angerman

So many down votes? I liked the reference to the recent item "Learn to read the source, Luke"[1] quite a lot!

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3849203

Brilliant!

Looks really nice. But $9.99 is a little pricy. Then again I'm use heroku only lightly.

Cool! I'd love to come. Let's see if I get an invite :D

So basically we stop using graphics and start using code (UIViews) to draw the images. Does it do caching? A quick search for cache didn't turn up anything. If we have learned anything from using UITableViews with custom UITableViewCells then it is that drawing is expensive.

The underlying idea of generating your images "programmatically" is not a bad one to start but performance wise, if the image (View) is going to be static, rendering into a bitmap and using that subsequently is the more performant solution.

Maybe the tool we are looking for is not one that generates UIViews but let's us just get the images correctly name and at the right resolutions with a click? Like automatic slicing and exporting at predefined resolutions with predefined naming schemes. I just think this would better be done off the device.

For interactive views (drag, move, ...), where redrawing is necessary, this could be a valuable tool -- if it can do that.

This seems to be a recurring phenomenon on HN. Why is the timestamp given so much importance?

If you prefer to have your VPS shielded behind a heavy firewall, why not. But in case you ever intend to do outgoing calls from the server on ports other then the default (80, 443, ...), prepare yourself to do some wrestling with the support and have the IPs of the hosts you want to connect ready. And it /will/ take some time. That's just one of the issues I had to repeatedly deal with. (Consuming some foreign service).

I disagree (again). If you are a technology focused startup, chances are you are looking for highly talented people for your core team. You usually don't want the average PHP or Java Joe; you want more! And those you are looking for are usually not afraid to learn learn yet another language, if they don't already know. On the other hand if you are not building a technology focused startup, but simply need some software as a vehicle to drive the main business, you are right to look at the cost-benefit analysis and choose a more mainstream language, for which you can find cheap and easily replaceable labor in your area.

I'm not saying you can't get the job done in a mainstream language; but I postulate that the mindset and attitude towards code of a good Haskell or Scala programmer is vastly different from your less expensive PHP or Java programmers. Some want to push the limits of what's technologically possible and others just want their paycheck by the end of the month; they are in both camps; are they evenly distributed?

Can't up-vote you enough. If we quit doing anything, because it's been done already... I don't event want to start imagining where we'd be right now.

Neat! I'm confused though why the kindle format is just a reformatted pdf?

Nice. I wonder if there will be a kindle version available. Does anyone know how to automatically convert that website into a kindle ready format?

I second this. An option to see the whole document would be /really/ nice.

How close would clojure/clojurescript and a webframework like noir be to what he wants?

Thanks! That's interesting but goes more into the direction I would think then the direction the company seems to think.

My calculation went bottom up: say a low baseline salary of 25eur/h + 50% freelance cost = 37.5eur/h + ~20% tax = ~45eur/h.

I guess that the company would calculate 70eur/h to 90eur/h for projects (e.g. 560-720eur/manday).

One thing that wasn't touched was JRuby[1], on their site they state high performance and real threading as advantages.

If twitter has (some of) the best ruby developer (mentioned somewhere at the end of the video), why have they neglected JRuby? Why is it no option? For legacy code with native extensions this makes sense. But is jruby slower, more memory hungry on the JVM then scala or clojure? I always though that JRuby was one of the more performant languages on the JVM?

Apart from that it was an interesting talk.

[1]: http://www.jruby.org/

Thank you. Good idea; reported.

Why the downvotes? And no, clicking "update" did /not/ work!

Found the solution: This happens if you have "Macintosh HD" listed under the privacy tab of Spotlight's System Preferences.

I'm very sceptical of this Mac App Store. As much as I like the idea (apt anyone? :-D) I am very disappointed by it's performance. Neither on SL nor on Lion does it let me update bought apps. Doing the "drag app to trash, click `install', empty trash" mumbo is not really my idea of "working".

If anyone has similar issues, or a fix, that would truly be great!

This is surely a nice update. But I _really_ miss configuration options. The only option seems to be

1.7GHz i5 -> 1.8GHz i7

No choice of flash no choice of ram :/ I love my current air. It's a really nice piece of engineering but even 4GB of ram are sometimes full. With an more powerful CPU more RAM would be a nice choice...

TB, Backlit KB and a faster CPU are very nice though.

Ok, this might be somewhat dumb; I'm just starting to get into testing. How does KIF[1] compare to Kiwi[2]?

--

[1]: http://corner.squareup.com/2011/07/ios-integration-testing.h...

[2]: http://http://www.kiwi-lib.info/

That's precisely what I've been thinking since I heard that. First FaceTime, now iMessage. Apple is sure not making friends with carriers with this...

My curiosity with G+ increases. Anyone has an invite for me?

Awesome! iTerm + zsh... If only I could disable the scrollbar :/ On a related note, is there a show/hide animation like Visor too? I liked the "slide in/slide out" animation a lot.

I think for the next two month he's stuck in Vancouver, but I've wholeheartedly forwarded your comment to him.

Great idea, will do!

I wonder if this is the common theme among many of us who try to put apps in the app store: figuring out what does not work. For our app: iEBT (which is an interface to a server allowing you to track your euro notes: eurobilltracker.com), we not only took a very tiny niche, but didn't think about marketing either.

What we did was this: - picked a somewhat hight price point ($2) This seemed to use like the sweetspot, with what we could live and what we would expect an honest buyer to pay. (who knows?!)

- we wrote to the canonical forum, where we expected most of the potential users. That resulted in an initial rush (two days after writing to the forum), but it wasn't much at all.

- the domain iebtapp.com was registered prior to publishing, but contained nothing more then a simple "Something's coming this december" string. Watching the server logs, there seemed to be some who were trying to figure out where the link from the app pointed.

- after some time, we wrote the current, very limited text on iebtapp.com. Not even with images. That seems to have resulted in a minor increase in sales.

- with some text on the website, we thought it was time to do some advertisement, and went with Google Ads. This too seems to have resulted in a minor increase in sales.

And here's what we plan to do: - add Appirater to the App. We have only a very few reviews, and they are not enough to get any star rating on the AppStore. Maybe this helps, who knows. I will closely watch this.

Personal conclusion: iOS development is really /a lot/ of fun. But I think we need to change two things: - More marketing. But not all at once; results should be measurable. - Niche markets, that are this tiny, can be a very high risk game. (Especially if someone else, writes to the forum that he's going to release another iPhone app and lets people sign up for the beta :-))

-- [1]: see iebtapp.com

Just an Idea. I think what causes so many sentiments against PHP is due in part to the mass adoption of PHP.

These days, you find PHP almost everywhere. And how do you get to PHP? Let's assume we are in collage and want to write that next big website that's surely going to rule them all.

Now, we don't really know that much about all this "tech" stuff. But hey, I can hit "show source" in the browser. This must be easy. After a few baby steps with a WYSIWY(WishYoud)G tool, you decide to learn /some/ HTML for good. Once you figure that HTML alone can't do a lot, there's a somewhat native path to PHP.

You keep on reading tutorials written by others, who know as much as you or a little more. You are still on the cheap side, and need to keep tight on your money for that next big website you are going to write.

And the more you read the more enlightened you feel. Wow! I can actually do that and my dead cheap webhost offers PHP as well. Life is good.

Because you don't lack any minimal intelligence, you figure out how to write your next (big) website. You probably didn't succeed in writing the next FaceBook, but hey, you are now /one/ of the /web guys/. You probably think what you are doing is real fun.

There are then two paths you can take: - A: stick with PHP and feel enlightened all the way, when ever you learn some new trick, or - B: wonder if PHP is the only true real thing. You don't know C or some other "ancient" language, so you are still a little afraid. Perl seems to look a lot like PHP but it's syntax is confusing and no one of your friends on the forums you are frequenting is using it anyway. Then there is Python or Ruby. Wow those look strange. No curly braces for function bodies. Why do people here talk about templating? What's this about? Do I need that? PHP was so easy... Anyway, you are still curious and learn about this "other" way of writing webapps (that's what we are still primarily concerned with). Once you start to figure out that variables do /not/ have to start with $ to be valid, you wonder what else PHP might have hid from your novice learning? There is a lot more. Not necessarily PHP's fault. Just the lockin in that PHP mindset.

----

The basic problem with PHP (to me) is that I've seen it to be more a motel on the way to enlightenment. Some just find it too comforting to move on. Others, once they've passed it, rarely(ever?) come back unless someone else tells (forces) them to do so.

"It just works - exactly as documented." -- I guess that's the one thing that Java is really good at.

I would even say you could go as far as saying it one end of the spectrum. Where you have frontend web apps (html/js/css) on a variety of platforms[1] on the one end and the big corporate backed languages and frameworks on the other end.

[1]: This can be a real pita. Though it's being mitigated more and more by adding compatibility layers on top (jQuery et al).

maybe I'm missing something, but XeTeX is part of MacTeX, as MacTeX includes TeXLive. (MacTeX 2009, SL)

  $ which xetex
  /usr/local/texlive/2009/bin/universal-darwin/xetex
  $ xetex
  This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.2-0.9995.2 (TeX Live 2009)
  **