JoeDeveloper Wins - Ribbit Killer App Challenge

• Posted by jfarrar on March 30, 2009
• 1 comments

I'm still suprised! I just got the word that I have won one of the categories in Ribbit's Killer App Challenge Contest!!! I won the Carrier, Network, ISP Integration category with my Simple Softphone. Along with winning the contest I want to say thanks to SimpleSignal for coming along side and approving my work. We plan to take this phone to the next level by integrating features from both the Broadworks platform and the Ribbit platform. Thank you as well to Ribbit for putting on the contest. It was alot of fun and was overall a great success. There were 129 application entries and 453 registered participants in the contest. Kudos also goes out to Top Coder for orchestrating the contest and making it all happen on the technical side.

I plan to continue the development of my apps and winning the 15k will definitely help in making sure I can do just that. I've always been a Flash lover and more recently Flex. I'm super excited to see the changes that are coming soon to the Ribbit platform to allow developers to monetize their applications. With the flexible pricing model that Ribbit has, I forsee there being plenty of mini applications, but also full blown apps that deliver all the features Ribbit has to offer.

Stay tuned, because there are going to be alot of cool things happening with this as the year goes on.

Official release: http://killerappchallenge.ribbit.com/news/?p=925

JoeDeveloper

mailFone & SimpleSignal Phone - Ribbit KillerApp Challenge

• Posted by jfarrar on March 14, 2009
• 0 comments

To start off with I must say that Ribbit has come a long way. I joined the beta program back in Nov 2007 and started messing around with the framework. After doing little with the framework for about a year or so I started re-learning the API and then updating some code examples I had built to be compatible with their 2.5 release. There were alot of great enhancements to the API with the 2.5 release. At the same time they released the version update they also announced a contest for developers.

I decided I was going to enter into the contest and see how it went. I made it into the 3rd checkpoint, but fell short of placing in the top 5. Further motivated, I created another application (SimpleSignal Phone) along with the my first application (mailFone) -- video after the jump. I enhanced my mailFone to include incoming screens as well as outgoing, and integrated Plaxo photos for a visual identification of incoming calls or outgoing calls.

So here are my two entries:

mailFone:
http://www.joedeveloper.net/ribbit/emailfone.html

SimpleSignal Phone:
http://www.joedeveloper.net/ribbit/simplesignal/JoeDeveloperSimpleSignal.html

It was really fun working with the Ribbit API and I know that I will use it more frequently and hopefully sell some apps.

Ribbit Ribbit!

Joe

Xtended Contest entry "Walkthrough of QuickSet"

• Posted by jfarrar on September 1, 2008
• 19 comments

Last entry I made was all about this new thing that I had been working on for the Xtended Contest. Now I will reveal what that application is and provide you with a walkthrough of how it works and where you can download it.

The name of the application is QuickSet. It's an Adobe Air application that allows you to dial out from it and configure several services. The true beauty of the application is it's ability to be run on both Windows, MAC and Linux operating systems. It crosses the divide of compatibility to allow almost every user out there to configure their Broadsoft services without ever having to leave their desktop.

Here is some instructions that I put together to help you get started with it

To get started you would need to go to  http://www.joedeveloper.net/quickset/  and click on the Install Now button.

Does the following window should pop up?


If so please press Open.
If that window doesn’t pop open you may see:



This is the Adobe Air platform that QuickSet runs on. Please press yes.
After this point if you are having any more problems it would be a good time to make sure you have the latest Flash Player and Adobe air.

Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher. (you can get that here: http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer)
Adobe Air 1.1 or higher. (you can get that here: http://get.adobe.com/air/)

After you press open, or press install the adobe air platform the next screen should be:



Please click on “Install”
If this is your first time installing the application you may also see the following screen:


This is an agreement for the Adobe Air platform installation. Please click “I Agree”.
The next screen will ask you about how you would like the application to install. It’s completely optional to put an icon on your desktop. Please click continue to start the installation.



After it finishes installing it should launch the application automatically. If it doesn’t, you can go to your programs or desktop and launch if from there as well.
Once you launch QuickSet for the first time you should see the “Configure your settings” box:


This box needs to have some information filled in: Server, Username and Password. Once that is filled in and you click save it will attempt to connect to the server. Currently the easiest way to test out the application is by having an account on the Broadsoft Xtended Platform by going to http://developer.broadsoft.com , signing up and getting a sandbox account. For instance the server address would be “xsp.xdp.broadsoft.com” excluding the “http://” from the beginning.

The next thing that should happen is the app will load in your services:
To find out how the different services and application work, please continue reading through the guide by going to http://www.joedeveloper.net/quickset/QuickSet_QuickGuide.pdf.

Hope you enjoy the application! Leave some comments and let me know.

Consume your own service

• Posted by jfarrar on May 8, 2008
• 3 comments

So I guess it makes sense to consume your own service and find out how it works. So I have added the click2message application to the right side of the blog. Try it out, it will actually call me (JoeDeveloper) and you can see for yourself how simple and powerful this service can be. We are underway with development to provide users the ability to manage their account on www.click2message.com and post the click2message flash application to alot of different social networking and blog sites.

Also we have updated the blog to be a little more colorful. Stay tuned for more information. We have some cool stuff on the way.

Thanks!
Joseph Farrar

The real JoeDeveloper

Ribbit is cool

• Posted by jfarrar on January 3, 2008
• 19 comments

I'm not the greatest when it comes to blogging. I guess it's just difficult to blog when you have so many things going on. I'm going to get better at it, but for the time being it appears there will be months between blogs <g>. Anyhow, I've recently starting reading up again about this new voip component for Flex called ribbit. I had registered way back in October when it was first being released as a beta to only developers. I never really got a chance to integrate it into anything. However, now that I've started reading up on it again and have some ideas to play around with it.

I kind of have a philosophy about developing with new stuff. I first of all like to read all of the documentation (twice) so that I get a good grasp of the classes, methods and properties so I am not constantly having to go back to the reference documentation. Then I like to build some really simple applications that illustrate most of the features of the component/api/platform. After I've developed and integrated most of the simple features and made a few working examples (widgets, simple webforms) it's time to start wireframing and diagraming a much larger scale application.

So enough with the way in which I like to go about development and back to the ribbit platform. This product is absolutely the most innovative technology solution that ties together both the UI and backend to present a pretty and powerful application framework. The best of both worlds. I started out developing in flash then moved to PHP then moved to ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET. I figure it makes sense to return to my favorite framework (flash/flex/actionscript) and develop some cool little applications.

Ribbit just makes a ton of sense when it comes to user friendly applications. Obviously because it allows the developer to focus on the development and the designer to focus on the design and not really have to worrying about cross platform issues. It speeds up development and design time in my opinion by 40%, depending on the complexity of the UI and functionality.

In the end I'm looking at developing some pretty cool applications around the Ribbit platform, but at first I'll just do some simple integrations into familiar platforms that I have developed in before. Looking forward to messing around with the API.