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Appcelerator Titanium, a relatively prominent open source alternative to Adobe AIR, does cross-platform app compilation on a 'cloud compilation' service:

http://www.appcelerator.com/products/

Here's a quick comparison between the iPulse, SD Card, and latest gen iPod Nano with sizeeasy:

http://sizeasy.com/page/size_comparison/31203-inPulse-vs-iPo...

Only the watch body itself is shown: SizeEasy only supports cubic dimensions, so I couldn't find a way to show the wrist band.

Also, SizeEasy requires all three dimensions be provided, and since I couldn't find official dimensions anywhere else I used those cited around the web, for example:

http://www.berryscoop.com/2009/11/questions-answered-about-t...

Overall, decently sized but definitely not head-and-shoulders above the Nano.

Care to elaborate on the show stopping bugs of Spaces?

I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.

You could quite easily 'pre-load' the volume button before taking the photo by holding it down partially without actually engaging it. This would make the amount of remaining force necessary to actually snap the shot roughly comparable to that required for engaging a touch screen button.

Sure, maybe your average user may not do this, but it would make the hardware shutter button a useful feature for the rest of us.

...The slides from the Yahoo meeting that show what products they're axing?

(Yahoo is.)

In short: No. I've used Diigo and Xmarks, and they don't cut it.

Would love to be proven wrong, but even the "people's champion" here, pinboard, doesn't even approach the usability or functionality of delicious.

There's no first party Chrome extension. The best third party one, felicious, doesn't do tag completion much less suggested tags. The latency between adding a bookmark and having felicious show it is atrocious, even with 'auto-sync' enabled.

Ugh.

I came to the same conclusion after using delicious for a few years... right before they came out with the intelligent auto-tagging stuff, which would mark bookmarks with perfectly relevant and useful tags automatically.

When it comes to bookmark retrieval, tags can be awesome. None of delicious' competitors that I've seen offer decent auto-tagging.

In looking through my options for transitioning away from delicious, Favbot is the one that has we genuinely excited.

If it works in the way that it's described and works well, I daresay I'd consider switching even without delicious' impending doom. The analytics are especially interesting for a stats addict like myself.

I just hope the invite wait isn't too long.

Arg, going over the alternatives in this thread and on the web, I fear the actual loss of delicious is its useful dataset.

With so many competing products vying to take its place, it will probably be a while before a de facto bookmarking service comes along and gathers a userbase large enough to be useful and years beyond that for that userbase to build the data to a point that approaches what we had with delicious.

Maybe some sort of anonymized delicious data export would be possible?

Pipes is a great example, with even more of a niche audience than any of the non-profitable Google products I can think of, aside from maybe Refine.

Yes, but there's some major differences between bookmarking and searching.

The fact that the majority of users are naturally dependent on searching means there's (obviously) massive exposure to eyes and wallets, and there always has been. Whether that exposure could be turned into profits was what was questioned in the 90s.

Bookmarking is different. I'm going to offend some people here by whipping out my anecdotal evidence: I don't know _any_ non-technical (read: average) users who are interested in maintaining a bookmark library, even if the benefits were explained to them.

On the slim chance that we could somehow convince them that it was worthwhile, I still can't see most of them being interested in browsing tag clouds and bookmark trees of other users, which they would have to do in order to be exposed by this 'ultra-specific' advertising. Anything beyond using it as a regular browser bookmark menu that syncs across computers is pretty unlikely in my opinion.

Why not just check Facebook to see what people are looking at? Or, for the 'geekier' of the mainstream, just check Twitter.

xMarks, a bookmarking service with 2million+ users, in their going away blog post[1] alluded to this same barrier:

> We built it and it put it front of potential advertisers. Many were interested, but ultimately the feedback was negative: our user base was too small to be worth their time and attention.

[1] http://blog.xmarks.com/?p=1886

This might be bad timing, but I finally discovered a Chrome extension that's basically there- Chromicious (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/animchmhhndbcfah...)

I absolutely _need_ a viable delicious alternative, too. xMarks looks like the closest bet, but their UI isn't intuitive and it's coated in ugly.

Maybe, but I think the only thing that would have been 'prevented' is delicious existing for as long as it did. They've tried to monetize, xmarks tried to monetize, both failed.

It seems possible that maybe social online bookmarking services just aren't profitable at this point in time, and can only exist as a 'public service'.

Google has their loss-leader products that exist for the benefit of the online community, but I don't think that this is (necessarily) Yahoo lacking that benevolence.

Let's face it, Google has a lot more capital to back non-profitable products. Yahoo supported Delicious for as long as they could, but ultimately it's hard to justify liabilities like expensive, non-profitable projects to your shareholders.

Google can do it because they've proven that their strategy stuffs the coffers regardless.

Two things:

Calling new Object[]{} directly is going to call the constructor for Object anyway, so there's no really difference in the number of method calls for either.

Also, in terms of optimization: calling new Object[]{...} makes it so that the size of the array isn't known until runtime when the initialization parameters can be evaluated. Because array length is immutable the JVM must wait until execution to create an array of the proper size.

With the overloaded static createArray() methods used in ArrayUtils the size of the array can be determined and memory allocated (based on the number of parameters at the callsite and hence which variation of the method should be called) at the JRE's convenience/when optimal.

All of this is probably micro-optimization to the who-really-cares level, and might even be irrelevant due to javac/JIT magic, just wanted to show that the existence of the new Object[] syntax doesn't preclude there being performance gains from using something like ArrayUtil.createArray().

>In any case, you can easily generate an ant script or whatever build groovy uses to either generate the vararg code or the insaneo source code as we see here.

Yeah, I don't think anyone is implying this is handwritten. Generating a text file is trivial in any modern language/build system.

>The point being that this should only happen when compiling groovy for java 1.4.

This is a part of the pre-compiled Groovy runtime library, it's used regardless of what JDK version you're targeting for your Groovy application/script.

>That Abraham Lincoln was willing to sacrifice an altruistic and noble outcome for political expediency shouldn't detract from the actual good freeing the slaves wrought.

Exactly. My quote was an example to support the sentiment of your post, not argue against it.

Ultimately the end result and lasting impact was the freeing of the slaves, history and time rendered Abe's intentions/motivations nearly irrelevant outside of historical study.

>My guess is they probably had this before java supported such a syntax so that you could create arrays easily

varargs came in Java 1.5, September 30, 2004

Groovy 1.0, January 2, 2007

Definitely could be for compiler optimizations or backwards compatibility, just providing some context for any possible historical reasons like the one you stated.

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it..."

-Abraham Lincoln (http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2008/December/...)

Maybe I'm biased as a VT resident, but Leahy (as the co-sponsor of the bill) deserves a little shout-out, too:

http://leahy.senate.gov/contact/

A bit OT, but I'm wondering about this sentence/typo:

> The caller-id, the caller saying “Ram, this is Steve” and that he was calling from Apple did suggest that it could really be Steve Jobs.

At first I interpreted this to mean that if you get a call from Steve or Apple that they have a custom caller ID display on any iPhone which would be kind of cool and would help validate to the receiver that it is indeed an official Steve/Apple call.

Now I realize this is probably just a typo, but I'm still wondering how the author knew that the call was actually from Apple as he implies.

Great summary, and what you're describing is a good practical/social example of information theory[1], where the entropy[2] is increasing with the unusualness of the phone number/backpack/whathaveyou, causing the efficiency of your ability to recognize the widget in question to decrease.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)

Any recommended links on where one could read more on the NY Subway systems you mention? I'm fascinated by pre-electronic computing, and this sounds like a particularly interesting example.

Whoa whoa, your 'language dilution' train stops here. Secret's latin root is secernere, _literally_:

> without; aside, by itself

Also, no complaining about language degradation while also using emoticons ;)

> Only Endless.com, a shoes-and-handbags site launched in-house, and Small Parts are “powered by Amazon.com,” a status which means Amazon.com customers can use their accounts on those sites.

I know at least Audible also has this functionality, so it's pretty safe to assume this isn't a comprehensive list or portrayal of Amazon's second party brands and sites.

Chrome is also my primary browser, but I wanted to point out a discovery I made today:

The Chromifox Extreme[1] Firefox theme in combination with its bundled helper extension completely negates the vertical pixel space waste in Firefox vs. Chrome, at least in Mac OS.

I'm actually using the carbon variant[2] in combination with the Omnibar extension[3] to combine the URL and search bars.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10674/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10883/

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8823/

I realize by Hacker News/Reddit/[Internet news site] a blog posting from 9 months ago is pre-historic, but:

As someone who keeps an eye on RIA/RAD toolchains and frameworks I found this to be an especially astute breakdown on the State of Things.

Love the UI, but was hoping for some info in 'How it was built'... technology stack, implementation process, etc.

There's certain cases, Amazon is another example, where a user interface violates what traditionally is considered 'good' design and is enhanced because of it.

Ha. By these standards I am way ahead of the game. How many GamerPoints for this "nothing" achievement?