Hacker News Reader

aschobelon CouchDB 1.0

Offline on Android support sounds really amazing.

I'm poking around DroidCouch and only see a wrapper for the CouchDB REST API:

http://github.com/sig/DroidCouch

Should I be looking at another project for offline support?

aschobelon Scala 2.8.0 final

Fantastic, is this release safe to run in production?

I recall there being a few missteps w/ earlier releases. Actors in 2.7.4 didn't seem to be thoroughly vetted.

aschobelon Ask HN: Useful articles on how to structure mail announcements for SaaS apps

We switched to SendGrid a few months ago and love it.

http://sendgrid.com/

They do subscription tracking, click tracking, bounce, etc.

Super easy API, you set an X-SMTPAPI header and it reads the config from there.

aschobelon Android bandwagon attracting developers and advertisers

Sure, we have one dedicated Android dev with a background in J2ME and embedded device drivers.

On a platform like Android were memory / GC can kill you you need to make sure the lead fully understands the constraints.

Our iPhone dev rocks at SQLite3 so he helps with those portions of our Android apps.

We have commits from almost every member of the engineer staff to our Android apps, we are small enough were this still can work.

Re: Paid, I would feel uncomfortable sharing that information. When we looked at contracting some of this out on the iPhone side we were seeing consulting rates in the $150 / hour range for Bay Area contractors.

aschobelon Android bandwagon attracting developers and advertisers

Sweet, we received a mention.

If you have any Android questions feel free to post them here or email me : aschobel [at] snaptic. com

aschobelon Critical iPhone 4 Issues and Complaints Are Mounting

Good video on Mac Rumors showing this issue:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=948533

Phone 4 Drops Calls when Left Corner is Touched

aschobelon 20% of Android apps use private data

You need permission to access any user data (SMS, calendar, etc).

It is almost impossible to get data from another app if the author doesn't expose it somehow (place it on SD Card, expose Content Providers).

aschobelon Want to be first in line for an iPhone? Rent a tent.

You may be the first in line to wait overnight, but you may not be the first person to buy the iPhone at this Apple Store.

I camped for the iPad launch and they split the lines in two a few hours before store opening. Folks with reservations got to go in first. For every ten people with a reservation they only let one in without a reservation.

Still a really fun experience meeting fellow enthusiasts and you may get your mug on CNN, NYTimes, Reuters, AP, random world newspapers. :P I was lucky enough to be the first to walk out w/ an iPad at SF Apple store even though I was third in the reserved line.

aschobelon Scala is not a better Java

Are you can use Guice from within Scala, we do and it works fine.

aschobelon Standing desk experiment and experiences

I picked the IKEA Fredrik standing desk last week and it works great. Not as pretty as their older Jerker desks, but it beats the phone books I was using to lift my normal desk.

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/60111123

aschobelon Fake Steve Jobs: Why I'm Switching to Android

Sir, More Data Please.

How recently did this happen? Sprint has historically had poor customer satisfaction but they seem to be turning things around.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_gadg/20100521/tc_ytech_gadg/yt...

aschobelon Fake Steve Jobs: Why I'm Switching to Android

The Plural of Anecdote is Not Data

aschobelon The Omni Group has sold 5,000 copies of OmniGraffle for iPad (for $50 each).

they don't

  2010-03-29 - Subsequent Final Mailed
  2010-03-29 - Subsequent Final Mailed
  2010-03-26 - Subsequent Final Refusal Written
  2010-03-02 - Teas/Email Correspondence Entered
  2010-03-01 - Communication received from applicant
  2010-03-01 - TEAS Response to Office Action Received
  2009-09-01 - Non-final action mailed
  2009-09-01 - Non-Final Action Written
  2009-08-13 - Teas/Email Correspondence Entered
  2009-08-13 - Communication received from applicant
  2009-08-10 - TEAS Request For Reconsideration Received
  2009-08-10 - Ex parte appeal - Instituted
  2009-08-10 - Jurisdiction Restored To Examining Attorney
  2009-08-10 - EXPARTE APPEAL RECEIVED AT TTAB
  2009-02-09 - Final refusal mailed

aschobelon Tell HN: The new yellow pages just got here -- and went straight to recycling

I collected a few and used them to make a standing desk.

aschobelon Ask HN: Which SSL Cert to Buy?

We use http://www.digicert.com/ since we need a SAN (SubjAltName). SAN lets you do *.domain.com and domain.com

Weird surprise, Android does NOT support SAN. DigiCert gave us a root cert for free with our wildcard.

aschobelon HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

It's a fabulous metaphor, but "Can't open any more Cards" really detracts from it.

Palm may have nailed the UX, but Android nailed the engineering.

aschobelon HP Buying Palm For $1.2 Billion

"Best" in what sense?

Android's life-cycle and Bundles makes a developer think about saving app state information from day one. Something as simple as a configuration change, rotating orientation, recreates your Activity.

Since creating and destroying your activity is such a common occurrence you are forced to save the state info.

When the OS needs to kill a background activity to free up space it tends to work.

Really good YouTube video explaining this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL6gSd4ugSI

aschobelon @twitterapi's countdown to Basic Auth removal

Was thinking more for Mobile / Desktop apps, but I see that xAuth support is fully out which should streamline things

http://twitter.com/twitterapi/status/9702051031

aschobelon @twitterapi's countdown to Basic Auth removal

UX, not libraries seems to be the bigger barrier for OAuth.

aschobelon Ask HN: Who is already sick of all of these "Like" buttons plastered everywhere?

We use it via FBML and JavaScript SDK and the slow down seems to be minimal. We load their script right before </body>.

Biggest annoyance is that it doesn't degrade very gracefully when FB has availability problems, you get a white square in the page in Firefox.

aschobelon Small Startup launches Android developer challenge, gets prize sponsored by TED

Thanks! We are really excited to see what kind of apps the community will come up with.

If anybody needs help feel free to me at aschobel at snaptic.com or come to one of our meetups http://www.meetup.com/Snaptic/

Sorry if this sounds too much like self promotion, honored to see this on the front page of HN. =)

Happy Hacking!

aschobelon Docs.com (Microsoft Office 2010 Web Apps + Facebook integration)

A bit disappointing that they are using Silverlight.

Not being able to use this on iPad seems to limit its utility.

aschobelon [dead]

dupe - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282850

aschobelon OCRopus: high-quality open source OCR sponsored by Google and used by reCAPTCHA

Is there something similar for handwritten text?

aschobelon Ask HN: Who's hiring?

Snaptic is hiring (https://snaptic.com), we hack on iPhone / Android / Web / API.

2 million+ active installs on Android. We speak scala, Obj-C, JS, and python.

Tools we are hacking with these days: avro, MongoDB, Google Closure

Please shoot me an email at hn@snaptic.com

We are based in South Park, SF

aschobelon Scaling MySQL to 700 million inserts per day

Facebook Scribe supports multiple stores

http://wiki.github.com/facebook/scribe/scribe-configuration

aschobelon Google releases Skipfish, an open-source web security scanner

Simple to build, just make sure you grab libidn:

http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libidn/libidn-1.18.tar.gz

It also defaults to white text, so set your terminal background to black.

aschobelon Amazon releases Kindle App for Mac OS X

Looks like it shares some pieces from the PC version ]=

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep PC

and what is this about?

strings /Applications/Kindle\ for\ Mac.app/Contents/MacOS/Kindle\ for\ Mac | grep -i easter

FeedbackDialogWrapper::doEasterEgg

aschobelon Ask YC: What's apps.ycombinator.com?

It's a handy to get around the noprocrast filter