fieldforceapp

Nice. Seems very similar in focus to other document based collaboration services, perhaps most notably these folks: http://www.collaborate.com/

Quip seems closed, no links to Google Drive or Box that I could see, but they include private links to hosted document storage and PDF export. It's like the Asana[1] in that way, but Quip has a solid focus on documents not tasks.

Some strange UI artifacts on my iPhone 4s iOS7b4, text insertion didn't work; wonder if this is due to a proprietary attributed uitextview?

[1] http://asana.com/product

Nice. Seems very similar to other document based collaboration services, perhaps most notably these folks: http://www.collaborate.com/

Quip seems closed, no links to Google Drive or Box that I could see, and no way to share by PDF, but they include private links to hosted document storage. It's like the Asana walled garden[1] in that way, but Quip has a solid focus on documents not tasks.

Some strange UI artifacts on my iPhone 4s iOS7b4, text insertion didn't work; wonder if this is due to a proprietary attributed uitextview?

[1] http://asana.com/product

From experience, if you stick with standard UIKIt navigation schemes (i.e. use nav bars not FB/Twitter style pop-unders) and, critically, standard Apple approved color schemes (i.e., light not dark UI elements) then crafting an app within Storyboard is incredibly straightforward, especially if you consider PaaS solutions like Parse.com integration[1]. The problem seems to be managing the complexities of non-standard UI elements.

For what it's worth, Jony Ive seems to be pushing us to all adopt the design approach of the OP. Wonder if 'deference to content' will become the new normal?

[1] http://blog.fieldforceapp.com/post/32922733018/weekend-proje...

The comercial tools market is usually based around "flows," which is a fancy way to say they try to bundle their offerings. While Xilinx is primarily interested in an FPGA flow, Synopsys of course would be happy to help you retarget your design to the more expensive ASIC flows as well. In addition, Synopsys offers hardware prototyping & emulation. All of which means while there's competition with Xilinx (and Altera, and Mathworks too) each vendor is focused a different use case of FPGA's.

Commercial "vendor neutral" tools do exist, Synplicity was a public company which sold such tools for several years before branching into proto board hardware sales and then being acquired by Synopsys [1]. Their tools for synthesis, partitioning and debug are still available [2] and strong sellers to both Altera and Xilinx FPGA developers.

[1] http://news.synopsys.com/index.php?s=43&item=570 [2] http://www.synopsys.com/Tools/Implementation/FPGAImplementat...

>High Level Synthesis isn't here yet

Plenty of commercial development on that front recently. Forte Design Systems [1] is selling tools targeting both FPGA and ASIC design using a C++ class library front end (SystemC). Synopsys has two flows in their Synphony product line, one which synthesizes from C called Synphony C Compiler [2] and another flow based on Matlab libraries which isn't really synthesis per se but supports mapping between Matlab Simulink to FGPAs [3].

Use of these (including AutoESL) seem focused on certain domains. Image processing, cryptography and machine vision seem popular areas just now.

[1] http://www.forteds.com/products/cynthesizer.asp [2] http://www.synopsys.com/Systems/BlockDesign/HLS/Pages/Synpho... [3] http://www.synopsys.com/Systems/BlockDesign/HLS/Pages/Synpho...

What percentage of these 'complaints' are just anxieties being surfaced? I for one am completely intimidated by the new iOS7 design paradigm: kerning? ligatures? color as a call-to-action? Rounded-rectangle buttons dying an untimely death? Man am I in trouble...

(I can almost hear Sir Jony hisself saying, 'keep calm, and carry on')

Just signed up for HackDesign and hope to hell they have an iOS7 focused segment soon!!

http://hackdesign.org

Living in Japan for 10 years, Sony was always perceived as closer to the Virgin Group -- Sony offered a series of consumer friendly services all wrapped within a unique marketing spin of 'fun, hip, young.' Only some of those services were electronics related. Their insurance product was marketed at young women, IIRC, and had good differentiation. Not unlike Virgin Bank I guess, something UK readers might know something about but which hasn't hit the States, and likely won't.

Sony's goals aren't the same as Apple or Microsoft and that seems to have confused the author: Sony sees diversification as a core competency and might be better off compared to say GE, rather than just a consumer electronics company:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732397500457849...

May be a culture issue but this title worked for me (native American English speaker, urbanite) because of the opposite sexism you didn't mention: most 'taggers' are male. The title implied that the girls are trying to clean up their own neighborhood and provide a counter example to the choices young, male taggers are making.

Would love to see if these girls can reach out to their peers in South San Jose or Oakland.

Agreed, Trevor, good content. And maybe you're going to address in part two, but how does the presence of IAP factor into your considerations. In other words, not just profitability but doesn't business model also matter? Or do you just assume free/paid/freemium apps will be required in any niche and plan accordingly?

Paywall work-around link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732439280457835...

I really enjoy seeing the rise of designers in the popular media, an awaking of design consciousness if you will.

I would recommend that in Version 1.1 you clarify the legal ownership & indemnification terms.

$5k to build, with payment upon MVP completion... spend an additional $3k, including costs to establish a legal entity with joint ownership with no worse than a 50/50 split and friendly buy-out terms...

Good luck!

Love this idea, really looking forward to learning about your results. I would recommend that in Version 1.1 you clarify the legal ownership & indemnification terms.

$5k to build, with payment upon MVP completion... spend an additional $3k, including costs to establish a legal entity with joint ownership and friendly buy-out terms...

Good luck!

Learn commercial hardware design & distribution, especially UL (TUV?) certification.

Another list with Japanese language skill as a goal, love it. Highly recommend traveling there, it's wonderful and confounding at the same time.

On behalf of all my Japanese friends, glad to see #1 on your list. Highly recommend traveling there: nothing like immersion to build a skill!

After seeing what Papermaster's doing recently, I'm actually getting enthusiastic on where AMD is going. Call me crazy, but given their CPU & GPU experience I think they just might be able to turn this thing around -- and maybe move faster than Intel:

http://www.amd.com/us/aboutamd/corporate-information/executi...

We used the same CSS themed button technique recently on our Bootstrap based site, we got the idea from @inserthtml

http://www.inserthtml.com/2012/06/custom-form-radio-checkbox...

I think this type of A/B testing (assuming these kind folks are doing that) is valuable for early stage product design.

If not posting to HN, where would you advise to post?

I like this UI style, and clean code. Good work!

We released as somewhat popular iPhone-based "springboard" like clone a while back on GitHub (https://github.com/fieldforceapp/openspringboard) and have since gone on to iOS6 and the iPad. The code isn't anything to be proud of.

For our iPad app, instead of your side bar style, we use a top bar with the ability to slide it down when needed, an hide it when not; the content is wrapped in a UIScrollView of buttons for the various options, using a simple highlight to indicate the selected option. You can find some screenshots on our website or in the app store description of our iPad product.

Two questions for you: how about extending your code for both side-bar and top-bar orientations? And related, can the CKSideBarController be hidden?

Hi, for us, this would have been a great visual addition to the HTML preview features built into Beanstalk... http://beanstalkapp.com/features/collaboration

Maybe the Wildbit boys would be open to some affiliate program pricing for you?

Thanks for pointing us to that link. I was surprised & pleased to learn that two women were promoted as a result of Sinofsky's departure: Julie Larson-Green and Tami Reller. Good for them, and all of us who enjoy seeing a little more gender balance.

Any MSFT'ers here who can comment on their backgrounds?

I like this idea too, but perhaps instead of just "hackers helping hackers," maybe you could open it up to something like "hackers helping charities" to do some more good.

Gotta say, these guys are really killing it... and love the quick turn-around @csmajorfive on my comments last month, now just get going on the local caching :-) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4700062

I'd say Parse is aiming to take on SF.com / Heroku with this, it's certainly causing me to rethink a custom Rails3 stack we have in the works...

Well, INTC could adopt the same IP-based business model as ARM and then give up 98% of it's revenue: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+of+intel+vs+arm

So the folks at INTC are doing what you'd expect, competing on discrete components and application-tuned architectures. A key example of that is the recent Merrifield-based chipset for smartphones which is obviously a key initiative:

http://www.intomobile.com/2012/05/14/intel-merrifield-system...

I actually see this rather as evidence of a strong corporate culture which recognizes the need for execs to take responsibility for mistakes, as the chapter from the Lashinsky book on Apple management famously quoted about the rubric being crossed when VP's are promoted: http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...

(Kinda wish a few more companies made this expectation clear... too much deadwood at the VP level in many IT companies I deal with...)

Saw a good roundup of the MBaaS providers, here: http://apievangelist.com/2012/08/22/mobile-backend-as-a-serv...

We use Parse for some apps and roll our own Rails backend too. Of all the MPaaS providers we've investigate, Parse seems to be getting things right: SDK's are solid & the documentation is up-to-date, 3rd party integration with Twitter / FB / S3 work great. It's a joy to get started.

The biggest problem we've seen so far are on caching, user models, analysis and emails:

- Local native caching on devices seems capricious, and we've often reverted to writing our own caching schemes on top of Parse (had to do the same for server-side, too, but maybe that's a given...)

- User data model is pretty basic, and although the ACL capabilities are nice, it's not easy to build (FB invite requests work, but outside of that framework you have to roll your own invite / accept / reject / exit logic)

- Custom emails on User model CRUD / password are supported, but not for any other user interaction (ie., weekly roundup emails, status updates, etc.)

- API introspection is tough, it's not easy to optimize (ok, minimize) API calls and some form of introspection & analysis would be helpful (eg., just when do the SDK libraries synchronize, and how often?)

All that being said, I don't think any of their competitors have done a better job on these topics and certainly Parse seems to be pulling away from the MPaaS pack.

I really like this take on asynchronous gameplay UI, it's tough get the "glance" aspect of the UI correct and yet make it compelling. The "Draw Something" problem where you're drowning in partially played games perhaps led to it's demise, a victim of the UI's inability to scale?

(Sigh... should have spent more time studying design / HCI in school...)

Commercial EDA vendors have solutions starting from C, Matlab and LISA for synthesis of HW logic into FPGA or ASICs. One such list of products is here:

http://www.synopsys.com/Systems/BlockDesign/Pages/default.as...

pg, do you have a quantified list of hardware startup business models that you can share? For example, as a startup, what are the realistic sales & distribution channels that we can model, financially?

What we're worried about is designing the wrong product at the wrong price for what seems like a limited set of distribution channels with some rather onerous fixed costs and low margins -- certainly compared to software/SaaS sales. How do you wade through that swamp?