jwarzech

I know like me many of you enjoy notch's Lundum Dare streams, unfortunately he isn't participating this weekend. I found a listing of other people that wil be streaming their progress and hopefully we wil see some interesting ones!

I actually was just in the middle of buying a domain name, decided that while I'd like to get away from GoDaddy I can't really afford to transfer all of my domain names right now and would like them all with the same register.

Well at checkout for some reason the PayPal button was missing and I didn't feel like typing in my CC (I know thats pretty lazy) so I decided to check and see NameCheap's price and with private registration (which was free) it was going to be $8 cheaper than GoDaddy. Needless to say I'm going to start moving my domains over.

At first glance I really like the idea of Microsoft/Nokia/Android manufacturers giving away free phones to get developers to write for their platform. However it makes me wonder: does a platform where the developer chooses it for their personal phone yield better apps?

I think this is great, it also lets your repo followers know that your not abandoning the project but are actively thinking about it even if you dont have time to work on it at the moment.

As someone who is doing more and more coffeescript this is awesome. However debugging in the console seemed like the only way I was going to stay fresh in native javascript!

This week I've been trying to get back into the early morning routine I started a few months ago. I've never thought of myself as a morning person but if I am able to drag myself out of bed my most productive is between 4:00am and 10:00am.

It has all the benefits of working late (quiet, peaceful, few distractions) with the added bonus of having a clear head. Definitely makes it easier for me to focus on getting stuff done when my head isn't spinning with the collective ideas of the day.

I am assuming that its not autonomous and the angle/thrust is either pre-programmed for the demo or is human operator controlled.

All I could think of while watching it was 'its a parkour robot!'

For what its worth CNBC's 'All-America Economic Survey' (http://www.cnbc.com/id/46857053) resulted in the conclusion that 51% of all homes in america have at least one Apple product.

I would say thats starting to get pretty common (of course this is probably skewed based on the demographic reading cnbc)

Well I guess I should have just asked him :) At least he didn't agree to your other assumptions as to how the money will be used.

I don't understand why this needs $25,000 in funding. He doesn't seem to mention where the money is all going to (I'm assuming just as 'salary' to work on it?)

Wow, she has a pretty impressive catalog of executing on ideas (even the bizarre/wacky).

They attempted this in small form on 'Marcel's Quantum Kitchen' (its on Netflix) using a toy quadcoptor to 'deliver' a piece of pizza at a dinner party. Didn't really work out to well but interesting concept nonetheless.

For me the pricing model is perfect for something like this. $2.99? thats right in my 'don't even think about it' impulse range. $5.99 for additional features? I'm already paying $2.99, its not much more AND I get more stuff. Bravo!

Nice and simple...I like it. Snippets like these are great to have in the arsenal. Sometimes I end up using the 'heavy' solutions for simple things (just cause I've used them before and its easy to snap in) when I could really get away with rolling a simple solution like you did there.

I've become a huge backbone.js fan over the last fews months. If your app uses a lot of large forms I'd definitely look at the backbone.modelbinding project: https://github.com/derickbailey/backbone.modelbinding. Also a few days ago I released a plugin from one of my projects that adds data binding support for deeply nested relationships: https://github.com/jwarzech/backbone.modelbinding.nested

Torn...vote up the story cause its interesting or don't so people don't see it and skew the data? ;)

I think your mention of OS drawn widgets brings up an interesting point of discussion.

In desktop environments for the most part windows apps look like windows apps and osx apps look like osx apps. A consistant look and feel across applications on a platform gives users a familiar and comfortable experience. This has been a detriment of java desktop apps for years as they appear 'foreign' to the end user.

Is there perhaps an argument that the web as a platform is missing out on this benefit of consistency?

From your product screenshot it looks like you did a great job building on top of the default styles. I like your use of the bootstrap top nav in the sidebar.

I think you hit the nail on the head!

For me I've found bootstrap is a perfect tool for use in tech demos, experiments, really any small project I'm using to learn some new piece of technology. Bootstrap makes it effortless to have the presentation in such demo look halfway decent.

I'm still not sure if I would use it in a 'production' application though (perhaps with a lot of fiddling to the default styles).

As a side note has anyone else found it funny that a few months ago anyone submitting a project to HN that used bootstrap would get comments like "awesome using bootstrap", "bootstrap is the new standard for the web", etc. And quickly the sentiment is turning to "yuck another bootstrap site" and "learn some css you fools".

Looks like there isn't any time tracking in the new Basecamp. When you upgrade it says that won't be moved over. I wonder if this is to be added later or not many customers use it. At my previous company this feature is the reason we upgraded to a higher plan.

I'd imagine that with most paid accounts the private repos are also the largest. I know my stats would we be completely different if it included those.

I stopped reading at "Run my gestures against an image in the cloud"

I'd guess the only 'odd' typing thing I do is that I only use the left side modifier keys. So for modifying a letter that is also typed with the left hand I am used to just simply 'shifting over' my fingers to account for the modifier. Anyone else do this or am I just weird?

One thing that always bugs me is that modern languages that ship with fairly strong datetime libraries still make it a pain to deal with just dates. My db can handle just a date why does my language need to treat date as some hack on datetime?

I want 12/01/1980 not 12/01/1980 00:00:00 -5

From what I have seen I don't know if WPF is at the adoption that Microsoft had hoped for. There is still a lot of development done in WinForms and a lot of that work has been migrated to ASP.net for years.

Some of the reasons I've seen quite a few devs not adopt WPF: - XAML a.k.a. super wordy xml? Why not just drag-and-drop-click-events - MVVM Template, Caliburn, Prism, or just do things how we did in WinForms? - Expression Blend makes sense in Microsoft's vision but how many small shops have dedicated UI designers? - We are moving everything to the web already why would we do another desktop app?

Of course I say that as someone who actually quite enjoyed doing WPF development for three years.

When starting out with backbone.js I also had a difficult time just using the documentation. Backbone is kind of the opposite of other popular MVC frameworks in that its un-opinionated, it doesn't enforce any strict organization which gives more flexibility but also makes it more difficult to learn.

What worked the best (however not optimal) for me was to combine the techniques used in the PeepCode(https://peepcode.com/products/backbone-js) screencasts and Thoughbot's book (https://workshops.thoughtbot.com/backbone-js-on-rails). Once you start getting in the groove of things the documentation is actually really good for quick look ups and you'll start to see that the framework is actually surprisingly tiny.

I also have a couple sample apps up on github that I used to learn backbone if you'd like to see some more examples: https://github.com/jwarzech/inspire_board https://github.com/jwarzech/realtime_hn

I've been using CoffeScript and backbone.js a lot lately, it really has changed my approach to web apps (keep the server light, just transfer json back and forth). The approach that has worked the best for me is to keep pages such as the landing and authentication as traditional rendered pages and save the client side rendering for the user-authenticated 'meaty' parts of the app.

If you want to look a couple really-small examples I have a couple apps on github I used for learning backbone.js/coffeescript. They both use the underscore.js template engine.

https://github.com/jwarzech/realtime_hn Backend is sinatra, takes a HN story url and polls the comments in reverse chronological order.

https://github.com/jwarzech/inspire_board Backend is rails, polls images from dribbble and lets you save your favorites.

I second this idea, however I think it would be better to rotate through the comments as they reach points in the video rather than have a cluster of icons on a timeline that you have to hover to read the comment.