rubymaverick

I wrote up a script a couple of months ago using JS for Automation that will automatically rotate a Keynote file from portrait to landscape (for use in prototyping on Keynote for iOS that only supports landscape). It was my first experience writing any automation script, so there was a lot of trail and error and google searches. I personally would much rather work in JS than Applescript. Here is the script in case you want to take a look at some more JS for Automation:

https://gist.github.com/ericallam/a5cd76651c327b116a6e

Thanks for the examples, and I agree that error messages are super-important for beginners. We have written a bunch of code trying to "massage" error messages to be more helpful. I'll be adding these to the list, thanks!

I repurposed the content in the course to produce a simple HTML version of the course here:

http://rubymaverick.com/try-objectivec-book/

The content is up on my Github and any pull requests would be welcome!

https://github.com/rubymaverick/try-objectivec-book

Very true. We really leaned heavily on the new literals and ARC in this course.

Yup, I agree with you, but I wanted to introduce referencing a variable before introducing formatted strings and placeholders. We actually went back and forth on this a couple times.

We've gotten the course back up and responding to submissions in a reasonable amount of time (2.5~ seconds as compared to 30~ seconds earlier).

Please form a single file line behind mietek ;)

That's a really cool project! Definitely going to look into it for some of our more complicated courses, but for this course compilation is usually under a half-second so it's not the compilation that's slow (it's the way we are tearing down an entire VM after every submission, we are working on changing that now)

Looks like work has started on using emscripten with Objective-C code:

https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/pull/1162/files

Still, a long way to go.

I'm actually working on extracting all the content for just a plain HTML version so people who don't want to do all the challenges will have something to read (it's almost a books length of content)

I know I feel so bad for them. We are working on some temporary fixes (including caching which as we all know is really easy to do) and changing the way we isolate the code submissions so we can get more throughput. GNUStep might be an interesting long term fix.

Good idea, and our minis thank you ;)

We're reusing the stuff we built for the Try iOS course we came out with late last year. I've looked into Emscripten for this and from what I saw it really wouldn't work with this course, although maybe I missed something?

Sorry for the slow response times on the challenge submissions everyone. We only have so many Mac Minis running these things . We are looking into ways to speed it up

We (Code School) actually run all of our tests server side, even for courses like Mobile Web and Backbone.js. We do this because we don't want to deal with the headache of dealing with cross-browser issues. For Javascript or HTML/CSS related courses we use either Node.js with jsdom or Node.js with phantomjs (we started with jsdom but now use phantomjs for these courses). It makes everything more reliable, and we can always assure the consistency of testing the submitted code.

We've gotten a couple of questions about this so far, and I just added an FAQ item in the Kickstarter project about this. Here is the answer:

Most of our courses do take a lot of time and money to build, and we've been able to fund those courses by charging money. But there is a much larger initial capital investment to build an iOS course like the one we want to build. We had a couple of different ideas on how to raise the money, from taking out a loan, to getting a more traditional VC or angel investment. We decided to try the Kickstarter approach so we could get funding from the people who would actually want the course.

mnicole, this is some KILLER feedback. I really want to make our hint system better (I'm one of the programmers that work on CodeSchool). A couple of us have been talking about changing the hint system to not deduct points, except for the last "hint" which is really the answer. We also want to make sure that you know when we are about to show you the answer (or something very close to the answer) so as to not spoil it. I'd like to chat more about how we can make CodeSchool better, if you'd like, you can email me at eric [at] envylabs.com.

My suspicion is that it just wasn't that good. This was given at a TEDx event, not an official TED conference, which means they have no control over the content and are pretty free to not post it. Only a few of the TEDx talks ever make it on the TED.com website.

And you are right, this is hardly controversial. You couldn't find a politician who would disagree that a strong middle-class is the backbone of our society.

Congrats guys. Way to represent Orlando!

Check out the Ruby on Rails guide on the subject:

http://ryanbigg.com/guides/asset_pipeline.html

DHH also talked a lot about it in his keynote this year at RailsConf:

http://www.rubyinside.com/dhh-keynote-streaming-live-from-ra...

We are using node.js to safely execute code for our jquery air and HTML5 & CSS3 course on codeschool.com

You do not need to use CoffeeScript in Rails 3.1, it is merely the default option. Just delete the "gem 'coffeescript'" line in your Gemfile and just use regular js.

Go and read "The Thinking Person's Guide to Sobriety". It's an eye opener.

This title is completely accurate. I happen to have some inside info on this, actually. Steve Jobs went on one of his epic rants after a person from Puerto Rico tried to order a free case. Everyone at Apple agrees with his basic sentiment: Puerto Ricans can suck it. It's like a new company mantra. Good thing the kind folks at consumerist are on the job!

Adobe could fix almost all of this by open sourcing the Flash Player. http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/site/Projects

Unless they want to make the web faster for their properties, which SPDY would do. They can only optimize their own sites up to a point and then they need to make the whole web infrastructure more efficient to realize any more speed gains, across all clients.

Had to stop reading at this:

"Apple is undeniably the most proprietary and closed technology company in the software industry. In fact, Apple makes companies like Microsoft and Adobe look like nonprofit open source organizations in comparison"

http://opensource.apple.com/

I've read it and I couldn't imagine anyone on HN NOT liking it.

Stevey answered the WHY question a long time ago:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rich-programmer-food...

When I used to drive to/from work I always had an audiobook to listen to. Sure, you can't read, but there turns out to be plenty of time to listen.

Has this guy heard of search.twitter.com?