tborthwick

You really think there's even a chance that java will be 'largely irrelevant' in 1 year? Maybe you should try assessing your prognostication skills by writing down your predictions for 1, 5, 10 years out and see how close you were. I have a feeling you're just as liable to make mistakes trying to guess what will happen in 3-7 years as you are using the best tools at hand today. Whatever you think of java, for example, google 'java is dead' and see how well people have predicted the future. It's still going strong in the enterprise, and even a lot of startups probably do some java in the form of Android apps. Flex has some great things going for it. It's only easy now in hindsight to say that four years ago you took the wrong path.

I really like Play and want it to succeed, but statements like 'Two years later, Play 1.2 has become so popular that it’s making Java developers who use other web frameworks look bad, because their productivity is so low' are silly. Play is by no means common in the enterprise world, which is java's primary domain. Play 2.0 is not backwards compatible with 1.2, I believe, giving the impression that it's not very stable yet. I hope 2.0 is great and is widely adopted, but it's too early for grand statements about it being the best framework out there.

I put the site back online at http://bigmath.herokuapp.com/.

The site is back online at http://bigmath.herokuapp.com/.

I agree I should have left a demo up- I had decided I should just start over so I took some screenshots for reference then scraped it. Later as an after-thought, I decided to write it up. I didn't really expect this much interest- I'll try to get it back up tonight.

The exercise was a little more than straight-up horizontal centering. It was to take two numbers randomly generated with possibly different number of digits, center them together along with an operator as a block, but right-align the text within. Also a text input field was put below. The line above the input field is just a simple border.

For reference, the CSS tutorial I looked at was http://www.noobcube.com/tutorials/html-css/horizontal-and-ve..., but I didn't add the IE elements because I thought it was only necessary for IE 6 and 7, not 9.

So the horizonal alignment problem in IE is probably because I used display:block. But why don't the numbers line up the same in chrome and firefox? What's up with the field border being all over the place? My point is not that I know html and css well, which I clearly don't, or that this stuff is impossible. It's that even with the latest browsers and techniques, it's still easy to get very different displays. I just didn't expect that, given the huge hype surrounding html5 and css3.

He wasn't proven 'right' as much as 'successful'. He wanted to keep flash off the iPhone and iPad and he succeeded. Just because Adobe, faced with a ban on the most important mobile platform, decided mobile flash wasn't worth the development effort doesn't mean that they couldn't have created a viable player on iOS. With enough money and the improving hardware of devices, they almost certainly could have. But even then they'd be left with the fact that native apps are succeeding far better than web apps on mobile devices anyway.

Filtering IS a pain point if you have very different audiences amongst your facebook 'friends', like real friends vs co-workers vs parents. Not having filtering may prevent you from making a personal post that would be funny to your friends but crude to others. The author asks how many people want fewer readers of their posts, but for non-technical users, number of readers isn't a concern at all. Publishing something embarrassing then remembering your grandmother is now a friend, on the other hand, is an annoying concern.

There's still a question, though, of whether people will think it's worth the effort to categorize all their contacts. I'm not sure how many will bother.