I too visited in 2008. It really is one of the world's most spectacular countries. So much history and culture. Bagan at sunset is absolutely breathtaking.
Development on ironrouter stagnated a long time ago. It has almost 300 open issues and the last commit was in June. FlowRouter by Meteorhacks/Kadira (one of the most active community members) was released about 3 months ago as a very slimmed down router. It's been quickly adopted, is well maintained and works excellently with alternate front-end like React.
Interesting. At the latest Rubyconf a few months back the Thunderbolt labs guys stated they didn't think RubyMotion was quite ready for production apps. Perhaps it is now.
I do this but in a different way. I work 40 hours a week for most of the year and then take off a few months at a time. This allows me to travel with my family before I'm retired and too old to climb mountains etc. You have your whole life to live, it doesn't begin when you retire. I'm fully prepared to work past the standard retirement age.
Sadly, I too found it unusably buggy. I reported a number of them. Some were fixed, some weren't. Their support response times were great and I really hoped they could get it working smoothly but after a year I was still having issues and it was not to be. Shame because I loved the simplicity.
We're planning to support a variety of services, not put all our eggs in one basket.
Tumblr, webstagram and all these sites do not offer the same service as us. Maybe our marketing needs work. We're paid because we allow you to CHOOSE ANY of your Instagram photos to make a portfolio from through caching a user's feed and using the realtime API to keep it up to date. All the other services simply wrap the API and show your photo stream - Now Instagram offers that too so these services offer nothing more.
In the case of my app, monogr.am, we provide a custom designed gallery with options to choose any images from your feed. We have custom domains etc. I don't see this as a competitor at all for our market - people who really put time and effort into their images.
Instagram's really just showing your latest photos online and a few curated ones at the top. The user has no control at all over which images are shown.
We generally feel that a window should only open in a new tab if the user explicity desires that action and we don't want to make that decision for them. We'd expect them do it via a Ctrl/Cmd click on the link.
We're intending Monogram to be a place where you can create portfolio sites for a variety of services. For example, maybe an Etsy storefront, a Vimeo gallery or a LinkedIn resume. Other plugins will be done in due course. This is our MVP and we want to see if people will use it before investing too much.
A public portfolio site is responsive but the rest of the site isn't yet. It's definitely high up on list though.
OP here. Just to flesh out why Monogram is better than your average Instagram gallery, we import all of the images to our db and allow users to create galleries from any of those images.
If you have a cool photo you took a year ago and one from yesterday then you can easily add these to the same portfolio. You can also filter by your most liked and most commented photos.
These are features not available through the Instagram API so we built them and we think it's pretty cool. We also periodically refresh the images to keep their comment/like counts up to date and use the realtime API to pull in new additions.
For far too long after I moved to Canada my bank would not allow me to withdraw more than $400 / day ($200 cash, $200 debit card). Of course I could deposit up to $250,000 just fine.
The problem with webapps using a BAAS intended for mobile apps is the same origin policy. I've yet to find any providers that support Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. This restriction doesn't apply to mobile apps (or Chrome extensions)
I jumped straight in at rails 3 without any real issues and I'm a relatively inexperienced developer. There's a wealth of fantastic resources out their for learning Rails 3 of which Railscasts is only a small part. Contrast that to Django (which I learned before Rails) and all the books are now over two years old and only cover Django 1.1 at the latest.
This is by far the simplest and best way I've found. This also allows me to remove manage.py and use django-admin.py. I just set DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE in the virtualenv's postactivate hook file.
I think you have to be realistic about HOW LONG you will be carrying a laptop on your shoulder before you take a break. 10 minutes? Half an hour? 3 hours? Realistically? A 'standard' notebook is no problem to carry in a shoulder strap bag for up to an hour at a time I'd say. Any more (like my recent siteseeing trip around London and you'll wish you had an Air. I certainly did! Most people go for only a relatively short distance before sitting.