nfm

I'd also assume that the author was using a new profile with no cache for each test run.

I've never used NowJS nor looked at the source for it, so I can't comment about their justification for a rewrite.

But most programmers I know don't need any encouragement to rewrite stuff, myself included!

Do you wear shoes while standing on the gel mat?

Thanks - added as a choice

Extremely cool. I had no idea sound was possible with Javascript.

Let the great experiment begin!

Unless I'm missing something this is blatant spam

I've been hitting the rails blog twice a day for the last three weeks waiting for 3.1 to be released.

Lets get involved and squash some bugs!

Thanks for letting us know. On first inspection this looks like an irregular response from Gmail's SMTP servers that our app didn't catch. I'll get this fixed ASAP :)

In the meantime, if you'd like to try to sign up again it will almost certainly work. I think you just lucked out.

Some interesting stats from this post so far. We've had 945 visits to the home page, 69 to the signup page, and 13 accounts created.

Quantitative data to back up a number of comments about our marketing site being lightweight!

GPS location tracking is one of the features we have in mind! Great to hear someone else is keen for it.

Something else that we haven't seen is better browser integration - some kind of bookmarklet that gives you a timer whatever site you're on in your browser. This would be good for web developers and other users that spend a lot of time working in the browser. What do you think of that idea?

Thanks for your thoughts.

We've held off emailing invoices through the app so far as we want to come up with a very good interface for it. Something that doesn't require lots of customization and mail merge handling, but is flexible as well.

But it's great to hear there's demand for this feature!

Great idea :) We'll get onto it

Feedback noted!

We've made the signup process as easy as possible (name, email and password only, no email confirmation) but it's definitely more of a barrier to entry than we'd like. We're keen to make a product video soon, and maybe pre-populate new accounts with some sample data too.

Yep, Marc did our logo for us. We love it!

Our goal is to be simpler to use, to focus on time tracking using a timer (rather than logging time after the fact), and to have an aesthetically pleasing application.

We've got some ideas up our sleeve for mobile and desktop innovation, but thought we'd build the web side first as (we hope) it's useful as a standalone product.

What do you love most about Freshbooks?

Thanks for the feedback :)

We're very light in the marketing part of the site at the moment. Would you rather see a feature comparison or a short product demonstration video?

We've been working on Paydirt for about four months while juggling our regular consulting work. It's been in open beta since it was even close to MVP and we had useful feedback from the users so far.

Now we'd love the feedback of the HN community. Thanks!

Bang on for my app's site! Very cool.

In terms of features, I'd love to see more emphasis on the aggregate/comparison data. For example, most popular server side framework, most popular JS libraries, most popular hosting platforms and so on.

I like it a lot :)

The cheapest Basecamp plan (Basic) is in fact $24/month, not $49 as mentioned in the article.

If you run a full time consulting business, $24/month is a negligible expense for software that supports the core function of your business.

I'd argue that all the prices are negligible as they scale with the size of the business. Even the Max plan ($149/month) is only $1788 per year, which is equivalent to less than 2 weeks worth of man hours. Logically, if using the Max plan of Basecamp saves you and your team 80 hours over the course of a year it should be a no brainer.

I'm eager to give this a try.

I'm a bit skeptical of whether it will be suitable if I'm programming all day. Perhaps bumping up the timer a bit would help me to get in the flow.

Has anyone else found this technique helpful?

You'll need to add 'therubyracer' (or another javascript interpreter) to your Gemfile. It requires python and a C++ compiler to compile its binaries.

If you're on Heroku, you may need 'therubyracer-heroku' instead - there are compilation issues. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

Agreed. Rails has significantly changed since 2.3.x, and is extremely different to 1.2.x. These changes aren't just for the sake of it - Rails keeps on improving! Start at 3.1 and you won't be sorry.

I agree that the barrier for entry to Rails is quite high. To really get into it, you might have to learn:

* A new language

* A new framework

* A new programming paradigm

* A new set of libraries

This is going to be really hard if you're currently a spaghetti coder. Will you learn a lot? Will you become a better programmer? Will you enjoy coding more? I say yes!

You'll often have NAT to deal with as well, and have to set up explicit port forwards to your local device (and give it a static IP address) in your routers.

Is it just me, or can nobody else see this working in practice?

Upgrading to Windows 7 to get IE 10 seems like a classic "You're doing it wrong"!

Agreed. It's great to know that there's some formal usability testing going on (and very interesting to see the results), but without comparing the usability of the existing desktop it's hard to know if we're going forwards or backwards.

Don't let a little competition get in the way!

I think you should definitely use multiple files. By all means concatenate them and minify them for production, but I find it very helpful to have CSS files for layout, forms, and specific sections of the site or app.

CSS complexity is increasing at a huge rate and the volume of CSS for even a simple site is running at hundreds of lines. Splitting it into separate files keeps it readable and reusable.