Weird... every sample link flashes the resume then shows 'ut oh :(' in IE9 and IE10... Odd, since I'm not seeing anything on this that would explain this technical limitation.
Given the purpose of the site and it's broad potential reach (and the fact that it's not a domain that requires pushing the envelope in terms of rich user experience), I was pretty suprised to see that the entire 'Rated Services' section was a giant white block in Internet Explorer 9.
I could understand lack of support for IE7 (or perhaps crappy formatting), would raise an eyebrow at lack of support for IE8 (given the nature of the domain and that there's no compelling reason for a lack of graceful fallback in this case), but lack of IE9 support is a bit... suprising.
I certainly hope the team plans on addressing this, otherwise you're cutting a large chunk of browser users out of the picture for (from what I can see) no compelling reason related to the technical requirements of the kind of content you are delivering.
I have a client who just switched to GMail, and most of the enterprise development team is in a state of revolt... apparently they are cracking down and removing outlook since people were just using the outlook client to get to their GMail.
One complaint I heard was the lack of sorting features (sorting your inbox by subject, sender, etc.) which also drives me nuts when I use Gmail on my personal account.
> It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us.
While not directly related, this is exactly the same reason I have a beater guitar hanging directly next to my workstation - if I get into a bit of tough code, I just take a break, strum a few chords, and then get back down to business.
I for one would have no problem with this. I'm well aware that the sites I go to will in many cases show custom experiences, just as I'm aware that Google tailors it's ads based on my browsing history.
If I am heading into an online retailer, or searching on the web, I'd much rather see relevant content.
I find this kind of customized experience a lot less intrusive/creepy than, say, having stuff randomly posted to my Facebook timeline, or ads showing up with my implied endorsement to my friends.
Oh, I agree 100% that if the community disagrees with the behavior of an entity they they have every right to berate them. And if a company behaves poorly enough, it will open the floodgates for competitors and revenue loss (i.e. GoDaddy during SOPA probably lost an appreciable number of customers).
That being said, in this specific case I think that whether or not there is a moral obligation to let a third party scrape and mix-in your data is very debatable (given that Craigslist does not provide an API).
Sure, people should play nice. And some may interpret playing nice as 'don't scrape other people's stuff for your own startup'. Or at least don't be suprised when they get pissed ;)
> It would be great if there was regulation over certain types of data that would require companies to post back to a central database if they take certain kinds of information. It would be great if there was a device that could help level the playing field.
My god, I hope not. The last thing we need is legislation that determines, because I went through the work of building up and creating a successful product and now have a massive amount of valuable data, I have to share it in the interest of 'leveling the playing field'.
I've been on the side of being a content creator with a very successful site, that was promptly scraped by a competitor because I had ammassed a large amount of very useful data. This data that was, through my site, freely available to the public, and the ad revenue helped pay the bills.
So I really don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who had, as part of their business model, the practice of scraping content from someone else's site, nor do I agree that we, as developers, should have free and unrestricted access to someone else's API... they are the ones gathering/storing the data, building the network, etc.. and any use they decide to allow us is at their discretion and a gift. Nothing wrong with that.
A company does not need to provide a constructive part of the community to achieve their goal of profitability... they just have to provide something that some segment of the population is willing to pay for, or build in a degree of lock-in that guarantees continued profits.
For example, It's probably fair to say that Monsanto is not a constructive part of the marketplace and community, but they sure do have a sustainable profit generating engine.
Edit - if you're going to downvote, how about some discussion as to how this comment does not add to the conversation... since I'm sure there was some other reason for the downvote other than not agreeing with me :)
I see pretty comparable numbers of listings for Python, Ruby/RoR, Java, and .Net (although if you add up all of the nix web dev jobs and bundle Python, PHP, and Ruby together vs. .Net, you're going to see a lot more of the former).
For web dev in general the split is pretty even, but if I am looking more at startups or small shops, the balance shifts towards Python/RoR (with Javascript being pretty ubiquitous whether you are on .Net, Java, RoR, or Python).
Still see this more of a tooling cost issue though, which makes sense. MS licensing is not cheap, although I've worked with a suprising number of startups that are on the MS stack, or using a combination of languages.
Oh, no debate on trying to build Ruby apps on Windows (been there, done that - which is why I have a separate Ubuntu partition for that). But more the point that if I am building a web app in, say, ASP.Net MVC using Visual Studio 2010/2012, the tooling is excellent.
Since the article is talking about Windows Developers, it's probably fair to assume that most of them are knocking out code in Visual Studio. And regardless of one's opinions on Microsoft, it's hard to argue with the quality of their developer tools.
I'd agree then that Windows is not an ideal environment for Ruby development, but not all web dev is in Ruby, and windows is an excellent web development environment if you're building out on the Microsoft stack.
I'd disagree that this has any relation to it being 'better for developing web apps'. I write code and work with teams coding a multitude of languages and environments (on Windows, Mac, and various nix flavors), and the developer experience in the Microsoft toolset is pretty impressive.
I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku, etc. than Windows (although I expect BizSpark is changing some of that).
So I do agree that there are some appealing reasons to start projects on nix and OSS, but ease of development and quality of tooling (i.e. a 'better development experience') is likely not at the top of the list.
I either use a PCL from the start, or I've taken existing code and moved it into the pCL (there are a few tricks to get around due to pieces missing from the various libraries, since they are an overlapping subset).
So if you have existing .net code, I'd try to plug it into the PCL and see which namespaces, etc. are missing then work backwards from there - even if you can only get some of your code, it's a better start than copy/pasting everything IMO.
I'd agree. On a side note, took me about ten seconds of googling to find HTML/Javascript that reliably crashes firefox (but does not crash IE8). I expect Chrome would have similar cases where there could be something that causes crashes (at least, there are bug reports asserting this).
(FYI here's some HTML/JS for the Firefox bug... Resizing the browser caused the issue to manifest in Win7 with FF 13.0.1:)
I've built a few cross-platform apps that work both on WP7 and Win8 - as noted before, Portable Class Libraries is a huge help. My web services were fully reused as were all of my base libraries, just had to redo the UI - and between Silverlight and WinRT I was able to copy and paste a lot of my XAML (just a few namespace changes and a couple of minor mods).
I actually did a talk at a user group where I showed a few different apps, then translated them live between the phone, the web, and the tablet.
IMO (and for me at least), switching between sitting and standing is the key - I picked up a drafting chair from Staples just for that purpose. So now I do about 75%/25% standing/sitting, and switch positions pretty frequently.
For mine, I knocked together one out of plywood (3' x 6') and 2x4's for supports and shelving (basically a pair of framed out stands 20"Wx30"Lx42"H)for about $50. Then added a nice anti-fatigue mat from Amazon, and picked up a nice Drafting chair, so I can easily go from standing to sitting (and tend to change position every half hour or so).
Best part is that I was able to precisely size it for my home office, and have it at exactly the right height. Took a bit of getting used to, but it's one of the best investments I've made. Only issue now is that my window AC unit only keeps my feet cold, since the desktop is a few inches higher than the AC unit..
Then you should have delayed, vs. alienating a huge section of the market (at least half, if you count FireFox, Opera, and IE9/10 together).
It would be one thing (and a lot easier to explain/understand) if it was because it's core functionality was based on a feature only implemented in Chrome - quite another if it is because the project simply is not finished.
No Firefox... no IE9... No idea what it even does... Am I the only one getting tired of clicking ShowHN links to sites with no clear vision or at least some kind of descriptive teaser, and minimal compatibility with the browsers out there on the market in the name of MVP? More dissapointing that it's due to a few CSS gliches...
Advice: If you are intending to ride the initial wave of eyeballs from HN, best to get those kinds of kinks worked out first. I'm hard pressed to find an example of an idea where pushing it out unfinished justified the loss of initial traffic.
Like some other commentors, if I go to a site that will not grab my attention in two of the three browsers that I use in that initial click, I'm never going to go back to it again.