Boris Masis

One of my favorite features of Google Sheets is the ability to use the IMPORTXML function to pull in content from anywhere on the web. It’s like having your own little Google-backed scraper to conveniently pull data into your spreadsheet. For example, if I wanted to get some data about my Google Play apps, I […]

I recently had a couple opportunities to present the digital art from our Masterpieces project in several physical exhibitions, first at the National Museum of Singapore, and then the Ayala Museum in Manila. For a sense of scale, the Singapore exhibit featured 50 tablet displays and 20 TVs. The tablets were interactive, allowing users to […]

Following up on how to use custom Stamen Maps on Android – here’s a bit about how to package these map tiles with an APK so that users see a map immediately upon opening your android app. I also include caching of the map so that any new tiles downloaded are cached for future re-use. […]

Stamen makes a beautiful set of google map layers. I love the watercolor look, and using it on Android with native the native google maps engine is fairly straightforward. Grab the .zip file of my eclipse project to take a look. I started with the hellomap starter project and this stackoverflow post. Most of the […]

Sometimes you might come upon a scenario where you want to limit the Google Play Apps you develop to a particular device manufacturer (*cough cough*). Play store doesn’t support this use case, but here’s a quick way to do it. Load your list of supported devices, then open your developer console (tested in chrome) and […]

I was thinking recently about the top 3 problems left to solve online – the things I still find myself needing and not having a good solution for. I want to spend more time with people offline (and I want an online tool to help me do this). This has been a desire for a long […]

I just open sourced my “send to calendar” chrome extension. I got tired of re-typing event info all the time, so the extension allows you to select text on any webpage, and send it to google calendar (with some smart parsing in between). The whole thing is super simple, and pull requests are welcome (particularly […]

Sometimes you want a nice clickable HTML button in your emails – something that looks great and that your users see even if images are disabled when they view your email. Here’s a bootstrap-inspired button that will render well across email clients: I am a button! <a href="" style="text-decoration:none;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;display:inline-block;padding-top:4px;padding-bottom:4px;padding-right:20px;padding-left:20px;margin-bottom:0;text-align:center;vertical-align:middle;background-color:#4ba1db;*background-color:#4ba1db;background-image:linear-gradient(top, #5CB1E4, #2693D5);background-repeat:repeat-x;border-width:1px;border-style:solid;border-color:#2693D5 #2693D5 hsl(201, 93%, 54.5%);*border:0;-webkit-border-radius:4px;-moz-border-radius:4px;border-radius:4px;filter:progid:dximagetransform.microsoft.gradient(enabled=false);*zoom:1;-webkit-box-shadow:inset […]

Visible metrics are the heart of many successful businesses. Setting up a dedicated stats or metrics TV (ours is powered by a mac mini) is a pretty straight forward endeavor – and having everyone rally around the key performance indicators is well worth it. We cycle between optimizely, customer satisfaction (NPS) results, key metrics from RJMetrics, real-time […]

If you use Rally, you may be familiar with the joys of trying to make it even slightly useful. Here’s my small contribution: this is a script that formats stories for easy copy/paste into update emails, etc. You can select any iteration to get a nicely formatted list like the one below: The script uses the Rally […]