primigenus

It's different in the UK but it's even worse for mainland Europe. Many subscription billing services don't support businesses that don't have a registered bank account or address in the US or UK. Many payment gateways won't work with you unless you're located in the US or UK, especially the larger American ones like Braintree or Authorize.net. And unfortunately, it's these larger ones that have solved most of the integration and vertical problems that you end up still having to face in Europe. So you end up having to settle for a second-rate, customer-unfriendly, enterprise-oriented, backwards payment gateway like Ogone or Atos Worldline (both of which we had to settle for). The only reason these guys are still in business is because the American services haven't spread to Europe yet.

Thankfully, Spreedly does support European payment gateways, and that's why Spreedly kicks ass.

I remain stunned that neither Google, Amazon, or PayPal have brought serviceable solutions to the continent yet. It's 2011, for Christ's sake!

I've posted this on HN before but in case there's someone here who's not in the UK or the US, but in mainland Europe and facing the same challenge: we've been there, it was a headache, and we came up with Spreedly/Ogone/Atos Worldline. It can be done. Here's our writeup: http://blog.quplo.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-...

Thanks for sharing Adam, there should be more articles like this!

Yes, because I actually agree with his statement. I have nothing to hide; Google can know all about it if it makes my life easier.

I was talking specifically about trusting Google's motivations, not the concept of security itself. You're twisting the issue; of course it's possible that Google's security will be broken somehow. But that's the case with anything, anywhere, anytime. So there's not much point (IMO) in basing decisions around that possibility.

One in thousands. Like I said: people make mistakes. It doesn't bother me that we're dealing with human beings who aren't perfect; better this than the big brother corporation with an agenda.

I love giving everything I do to Google. It makes my daily life so much easier. Whenever I think about big corps and how I potentially may not trust them, I look around for people who actually work there. In Google's case, I find young, smart, cool people just like me who I trust not to be dicks and do things with my stuff I wouldn't want them to. They may mess up sometimes (I would), but I feel like I can trust them. The upsides from sharing all of this stuff with Google outweight the possible downsides for me.

Just wanted to post this since I feel like not enough people speak up to represent the not-so-paranoid crowd.

Satoru Iwata gave a keynote at GDC in which he explained Nintendo's current philosophy and strategy around "garage developers".

It basically comes down to this: Nintendo wants to protect the traditional videogame market because it views it as a market of craftsmanship. By that they mean that when you invest in the development of a game, you price it accordingly, and that has led to the current market, which to some extent is healthy (certainly on Nintendo platforms).

Compare that to the App Store market where prices are low and, on other mobile platforms like Android, sometimes free, developers have less incentive to invest much as the expected return on investment is less stable. Sure, there are huge hits, but the long tail of the market is full of low-cost, low-investment stuff. Or as you called it, "shovelware".

I for one see Iwata's point of view and although it differs substantially from Apple's, I think both companies serve different markets, with different goals and ideals, and both can exist. That's why Reggie says they're not currently interested in serving that market. It's a different market.

I have a simple cell phone plan. It's called Ben (http://www.ben.nl) and it's a subsidiary of T-mobile in the Netherlands that's historically (since the 90s) been the simple cell phone plan provider.

Here's what I pay: €3/month for 50 minutes or texts and €9.95 for unlimited data. If I go over, I pay a premium of €0.25 for each minute/text I go over. Simple.

It can be done!

Don't you think it's kind of inappropriate to respond to a serious accusation with a marketing statement about the technical architecture of your site?

I mean, sure, before reading this I thought Etsy was cool because of the continuous deployment thing, but now I think two things:

1. perhaps continuous deployment leads to launching features without thinking about their consequences for long enough; 2. Etsy's team is more interested in thumping its chest about continuous deployment than owning up to a serious mistake.

I found that using webkit inspector to set the paragraph style to normal letter-spacing, 1.4em line-height helped the readability immensely. Something to consider, perhaps?

Sorry you feel that way, eps. It's our product's blog and we wrote it because we're genuinely facing this problem and wanted to share. There was no intentional "marketing content", it wasn't forced, and it certainly isn't disingenuous.

webpop minus the CMS and with a prototyping slant actually ends up sounding very similar to quplo. Not sure what that means. Perhaps 3 years from now we'll both look back and realise we were making the same thing...

That is funny! Perhaps you should direct your customers looking for a prototyping product to us and we should direct our customers to you when they want hosting. Something to think about.

Click the "M" at the bottom left of the viewer to change to a Google Maps-style drag interface. (not the most obvious of buttons to click, either, but it's there!)

We passed on them because their homepage didn't feel professional and trustworthy.

"Zappos wants people to be comfortable where they work, and 37signals wants people to work wherever they are comfortable."

What a great way to summarise the difference between the two.

We're using Spreedly on top of Ogone and Atos Worldline. The notable thing about our setup is that we're based in the Netherlands and it took us 6 months of painstaking research and headaches to figure out the combination of services that would allow us to accept subscription payments. I wrote a blog post about the ordeal last week; I recommend it to anyone in a similar situation (eg. non-UK Europe): http://blog.quplo.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-for-...

Consider teaching yourself to use Ctrl/Cmd-W. Once you've done that and some of the other shortcuts (like Ctrl/Cmd-T to open a new tab, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift-T to reopen a closed one), you'll rarely need a mouse for most websites.

http://ipad.sarien.net/ offers an iBooks-esque iPad specific library view of the games available.

I think the point is that Kinect is only part of the package. Nintendo delivered the full thing with the Wii: a friendly, non-gaming-related name and brand, accessibility with the Wii Remote from the first minute you turn it on, a low price point, what they call "bridge" games (games designed to get hardcore and casual playing together, like Mario Kart - unsurprisingly, Mario Kart outsold and continues to outsell games like Wii Fit), etc. Kinect just provides casual games and a UI for those games.

There needs to be more, and hopefully Microsoft will grow in that direction. Obviously their decision right now was to spur the growth and sales of the Xbox brand for the next few years by releasing Kinect as an addon instead of a separate device, but there was a lot of wisdom in Nintendo's move away from the "Nintendo" people associate with 80's videogames and Super Mario.

effectgames.com has a pretty strong library with good examples and documentation. I've been using it on-and-off to play around with and it does a good job of generating cross-platform games. One important feature is that it offers similar functionality to Impact (eg. a level editor) but it's all web-based.

This exact thing happened to me in 2005 - I lost 7 years of emails from high school, college, between myself and several girlfriends, chat logs I'd saved from IRC, photos, and other important notes. I was incredibly pissed and immediately stopped using hotmail for anything, including changing all my other accounts everywhere else to not use hotmail as a backup email address.

It was unbelievable to me then that they would delete your email after 30 (?) days of inactivity, and it's unbelievable to me now, especially after Gmail changed the game for them in 2004 by essentially saying that diskspace is a commodity and you can therefore store as much as you want with them (within reason) for as long as you want.

Sure, there are things in the ToS that cover Google's ass, but no Google engineer in his right mind would write code that automatically deletes someone's email after a predetermined (way too short) time period. There would be too many alarm bells going off in their head, they'd talk about it with the team, and they'd make the right call. Something tells me that with Hotmail, it was just an exec somewhere looking at a balance sheet and trickling an order down the waterfall so the revenue looks nicer.

Jaded, but goddamnit.

Our HTML prototyping tool Quplo (http://quplo.com) is a web-based IDE for designers and developers. It doesn't have github, dropbox, or server-side coding (offline support is on the way). It's purely meant for developing prototypes. But it's a start. We'd love to see more products in this arena and we'll definitely be making sure we're in the Web Store ASAP.

I imagine they'd seed a few million profiles to start with, so probably a few people ("a few million" equates to "a few" in the Facebook ecosystem!) got converted over to hotstart things. Not surprising, really.

Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine. You want to move your userbase over to the new code as soon as possible so you can start iterating on that for everyone, without worrying about maintaining two versions.

One thing that's fascinating me is how they're letting this update deploy virally, by itself.

You sign up for the new profile and your friends are going to see you did. If several of your friends do it, you're going to see that a number of them did. This is bound to be at least somewhat convincing, given that you trust your friends more than the faceless evil of Facebook Corp, and therefore it might be worth doing, and your curiosity will be piqued.

Given Facebook's history with negative feedback around new features, this seems to me like the most brilliant part of the entire new profile - and it's very subtle, too.

3 years ago I built branddating.nl for a client; it was pretty innovative but not particularly successful (which was okay because it was intended to appeal to a niche). And right now the company I work for is building another innovative dating site for a different (bigger) client. So yes, I'd say there's still innovation in this space, just perhaps not at the scale of OKcupid, or necessarily with the same amount of attention startups in the US get (the above two are both Dutch).

It would be hard to just copy/paste the example as it uses Quplo's proprietary syntax (flow, a prototyping markup language). You'd have to load it in quplo for it to work, and we didn't want to suggest that you needed a quplo account just to check out Scatter.

Not entirely what you mean, but have you seen sarien.net?

Downvoted for irrelevancy/spam or because the product doesn't sound appealing? I'm honestly interested, hope someone can comment!

Great to see another innovative web-based prototyping tool, Matt! I tweeted about you and added your tool to the @quplo/prototyping list on twitter.

I'd love to write about jMockups in our blog, but I try to keep our posts limited to truly interesting apps. Could you summarise a few really unique features that only jMockups has, compared to competing wireframing and prototyping tools?