> But navigating the full screen while holding the iPhone [5] in one hand is worse ... Consider the windshield wipers on a car, and how, because they swing in a radial arc, they can’t reach the passenger-side top corner.
Gruber brought up a very good point about the somewhat less than perfect screen size which shows a UI weakness of iOS: the back button—one of the most used UI elements—is always at the top left. Try it yourself, go to versus io to see the iPhone 5 in its orignal size, calibrate your screen (click at the top-right corner on versus io) and place your hand next to the iPhone and see if your thumb would be able to reach the top-left corner: http://versusio.com/en/apple-iphone-5-64gb-vs-samsung-galaxy... In contrast, Android has hardware back keys always at the bottom, so even 4,8" phones could be used for a short while with one hand (just try the same experiment with the S3). Moreover, there's a huge target not bothering about bigger phones because they have space in their bag and don't put them into their pockets (women). So, I agree with Gruber to start offering two size: 3.5 and something about 4.5 or even larger (and changing the back button UI in the long run).
So, do I need GridFS if I just want to attach few pictures to a user collection or can I just embed then in a user document assumed they stay under 4mb?
At the end of day, you won't get much more data than from a traditional tool like Google Analytics. But the real-time nature and the presentation make your data so vibrant that you check Chartbeat 100 times a day—everytime you get some small hints and insights you would overlook without. Basically with Chartbeat your site lives and breaths.
Like the reference to Rails—so easy and at the same time so inaccessible.
In the earlier days without powerful frameworks I was really developing: figuring out which pattern/algorithm did the best job. Nowadays when working with frameworks I feel dumber and dumber—before thinking myself I just google API calls and put them together. I am not trying anymore because I don't know where to start and everything is already solved on Github. This magic feels sometimes so meta and boring because I am more into consuming specs, tutorials, screencasts just gluing things together instead of real programming.
Just diving into JS and Node.JS to get this "go-kart" feeling back. But I guess the more magic involved the faster the development and Meteor admittedly looks revolutionary.
I've been to some conference lately and next to me was a guy sitting excited about the high traffic system he's building—I asked about the language he is using:
He (playing with his iPad 3): PHP
Me: I thought PHP devs died out for years??
He (angry): PHP is still the most used language for the web and it's fast.
Me: Do you guys still mix front-end and back-end code?
He (still angry): Of course not.
Back home I started googling "PHP" and "PHP frameworks" for the first time since 2003 again. I was surprised: there are many Rails-inspired frameworks like Yii, Zend, Codigniter, etc. And I tried to be objective giving PHP another chance (I haven't an actual use for PHP but I was just bored and wanted to be prepared for better counterattacks next time).
My impressions:
- There seem to be too many frameworks or call them ecosystems, so I couldn't figure out which is the dominating one (Zend?). And I am not sure if they are really interoperable
- Not relevant but awkward: most frameworks websites (except Yii) and in particular the PHP site look like 2003. What disturbed most was the often used claim "no console needed".
- On Freelancer.com, Monster or any other job-related site the quantity of postings for PHP devs were massive—any other web-related fraemwork/language else like Ruby, Python, Django was a small fraction oft that.
After looking at some "modern" PHP code (which strictly follow the MVC patterns now) I still couldn't get warm with PHP. I assume that most PHP devs are long-time PHP devs and I don't understand how PHP can attract people compared to newer concepts.