ctrager

"Chicago poised to license, regulate vacation-apartment rentals": http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/ct-biz-0629-vacation-re...

I use Sinatra running at Heroku for my Hacker News Android app, for the screen scraping part, the part that scrapes pages just like this one. Both are easy and fun.

I was in "Like" prior to the update that added multitouch to the browser, and prior to finding into Aedict, a Japanese/English dictionary app. After multitouch and Aedict, I'm in Love.

And, shameless plug: Did y'all try the free Hacker News reader app I uploaded to the Market?

http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android...

Is there a way you could send me a screenshot that illustrated what you mean?

I'm running into this issue. http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=4303 Is the solution to learn how to work without Eclipse? I'm only now getting over the pain of learning how to work WITH Eclipse.

Earlier today I published a Hacker News app to the Android Market and disappointed a lot of people because the app wouldn't run on their devices. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1097568

So, I recompiled for 1.6 (G1), but I couldn't compile error free for 1.1 and 1.5 (Hero) - complaints about the "res" folder. I'll have to follow-up and see how to fix that. The URL I posted here is a blog post where I assembled a bunch of links that deal with Android versioning woes. I'm very open to guidance on this topic.

Try again for G1. I just republished.

I just republished, for Android 1.6 (G1)

I just uploaded a newer version to the market that should work with Android 1.6 (G1). However, I couldn't compile for 1.1 and 1.5. The compiler complained about my "res" folder. If folks want to point me in the right direction, how to learn more about this stuff, how to handle versioning with Android and the Market, I'm open.

I saw your app before I started working on mine. You did a nice job. You set the bar pretty high!

Ok. Maybe even tonight.

According to the following the white-on-black display uses less power. Also, I found that once I altered a little bit of the default color scheme I had to alter ALL of it somehow, like changing the background and text color would mess up the border and highlighting color. It's an area where I need to do some more learning.

http://blog.javia.org/nexus-one-display-and-subpixel-pattern...

On Android too, if you use the browser on Android, you can interact with Hacker News same as usual, login, vote, etc. But you'll find yourself zooming and panning a lot. The rest of this comment is off topic: Speaking of voting, here are two people asking about voting at Hacker News, but yesterday was an election in Illinois with Obama's old senate seat at stake, and not one of about two dozen co-workers I talked to bothered to vote. There's more interest in voting for a Hacker News article than for a US Senator?

Try this link instead. Don't ask me to explain, but I had to rename the file here .zip instead of .apk, so rename it after you download it:

http://ifdefined.com/HackerNewsReader.zip

Voting would require allowing you to login, a whole 'nother degree of difficulty, especially given the architecture of going thru the proxy at heroku.

If enough people seem to care, I might attempt supporting logging in. And charge 99 cents for it....

Caitlin Flanagan is one of my favorite essayists, and here is my favorite essay of hers, "The Wifely Duty": http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200301/flanagan

If you are young or single or childless, it's not for you. Yet.

This reminds me of something I heard about Motorola, and their decline after the Razor phone peaked. They learned that the phone business is more like the fashion business than the electronics business.

With software related to the dev process, look how fast Subversion went from cool to uncool. It took just one viral Linus video.

I think there IS a bit of a network effect and Joel is correct to have concerns.

As a developer, I say not trivial. This isn't just about bug trackers, because bug trackers integrate with version control, maybe our IDE, and soon code review tools.

A bug tracker can be like email, on the screen all the time, with a lot of our communication with co-workers going thru it ( and in fact the good ones incorporate email into them very well. )

So, it's the software we are living in. Next to our text editor, it's maybe the MOST important software.

Not counting Pandora, of course.

Joel has been and seems to continue to be anti-paid advertising. I've heard him say it on the Stackoverflow podcasts, and I know it from trying to get FogCreek to advertise on my website (I tried again after having read the Inc article, thinking that maybe he was born again...).

I think he overestimates how well known FogBugz/FogCreek is. I think he unnecessarily handicaps himself with that policy.

You are contradicting my unsupported opinions using actual facts? That's not fair.

Regarding "You'd be amazed": No,I wouldn't. Whatever the humble origins of a bug tracker, user pressure does push them to accrete more features and complexity, so even my own little BugTracker.NET also has evolevd to be also a ticketing system, time tracker, and a tiny bit as a project management system.

(Please let's not talk about permissions and customizable, enforcable, workflow...)

Here's my favorite way I've seen BugTracker.NET stretched: http://frap.cdf.ca.gov/projects/hazard/btnet/bugs.aspx, by the "California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection".

You're probably right about the 90% for now, but I think the Generational Change thing also affects attitudes towards hosted versus installed.

And, you have more and more big companies whose OWN business depends on THEIR customers trusting THEM to host their customers data, so I think that is a force for attitudes about hosted solutions changing too.

I work for a company that makes software for futures traders. Our customers include the trading depts of the biggest banks you can name. Presumably security conscious and with the expertise to manage the software/hardware themselves if they chose to. We offer both installable and hosted solutions. Plenty of these big banks have opted for the hosted solution.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of an open source bug tracker, BugTracker.NET, a sorta hobby project that got better over time and sorta, kinda, "competes" with FogBugz. Also, I receive money from Atlassian to display their ads on my website, but other than that, I know nothing about their business. So, I'm not any sort of insider. But I do pay attention to the space, and here's my two cents.

Some of the income for these companies comes from the hosted versions of their apps. I think free and somewhat viral services like GitHub put a lot of pressure on Atlassian and FogCreek. 1) Downward pressure on what they can charge. Consider Atlassian's recent price drop. and 2) Classic Joel "Fire and Motion" pressure to match the competition's features. Kiln is FogCreek returning defensive fire.

Not to mention less viral players but really nice playes in the hosted space like Unfuddle, Assembla. Christ, even Google.

So, along with hosted apps, some of the income comes from installed software. There, both companies compete against open source, like Trac, Redmine, and even my own BugTracker.NET. Traditionally some stodgier companies have tended to be fearful about running open source alternatives, but there might be a generational change going on. There could be a tipping point where open source developer tools start being perceived even by the stodgier companies as being the more comfortable, safe, mainstream choice. Safer than commercial. That might already be happening with version control.

I apologize for being...Microsofty...but I use (and am the author of) BugTracker.NET. It's a free and open source bug tracking app for ASP.NET. In style and philosophy, it's closest to FogBugz.

This weekend I just finished getting the git and mercurial integration working. My eyes hurt.

More info about BugTracker.NET at http://ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html.

http://ifdefined.com. This is a Microsoft oriented site, the home of "BugTracker.NET", so you'd expect it to skew a little towards IE. For the last 30 days, about 22,000 visits:

  IE      45%  
  Firefox 41%  
  Chrome   8%  
  Safari   3%  
  Opera    2%