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