I work for Rackspace full time from home, and I'm paid the same as I would be at the office. Whether I work from home or not is ultimately irrelevant, because the most important variable of all is loving your job. I work where I do because it is a truly amazing place to work.
That said, volunteering a pay cut is risky business. Your salary is a gauge of how much your company values you, so you should try to get as much as you possibly can.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. If you telecommute, it's also cheaper for the employer (less electricity, water, bandwidth, etc) 2. If you take a pay cut, any time you get a raise it's going to be less than it could have been, since most companies do raises as a percentage of your current salary 3. The downside of working exclusively from home is that it's easier to not get noticed. If you're not getting much face time with your peers, you better be doing some amazing work
I've used the local storage features and they're great. Even made a simple hash store based on it. But you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app. Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app. At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.
But it's definitely moving in the right direction, especially when you throw in CSS-driven animation (which is sadly slow on the iPhone).
Twitter's pretty handy if you want to search about something that's happening *right now* and hasn't had time to be blogged about and then indexed by the search engines. For instance, there were several helicopters flying overhead and none of us knew what was going on, so we searched Twitter and discovered that someone was filming a scene for a movie.
Objective-C does have garbage collection, but it's not available for use on the iPhone (at least not yet...maybe when the vast majority of iPhones are at least 3GS speed they'll allow it?)
I'm more of a fan of languages like Ruby than I am Java, but if you really want to run Tomcat, it might not be a bad idea to move to a VPS like Slicehost and install it yourself. You'll get much better performance than any shared host too.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't expect iPhone apps to break across the board, but there would likely be issues with custom UI elements.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 1
I completely agree with you, and I'm looking forward to a better Android platform in the future.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 1
Exactly. Eclipse was my IDE of choice when I was building J2EE web apps back in the day. It's really the Android stuff that's so slow.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 1
Thanks! I'm glad you love the app!:)
I am concerned about what will happen when iPhone goes device independent. The UIKit widgets should be fine, and hopefully my custom ones will be fine too, but I'm more concerned about images (for instance, the OS logos in the Slicehost iPhone app).
And yeah, I like them both really. I think they're both fantastic platforms. The Android Market is wonderful though. I had a bug with the Android app and I was able to push it out as soon as I finished it, which was lovely.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 1
<ol>
<li>item 1<li>
<li>item 2<li> <ol>
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I shouldn't have listed Java, as I have no problem with the Java language; it's really Eclipse that bugs me and only because it (and the simulator) are so slow on my (fast) machine.
And all of the Android UI design tools I've used have been extremely awkward when compared to Interface Builder. In fact, I gave up on the tools and decided to simply write XML by hand (and only then could I finally get the results I wanted). As for IB being closed source and proprietary, that doesn't really matter much to me as I simply want to build the best UI possible (and IB's output is actually extremely verbose XML). I love open source and use/build plenty of it, but ultimately I'm going to use what I think are the best tools regardless of price or openness.
If Apple made a iPhone OS device with different resolution, I might be screwed. But in that case, I'd rather redesign the app to fit the specific device and its nuances, so that doesn't worry me so much. Ultimately, it's a difference in philosophy. The iPhone approach is more like native app design, and the Android approach is more fluid like web design. Both are good in different ways, but I personally prefer the precision of the iPhone OS approach.
As for Core Animation, it's great because it's very simple and intuitive. You can create very sophisticated animations with very little code. In fact, you can do the same kind of morph effects that you see in Javascript libraries like script.aculo.us and and jQuery, which is so easy. Maybe it's that easy in Android too, but on first glance it didn't seem to be to me.
Just so you know, I don't hate Android, and I will probably write another app at some point. If the iPhone wasn't out, it would be my phone of choice, and I think the openness of the platform is great, and publishing to the Android Market is drastically better than the App Store approval process.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
·
· Score: 1
I probably shouldn't have mentioned Java in my list of criticisms, as I really have no issue with the language. Most of my career has been in Java and I'm quite comfortable with it (though we differ on opinions about Objective-C).
I definitely agree with you about the UI designer. I found it (and third party UI designers) far more confusing than simply writing the XML, and if it had not been for the layout managers I would probably still be working on the first version of the app:)
And since I have no idea what's coming in the future for Android devices, I felt that it was smartest to design with DIPs. To me the approach is kind of similar to web design, and while I like it as a philosophical level, I found it to be clumsy in practice compared to Interface Builder.
Back to the web design point, Core Animation is quite intuitive if you're comfortable with Javascript morphing effects from libraries like script.aculo.us or jQuery. It's almost the exactly same idea, but in Objective-C and more options than just CSS rules. Maybe Android is the same way, but I don't really know.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
·
· Score: 1
I'm not talking about the speed of apps. I'm quite happy with the performance of my app on a G1. I'm talking about how responsive Eclipse is compared to XCode.
Re:Android just won't catch up with iPhone
on
Unlocking Android
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've published an Android app (Slicehost), as well as a few iPhone apps, and here are the biggest differences in development that ultimately (in my opinion) make Android apps inferior:
It's Java + Eclipse, which is notoriously slow when compared to XCode and the iPhone Simulator
UI design is done in very verbose XML, as opposed to Apple's Interface Builder, which lets you easily drag things where you want them
Since Android is a platform and not tied to a single device, you have to design in "device independent pixels" which is much different than the iPhones set-in-stone 320x480 resolution
i learned a lot of these Web 2.0 techniques by doing them myself on my own site. if you're trying to pick up on all this in cubicle-land, it's going to take a long time to get up to speed. things as simple as RSS feeds can be become quite complicated if you're using a huge legacy content management system. things like AJAX are hard to effectively introduce into a mature J2EE web app.
i knew nothing about RSS feeds, and after a quick read at google I was able to add RSS to my site and get it online in under half an hour. this is because my code is lean, and it's mine. there was no process to follow, no code reviews, no deployment scheduling. nothing, just me and a text editor.
This seems to be an unusual year for Apple, in that most of their major innovations are in software, rather than with new gadgets and hardware. Instead of iPhones, new iMacs, etc...the real innovation I'm seeing is with iPhone software and the upcoming SDK, and the new Apple TV software. Of course, the MacBook Air is cool, but I want something powerful and it makes the MacBook Pro look much less attractive (and even dated) to me....
It all depends on your employer. I carry a Blackberry for work, but I don't worry about it at all. I'm almost *never* called after hours. Even without these things, I think stressful jobs would still creep into your personal life, regardless of what device you have clipped to your belt.
i don't know about most e-commerce operations, but where I work, we make a point to not tie ourselves in with the kinds of companies that would do these sorts of cross-sell scams. TFA says some people think of this as free money, but it's not at all. when you hand control of what your users see to a third party, that's not free.
Slashdot Mirror
I work for Rackspace full time from home, and I'm paid the same as I would be at the office. Whether I work from home or not is ultimately irrelevant, because the most important variable of all is loving your job. I work where I do because it is a truly amazing place to work.
That said, volunteering a pay cut is risky business. Your salary is a gauge of how much your company values you, so you should try to get as much as you possibly can.
A few things to keep in mind:
1. If you telecommute, it's also cheaper for the employer (less electricity, water, bandwidth, etc)
2. If you take a pay cut, any time you get a raise it's going to be less than it could have been, since most companies do raises as a percentage of your current salary
3. The downside of working exclusively from home is that it's easier to not get noticed. If you're not getting much face time with your peers, you better be doing some amazing work
this is the funniest slashdot comment i've seen in a very long time
I've used the local storage features and they're great. Even made a simple hash store based on it. But you're still stuck in the browser, so the user experience isn't quite as good as a native app. Also, you have all of the overhead of the browser, so even the leanest and meanest Javascript will have a hard time keeping up with the speed of a native app. At least, that has been my experience with the iPhone and Mobile Safari.
But it's definitely moving in the right direction, especially when you throw in CSS-driven animation (which is sadly slow on the iPhone).
And I clicked it without even looking. Shame on me. :(
Twitter's pretty handy if you want to search about something that's happening *right now* and hasn't had time to be blogged about and then indexed by the search engines. For instance, there were several helicopters flying overhead and none of us knew what was going on, so we searched Twitter and discovered that someone was filming a scene for a movie.
It's a nice UI with no driver issues and a unix terminal. That's the only reason I switched.
Objective-C does have garbage collection, but it's not available for use on the iPhone (at least not yet...maybe when the vast majority of iPhones are at least 3GS speed they'll allow it?)
It's kind of ironic that the research team is also studying how to design computer voices for cars.
I'm more of a fan of languages like Ruby than I am Java, but if you really want to run Tomcat, it might not be a bad idea to move to a VPS like Slicehost and install it yourself. You'll get much better performance than any shared host too.
I wouldn't expect iPhone apps to break across the board, but there would likely be issues with custom UI elements.
I completely agree with you, and I'm looking forward to a better Android platform in the future.
Exactly. Eclipse was my IDE of choice when I was building J2EE web apps back in the day. It's really the Android stuff that's so slow.
Thanks! I'm glad you love the app! :)
I am concerned about what will happen when iPhone goes device independent. The UIKit widgets should be fine, and hopefully my custom ones will be fine too, but I'm more concerned about images (for instance, the OS logos in the Slicehost iPhone app).
And yeah, I like them both really. I think they're both fantastic platforms. The Android Market is wonderful though. I had a bug with the Android app and I was able to push it out as soon as I finished it, which was lovely.
<ol>
<li>item 1<li>
<li>item 2<li>
<ol>
I shouldn't have listed Java, as I have no problem with the Java language; it's really Eclipse that bugs me and only because it (and the simulator) are so slow on my (fast) machine.
And all of the Android UI design tools I've used have been extremely awkward when compared to Interface Builder. In fact, I gave up on the tools and decided to simply write XML by hand (and only then could I finally get the results I wanted). As for IB being closed source and proprietary, that doesn't really matter much to me as I simply want to build the best UI possible (and IB's output is actually extremely verbose XML). I love open source and use/build plenty of it, but ultimately I'm going to use what I think are the best tools regardless of price or openness.
If Apple made a iPhone OS device with different resolution, I might be screwed. But in that case, I'd rather redesign the app to fit the specific device and its nuances, so that doesn't worry me so much. Ultimately, it's a difference in philosophy. The iPhone approach is more like native app design, and the Android approach is more fluid like web design. Both are good in different ways, but I personally prefer the precision of the iPhone OS approach.
As for Core Animation, it's great because it's very simple and intuitive. You can create very sophisticated animations with very little code. In fact, you can do the same kind of morph effects that you see in Javascript libraries like script.aculo.us and and jQuery, which is so easy. Maybe it's that easy in Android too, but on first glance it didn't seem to be to me.
Just so you know, I don't hate Android, and I will probably write another app at some point. If the iPhone wasn't out, it would be my phone of choice, and I think the openness of the platform is great, and publishing to the Android Market is drastically better than the App Store approval process.
I probably shouldn't have mentioned Java in my list of criticisms, as I really have no issue with the language. Most of my career has been in Java and I'm quite comfortable with it (though we differ on opinions about Objective-C).
I definitely agree with you about the UI designer. I found it (and third party UI designers) far more confusing than simply writing the XML, and if it had not been for the layout managers I would probably still be working on the first version of the app :)
And since I have no idea what's coming in the future for Android devices, I felt that it was smartest to design with DIPs. To me the approach is kind of similar to web design, and while I like it as a philosophical level, I found it to be clumsy in practice compared to Interface Builder.
Back to the web design point, Core Animation is quite intuitive if you're comfortable with Javascript morphing effects from libraries like script.aculo.us or jQuery. It's almost the exactly same idea, but in Objective-C and more options than just CSS rules. Maybe Android is the same way, but I don't really know.
I'm not talking about the speed of apps. I'm quite happy with the performance of my app on a G1. I'm talking about how responsive Eclipse is compared to XCode.
I've published an Android app (Slicehost), as well as a few iPhone apps, and here are the biggest differences in development that ultimately (in my opinion) make Android apps inferior:
will they offer t-shirts to people who don't participate this time? i've been out of college for a while, but i love the Summer of Code shirts....
i learned a lot of these Web 2.0 techniques by doing them myself on my own site. if you're trying to pick up on all this in cubicle-land, it's going to take a long time to get up to speed. things as simple as RSS feeds can be become quite complicated if you're using a huge legacy content management system. things like AJAX are hard to effectively introduce into a mature J2EE web app.
i knew nothing about RSS feeds, and after a quick read at google I was able to add RSS to my site and get it online in under half an hour. this is because my code is lean, and it's mine. there was no process to follow, no code reviews, no deployment scheduling. nothing, just me and a text editor.
This seems to be an unusual year for Apple, in that most of their major innovations are in software, rather than with new gadgets and hardware. Instead of iPhones, new iMacs, etc...the real innovation I'm seeing is with iPhone software and the upcoming SDK, and the new Apple TV software. Of course, the MacBook Air is cool, but I want something powerful and it makes the MacBook Pro look much less attractive (and even dated) to me....
in this case, facebook is more of a common carrier. blockbuster is the one who broke the law; they just used Beacon as the tool.
It all depends on your employer. I carry a Blackberry for work, but I don't worry about it at all. I'm almost *never* called after hours. Even without these things, I think stressful jobs would still creep into your personal life, regardless of what device you have clipped to your belt.
it's actually a charity.....
i don't know about most e-commerce operations, but where I work, we make a point to not tie ourselves in with the kinds of companies that would do these sorts of cross-sell scams. TFA says some people think of this as free money, but it's not at all. when you hand control of what your users see to a third party, that's not free.