nikz

We do the same thing, with a simple label system ("Follow Up", "Request for Feature X", "Request for Feature Y") to give us a little more overview visibility.

I'd certainly recommend this approach, especially if your workflow is well defined (we answer, then archive - Follow Up and start a ticket in Lighthouse if it needs to fixed. Unread == unanswered).

Have looked at ZenDesk and Tender, but we feel like they force people to jump through too many hoops in order to ask a question. For a logged-in user, it should really just be a "what do you want to ask us?" field, and for a logged out user just email/question. In my humble opinion, of course. ;)

I'd second this. We've been using GRaphael for the reporting graphs on MinuteDock, and we had to manually hack in a bunch of things - like rotating the labels on the x-axis correctly if they were too long, and even drawing both axes on some graph types.

It's worth the effort though - works on iPhone/iPad out of the box, and is super snappy even on OS X (unlike most Flash charting solutions, including Google Viz.)

Could you post a link to the patch in question?

Seems like there is a program called "fortune" that prints a random "fortune" on boot.

And some joker took it upon themselves to add a somewhat distressing boot message into the default list.

(man fortune: http://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune)

whereabouts in New Zealand are you? In Wellington there's been a pretty successful "Summer of Code" program run for the past few years, placing interns with startups (nothing to do with Google). I've been part of it both as a student and later as an employer, it's a great opportunity for both sides of the fence.

I use Knox - http://www.knoxformac.com/ - similar thing, much nicer UI.

What advantages would a "mix'n'match" approach like this have over something unified like Prototype (which, as far as I can tell, includes implementations of all the parts you are using)?

I have found Prototype much better for a "web-app" framework - I can build up complex controls and effects with the "OOP"/Inheritance framework, and I have access to all the functional tools I'm used to from Ruby.

JQuery, on the other hand, has always felt "lighter" - really great for a quick Carousel control on a marketing site, or a pop-up effect or something like that, but it quickly turns into spaghetti with anything more complex.

I'd be interested in other people's views on this split, especially people with experience using a whole toolset like yourself.

Hmmm, we're trying to figure out some sort of demo. It's hard to jig up with the way Xero does OAuth (they only allow access tokens that last for 30 minutes. Twitter's access tokens last forever. They assure me they are working on it though!).

I guess we could do one that doesn't connect. We'll push it up the priority queue. Thanks :)

Hey, we've just fixed this up - sorry about that :)

One of the problems with having too many things to focus on, I think :)

Clickable link: http://minutedock.com

I think you need to be particularly careful when approaching a technical audience (like HN) for something like this.

I'm not saying that I feel this attitude in particular from you, but posts of the "I'm the business guy, I need a tech guy" nature often come across as condescending to me, as a technical reader. I think the implication is "anyone can make the tech work", when in reality a technical cofounder probably feels like they'll have at least as much input into the startup as you.

Or this could just be a personal attitude I've adopted after too many proposals of the "here's 1%, now go do all the work" nature ("I'm worth more because I'm the business guy!")

:)

In any case, best of luck finding someone.

No possibility of getting a "hackernews3"?

Some of us are timezone-impaired :)

How did you set this up? I'm interested to give it a go ;)

It's the "Disputes Tribunal". So it's not a proper "Court" per se - you present your case to a mediator, in person.

http://www.justice.govt.nz/disputes/about/default.asp for more information.

Hey there,

Nice looking application :)

One small suggestion - "Powered" is misspelled in your title ("Powerd [sic] by Basecamp"). I hate to be pedantic but it kinda jumped out at me - being a title, and all.

Whenever you type that, you usually want has_many :through anyway :)

This kind of thing is really difficult to do in Ruby. (I'm guessing you're looking for something similar to the autocomplete lists you've used in Visual Studio, Eclipse, or another IDE?)

Because classes can have new methods added at runtime, individual objects can have methods added or removed at runtime, and so on and so forth, there's no easy way to reflect and grab that information while you're typing.

Having said that, try the following in irb or script/console (not sure how to do that on Heroku)

>> object.methods.sort

>> object.methods.sort.grep /something/

(where /something/ is a regexp representing the name or part of a name of what you're looking for).

Hope that helps!

What is the big deal about keeping a clean history?

It's always seemed so much effort than it's worth.

Besides, isn't it better to keep a history of what actually happened? Something about being doomed to repeat it comes to mind...

In a number of the apps we've worked on, we've found that migrations are no longer useful in order to build a database from scratch (say, you're getting a new employee started and are setting up his development rig).

Mainly because the actual Model code changes so much in between someone running the "rails" command and the "mature app" stage - the validation logic and callbacks being the main culprit.

Eventually, it's easier to bootstrap the schema from schema.rb (rake db:schema:load IIRC) than it is to maintain migrations from a zero state.

Then you've just got to make sure you keep up with the deltas :)