Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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Be’er Sheva Props in TV Show Asfur

Got sucked into watching the show Asfur a few months ago, and took me a while to get through the whole season. Turned out it was worth it — great acting, awesome music, but some disappointing episodes too. Couldn’t quite tell why, but the writing seemed to copy some of those 1970s US dramas / soap operas – with inexplicable coincidences, fake deaths, and all the rest 😉

The opening of the show is embedded here below:

What caught my eye one night was seeing a shout out to the city of Be’er Sheva, which one of the characters was from:

Roughly translated, she is saying “this wouldn’t happen in Be’er Sheva …”.

If Tel-Aviv is the NYC / Miami / LA of Israel, then Be’er Sheva is the Cleveland / Detroit / Newark of Israel — a great town but doesn’t get a lot of respect.

Private Location Sharing with Glympse

I love foursquare, and have geolocation turned on for my blog and Twitter, but have often wanted to share my location with just a select few — and not the world.

The other day I ran across Glympse – and it does exactly what I was wishing for. You install the mobile app, and then you email or SMS who you would like to share your location with. The recipients don’t need the app, they just follow a private link, and they get to see in real-time where you are and the progress you are making. You also control the duration of the time where they can track you.

I find this perfect for meetings and letting your family know that you are heading home.

I’ve been testing it all week, and for me it’s replacing my SMS updates as I make my way to a destination with a single one of these glympse links – it’s very cool.

Video overview below:

Worth checking out: http://www.glympse.com/

Dave Pell: Mel Gibson Calls the Internet

As the kids would say today, OMG, this is good stuff. The talented Dave Pell, of Tweetage Wasteland- Confessions of an Internet Superhero fame – has put together something very special.

(Before you listen to it by clicking play on that YouTube embed, make sure you get up to speed on the insanity that is Mel Gibson):

Inspired by Mel Gibson’s outlandish recorded phone calls to his ex, I decided to call the internet with some complaints that have been building up. And I did it, Mel style.

[ via davenetics.com ]

Podcast: Legal Professionals using WordPress

I was on a podcast last week with Adrian Dayton speaking with his audience about how lawyers are adopting WordPress, best practices around securing your WordPress, integrating Twitter, using mobile apps, and a bit about our VideoPress.com service.

Thanks Adrian and your guests for a great discussion and the podcast mp3 is now available on adriandayton.com.

Podcast: WordPress and Commercial Services

This past weekend I participated in a panel discussion on the WPTavern WordPress Weekly podcast – where we chatted about WordPress and commercial services.

Thanks to Jeff Chandler for inviting me on the show, it was definitely a lively and fun discussion.

You can listen to the MP3 here: WordPress Weekly Episode 96 or feed it into iTunes here.

The Making of WordPress for iPad

Back in late February I met up with Raven Zachary and his team from Small Society as well as our own Matt Mullenweg, to figure out if we could get an iPad app for WordPress ready in less than 30 days.

We sketched out a rough plan that I captured from my iPhone:

Whiteboard sketch from initial meeting re: WordPress iPad app

We were committed to getting the app out for the iPad launch, and leveraged much of what was already in the popular WordPress for iPhone app functionality wise, but completely redid the UI and interactions for the iPad version. Matt Thomas who did a ton of great work on this app and redesigned iphone.wordpress.org, described the goals of the initial app like this:

“So what’s new for the iPad? In order to ensure that using WordPress on your iPad would be a great experience from day one, we decided not to add any new features. Nada. This release is all about taking advantage of a huge 9.7″ touchscreen. Writing and editing posts is far easier than before. Skimming through your comments and moderating them is far faster than before. And using the app is simply more beautiful than before. “

And thankfully, after hundreds of trac tickets and around the clock testing, our universal iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch WordPress app is now available via iTunes:

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On a personal note, I’m excited to get my iPad tomorrow and ditch the simulator for a while 🙂 I’m eager to see what my usage patterns will be with a device that clearly falls in between my iPhone and MacBook Pro. I’m already seeing positive anticipation from top bloggers as well, such as Om Malik — and my hunch is that for content consumption and drafting of new content, this will be a killer device. And no question that for managing your WordPress site — managing comments, editing posts, and even writing some long form posts — this will be an experience unlike any other.