Barnabas

It looks like they've just taken the release that we've already had (4.0.249.30) and made it more public. If you've already had the developer channel build, then you've already got it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

From 2000 (gasp), here's an article from Jacob Nielsen on why you only need to test with 5 users: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

More recently, here's a related article on Multiple-user Simultaneous Testing, when and why you'd test with more people and how to actually do that: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/multiple-user-testing.html

Interesting take. This adds weight (but not proof) to the oft-repeated mantra that Apple doesn't know how to deal with businesses, just individuals.

(Edit: spellnig)

Great idea. But short of paying a lawyer $X thousands to make my own generic NDA, where can I get an NDA that I can counter-offer with as you suggest? Any suggestions for good off-the-shelf documents such as this that protect both parties? I'd be willing to pay a couple of hundred bucks for a set of good documents like this. I'm an independent web developer like many here and have signed my fair share of NDAs.

Ha, read up on http://bikeshed.com/ if you don't get this joke.

Since the assumption is that MS costs more, I thought I'd dig up some links to prove/disprove that. I learned that MS actually provides hosted Exchange services, which is more of an apples-to-apples comparison with Gmail: http://www.microsoft.com/online/buy.mspx

From that link, there was a "Microsoft Online Services Cost Estimator" (http://www.microsoft.com/online/estimator/default.aspx). I input 30,000 users for Exchange and it estimated $228,000/month. If we assume that the $7.25 million was for 5 years, then Gmail for 30,000 users costs only $120,833/month, which is theoretically $1.3 million/year less than MS hosted Exchange.

For some context on how much of a big deal this is or isn't, according to the LA city budget (http://budget.lacity.org/), their total IT budget is about $100 million/year.

Mean.

Links are nice: http://www.publictivity.com/

I have no such scruples: http://www.officemedium.com/

Twilio's REST API (http://www.twilio.com/docs/api_reference/REST/) is really easy to understand, very sensible. It's practically self-documenting, but it's backed up with thorough documentation and examples. One can get up and running very quickly because of that. They have clearly spent a lot of time getting the API right.

When I saw the vid, I just realized I've been pronouncing "Posterous" wrong all this time. I assumed it was long o, as in "post". But to hear them pronounce it, it rhymes with preposterous. My way seems better to me, but what do I know.

You can get some ideas from the previous contest winners: http://www.twilio.com/contest/netbook/

There is a huge gulf between "can copy" and "will copy". Execution wins every time.

I strongly agree with this post. Summary: you have more to gain in idea refinements and reality checks than you have to "loose" from competition. Also NDAs are almost worthless.

"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us." -- Mark Twain

I don't know why this is, but personally I think making friendly URLs is a mark of attention to detail. So, with a little htaccess kung foo, you could make links that look like this: http://www.jobpic.com/auction/35 and http://www.jobpic.com/profile/38 instead of http://www.jobpic.com/auction.php?id=35 and http://www.jobpic.com/profile.php?id=38. Better to do this sooner than later.

I like the JS load category, but it should at least be linkable. See: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history

There is a precedent for traveling like this and it's not very positive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Slavetrade2.jpg

Here's some info about including image data as part of the URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme.

Assuming the HTML is compressed, wouldn't this also achieve the same "poor-man's pipelining" result, as in less server connections? It seems to have broader browser support than the JAR thing.

Edit: I found this too... the MHTML method linked in this article is also interesting: http://danielmclaren.net/2008/03/embedding-base64-image-data...

I'm not sure how this differs from Unfuddle.com, except that it's not out of beta yet. Unfuddle is pretty great by the way; I was part of a distributed team of about 20 on a large project last year, and that company used Unfuddle for that and about 40 other projects.

Nevertheless, here's to more choices and good competitive pressure for all the developer project infrastructure companies out there.

I just used Protoshare (http://www.protoshare.com) on a recent project, and it's a very good web-based tool for making clickable prototypes. It has good discussion features and there's an entire workflow for doing both wireframes and design comps as you get further along in the project.

My favorite phrase in this article was "four-dimensional enraged-leprechaun hypercube visualization".

Found via CEO's blog: http://luckyrobot.com/2009/04/29/swine-flu-collecta-realtime...

2 ^ 52 = 4,503,599,627,370,500

If that equals a number of seconds, then it is equal to 142,808,207 years. If kilometers, it is equal to 476.03 light years.

So 2 ^ 52 is still a big number anyway.

It is strange; usually you see someone put their name in the footer, have an about page, or at least sign their work in a meta tag somewhere. I couldn't figure out who was behind it until I hit the "donate" link which reveals the donation will go to "yavorskiy.s@gmail.com", AKA Sergij Javors'kij of Khmel'nic'kij Ukraine, whose unfinished home page is at inetcat.com according to WHOIS. Why not see if Mr. Javors'kij is looking for work and offer him a job?

The article doesn't link to the company's website, which is here: http://american-maglev.com/index.php. Sadly, neither the article or the company website indicate how fast the train will go, or any details about where they get the $20 million/mile figure. Those were my questions anyway.

I didn't know about Varnish so I found the link: http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/. There's commercial support for it too: http://varnish-cache.com/

Thanks for the resource. This will come in handy.

It's not up anymore. Maybe she's a better fit for Twitter than we thought!

The example he uses throughout is pirate.net attacking penzance.org. Lovely Gilbert and Sullivan reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance

No, look at TextMarks.com or ZeepMobile.com for SMS. A mashup between a service like that and Twilio would be very cool, however.

Twilio is great for building the kind of phone apps you get when you call your credit card company to get your balance, for example. It makes programming an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) application a piece of cake. Once you learn the REST interface and the really simple XML syntax, you can use whatever language/platform you want to build your app and host it on your own web server. When a call comes in, Twilio hits a URL that you set up and executes your script.

I was able to set up a pretty complete voicemail/calling card application in only about three weeks of spare time hacking. Please check it out: http://ThisLineIsSecure.com. Twilio made this project absurdly easy.

Thanks very much for this. I appreciate text more than audio.