Archives - May 2010

Inspired by his grandpa from a young age to be the best he can be, Jonathan is a true innovator; his mind is always alight with new ideas and ways to execute on them. He brings his passion for innovation to Intridea as our Product Manager. Meet Jonathan Nelson, in this week's Intridea Insider.

Jonathan brings fire, optimism and enthusiasm to the team: three vital ingredients that not only help to keep the rest of us inspired, but also make him astoundingly adept at marketing, business development, product design and development, and managing ideas and innovation. He does a little of everything, (ok, a lot of everything) and never seems to tire. His passion to be the best he can be is always driving him to work harder, for the benefit of us all.

Lately, Jonathan has been working on our enterprise microblogging solution, Presently. He has also been busy with Oil Reporter, a mobile app that gives people in the affected areas of the oil spill a way to create data reports (including geo-tagged photos and videos) of what they're seeing. All the data is available to the public and urgent reports are sent to CrisisCommons, who then shares the data with organizations and agencies that are dedicated to the cleanup effort.

While Jonathan is busy designing and developing products, he says he's also looking for ways to "increase exposure and drive business through various existing and new channels." Before becoming an Intridean, he spent many years working for high-profile companies like Shopzilla, and Primedia.

In fact, he first learned about Ruby while he was working at Shopzilla: "I was charged with coming up with, leading and developing technologies to drive more traffic to their site." Shopzilla was using Perl to run their systems. Jonathan had been hearing a lot about Ruby at the time from the tech community in California, and he decided to teach himself Ruby; "I dove right into it. It was love at first sight. I was so amazed that I couldn't stop telling and pleading with my engineer friends at Shopzilla to try it out." Not only did he get Shopzilla to start using Ruby, but when he later went to work with Primedia, he also convinced them to switch to Ruby from .NET.

Jonathan left Shopzilla to join Primedia after proposing to his (then) girlfriend, Ashley; she lived in Georgia and was still in college, so he left his 400 sq ft apartment on West Sunset Blvd and traded in the energetic startup lifestyle for an equally awesome job at Primedia and joined Ashley in Buford, Georgia.

Although he spent many years in business development and strategy for tech companies, Jonathan always loved programming: "I enjoy creating new things, and making my ideas become a reality." So eventually, the desire to code overcame him and he left Primedia to create his own app for Twitter, called TwitterMass. "The idea was simple, really. Create LinkedIn type functionality, but for Twitter." He knew he was taking a leap of faith, but argues, "I knew if I didn't do it now, I never would." He was able to market the application and got it running virally. TwitterMass had nearly 10k users in the first three months. The success of that app inspired him to create another app, Tweet Blocker, and he sold both applications before joining the Intridea team.

As skilled as he is at marketing, strategy, product design, development, and innovation, Jonathan wasn't supposed to be a developer or Product Manager at all. After finishing high school in Seattle, he joined the Air Force, with the intention of flying fighters and then retiring to fly private or commercial jets. His career path changed after 9/11; "I was in the Air National Guard when 9/11 happened, and due to training orders being changed, I had a lot of flexibility with my schedule; so I decided to direct my energy toward programming and other tech-related passions." During his high-school years, he was preoccupied with dissecting and then recreating internet sites that he visited frequently, in an effort to understand how sites were built and how the web worked. "When I got back in the swing of things (after 9/11) I couldn't stop reading and learning. I learned Perl, JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and even some PHP."

Aside from a few CS classes, Jonathan taught himself everything he knows. As a kid he had even taught himself to play drums and piano. That's just the kind of guy he is. When he feels inspired to do something, he makes it happen and nothing stands in his way. He says that the ideas of Napoleon Hill, as expressed in his book, "Think and Grow Rich", helped to teach him tried and true methods to achieving success.

Jonathan balances his work life with a strong family life and spiritual life. He spends lots of time with his wife, Ashley, whom he praises for her incredible photography, and their two adorable sons, Noah and Caleb. "Being a Dad is the best thing ever. It helps me to keep pushing myself. I feel like I have so much work to do, because I want to leave a legacy with my kids that continues even when I'm gone. I want to instill good character and a thirst for knowledge in them."

He enjoys listening to classical and jazz music in his office while he works, and makes a point to go to concerts in the Summer. He goes to comedy shows when the opportunity arises, and even had some stage time at a Dane Cook show. He works hard (there is even a bed in his office for the nights that he works late) and then balances that by playing hard too.

Jonathan brings genuine ingenuity and vitality to our team. He loves working, and he's not afraid to push himself. We're grateful to have him on board with us, and it seems that he likes us too; "I just have this gut feeling about Intridea. It's the best company I've ever worked for. The ability to work from home means that I get to give my son a hug and kiss when I come upstairs for coffee during the day. That's priceless."

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

Many of you may have already heard about the tragic swimming accident that took our friend and colleague Zigzag's life last week. We want to take this moment to tell the community about what a wonderful person he was and express how much we will miss our teammate.

Zigzag was an exceptional person. He had many passions, but most notable, Zig had a thirst for knowledge, one that eventually led him out of the Java world and into the Ruby community where he quickly made himself at home. After teaching himself Ruby and Ruby on Rails, he didn't hesitate to start giving back to the community. He began by blogging about Ruby, creating small open source applications that he put up on github, and contributing to open source software projects that he believed in, like Sonar and Redmine.

"Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people
who have come alive." – Howard Thurman

Zigzag was one of those people who had "come alive." He was passionate in his ideals and lived by them. Zig was courageously outspoken against the "Great Firewall of China"; his belief in free access to information drove his enthusiasm to be part of a strong, open source community. He was the kind of programmer that relied on the wisdom and knowledge of his community and was always eager to give back.

Zig's death has been a painful loss for all of us at Intridea, and especially to those that knew him best:

Iʼm having a lot of difficulty writing about this, because it's difficult to accept that he's gone. It can be complicated working as a team of distributed developers in the U.S. But add thousands of miles of oceans between us, combined with the cultural differences between Americans and Chinese, and it can make building a coherent team difficult. It was initially intimidating for all of us when Zig came onto our team.

But Zig was woven into our team just as easily as the rest of the members. His highpitched, staccato laugh kept the mood light even while he was constantly pushing us to move through our workload and keeping us on task. I guess thatʼs probably because Zig stayed up until midnight for our meetings, every day of the week. He never complained, and never expected anyone else to do it - he just did it. But I canʼt blame him for keeping us focused when the meetings got a bit silly.

Zig loved software, and he loved working on a team. I know that because when we did code reviews, he started pushing me for more. He was trying to improve and develop his own talent. He very clearly loved his job and the act of learning - who else would bug me to give him more code reviews at 1 in the morning?

He was funny too. He had more personality than the rest of us. He was 25% of our team and made up well over 25% of our team's personality. Having Zig taken from us is very difficult. And he always looked forward to being outside - every Monday he would announce “it was great weekend.”

It's hard to capture his essence in words. But I know that I'll miss him. I already do.

Flip Sasser, Senior Engineer

Working alongside Zig on a team, I had the pleasure of interacting with Zig every day. Two of us worked on East Coast time, one of us on West Coast time. And Zig? Well Zig was in Guangdong, China. 12-15 hours ahead of everyone else. We found out how considerate and dedicated he was when he immediately volunteered to join our daily "standups" at midnight (only much later did we find out he preferred to do work in the morning). He never complained, was always supportive and good-natured, and early became an anchor that kept us on track throughout the project. I would often check in with Zig on Campfire late at night to see how he was doing, and he would always wish me "a happy sleep and happy dreams." It was only natural, coming from such a happy person; I wish the same to him now.

Patti Chan, Interaction Designer

When I interviewed Zigzag for a position at Intridea, I appreciated his passion for work and also his contributions to the community. I like any guy who works for fun and is eager to contribute so much of himself to make the community better. After the interview, there were no other thoughts in my mind except, "He's the one; the exact person that Intridea is looking for!" I'm very sad about Zigzag. We miss him. :(

Dingding Ye, Software Architect

Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of meeting Zigzag in person; but he still felt like a brother to me. His charisma, kindness, and generosity will never be forgotten. Zigzag will always remain in my memory as an excellent person with exceedingly great character."

Jonathan Nelson, Product Manager

We'll hold Zig close to our hearts, and commemorate him as we continually find new ways to give back to our community in his name. We also express our deepest sympathy to Zig's family and his friends. We have lost a bright and generous soul, and we are reminded of how fleeting and precious life is.

May Zig find peace.

Actually, save for the limited time constraint, none of that is true. The app is in fact for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the clandestine agents are volunteers spread around the gulf armed with smartphones. CrisisCommons, a gathering of "idealists and innovators", had worked with Intridea previously in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake and with that collaboration came Tradui, a mobile app built for iPhone and Android that could translate English to Creole and back. Knowing firsthand our adherence to agile development practices, they turned to us for help in fleshing out their ideas for the oil spill.

Principally, what they wanted was a means for anybody to download the app for their smartphone, collect data for their affected area and then upload that data to a single web service which would make that information available to anybody who wanted it. Having already authored several cross-platform mobile apps, our Director of Mobile Development, Brendan Lim, immediately set to work writing the app in Titanium, an effort I was only too happy to help with. Having programmed iPhone apps only in Objective-C, I can attest to the fact that it's a strange sight to see your rather verbose Cocoa method calls reduced to just a few lines of Javascript. But the security blanket of verbosity quickly receded in my mind as Brendan and I made enormous progress in just a few hours. We continued working well into the night and by around one o'clock in the morning we had a working Titanium application that could be compiled for either the iPhone or Android platform.

The next big task on our list was the web service. Aside from some required fields, we were given lots of leeway as to how it would function. We went with a Rails instance running on Heroku and began developing a RESTful web service that would be simple to communicate with. Modifying the mobile app in tandem, we were able to get a working provider/consumer solution working within the evening. Users could now send data about a location such as the amount of oil, destroyed wildlife, etc as well as any associated photos. When the next day rolled around, we found ourselves with an additional resource in the form of Jonathan Nelson. Having a keen eye for UI, he set to work making both our mobile and web apps look fantastic. Iterating over countless designs, we had within an evening a splash page, theme and all the graphic components necessary to give our apps the professional and uniform look they deserved.

Since then we've gone on to add a Google Maps overlay, an API service for outside developers and a host of other features. But it's worth noting that within three days time a usable application was up and running. It speaks volumes not only about a small company spread over a dozen timezones but also about agile practices and the plethora of great services out there like Heroku and GitHub that make this quick development path possible.

Checkout the website and download the apps!

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Thadd Selden, our Project Manager and Scrum Master.

Thadd's experience in Project Management is rooted in years of working on government contracts at companies like Raytheon. He studied Math and Physics and minored in Astrophysics and French in college, but his career in programming was initiated when he was recruited by a Navy research lab after his sophomore year at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. "They took me on for the summer and that's where I learned to program. Their philosophy was that it was easier to teach physicists coding than the other way around; so I spent my first two weeks (while waiting for my security clearance to come in before I could even log on to the system) reading C and FORTRAN books."

Thadd worked as a civilian scientist for the research lab while teaching himself different programming languages. "Most of my job was doing code archaeology on ancient algorithms written by a guy who retired a few years earlier." He was migrating the codebase from FORTRAN to C, and later to C++; "I offered to do a trial of it in C++ to see how it worked and everyone got on board." And because he was working on a classified system, "We couldn't download anything to it; so if we needed a tool, we had to write it." So he wrote things like calendar programs and chat clients. "Everything was usually written in nasty combinations of shell scripts, Motif, etc. I even wrote a whole to-do application in awk. We used to build GUI apps in Matlab even if they had nothing to do with our algorithms, just because that was the only easy UI toolkit we had."

Even now, Thadd still writes his own tools when he needs to. For example, he's been using a combination of Pivotal Tracker and Unfuddle at Intridea and made a way to import tickets from one to the other: "We like Unfuddle, but when we need to prioritize tasks against each other, we have to use Pivotal. So I wrote a little script that lets us import our Unfuddle tickets into Pivotal, which makes things a lot easier."

Although he was learning a lot at the research lab, Thadd battled with personal conflicts between being a pacifist and working on a nuclear weapons program. "I actually remember the exact moment that things changed for me: I was building a simulator that loaded terrain data from massive data files and I needed to know if I had north/south setup properly. So the solution was to load up New York in the simulator and go based on the buildings that were recognizable. It hit me when I realized I had just run a targeting sim, and there on my screen, were the Twin Towers."

That pivotal moment got Thadd working on his resumé. He got a call from Raytheon to go work on their unmanned vehicle programs, which weighed less on his conscience; "That was easier for me since it was all surveillance and they had some peace-time uses too." Not only was Thadd writing the control software for the vehicles that the pilots on the ground used, but he also was part of a startup R&D team at Raytheon that was charged with doing accelerated development and proofs of concept for new ideas and technologies.

I actually remember the exact moment that things changed for me: I was building a simulator that loaded terrain data from massive data files and I needed to know if I had north/south setup properly. So the solution was to load up New York in the simulator and go based on the buildings that were recognizable. It hit me when I realized I had just run a targeting sim, and there on my screen, were the Twin Towers.

As one of the tech leads on those projects, he began to get into agile development and processes. "Since Raytheon was a big company and did mostly government contracts, we had to have formal process; but we quickly realized that the traditional waterfall process wouldn't work for our team or our products. So we spent a lot of time working on developing agile process definitions and educating management and other teams on our lessons learned." Surprisingly, the government was on board with the agile development; it was Raytheon that he fought to convince: "They were so used to seeing the exact metrics and charts that they were used to, that trying to convince them that a project was on track with other data was a huge headache."

Thadd, now a certified Scrum master, is our agile evangelist. He discovered Intridea when he found himself in dire need of a company that would allow him to work remotely. "My wife is a college professor, and when she started a new tenure-track position here in Wilkes-Barre we had to relocate." Raytheon allowed Thadd to work remotely for a while, but eventually it became too hard to be the only remote worker on the team. Since most of our development team is distributed Thadd jumped at the opportunity to join us.

Thadd has been spending most of his time at Intridea leading a team of developers on a huge project for a gaming website, written in Ruby on Rails. He taught himself RoR when it first came onto the scene. "I was deep into the enterprise-y stuff when RoR came out, and PHP just didn't fit well for bigger projects at the time. I liked the idea of using model-view-controller for web development." He started building some small personal projects in RoR, and even used it a little bit at Raytheon; "There is now a RoR server running onboard an unmanned airplane." Although Thadd has used many different programming languages over the years, he loves Ruby the most; "I love that literally everything is an object. Other object-oriented languages half-ass it, but the fact that you can say 4.times in Ruby kicks ass."

One of our Senior Engineers, Joe Grossberg, asks Thadd how he keeps his programming skills so sharp now that he's a PM and Scrum guru: "I have to know my way around the code really well because I'm always doing deployments and configuration. Also, I have to know how the code is structured so I can process all the bugs and features requests from the client." In addition, sometimes he will code up small features or fix small bugs himself if it's easier than pulling a dev off a task. "This project is so big and complicated, especially with all the various stakeholders. But the Intridea developers are so great that they make my job easy."

Thadd loves programming, but his computer hobby began with hardware when a family friend introduced him to BBSes and AOL when he was in middle school. He learned how to build and fix computers, and even tinkered with Linux early in college. "I bought a domain name and set up a simple box in the Society of Physics student's lounge." As a teenager he was mostly interested in discovering how he could use software as a means to an end, like using lighting software in high school plays, as the Tech Director. "My Mom was a graphic artist and my step-father was a published expert on Postscript and Photoshop. So I was involved in the desktop publishing side of things too for awhile in high school." He credits his early experience with desktop publishing for giving him a "more critical eye for usability."

These days, Thadd works exclusively on Macs but he still tinkers with Linux from time to time. When Thadd isn't working, he makes time to enjoy sailing; "My main passion is sailing. I grew up spending a lot of time around boats and I still love it." He says that the lack of good sailing in Wilkes-Barre is problematic, but he keeps himself busy with hiking, reading Sci-Fi, practicing Kung Fu, and hanging out with his wife and their three dogs and four cats.

What does Thadd love most about working for Intridea? "Working on a challenging project and leading a talented team of developers. It's also great to be able to work out on my deck, which I get to do whenever the weather is nice." During the winter, he hibernates in his office down in the basement, which gives him the opportunity to "build a nice warm fire." It's a different life from the pressure of writing software for unmanned vehicles and nuclear weapons simulations. And different is good.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

This week in the Intridea Insider, meet Adam Bair, our Director of Development.

Adam was born to hack. At the age of three he started taking apart electronic equipment to see how things worked and before he was eight he was building intricate Lego Technic creations, like cars that had four-cylinder engines with moving pistons and suspension systems. By the time he was a teenager, he was making lineman's handsets to tap into and test phone lines.

What truly sparked his passion for technology, though, was video games. "I started gaming with text adventure games on BBS's and became obsessed with PC gaming when games like Wolfenstein and Doom were introduced." Back then, there was much leg-work to be done in order to support a hardcore gaming hobby. "For example, I had to learn how my modem worked so I could play Doom with a friend by dialing into his modem directly over a phone line." He even went so far as to replace the telephone lines running to his house: "I had to make sure I had the fastest, cleanest connection. The lines get fragile over time from exposure to the elements, and that can affect the speed and quality of the connection."

Adam thinks back to those days with nostalgia; "Today, someone can be a 'gamer' and not necessarily (or even likely) be a geek. But back then, you had to be a geek in order to be a gamer. Those were the 'good old days'. I would stay up all through the night, playing around with old Linux distros, reading about electronics, reading 2600 magazines, connecting to BBS's and gaming. When my Mom woke up at 5 in the morning for work, we'd have coffee together before I went to bed." I asked Adam about his 2600 magazines, and he explained why they were an important resource to him back then; "We didn't have Google then for all the answers. We also didn't have laptops and iPhones and iPads; 2600 gave us mobile access to tech information."

After college, Adam worked several sysadmin jobs but he was always finding a way to program. "Every place I worked at, I got bored with working on hardware, so I started writing software to automate the stuff I did. For example, when a user left the company, terminating their access to the systems they had privileges on could take up to an hour. So I wrote scripts to go in and handle most of that work for me. I started off writing small, useful scripts in Perl and bash -- even some command-line PHP -- but it felt inelegant."

Adam discovered Ruby when he was poking around at Borders one afternoon. "I was just looking around in the computer section, and I saw "the pickaxe book" ("Programming Ruby"). I browsed through it and thought, 'I have to try this out.' It was similar to Perl, but it was sold on elegance and programmer happiness, which was just what I was looking for." He gushes, "I never loved programming like I did once I discovered Ruby. In college I thought I would be a hardware guy forever; I guess Visual Basic will do that to a person." He was determined to learn Ruby and began by replacing all of his old scripts with Ruby ones.

Adam was working as a sysadmin for a small healthcare company in southern Maine. "I happened to watch the 'Build a blog in 15 minutes' video from DHH and that got me really excited about Rails. Its philosophy values elegant simplicity and using it meant that I could write web apps in Ruby, so I quickly learned Rails."

A few months later, he saw that Big Nerd Ranch was offering one of the first Rails classes in the US and it was a 7 day course, taught by Marcel Molina who was then a core contributor to Rails and a 37 Signals employee.

His company paid for the training, and Adam soon found himself in the middle of the humid woods of Georgia for a week, learning from one of the brightest luminaries in the Ruby and Rails community, at the beginning of the Rails surge. "Not only was I learning Rails, but I was actually talking to professional software developers. That was a big deal for me, because everyone else in my circle were hardware people and I never had the opportunity to work alongside other programmers. So here I was, talking to guys that worked for the government, and for Pixar Animation Studios, who were using Ruby to manage their build scripts on their rendering farms. It was a turning point for me, because I realized there was this whole other world out there, with programmers in it."

"We were expecting our first baby, and Renae wanted to be a stay-at-home Mom. We came to the realization that a sysadmin's salary in Maine would not be able to support that lifestyle." So Adam started looking for higher-paying jobs and ended up sending his résumé to Revolution Health. "I was sure no one would call me back," but he got a call the next day and they asked him to fly down to their office in DC that week for an interview.

After his interview, Adam strolled around the National Mall for the first time before his flight back home to Maine. He hadn't made it back to the airport before Revolution called him with a job offer. "Here I was, a country boy that had never traveled, in the nation's capital. I was seeing things that I had only seen in movies. And then I get a job offer, with a salary that was three times what I was making in Maine. It felt like I won the lottery. I still do feel that way about my life, even now. It's pretty awesome."

Adam learned about Rails development at lightning speed during his time at Revolution. The codebase was massive, and there was little room for error. Adam was put in charge of the home page, the most highly visible portion of the site. "The only reason I became really good so fast was because I was working some brilliant developers at Revolution; I learned so much from guys like Todd Fisher, Aaron Batalion, Svante Adermark and Eddie Frederick. They had an amazing drive for excellence and delivery and they knew the source code inside and out."

When he interviewed at Intridea a year later, Adam was already well-trained in software development and comfortable working with large teams of developers with tight deadlines. "I loved working at Revolution. But the 90-minute commute each way was killing me. I barely saw my daughter, Serenity, for the first year of her life, between work, commuting and social activities with Revolution. So I found Intridea and sent them my résumé; I liked their site, their philosophy and they were located in DC. And as a bonus, they allowed all of their employees to work from home."

The reality that he was a talented developer was slowly setting in; "It blew my mind when Dave hired me. Up until that point I thought that getting hired at Revolution as a developer was just luck, but then it happened again. It felt like a 'Cinderella story,' to quote Caddy Shack:"

"Cinderella story. Outta nowhere. A former greenskeeper, now, about to become the Masters champion. It looks like a mirac... It's in the hole! It's in the hole! It's in the hole!"

I asked Adam how the work at Intridea differs from the work he did at Revolution. "We have smaller teams with a lot more trust. There's no bureaucracy or red tape feeling. Things just get done the right way without a lot of fuss. I've been working on small projects, which means I get exposure to more codebases." In addition, he gets to work with a lot of experts; "We all work remotely, and that requires a different kind of person. People that work remotely have to be really dedicated, driven and talented, and we all are."

Adam's specialty is taking on "rescue projects," so he's often working on fixing broken code; it's his niche, like Winston Wolfe from Pulp Fiction. "I go in and clean up messes that we inherit. I'm good at it, and I enjoy fixing things."

Although most Intrideans work remotely, they certainly don't work alone. Adam travels to DC frequently to the Intridea office, and meets up with other Intrideans when he is in town. "We're in constant contact through IMs, Skype and Present.ly. Intridea is well-represented at most conferences, and since there are so many of us that do speaking engagements we get to see each other whenever we go to conferences."

Adam raves that Intridea is truly an awesome company to work for, especially with the freedom that he is afforded as a remote worker. At lunchtime he walks upstairs and enjoys lunch with his children, Serenity, Sébastien and Séraphin. "I work hard, and I work a lot. But working here has actually given me so much more time with my family, and I'm always grateful for that." Adam is fortunate, and he knows it. "I'm not in the rat race anymore; I don't sit in traffic for hours a day, pay tolls and use gas to commute. I get to listen to dubstep while I code all day, and I don't even have to wear headphones."

Adam is a Vim user and evangelist. "I used TextMate for a short time, until I realized that future versions were essentially vaporware or questionable at best. I used Vim back in college and for sysadmin work, so I went back to my roots. Using Vim decouples you from the mouse, a tool that really slows you down. The sound of someone flying along in Vim is like the hymns of angels. It's beautiful, and it's how a computer should be operated. If you think of hacker movies, what are they doing? They're not pushing a piece of plastic around on a desk. They're mashing keys. That's how it's done."

To what does he attribute his good fortune? "A combination of drive and luck: I was born at the right time. The internet was just starting to become mainstream, and I have a very technical mind. If I weren't working on computers, I'd be doing something just as technical like working on engines, or building things, or maybe blacksmithing if I lived in another time."

He also gives much credit to his parents: "They gave me so much freedom to explore and to do my thing. They saw the potential of what was happening with me. I was unaware, even in college. I was just doing what I liked to do. I wasn't even thinking about a career until after I got out of college, which was probably why I nearly starved for the first year after graduation." But it didn't take Adam long to find his path to developer bliss.

This post is part of a weekly series, called "Intridea Insider"

“Mashable is excited to launch our new iPad app and we think Intridea has done a fantastic job. There’s high demand for Mashable on the iPad, and we think our readers will be as excited as we are about the launch”, Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, Inc.

Mashable is one of the world’s largest blogs focused exclusively on Web 2.0 and Social Media news, with more than 15 million monthly pageviews. We were very excited when approached to develop their iPad application. Mashable already had a very popular iPhone application and it was our job to figure out the best way to take advantage of the iPad’s increased real-estate and new user interface to be able to deliver something that all of their readers would enjoy.

One of the best things about the iPad is that it’s a wonderful device for reading. Whether you’re reading the news, a book, or a comic, the increased screen size makes the experience much more enjoyable. We wanted to make reading the latest articles on Mashable just as enjoyable. Not only can you see the latest news from all of their different news channels, but the articles themselves are formatted in a way that makes them very easy to read.

There are many other applications that allow you to read news on the iPad, but none of them take into account the way that you hold the iPad. Normally, when you hold the iPad with two hands, your thumbs are able to touch the screen. Other iPad applications have very un-intuitive ways of jumping to the next article by having small buttons on either the top left or top right corner of the window. We took into account the way that people hold their iPads and enabled them to easily go from article to article just by tapping on either side of the window.

Reading the latest news from Mashable is just some of what you can do with the application. With Mashable! for iPad, you can also share what you’re reading in many different ways. You can e-mail the article to a friend, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and you can also save it to Read Later on Instapaper.

Mashable! for iPad is now available for free on the App Store. Also, you can expect some exciting new features for Mashable! for iPad soon. There are some great new features that are in the works.

Intridea offers services for application development on all major mobile platforms, which include iPad, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm webOS. If you need help with your mobile application feel free to contact us for a quote.