Categories: Technologywocket

wocket – a side project

As I mentioned in the past, I am an information junkie. I go through the week collecting articles that I read when I get some free time, in between social commitments, exciting work at Microsoft, startup, concerts, etc. One of the services that I use a lot is Pocket (previously known as “Read It Later”). On my iPad, I used Reeder to go through technology blogs, adding to “read it later” services those articles that I wanted to read, comment, share with others.

Sharing with Pocket is a functionality that I miss on Windows 8 apps, especially when using my Surface. So, I decided to write my first feature-complete Windows 8 application. “Wocket” was born.

The nice folks at Pocket have given me full access to their API. I am going to write more about “wocket” once I make it available for everyone through the Windows Store. In the meantime, check out a couple of screenshots below (I am currently working on the UX so what you see are not the final pages). I spent a lot of time on the speed of the app by making sure all articles and content is synchronized with Pocket and cached locally.

Through “wocket” I managed to learn many things about WinRT development. I am hoping to reuse this knowledge as I embark in the final stages of my startup idea (taking a week off at the beginning of Dec to concentrate on coding). Also, I have a dream that even if “wocket” gives me few 10s of dollars, I can say that I directed the money towards the bigger project :-, on which I have already invested >$15K 🙁

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about