Categories: wocket

wocket is ready for beta testing

As I mentioned few weeks ago, I’ve been working on a side project in my free time. After transitioning from the iPad to Surface, I was missing a Pocket client for Windows 8, so I decided to write one. The application is almost ready for beta testing. If you are interested in helping with ironing out bugs, please drop me a line (requirement: Pocket account, Windows 8 x86/x64/ARM, desktop, laptop, or tablet). The application currently supports:

synchronization with your Pocket collection for offline reading;
archiving of articles;
video/image browsing;
operations against your collection (add/archive/favorite) while you are offline; and
addition to your Pocket collection from any Windows 8 application through the “share” charm (last screenshot).

After the initial feedback, I am going to do some work on the UI/design. I would especially like to have the front page look more like a newspaper (e.g. the News Windows 8 app). Design-wise, there is more work to be done but I am interested in testing the main functionality for now.

And since I know that some will ask… No, this is not the idea on which I’ve been working for more than 2 years in my limited free time. That one is still in progress. We are currently setting up the company and finalizing the team.

Update Jan 12, 2013: Wocket is now available for download from the Windows Store.

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