I used it primarily as a travel & underwater cam. The software is pretty terrible out of the box, and I ended up having a decent # of pictures that were either never saved or "lost" from the memory card. (The card was fairly old - so this could have been an issue with the card...) Also the camera stopped working completely (as in wouldn't take any pictures, and wouldn't turn off without taking the battery out) after about two months of use.
Given it was $50, and the shots I was able to pull off the memory card were great, I am not too upset. However, caveat emptor.
I can't say for the privacy policy, but I used Clue for over a year without an account. Since I forgot to do a final export of the data before resetting my phone (I know, I know...), I subsequently lost all the locally stored data for the past few months. When I contacted Clue, they said their was no way to retrieve it. So my guess is that they are telling the truth re: nothing sent to the cloud unless you explicitly choose to.
My team also recently built a chat service into a mobile app for a cruise line, and had to have high resiliency to network drops and offline users - while having a mission-critical "guaranteed delivery" requirement. We also chose OpenFire since it was an off-the-shelf XMPP server, and (presumably) was easily extensibile via plugins.
After working with (hacking around) OpenFire for two years, I 100% agree with your statement. The clustering plugin routinely fails (to the point where we have actually investigated not even clustering it anymore), the admin interface routinely displays "wrong" data, and other fun bugs we found along the way.
Does it work for us (with a lot of client XEPs and additional custom plugins)? Yes, it does an acceptable job. Would I choose the same product again, if given the choice? No.
We use this at the (very large) corp that I work at, with very large, complex, high-traffic/revenue sites. Each component in the architecture has it's own "light/dark" deployment (in each environment), so any piece can be staged/tested/deployed/rolled-back with zero downtime. It has worked fairly well, with the majority of hiccups occuring during the ramp-up on the process.
Regarding juggling sim cards: I recently traveled between a few EU countries using a 3 UK pay-as-you-go card (with the their roaming package http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home). It worked well, and even in the middle of nowhere in Italy, I had good coverage. It was a PITA to top-up before I left from the US. But if you are already in the UK, that is probably a non-issue. I think it was 15EUR for unlimited data + N/minutes & texts.
I am sure there are probably downsides, but it might be something to look into while Fi is still in infancy.
This! It would be nice if the places recommended were aggregated from the typical go-tos for travel (Yelp, TripAdvisor) - rather than starting yet-another place for reviews/opinion content. Also potential integration or partnership with Rome2Rio and/or Uber transport suggestions.
Currently I am doing all this manually in various apps, and entering the data into TripIt (which is also sort of ugly).
As a woman engineer I understand what the OP is trying to say, but it sounds callous and (surprisingly) oblivious to the realities of this field.
As someone else pointed out: "1) What is the nature of hackathons? Many are pitchathons."
I have also lost "hackathons" to projects that were objectively NOT technical (mocked-up images of an app, without a single line of code). It happens often, and it's always a bummer to lose, but often they might actually be solving a bigger issue than me or my team.
For the group of women (girls?) that won - as you pointed out - maybe they will continue doing hackathons (and maybe - despite your doubt - they even eventually progressing beyond the Wix stage) because they won an encouragement award at their first hackathon. It's like a consolation prize for mustering up the courage to present their product that was obviously not as technically advanced as some other products. That takes guts, a lot of people (men/women/other...) might just slink out the back door after the first few presentations.
So good for them, in that sense - they indeed are an inspiration for people just starting out.
I actually find both 2 & 3 to be more prevalent in self-taught programmers (especially those who know enough "officially" taught people to have an inferiority complex. (i.e. why re-invent the wheel when (surely) someone else has already re-invented it better).
Also, I find that most CS students miss the "forest for the trees", and focus on the technical - rather than the immediate reality (Big-O < shipping features) at a small company.
Overall, none of those qualities are bad, but both can contribute to the success or failure, of a company.
Morale: caveat emptor. Culture & Diversity is important.
How would you say the stability of this release compares to the last version?
I understand it's very new software, but the last version I played with (1-2 weeks ago) was incredibly buggy. Not just in terms of core functionality (hanging packages etc - some of which I see you have addressed https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic/milestones/v0.4.0) but just in terms of the general UI, buttons randomly disappearing/appearing.
I was/am really looking forward to using this but the bugginess did not give me a lot of confidence that the behind the scenes logic was behaving as expected.
I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me.
For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".
So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?
Getting more women into tech* isn't just about the money...
1.) Not encouraged in early years: If you are a tech-savvy female, "soft" tech careers (Graphic Design etc.) are generally recommended as career paths.
2.) It's a Boy's Club: If you make it past the college classes (with a 20:1 M-to-F ratio), you enter the workforce with (mostly) the same ratio. This means that unless you have thick skin & a good sense of humor, you'll never make it.
3.) You're Wrong: Even if you are right. And no one will hesitate to tell you why.
* Speaking for a professional career in Tech.
In my experience, a lot of these actually provoke you to strive to over-achieve & prove yourself. But I can see how it can seem off-putting for a new-comer.
I have the opposite background, but similar anecdotes. Spent all of high school and college in various art or design-focused curriculum and degrees. Inevitably ended up taking a few dev courses, but was only marginally interested. My first job after college was as a web designer in a software shop where I quickly realized that "real-world" programming mixed aesthetics and creativity with logic and really hard problems, was immediately hooked and started absorbing everything (even SICP!) in my quest to become a better developer.
Like yours, my left-brain intuitively sees patterns and (un)readabilty in code, beauty in simplicity, and has empathy for users/novices. My right-brain solves the problems, connects the top to the bottom, and is cold-and-calculating about the inner-workings.
It's also my experience, that if you are design-forward people discount your programming skills (all the more reason to prove them wrong) and if you are development-forward people discount your creative side ("oh, I _totally_ trust your opinion, but just to be on the safe side....").
IMHO Diversity of skills gives you insight into your work and the world around you. Even if you are not a natural you still gain new perspective. Hell, even knowing that you aren't any good is half the battle! I am good at _executing_ other people's ideas, and intuitively knowing what looks good - but struggle coming up with an original _truly unique_ artwork from scratch. On the other hand, Give me an empty vim buffer...
Let me precede this by saying - JS is one of my favorite programming languages. And I agree, unless you know JS you will not be a well-rounded client-side engineer.
But...
Unless the styles are integral to the functionality of a certain component (usually layout or box model), I prefer to keep the styles where they belong. To me, it is much easier to maintain styles in a stylesheet - especially if you have jr. devs or designers working with you. Yes, CSS easily becomes a big ball of mud. But if you organize it properly - and maybe even use something like LESS or SASS - it is much more maintainable.
It is also the responsibility of a good developer to know when to apply certain techniques. For instance - a simple "grow on hover" is very easy to achieve via CSS animations - with a fallback to non-animated grow on IE etc. But a "grow on hover and then do crazy animations" is probably better accomplished with JS.
What mitigated this a bit though, is the actual Phantom codebase on-top of Webkit is really small. So when you need to figure out exactly what it's doing, it's super easy to just dig into the src.
I'm hoping more visibility as CLI JS (and/or Coffescript) testing becomes more mainstream, it will bump up the # of contributors.
PhantomJS is one of the better "headless" browsers out there. Webkit-based, Minimal src codebase (Python), and easy to compile (with QT tools).
IMO The API is a little weird though: when evaluating js within a PhantomJS "WebPage" context, it is _completely_ sandboxed. i.e. you can't use closures or otherwise reference any variables outside the scope of your "WebPage" (without work-arounds). This is odd, when you consider that the page is just another var in your script. IMO it kind of breaks some JS paradigms. Not a big deal, but an annoyance none-the-less.
Given it was $50, and the shots I was able to pull off the memory card were great, I am not too upset. However, caveat emptor.