Everyone keeps comparing a system like this to CDDB or the like. I think a much better comparison is iMDB. Yes I never do automatic lookups into iMDB, but there are tons of times when the information on that site is useful. I think a full catalog of a book would be very helpful: Title, Author, Editor, Publisher, Publishing Date, etc. Characters, Plot Summary, links to movie adapations (for those who can't stand reading)
And then do what iMDB has also done and allow searches other than by title. Remember the character name in a favorite story, but not the title -- then search by character name. Want to find any other books by the same author?
Don't think of it as a lookup tool for ISBN information, but a lookup tool for all the other meta data on a book
I agree that this is definitely very pretty web design -- but both singlefile.com and 37signals.com have one fundamental flaw which just drives me up the wall -- there is no way to visually find hyperlinks in the page. I was forced into scanning my mouse cursor over the page to find them (or tabbing through them all, which is even worse). Enough to drive me right off the website...
Microsoft's stance on this is still unknown. The current public preview refresh of IE6 (6.0.2479.006) does not support the EMBED tag which is used to load Netscape plugins. Any use of the embed tag just results in 'broken image' images. I have submitted bug reports to their beta testing and tried to hound them on whether this is a permanent change or merely a bug in the public preview refresh, but they are non-responsive.
Personally, I can't believe they'd dump support for EMBED, but you never know.
I had been an avid PayPal user for about the past six months and had been using it fairly regularly. However, about two to three weeks ago I got a very curt letter from them saying that they were no longer supporting their PalmOS product. To quote from their web site:
Now that X.com has launched the world's first wireless payment platform for mobile phones, many of our Palm users have made the transition to the new product. With the growth of wireless Internet applications and the rapid spread of web-enabled PDAs, we feel that we can best serve our customers by focusing on the creation of new features for our wireless payments platform. As a result, we will be discontinuing support for the Palm product.
Well needless to say I shut down my account about 5 minutes later. I really wished they'd bring this service back to the PalmOS - it is sorely missed.
Slashdot Mirror
Though its not obvious how to do it, it is possible to make some assertions work at compile time in C++.
For a good example of this check out the boost library and look for static_assert.
Everyone keeps comparing a system like this to CDDB or the like. I think a much better comparison is iMDB. Yes I never do automatic lookups into iMDB, but there are tons of times when the information on that site is useful. I think a full catalog of a book would be very helpful:
Title, Author, Editor, Publisher, Publishing Date, etc.
Characters, Plot Summary, links to movie adapations (for those who can't stand reading)
And then do what iMDB has also done and allow searches other than by title. Remember the character name in a favorite story, but not the title -- then search by character name. Want to find any other books by the same author?
Don't think of it as a lookup tool for ISBN information, but a lookup tool for all the other meta data on a book
I agree that this is definitely very pretty web design -- but both singlefile.com and 37signals.com have one fundamental flaw which just drives me up the wall -- there is no way to visually find hyperlinks in the page. I was forced into scanning my mouse cursor over the page to find them (or tabbing through them all, which is even worse). Enough to drive me right off the website...
Does that mean its soap on a rope?
Microsoft's stance on this is still unknown. The current public preview refresh of IE6 (6.0.2479.006) does not support the EMBED tag which is used to load Netscape plugins. Any use of the embed tag just results in 'broken image' images. I have submitted bug reports to their beta testing and tried to hound them on whether this is a permanent change or merely a bug in the public preview refresh, but they are non-responsive.
Personally, I can't believe they'd dump support for EMBED, but you never know.
Hmm... for a company begging the slashdot audience to review it, you'd think slashdot would actually be in their index:
Search for Slashdot on TheIndex.