I'd love something like this that handled in-app purchased subscriptions. There's a bunch of annoying parts of dealing with the app store SDK's & verifying transactions, handling refunds etc. We have a combination of online credit card purchases and in-app ones, it seems like there's an opening for some tool to handle the in-app part as well.
I've written C# for most of my career, and have in the last couple of years been exploring functional programming. I started learning Scala, and getting involved in the community and I found it to be quite interesting.
Something I find different is that most C# developers like writing C#, they may dislike many other parts of the ecosystem, but they generally enjoy the language. However with Scala developers, I find that many of them seem to dislike the language.
To cast a broad stereotypical brush, it seems like there are 2 main groups of Scala developers. There's those who are really into FP, and would love to be getting paid to write Haskell all day, but unfortunately Scala is the only option they can convince their employer to adopt. So they begrudgingly choose it because it has some of what they want, but they are forever wishing it was better & making their frustrations known.
Then there's the other side, which are developers coming from Java (or other OO languages) after hearing about the benefits of FP/Scala. They're either not using Scala professionally, but want to learn, or are just starting to use it at work. They are much more enthusiastic about the language.
Unfortunately, the first group are often more vocal, and it puts off newcomers.
Ah man, I've been working on http://sploria.com/ for a while, leading up to launching an MVP soon and hadn't heard of TourstEye. Had a look at the app and the 'experiences' part is almost exactly what we've been building, damn :(
Congrats on your success with the product though, it's really beautiful!
2 weeks doesn't seem like that long to persist with a major change like swapping from sitting all day to standing. Would be interesting to hear from someone who persisted with it for longer to see if they were able to adjust fully. I have a desk that is adjustable from sitting to standing and enjoy it as it lets me work longer without my back annoying me.
In regards to the 135 degree suggestion, I've found this doesn't work well for me, my lower back hurts, and also it encourages me to stick my chin forward which puts pressure on your neck. Could be a result of body shape or specifics of my setup though.
Really interesting article, thanks for writing it. I'd like to hear a bit more about the reasoning for the whole company swap, what problems you were having with C#/Microsoft stack. The impression I got was that you tried out something new for a small project, liked it and liked the idea of OSS in general and then started doing everything in that way, is that all there was to it? What other factors came into the decision on a whole?
I use Fitocracy to track my fitness, MyFitnessPal to log every bit of food I eat and http://askmeevery.com/ to email me once a day reminding me to rate things between 1 and 10, like health, happiness, productivity. These all don't take much effort really, and they give me some interesting history. I'm hoping to do things like correlate what I eat with how well my workouts go, or how healthy I feel in the future.
I recently discovered a good reason to be running Canary/dev channel. Chrome version 22 introduced a bug with heavy JSON pages, where navigating away from them would lock up the browser. Our page had been working great on all browsers, then literally on the morning we went live, Chrome 22 was pushed out to auto-update, which broke this page for our users. If we had of been running Canary, we'd have seen the issue earlier in the development process.
Lots of people are quick to jump on Facebook and claim that their well paid developers are just poor at their job. What I'd like to see is a list of html5 mobile apps that are as interactive as Facebook is, so that we can see the best practices in action. I'm struggling to come up with many that aren't simple blog/news sites. Is anyone able to point me towards some good ones?
Nice job, seems to work well. I love airdroid but it annoys me that I am constantly having to reconnect after I walk out of wifi range. If this gets around that issue then I'd swap.
One comment I had is that if I was to download this app on my device, the initial experience could be improved somewhat. The first screen is a login one and it says to go to your website, sign up and come back to the app. I did this on my mobile browser (chrome) and it was a bit clunky to sign up (I had the feedback/need help button hover over the form a bit). Perhaps instead of that, you could have a registration function right in the app? even if it was just a web view with a mobile optimized signup web page loaded. That way I don't have to leave the app.
Not a major thing but thought I'd offer you some feedback.
Disappointing that this doesn't include screen sharing. Our team have been using Google Hangouts for remote code reviews as it seems to be one of the better free options for screen sharing at a 30" monitor resolution (MeetingBurner is probably slightly better though). I'd much rather just use our Google apps gmail interface, rather than having to create a second Google+ account.