonder the lifespan for things like this. They're so dependent on other people continuing to be the thing. Right. And then once those things are no longer the thing, it goes away.

Jason Atwood: It definitely has, it does have a lot of features that, again, if you're very very involved in Facebook and Twitter it's great because it kind of builds a whole Twitter client right into the browser and it builds Facebook kind of right into the browser so you're not even wherever you are Facebook is with you so I think for people who like that and again get the top of my browser windows it has a little Facebook icons that you know where I can hover over people that are sitting on the side and see like I can hover over your Facebook and see that you know you last tweeted or you asked Facebook the Arcus blog post or so I can see this stuff but without having to lose my browser or go anywhere. Interesting, again, I actually look at it like it's, you know, we talk a lot about productivity and we talk about, you know, focus and this to me is sort of the ultimate. You might as well just have lights going off in my face. Oh my

Justin Edelstein: goodness. If I try to do something. Oh wow. Yeah. It's just all in your face, isn't it? It's everywhere. It's holding my bookmarks from Chrome, it looks like. Yeah, It pulls in your Chrome. Or from Safari. Safari.

Jason Atwood: So that's it. It's RockMelt. Give it a shot. I mean, I think if you're a browser geek, if you like trying out new browsers and seeing features, and again, just seeing how things can connect, it's definitely worth a shot or to look at. It's free as you can be. It's up to version, well, as of today, 0.9, 0.58, 0.423. And it's using Chrome as the back end, so it's fast and furious and I'm sure can do all the other stuff. It's almost like a Chrome browser that someone had just have pre-installed a lot of pre-installed plugins into.

Justin Edelstein: It's kind of what it reminds me of.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, because there are a lot of these plugins, or what they call them, extensions, that can do all this stuff. And I use a lot of them. That might be an interesting blog post or podcast.

Justin Edelstein: What has this read later thing, which is kind of cool.

Jason Atwood: Yeah, which is going to be built into Safari. So anyway, RockMelt social browser by RockMelt. So good stuff. So that's it. Wrapping up the COD folks picks of the week. Again if you want to read the blog posts, they're all up there. Blog.arkusinc.com. You can follow the company at twitter.com slash arcusinc. That's A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C. I'm at twitter.com slash jasonmattwood. Justin here is at twitter.com slash justedelstein because Justin Edelstein was taken. No it's too long. Too long. I had it. It was too long. But mine is longer than yours, no?

39:39 Justin Edelstein: I was one character too long. You want to go justy just yet. I could have done Justin Edelstein I would have been worse. Yeah, that would have been pretty bad or go to Facebook.com

Jason Atwood: With your rock mount browser and go to Facebook.com slash Arcus Inc and again A-R-K-U-S-I-N-C and we have our stuff up there We post once or twice a week where we put updates to things But if you're looking for the podcast looking for the Cod focus weekly podcast Which is rounding on its year anniversary end or 50th episode which would be about right? I think we did a little bit more episodes in a couple weeks So we will be above our 52 when we get to the 52 weeks But go to iTunes and subscribe to it there leave us a nice review We'd love that and every time we publish it and generally towards the end of the week But sometimes earlier sometimes multiple times especially as we get closer to dream for us. We'll probably be doing much more more. Good place? Subscribe on iTunes and it will sync right down every time we publish it. So that's it. So for the rest of the day, as it were, enjoy this cloudy day and all your social browsers.