Taxis in general don't fully turk the concept, at least not in areas without reliable taxi volume. It's reasonable as long as you can rely on the taxi to show up within a decent amount of time of requesting it or expect to see one in passing in a short amount of time.
Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the immediate vicinity. Calling the cab company has often led to lots of waiting, not knowing when the car will get there, with cars sometimes never showing up at all. Knowing that the car is definitely coming to you (whether it's a self driving car, Uber, or any other service that tracks the vehicle's location) help remove that uncertainty and definitely makes it an acceptable option in more areas.
That reliability and knowledge justify the extra cost for taking Uber (or requesting a self driving car some day) to me, more than the comfort or style of a town car compared to a cab.
I've had mine for a couple of weeks, using it with an iPhone, and so far it's a neat toy that doesn't do very much. I can see text messages, and I can see the phone number of the person calling me (not their name yet, though). I can control the music playing on my phone. That's about it right now. I haven't tried Runkeeper yet.
I've heard that Android users can hook in to a lot more. Hopefully iOS opens up more access for other apps to send notifications to it.
The feature I probably use the most is the watch itself - I don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket to check the time, and flicking my wrist to activate the backlight works really well.
It's not known if Maps was removed because of Apple or Google or both. So while there's no choice on having Google's Maps removed in iOS 6, the reason it happend isn't clear. When it came time to renew the contract one or both parties could have made unacceptable demands, leading to the current situation.
I believe Exceptional was acquired by Jon Siegel, and then Exceptional, under its new ownership, acquired Airbrake. I haven't seen anything that indicates which brand will take precedence or if both will continue running.
The beta currently contains about half of the chapters. More chapters will be added in the coming weeks as they work their through the review process, but they're not in the beta copy that you'll get today.
In reply to your OT question - does your PHP app have an API at all? You could make a small standalone app that pulls from your existing API. Or go the other direction and create a Ruby app in Rails or Sinatra that aggregates some information for you and makes it available for your existing app to consume.
Nope, we don't only talk about Ruby. We have a few PHP examples as well, but there's a lot more on CSS, JS, Git, server administration, etc.
There's not a lot of server-side code in the book, to be honest. Chapters like Creating a Widget focus on the client-side code - loading content in to your page and providing an example for what the data looks like, without getting in to "here's how you'd' do this in Ruby or PHP or .NET".
You don't need to know any RoR. There are a couple chapters where we use some Ruby (Jekyll and Cucubmer-driven Selenium Testing), but we walk you through getting things set up properly if you want to use them.
This is definitely one of my biggest complaints as well. I'd love to see them follow the lead of Amazon Prime and let me specify other accounts within my household that I want to be able to share books (and perhaps other media) with.
As for S3, we work in Ruby and use RightAWS (http://rubygems.org/gems/right_aws). That would handle the transfer of files from your users to S3. If you're using another language I'd recommend checking online for an S3 library compatible with your language.
Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the immediate vicinity. Calling the cab company has often led to lots of waiting, not knowing when the car will get there, with cars sometimes never showing up at all. Knowing that the car is definitely coming to you (whether it's a self driving car, Uber, or any other service that tracks the vehicle's location) help remove that uncertainty and definitely makes it an acceptable option in more areas.
That reliability and knowledge justify the extra cost for taking Uber (or requesting a self driving car some day) to me, more than the comfort or style of a town car compared to a cab.