Good process might not hurt but my experience is that it is directly related to how fast many projects get mired down and never write any code. People get so involved in process that they never do anything. Process can be good but you have to avoid letting process become more important than coding. A perfect program that is never written isn't very useful.
To me, as an advertiser, Google is the best solution because they let me make highly targeted advertisements. I can literally say I only want to show up on Monday afternoons in Bobstown,NY for middleage men searching for "Frobs Widget 203B" and that is where my ad money will go. I can use these tight settings to compare which demographic and keywords get the most clicks or even the most revenue. About 70% of my business comes from natural listings on Google and another 15% from AdWords. No other search engine gets close to providing as much traffic and when you compare their speed of indexing and their quality of search results it's obvious as to why. So long as Google continues to drive high quality traffic to businesses they aren't going anywhere.
Google's biggest problem is that they change to much and often in pointless ways. Froogle for instance has had about a half dozen names and keeps changing the way a merchant gets to their dashboard. Their second biggest problem is poor support even for paying customers. I swear their support people must be the stupidest people they could find in India because they don't understand what you're telling them and don't even make an effort to be useful. I've talked to walls that gave more useful responses.
Unfortunately around 20% of our revenue also comes from users using IE6. And since most of our business is from first time visitors there is not a real chance to educate visitors.
I wouldn't say it takes us 10% longer to add IE6 support though. I'd say that it takes an average of 200% longer to support IE6/7/8 than it does to support Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera together and that it limits what we can do.
I can type on my iTouch as fast as most people type on a computer (which is faster than most people write) so I'll be surprised if i cant do the same on an iPad. Get a stylus for your iPad (yeah it's a little annoying it isn't included but whatever) and draw diagrams and stuff and you're probably set. If you just can't type by muscle memory without having a touch keyboard then maybe add a bluetooth keyboard. Add in the ability to record the audio and you can probably get some pretty good notes.
I don't buy the handwriting being better for memory. It's probably just whatever you're used to. I always type my notes on my laptop and I find it less distracting than writing. The diagram thing is a point but having a screen you can draw on would take care of it.
I don't. They arbitrarily started reversing all my payments after I'd shipped product and provided tracking numbers proving delivery. Cost me thousands of dollars and put me out of business. Now they want me to pay them $800 because they not only cleaned out my account but I guess gave away even more. And you pretty much have no recourse but to keep feeling out online forms asking what the frick is going on.
Been using Google Checkout and Amazon Payments and they seem viable alternatives. I don't leave money sitting in accounts attached to order processing though because who knows what they'll do to you.
Credit card / order protection is a scam. The venders get ripped for no reason. I think unless fraud can be proven there should be no refund and then it should become a legal matter. The credit companies charge fees but they don't cover any of the costs. It all comes from venders.
They should fire the proofreaders as a start as I frequently see a lot of errors including lots that a spellchecker could have caught if it had been used. Sell the eBook first and make it easy to submit errata found back to the publisher. Make it so the books can be easily updated as problems are fixed. When the book stabilizes then make a hardback version.
The authors I've talked to have told me they make very little for a book. So if the author is making $1 for a $20 book and the publisher isn't making anything you're telling me the editor is making most the buck? Obviously MSRP is usually something like 50% - 100% markup over what the publisher sells the book for so you're saying that a book they sell for $10 and pay the author $1 that there is absolutely no profit in that other 9$? Even if they aren't paying for printing, distributing, etc? If that is so they must be horrible inefficient. I run eCommerce businesses for a living and typically we sell products for 3% - 14% over our price and still manage okay. I'd guess we sell a lot fewer units than any major publisher so I doubt they are seriously hurting. I doubt they are losing a large part of their sliver of income in credit card fees and such either.
Which comes to the reason why retailers sell for low margins these days. With global competition you can't sell most products at 100% markup anymore. Lower your prices and you sell more units and make more money. Of course that is balanced by how many people are interested in buying your product at any price and as a retailer we balance for that by trying to choose hotter items, selling a wider range of items, building customer loyalty, and trying to build our customer base. I'm sure a successful publisher would behave in a similar way. Make books people want to read. Court authors that are popular. No surprise there. Make more books on more topics. Maybe sell something besides just books. Publishers should be looking into semi-interactive books I think. This is a concept that has finally come and they should be getting on board. I've bought lots of kids game/books for iPod this way but I don't think it has to be just for kids. Books that are in a series are an obvious idea for publishers. If a customer reads book #1 and it's good then probably they'll want to read books #2 - #9 too. Possibly the hardest thing for publishers is to encourage more people to read. Cheap eBooks would seem a really good way of doing that. Cheap + easy to get means it's more interesting to consumers. Pushing books on kids and funding reading programs is another good method. Making semi-interactive books may be a good way of growing interest too as it broadens the appeal. All you really need is an author and an editor and a PC each. Anything else can be cut if their profits are really that low.
All in all it's nothing surprising but I call bullshit on publishers if they claim they can't sell eBooks cheaper and still do good business.
I read a lot. What I want is the hardback/paperback to come with a free download of the eBook. I like to read the paper book when I can but it's a lot easier to carry a Kindle or iPad with me when I'm out of town, or just at the office, than half a dozen books. Also I like being able to search a book - it's especially handy for textbooks and tech books.
I have tens of thousands of books saved on my laptop. I tend to buy the paper edition of books I like but if the publishers make me feel like they are out to screw me I could easily just stick to the digital copies. Some of my textbooks didn't have electronic versions available so I had the bindings cut off and ran them through the scanner (it has a feeder) and ran OCR on them. It works quite well. Just refusing to offer electronic copies won't keep them off the Internet.
IMO the strongest point PHP has going for it is that the language and libraries are documented in one place and in a reasonably human readable way. I'd say Python has the second most readable docs. Certain parts of Java are pretty well documented but to a newbie the docs alone are overwhelming. Other languages frequently are hard to grasp without taking classes or buying books, libraries are diverse and not documented in the same place/way, and in general are just overwhelming.
Point in case. I recently taught myself Objective-C for iPhone programming. It wasn't an especially difficult language being familiar already with C, C++, Java, etc and the libraries are reasonably well documented but it's a whole different world from picking up PHP. The level of effort involved is just a bit more here, a bit more there, until it adds up to being a lot more work.
I'd like to see someone try to document C and all the common libraries you would want to be as easy to grok as the PHP docs.
By that definition nothing is free because you pay for it some way. I buy good hardware and software and my good tools come for free with it. I could download the tools for free anyway but what good would they do me without the hardware and software to make them work?
Android just isn't there yet. It's reasonably easy to develop for and I like it being Java based but the UI overall is crappy and there is to much difference from platform to platform. Android devices are just crappy compared to iPhone OS devices. The screens aren't as good, the touch sensors aren't as good, the devices just aren't as well engineered. I'm all for competition but Google needs to step it up a notch. I'd hoped that by releasing their own hardware they'd be doing so but so far it doesn't seem there yet. Of course cheaper speaks to a lot of people so good enough at a lower price may work for many people.
Google and Apple are my two favorite tech companies so I love watching them compete. I think the overall results will be, and are, awesome. I hope they can stay friendly and cooperating through the competition as I think we all get the best results that way.
VS Crap edition and I don't remember the last time I had it pre-installed on the Windows computer I bought. It's better than nothing but it's hardly the same as getting the full pimp dev tools installed right on every new computer.
Of course I still like to code in a text editor on the command-line so maybe it doesn't matter but anyway the point is Apple doesn't behave like they are trying to keep you from learning to program.
All Macs come with XCode and an extensive set of developer tools = for free! Schools can sign up for free rights for students to develop for the iPhone/iTouch/iPad and are encouraged to teach courses on it. Anyone can sign up as an iPhone developer on their own for $99/yr. (IMO the ads make it sound as if it's $99 for life but this is false.) To a large degree Apple has turned a blind eye to the jailbreak community. I hardly think Apple is trying to keep people from learning programming or doing cool new things.
I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad. It appears that Apple has relaxed some of their rules with the announcement of the iPad so I wouldn't be surprised to see some user-programmable apps. I doubt you'll directly be able to create new apps die to security issues but maybe something like Scratch or maybe even Java or Python based programming. Also, there is nothing stopping anyone from creating a tool to develop web-based apps for the iPhone/iPad from the iPhone/iPad. You could do quite a lot with that given the capabilities of Safari.
I'm sure the iPad can do that since my iPod Touch manages. You don't need a windowing OS to do that. If anything a windowing OS makes it harder. Why have a window to locate and manipulate when a couple clicks or a gesture can
On the other hand the iPad is exactly what I wanted. I can already buy a full Mac OS tablet and I don't want it. I want a bigger better iTouch and that is exactly what they are offering. The idea of a windowing desktop and the associated hassles is idiotic and a relic of the past. Us geeks can have a full system when we need it but the vast majority of people don't need or want that. Secure, easy to use, just works is what most people need and want.
To start off with it looks ugly. Not as bad as Vista or XP but still pretty ugly. Of course all Microsoft products look like they were designed by and for MySpace users.
Windows is noticeably still slow. I especially notice when using the network. The same transfers take considerably longer when timed.
Drivers never work right. Oops that scanner is two years old so I have to get a new one. Microsoft doesn't bother to keep the drivers up-to-date for whatever new OS they are pushing. Haven't tested for Win7 but I had a hell of a time with Vista apps that wouldn't run on 64 bit Vista and had no 64 bit version available. Why they even still offer a 32 bit OS I have no idea.
What Windows specific apps do you need to run? I have one. It's a rare proprietary business app. I could rewrite it to be OS independent pretty easily is it's really just a terminal app for connecting to our ERP system. Games? Windows really is the only choice if you want to run games on your computer. I don't do much of that as I have game consoles and an iPhone.
I don't hate Windows 7. I just don't like it. It is better than Vista. As you said any OS has issues.
You want your indention to match for every line of code in a block of a certain depth don't you? How else do you tell you haven't put the line in the wrong place without having to trace the logic? Maybe it isn't important if you're working on a 100 lines of code but if you're working on 50,000+ lines of code neatness matters.
Who doesn't use a fixed width font for coding? Barbaric. I find a little indention easier than massive indention because I can see it all in a glance without eyeballing around the whole screen. Of course I use a lot of whitespace in my code.. function doSomething ( int x = 62, char y = 'x' ) instead of function doSomething(int x=62,char y='x').. so maybe I don't need as much indention to make it readable.
A lot of code I have to deal with isn't my code. Also I work a lot with nested objects that aren't in a loop but it's easier to read if indented to show the logic of how the components are nested.
Have you seen some people code? They grow up with Perl and think they are brilliant if they can fit the entire program into a single line of code. I've seen a single line that is thousands of characters long. Very nice when the moron that wrote it has been fired for some reason (couldn't guess why) and hasn't documented anything. Luckily I haven't had to deal with that kind of code lately.
And my iMac crashes sometimes (bad RAM? Not often enough that I've checked.). My wife's first iPod Touch was exchanged because the battery would die after about half an hour. It's just an example and obviously while somethings may in general be better than others it isn't always the case. I'm sure the odd BMW sucks ass as does the odd Apple product.
Still I've been using computers for decades ranging from expensive mainframe and Unix servers to the old TI and C64 to embedded controllers to modern Linux, Mac, and Windows systems. Linux is my choice for servers, Mac for desktop, iPhone OS for mobile, and Windows is good for people that want to run Windows software. To be fair Windows isn't my choice for anything but does a reasonable job of doing a little of everything. Windows 2000 is still my favorite Windows.
I used to have a graphical shell script creator. Was sort of cool. You could drag around bash shell elements as well as common cli programs and could define your own. I don't think anyone but me ever used it.
I can see some benefit to using off-the-shelf components to make it easier but I hope they concentrate on programming and not just dropping components together and setting some options. Python w/ Pygame I think would be a great start. Back in the day we learned LOGO and BASIC but now it seems most of the kids don't get this kind of exposure to computer programming. I'm sure I'm biased but I think programming skills should be added to the three R's as it's incredibly useful to develop the needed thinking skills and pretty useful to have some idea how to write custom programs later in life. Almost everyone I know asks for little custom apps they have thought of but don't know how to make for themselves.
I think a simple app constructor is the killer app waiting for Android/iPhone. When people can quickly and easily make and share their own apps it will bring a whole new aspect to these universal devices. It's a matter of making it possible to graphically work with common programming features (like Scratch programming) and powerful pre-built components.
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Every none programmer I know seems to think that all software should be written at the speed of thought and be bug free.
Good process might not hurt but my experience is that it is directly related to how fast many projects get mired down and never write any code. People get so involved in process that they never do anything. Process can be good but you have to avoid letting process become more important than coding. A perfect program that is never written isn't very useful.
Google's biggest problem is that they change to much and often in pointless ways. Froogle for instance has had about a half dozen names and keeps changing the way a merchant gets to their dashboard. Their second biggest problem is poor support even for paying customers. I swear their support people must be the stupidest people they could find in India because they don't understand what you're telling them and don't even make an effort to be useful. I've talked to walls that gave more useful responses.
Unfortunately around 20% of our revenue also comes from users using IE6. And since most of our business is from first time visitors there is not a real chance to educate visitors. I wouldn't say it takes us 10% longer to add IE6 support though. I'd say that it takes an average of 200% longer to support IE6/7/8 than it does to support Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera together and that it limits what we can do.
I can type on my iTouch as fast as most people type on a computer (which is faster than most people write) so I'll be surprised if i cant do the same on an iPad. Get a stylus for your iPad (yeah it's a little annoying it isn't included but whatever) and draw diagrams and stuff and you're probably set. If you just can't type by muscle memory without having a touch keyboard then maybe add a bluetooth keyboard. Add in the ability to record the audio and you can probably get some pretty good notes. I don't buy the handwriting being better for memory. It's probably just whatever you're used to. I always type my notes on my laptop and I find it less distracting than writing. The diagram thing is a point but having a screen you can draw on would take care of it.
I don't. They arbitrarily started reversing all my payments after I'd shipped product and provided tracking numbers proving delivery. Cost me thousands of dollars and put me out of business. Now they want me to pay them $800 because they not only cleaned out my account but I guess gave away even more. And you pretty much have no recourse but to keep feeling out online forms asking what the frick is going on. Been using Google Checkout and Amazon Payments and they seem viable alternatives. I don't leave money sitting in accounts attached to order processing though because who knows what they'll do to you. Credit card / order protection is a scam. The venders get ripped for no reason. I think unless fraud can be proven there should be no refund and then it should become a legal matter. The credit companies charge fees but they don't cover any of the costs. It all comes from venders.
Why support bad standards? It just encourages people to use it. Then network pressure creates a need to use the crap product I'm trying to avoid.
Flash sucks. I for one am glad not to have it on my iPhone device. It drags down my PC whenever encountered and I don't want that hell on my iPhone.
They should fire the proofreaders as a start as I frequently see a lot of errors including lots that a spellchecker could have caught if it had been used. Sell the eBook first and make it easy to submit errata found back to the publisher. Make it so the books can be easily updated as problems are fixed. When the book stabilizes then make a hardback version. The authors I've talked to have told me they make very little for a book. So if the author is making $1 for a $20 book and the publisher isn't making anything you're telling me the editor is making most the buck? Obviously MSRP is usually something like 50% - 100% markup over what the publisher sells the book for so you're saying that a book they sell for $10 and pay the author $1 that there is absolutely no profit in that other 9$? Even if they aren't paying for printing, distributing, etc? If that is so they must be horrible inefficient. I run eCommerce businesses for a living and typically we sell products for 3% - 14% over our price and still manage okay. I'd guess we sell a lot fewer units than any major publisher so I doubt they are seriously hurting. I doubt they are losing a large part of their sliver of income in credit card fees and such either. Which comes to the reason why retailers sell for low margins these days. With global competition you can't sell most products at 100% markup anymore. Lower your prices and you sell more units and make more money. Of course that is balanced by how many people are interested in buying your product at any price and as a retailer we balance for that by trying to choose hotter items, selling a wider range of items, building customer loyalty, and trying to build our customer base. I'm sure a successful publisher would behave in a similar way. Make books people want to read. Court authors that are popular. No surprise there. Make more books on more topics. Maybe sell something besides just books. Publishers should be looking into semi-interactive books I think. This is a concept that has finally come and they should be getting on board. I've bought lots of kids game/books for iPod this way but I don't think it has to be just for kids. Books that are in a series are an obvious idea for publishers. If a customer reads book #1 and it's good then probably they'll want to read books #2 - #9 too. Possibly the hardest thing for publishers is to encourage more people to read. Cheap eBooks would seem a really good way of doing that. Cheap + easy to get means it's more interesting to consumers. Pushing books on kids and funding reading programs is another good method. Making semi-interactive books may be a good way of growing interest too as it broadens the appeal. All you really need is an author and an editor and a PC each. Anything else can be cut if their profits are really that low. All in all it's nothing surprising but I call bullshit on publishers if they claim they can't sell eBooks cheaper and still do good business.
I read a lot. What I want is the hardback/paperback to come with a free download of the eBook. I like to read the paper book when I can but it's a lot easier to carry a Kindle or iPad with me when I'm out of town, or just at the office, than half a dozen books. Also I like being able to search a book - it's especially handy for textbooks and tech books. I have tens of thousands of books saved on my laptop. I tend to buy the paper edition of books I like but if the publishers make me feel like they are out to screw me I could easily just stick to the digital copies. Some of my textbooks didn't have electronic versions available so I had the bindings cut off and ran them through the scanner (it has a feeder) and ran OCR on them. It works quite well. Just refusing to offer electronic copies won't keep them off the Internet.
IMO the strongest point PHP has going for it is that the language and libraries are documented in one place and in a reasonably human readable way. I'd say Python has the second most readable docs. Certain parts of Java are pretty well documented but to a newbie the docs alone are overwhelming. Other languages frequently are hard to grasp without taking classes or buying books, libraries are diverse and not documented in the same place/way, and in general are just overwhelming. Point in case. I recently taught myself Objective-C for iPhone programming. It wasn't an especially difficult language being familiar already with C, C++, Java, etc and the libraries are reasonably well documented but it's a whole different world from picking up PHP. The level of effort involved is just a bit more here, a bit more there, until it adds up to being a lot more work. I'd like to see someone try to document C and all the common libraries you would want to be as easy to grok as the PHP docs.
By that definition nothing is free because you pay for it some way. I buy good hardware and software and my good tools come for free with it. I could download the tools for free anyway but what good would they do me without the hardware and software to make them work? Android just isn't there yet. It's reasonably easy to develop for and I like it being Java based but the UI overall is crappy and there is to much difference from platform to platform. Android devices are just crappy compared to iPhone OS devices. The screens aren't as good, the touch sensors aren't as good, the devices just aren't as well engineered. I'm all for competition but Google needs to step it up a notch. I'd hoped that by releasing their own hardware they'd be doing so but so far it doesn't seem there yet. Of course cheaper speaks to a lot of people so good enough at a lower price may work for many people. Google and Apple are my two favorite tech companies so I love watching them compete. I think the overall results will be, and are, awesome. I hope they can stay friendly and cooperating through the competition as I think we all get the best results that way.
VS Crap edition and I don't remember the last time I had it pre-installed on the Windows computer I bought. It's better than nothing but it's hardly the same as getting the full pimp dev tools installed right on every new computer. Of course I still like to code in a text editor on the command-line so maybe it doesn't matter but anyway the point is Apple doesn't behave like they are trying to keep you from learning to program.
I'd love to see some development tools actually on the iPad. It appears that Apple has relaxed some of their rules with the announcement of the iPad so I wouldn't be surprised to see some user-programmable apps. I doubt you'll directly be able to create new apps die to security issues but maybe something like Scratch or maybe even Java or Python based programming. Also, there is nothing stopping anyone from creating a tool to develop web-based apps for the iPhone/iPad from the iPhone/iPad. You could do quite a lot with that given the capabilities of Safari.
I'm sure the iPad can do that since my iPod Touch manages. You don't need a windowing OS to do that. If anything a windowing OS makes it harder. Why have a window to locate and manipulate when a couple clicks or a gesture can
On the other hand the iPad is exactly what I wanted. I can already buy a full Mac OS tablet and I don't want it. I want a bigger better iTouch and that is exactly what they are offering. The idea of a windowing desktop and the associated hassles is idiotic and a relic of the past. Us geeks can have a full system when we need it but the vast majority of people don't need or want that. Secure, easy to use, just works is what most people need and want.
To start off with it looks ugly. Not as bad as Vista or XP but still pretty ugly. Of course all Microsoft products look like they were designed by and for MySpace users. Windows is noticeably still slow. I especially notice when using the network. The same transfers take considerably longer when timed. Drivers never work right. Oops that scanner is two years old so I have to get a new one. Microsoft doesn't bother to keep the drivers up-to-date for whatever new OS they are pushing. Haven't tested for Win7 but I had a hell of a time with Vista apps that wouldn't run on 64 bit Vista and had no 64 bit version available. Why they even still offer a 32 bit OS I have no idea. What Windows specific apps do you need to run? I have one. It's a rare proprietary business app. I could rewrite it to be OS independent pretty easily is it's really just a terminal app for connecting to our ERP system. Games? Windows really is the only choice if you want to run games on your computer. I don't do much of that as I have game consoles and an iPhone. I don't hate Windows 7. I just don't like it. It is better than Vista. As you said any OS has issues.
You want your indention to match for every line of code in a block of a certain depth don't you? How else do you tell you haven't put the line in the wrong place without having to trace the logic? Maybe it isn't important if you're working on a 100 lines of code but if you're working on 50,000+ lines of code neatness matters.
Who doesn't use a fixed width font for coding? Barbaric. I find a little indention easier than massive indention because I can see it all in a glance without eyeballing around the whole screen. Of course I use a lot of whitespace in my code.. function doSomething ( int x = 62, char y = 'x' ) instead of function doSomething(int x=62,char y='x').. so maybe I don't need as much indention to make it readable. A lot of code I have to deal with isn't my code. Also I work a lot with nested objects that aren't in a loop but it's easier to read if indented to show the logic of how the components are nested. Have you seen some people code? They grow up with Perl and think they are brilliant if they can fit the entire program into a single line of code. I've seen a single line that is thousands of characters long. Very nice when the moron that wrote it has been fired for some reason (couldn't guess why) and hasn't documented anything. Luckily I haven't had to deal with that kind of code lately.
We all have to use Windows some times.
And my iMac crashes sometimes (bad RAM? Not often enough that I've checked.). My wife's first iPod Touch was exchanged because the battery would die after about half an hour. It's just an example and obviously while somethings may in general be better than others it isn't always the case. I'm sure the odd BMW sucks ass as does the odd Apple product. Still I've been using computers for decades ranging from expensive mainframe and Unix servers to the old TI and C64 to embedded controllers to modern Linux, Mac, and Windows systems. Linux is my choice for servers, Mac for desktop, iPhone OS for mobile, and Windows is good for people that want to run Windows software. To be fair Windows isn't my choice for anything but does a reasonable job of doing a little of everything. Windows 2000 is still my favorite Windows.
Probably but all the ones I've seen have languished as a toy.
I used to have a graphical shell script creator. Was sort of cool. You could drag around bash shell elements as well as common cli programs and could define your own. I don't think anyone but me ever used it.
I can see some benefit to using off-the-shelf components to make it easier but I hope they concentrate on programming and not just dropping components together and setting some options. Python w/ Pygame I think would be a great start. Back in the day we learned LOGO and BASIC but now it seems most of the kids don't get this kind of exposure to computer programming. I'm sure I'm biased but I think programming skills should be added to the three R's as it's incredibly useful to develop the needed thinking skills and pretty useful to have some idea how to write custom programs later in life. Almost everyone I know asks for little custom apps they have thought of but don't know how to make for themselves. I think a simple app constructor is the killer app waiting for Android/iPhone. When people can quickly and easily make and share their own apps it will bring a whole new aspect to these universal devices. It's a matter of making it possible to graphically work with common programming features (like Scratch programming) and powerful pre-built components.
There isn't a genius that isn't missing a few screws. Sane people don't change the world. :)