cscotta

I respect what Ryan's trying to do here, and understand the frustration that is almost unavoidable when working on a community-driven open source project with a large number of users.

But at the same time, I'm frustrated. I've found bugs, worked around them, written up an incredibly detailed description of one. I wrote a patch, wrote tests for the patch, and mentioned that I was a first-time contributor and wanted to do it right. After a few positive comments, a member of Rails core came along, made a dismissive comment, and left.

If you're going to write blog posts calling community members "useless, pathetic bastards", you darn well better make sure that the community is one that welcomes patches, encourages positive discussion, and if the patches or contributions are inappropriate/applied at the wrong level of abstraction - work to get it there.

Otherwise, you'll end up with a community of users that maintain their own local patches, forking the core or components of it because the mental overhead of sponsoring a patch and pushing it through takes weeks, while just Getting it Done is a couple lines of code and push to your repo. Which is (sadly), kind of where I'm at.

I love Rails. I like many of the principles it rests on, and I love the flexibility it offers. I've learned at least half of what I know about software development and engineering while programming Ruby. But when it comes to dropping writing elegant code so that I can spend hours hammering through endless gut-wrenching arguments on a Lighthouse ticket - count me out.

Interesting - yesterday morning, I found myself suggesting the opposite: http://twitter.com/cscotta/status/11604836074

I'd counter that this emerging pricing structure suggests developers are finally charging fair prices for their software, and that this is a good thing.

I don't mean to be a curmudgeon, but I'd suggest that the move towards "free/freemium" across the web has helped to breed a sense of entitlement in users while devaluing the work of interface design and software development. To see a user buy an app for 99¢ on which a dev team spent months, then pan it with a one-star review complaining that it doesn't have a feature s/he dreamed up is ludicrous.

Geometry Wars from Activision is $9.99. After watching a demo on YouTube and finding it as good as (or better than) the Xbox version, I snapped it up and couldn't be happier.

I'm glad to see that developers are charging what their worth. This is good for software, and good for users.

I like home2 much more. The contrast is nice, and the choice of gray gradient works well with the bright blue.

The spacing and alignment is a bit odd (e.g., the placement of the [ Try It ] button relative to the open space to the right, but it's very simple and you have a well-defined call to action.

Then again, maybe I'm just averse to the giant, bold, black capital letters in ?p=home.

Either way, it would be good to have a designer tighten up the design you choose. Both are great work for people without a strong design background, so nice job!

I think your attitude is overly dismissive. At least, I'd have a hard time writing someone off as a "typical designer" (a bit of a tired stereotype) if they're experienced in both vim and emacs, let alone work for Peepcode. The author offered a sustained, reasoned argument for better navigation within projects.

I agree that as a programmer, I care about functionality and tools that get out of my way so that I can get my work done quickly and efficiently. But I don't think that means that everything has to look ugly (or better - that it couldn't be more elegantly presented).

I'm a Vim user, and rarely leave full-screen mode. It's a great app, but on large projects even with the Fuzzy File Finder plugin, I agree that navigating can be cumbersome. I'd like to try out Jamis Buck's "Fuzzy Finder Textmate" plugin that builds on this, but have had trouble getting it installed on both my desktop and laptop.

tl/dr: The author knows what s/he's talking about, and things can be pretty and functional, too.

Try writing something that runs on the desktop, or perhaps a program that has no user interface at all. Sometimes it's fun to branch out from things that run in a browser.

Note: This article was written in February 2002.

I couldn't agree more. A good validation test and set of examples are worth a hundred specs.

I've been working on a project for the past couple months that involves using XMPP for client-to-client communication. While there are some good how-tos and libraries, the process would be infinitely easier if XMPP.org's documentation was in terms of reference examples and sample packets/messages, rather than incredibly dense specs written in convoluted techspec language that takes some time to comprehend, even when reading intently.

A refreshing counterexample is the RubySpec project. While Ruby began with only a reference implementation, the process of developing a comprehensive test suite that is able to measure conformance to the reference implementation has created an invaluable metric for other implementers.

While JavaScript has a very thorough specification, Sputnik's project of building a test suite that measures the conformance of an interpreter to the spec will be helpful in understanding how far we have to go, and in which direction we're moving.

See here for four more comps based on the same layout: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Jetpack/FlightDeck

This is pretty shameful. These were all posted by wiki user Dandonkulous (Daniel Buechner; @dandonkulous), who was Metalab's contact in the article. These may just be comps rather than a full product, but regardless, they demonstrate that significant effort has gone into producing a nearly identical copy of the original Metalab design. That's disappointing; if these allegations are correct, I'm very disappointed in Daniel and those involved at Mozilla in creating this product.

Update: Mozilla has removed the screenshots. Here are three of them:

- http://u.phoreo.com/gn.png

- http://u.phoreo.com/1x.png

- http://u.phoreo.com/gq.png

There's no war here, and not much of a debate. Different companies with different problems use different languages and platforms.

I use both. It's nice.

It's a brand new app with 1 - 1.5 developers; give them a chance ;-)

The design is great. It's a bummer that Quicksilver development has ceased. Google QSB is cool, but it's also nice to see a free/ISV competitor pop up with a genuinely capable product.

Would you care to comment on the "noindex" issue? It would be interesting to hear how these are applied and removed (algorithmically, by hand, etc?).

While the article's content uses the phrase, nothing suggests that this distribution, which appears to be a very loosely-rebranded stock Linux, is any sort of "cyber-weapon" in terms of digital warfare.

Thanks for taking the time to write. It might be helpful to post a few links or examples to your previous work and help us understand why they didn't succeed as you'd hoped.

Building a successful company is hard work (spoken as someone working on it, but not yet there), and in my limited experience, nothing has ever just "caught on." I'd suggest that the disparity between the frustration you've experienced attempting to build these companies and the frequency of articles proclaiming just the opposite is indicative of the problem: we want to believe that it's a cakewalk, that it's merely a combination of skill and luck.

What have you worked on, and where are you headed? Perhaps others who have been down similar paths may be able to offer some insight.

This article is a good description of circular references and memory leaks in JS, a pattern which is especially common in IE6 and one which my coworkers have spent a surprising amount of time combatting. Memory leaks border on a special kind of hypochondria, but once you can prove they exist, they're a bear to track down.

The biggest surprise in this article, however, was in the bio:

_"He has worked as a part of the OS/2 IBM Web Browser Support Team for the past three years."_

The OS/2 Web Browser was Mozilla-based, with open development happening in the free WarpZilla project. Apparently WarpZilla, a port of Firefox to OS/2, is still going strong as of version 3.5.4 (with prereleases of Fx3.6 and Fx3.7 still available): http://www.mozilla.org/ports/os2/

Second. I'm currently developing an app on Heroku and have found the infrastructure, hosting, and deployment workflow to be fantastic.

Give it a try!

I just read the article and loved it.

I'm a developer - I've been working on a startup for two years now and have some momentum. But it's hard work and great things don't happen overnight.

"Overnight success ... takes years" is a great reminder, and the idea of my software as a little box with a magical engine in outer space is delightful :-)

This is pretty hilarious, but before we start making jokes about how Rails is powered by LOLcats, keep in mind that all but one file touched by this commit is a test or test-related code.

No outrage here - and honestly, no overhauling necessary for most of my work. Touch-enabled devices have been with us for years, so most companies writing software, sites, and web apps to be used with them have long since adapted. Over-reliance on hover states is annoying, anyway.

I develop on a Mac and use an iPhone, but I have no strong feelings toward Apple's new product and don't fully understand those who do. Perhaps you'd be happier if you took the announcement less seriously?

But yeah, no outrage here.

It strikes me as a bit disingenuous to criticize the performance of a browser while openly admitting that you haven't tried it.

I've been an avid Safari user for years, but switched back to Firefox at 3.6b5. The performance improvements they've made are incredible, and with the GrApple theme applied, it looks just like Safari. Plus, I get back some sorely-missed keyboard shortcuts, Firebug's awesome profiling support, and the "snappiness" that I'm used to in Safari.

But until you've actually tried the latest release (genuinely - not 10 minutes working from a disk image), please consider refraining from commenting. An aspect of the software you used to hate might have been improved.

This title is significantly overstated.

See here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/technology/29hack.html

"The encryption key itself does not enable surveillance of mobile calls, which must still be overheard and identified from the digital stream of thousands of calls transmitted through a single cellphone station.

The undertaking is complex because a digital call typically hops among up to 60 different broadcast frequencies during a single conversation, as the mobile network operator maximizes the use of its available bandwidth."

Completely with you there. Safari was my primary browser (and has been for about a year) until a friend mentioned that Firefox 3.6b5 had some major retooling with respect to perceived performance (esp. in the address bar and page compositing engine).

I'm really enjoying it so far, but had to switch to the GrApple Yummy theme at the above link. The base Firelight treatment feels so bulbous with a lot of wasted vertical space and unnecessary large rounded elements.

I love this UI concept series, though - the proposed Windows design is gorgeous. I'm jealous of how beautiful Chrome and the new Firefox 4 concepts look with Aero compared to their bulgy gray counterparts on OS X.

Never thought I'd say that :-/

Wow, this is a really nice little language.

The howto refreshing to read. While I love JS as a language, even written longhand, it feels like you've brought an uncommon elegance to it. The syntax is much simpler and maps more cleanly to how I think. It feels a lot like Ruby.

Granted, most of the JS I work on is in pretty complex applications, so I'd be hesitant to work in anything but the target language itself. But it's a very clean abstraction or concept to begin with. I'd love to see something complex written in CoffeeScript, especially with DOM manipulation or another JS framework involved.

It'd be fun to try writing a DSL or simple compiler sometime. This must have been very interesting to create. Cheers for such detailed examples in the unveiling as well.

Great job, and thanks again!

Edit: Hahaha, thanks for the examples from the Poignant Guide. Pouring out a few drops for _why right now.

Edit 2: Forgot that you wrote underscore.js - thanks for that as well. Crazy to see how simple it is when written in CS.

Thanks for posting the detailed write-up, but I don't believe that the facts warrant this conclusion.

The fact remains that PastryKit is open source, but close-licensed - by which I mean the frontend source code is transmitted when you access the website by necessity, but owned entirely by Apple.

Honestly, Apple is behaving much like Plurk just a few days ago. Their frontend source code was lifted, unpacked, analyzed, and repackaged for another product. Frustrated by having their intellectual property repurposed without permission or license, a takedown order was appropriate.

While I'm all for analyzing techniques like those found in PastryKit and am sort of a "rah! rah! open source!" guy in general, Apple was well within their rights to request a takedown. It sucks that they did, because I'd love to read up on this sometime and learn from it, but that's how these things tend to go.

That said, whether you agree with me or not, I don't think that this takedown notice is any reason to suggest that "Apple is terrified of iPhone web apps being as good as native apps."

Hey Phreanix,

Do you have Javascript disabled, by chance? JS and Flash are required to display the product configurator.

I did some looking around, and I can't find another way that you might have arrived at this link (unless perhaps the JS did not initialize correctly).

If you still have trouble after ensuring that JS and Flash are both available, drop me an e-mail at scott@weareinstrument.com and we'll look into it right away.

Thanks!

- Scott

If you place an order today, it'll be printed and shipped today. Ground shipping should be okay depending on your location (they will be shipped from Louisville, KY), but 3-Day might not be a bad idea.

Feel free to drop me an e-mail if you have any questions: scott@weareinstrument.com

Of course! Sorry for all the renders; they look nice, but it's good to see the real thing.

Here are some of the cases coming off the line now: http://u.phoreo.com/pa.JPG

And here is a hand shot (the original art was a bit messy; the printing is correct): http://u.phoreo.com/en.JPG

Matt King (op), myself, and the rest of our team at Instrument have been building out the site and backend infrastructure for this manufacturing process for the past five months.

It's been one heck of a ride...we're web guys and don't exactly have a lot of experience in building factories or making, um, real physical objects.

The frontend is powered by Interface (http://www.getinterface.com), with the backend order fulfillment / manufacturing infrastructure built in Rails running on top of Ruby 1.9 and Unicorn, all sitting behind Nginx. All asset processing on the backend is done using GraphicsMagick using a modded mini_magick, which is way faster and more efficient than ImageMagick.

We'd love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and criticisms!

Wycats is a great guy and contributes a ton to the Ruby community, but I have to say...there's really not much here that's new or insightful.

Set your headers, gzip content, and split assets across domains, yes, but - "Your pages will load faster with Rails"? Somehow the headline doesn't seem appropriate.

It's important to note that String#Fixnum (the target anchor in the article) does return the character at that index in the current version of Ruby.

The behavior was changed at the start of the 1.9.x series.

Really? My download completed in about 20 seconds. T1 lines are highly reliable, provide guaranteed bandwidth, and low-latency, but are also very slow at only 1.544mbps (on par with low-end DSL).