What the article didn't mention is that with Scrivener projects you can use MultiMarkdown, a derivative of John Gruber's excellent Markdown plain text to HTML converter to format text for other uses. You can then export the marked up Markdown files to HTML or LaTeX. That makes Scrivener not only an excellent writing program but a brilliant formatting one.
You can, of course, also read and write RTF and DOC formats if you don't want to manually format text.
2.5 gallons of fuel produced per plant, per day? It's nice that it might scrub pollutants but it seems the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity.
I wonder if this is the start of Microsoft finally unburdening themselves from all that awful legacy code that's been such an albatross and has contributed to such bloated apps and OS?
I use my iMac's Wi-Fi capability and use it as a base station and don't have to buy an extra router. I then connect with my MacBook Pro as does my wife with her iMac, which she uses in her studio building. There's no phone line out there for DSL.
We have a company that was successful when the founder was running then foundered under his replacement. Now the founder returns and is righting the ship. Who would have thought that Dell would follow Apple's business model?
The problem with Xbox isn't that with its capabilities but the fact that Microsoft is using them as a loss leader. They're still loosing money on them. When MS decides to start selling them for a profit and tries to leverage their monopoly position then we'll see five versions, the bottom end of which will be crippled and the top end with unnecessary features we would have to pay through the nose for.
I know that it's popular to trash IE. We all do it, But its bugs are well documented and workarounds have been posted for the vast majority of them. It's a wonderful thought to want to build for browsers that have full version 2 CSS (and JavaScript) compliance, let's see that's, uh... Well someday a browser might support all of the existing recommendation. All browsers are deficient. IE is just more so.
Working with IE requires an attitude adjustment as much as technical skills. Knowing what you can do and coding for the shortest IE conditional style sheet(s) from the beginning should shorten development time to something reasonable. Also communicating amongst different departments might be encouraged. If designs that require full alpha transparency in IE 5 are coming to you often, a friendly little sit down earlier in the process would be helpful.
If you haven't spent time with the thing you are just blowing smoke out your a##.
I spent an afternoon with a friend's Kindle. It's amazing how a couple of hours reading with the thing shot down most of my negative preconceptions. Bottom line: it just disappeared and I was reading a book.
Is it perfect? No.
Is it ugly? A bit, but remember what momma said, "Don't judge a book by its cover."
Is the page flash annoying? For the first 10 minutes or so.
Does it cost too much? Most likely.
Will I buy one? Someday. I won't pay the early adopter premium. I'd like to see more titles and want better conversion software for the Kindle format, etc., etc., etc.. But given Amazon's track record I expect those considerations to be addressed within the next year or two.
I had hoped for a better better reader from Sony but their recent track record in digital media and product innovation is awful. With Amazon on it, e-books might actually become worth the expense and effort. The Kindle is a promising version 1 effort.
You're right, it's hyperbole.
On the other hand, access to 911 is not precluded if cell phones are jammed. Businesses still have land lines. A cry of "Please call an ambulance," will get a 911 call out in the extremely rare case of actual need. I owned a restaurant for 10 years and in all those thousands of hours of operation had exactly 1 emergency call need.
If I were starting out today I would seriously consider offering Cell and non-cell seating. It would be terrific marketing.
Another endorsement for the book
on
Learning jQuery
·
· Score: 1
I know, you don't have to read or pay for a book. There's all the information online. But a well written reference can save a lot of time. Following links and ending up finding content that is poorly written and confusing or that requires reading a previous entry that in turn references yet another entry is not something that I want to waste otherwise billable hours doing.
Like a lot of other people, I've looked at a number of JavaScript libraries and decided that jQuery was the best fit for my needs. What appeals to me most is that jQuery handles most of the cross browser headaches that JavaScript brings as baggage. So I bought Learning jQuery and have been quite satisfied. jQuery is enough different from plain vanilla JavaScript that I was having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around it. A couple of hours spent working quickly through the first few chapters cleared that up.
This is a worthwhile addition to my library. The writing is clear and concepts are presented in a logical order, and the examples are actually useful. Anyone with a solid grounding in HTML and CSS who has even a basic understanding of the DOM will quickly be able to write useful scripts that tap into this lean and efficient framework. I've worked my way through most of the book and have a pretty solid intermediate grasp of jQuery and have been able to easily add it to my last couple of projects as progressive enhancement that leaves pages still usable with JavaScript turned off.
As you would expect from a book with the title, Learning jQuery, it doesn't take you into true expert territory and that's a plus. It's just the right length to provide a solid grounding without being a doorstop that never gets opened. I've bought too many "Bibles" or "Definitive Guides" in the past and never got around to working through them. Start simple and take learning 0ne-step-at-a-time works for me. Having somebody do the hard work of learning the framework, distilling the concepts down and serving them in a concise and logical order makes my learning curve so much shorter that I consider the price to be money well spent.
It's not like the current version of OS X, Tiger isn't already winning converts. After the pain of buying a new PC with Vista then going through the hassle of getting the reseller to supply a copy of XP and all the time spent installing the older OS, I'd honestly be a bit leery of a following that experience up by buying a Mac with a brand new version of OS X. If people are going to like the Mac experience they will like the current version just fine, if not they'll go back to XP. A new OS isn't going the change the differences in design philosophy between Apple and Microsoft.
In Apple's place I would have delayed a new OS and concentrated on the iPhone too.
What if websites had to meet 508 accessibility standards? Why they might actually have to be created be designers/developers with a clue. The sites might also get more usable in the process, benefiting all of us.
Actually in the larger corporations it often isn't the technical people who are clueless it's upper management that is more interested in scraping the last little bit of profit out of the website and deliberately making it less usable. Add that influence to the marketing people who are more interested in Flash and sizzle than in usability. Knowing some corporate IT people, I can see a lot of them being happy about the possibility of lawsuits forcing management to insist on making sites accessible.
Not ever envisioning writing the next social app mega hit I find comparisons to Twitter a bit amusing. I just finished my first Rails site, an intranet calendar that may see a couple of thousand visits a day if the entire company uses the thing to its full potential, which isn't likely. Even taking into account the time learning RoR it took me about as long as it would have had I done it in PHP. That's amazing. I bid the job on my old time scale and got paid for on the job training. From now on out I should be able to do more work in less time. That's the scalability I'm interested in, the kind that makes me more productive and brings home more income.
Like many self taught web designer/developers I started with CGI/Perl then moved to PHP, now Rails. Each move has been in the direction of increased productivity. I'm a just good enough programmer and am blown away by the MVC framework, DRY and Active Record. Real programmers may say, "Yeah, no big deal," but for the humble masses that just want the ability to deliver a custom site that will never see high traffic volume, the processing effeciency of a framework just isn't an issue. If you want to create the next coming of Face Book hire real programmers. If you want your website to do what you want and not force-fit your expectations to the constraints of an out of the box CRM or CMS, all at a reasonable price, then RoR looks really fine.
"What is exciting about this tool or blog engine is that even a lay person can easily master its use and get his or her blog up and running in no time"
Right.. so I guess this is why it needed a whole book about it? You can't claim both now, can you.
And why not?
Because something is easy to get going with doesn't mean that gaining mastery of it isn't helped by reading good instructional material.
Haven't read this book, but can see its value (if well written). Even though WP has extensive online documentation many still find that a good step-by-step tutorial is easier to learn from.
That's an excellent synopsis but you're forgetting the non profit site. True, only a few people care about the content but they are often passionate about it, wanting current information about their organization. Forget that the sites for all volunteer organizations look 10 years old and ugly. Non profits are one of the few places where the webmaster is alive and well, though not remunerated.
One of the reasons that Moore's law has so accurately predicted the continual doubling of storage and speed is that it offers companies an excellent guideline for product roll-out. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customers expect computers to get more-bigger-better-faster at that rate, so companies have a production target. That provides a much more stable product ecosystem than one that is marked by a punctuated equilibrium of sudden large advances followed by unpredictable periods of status quo.
Apple gets too much attention from their current way of doing things to want to change. They probably get more blog attention from outsiders guessing what is coming out at the next conference than they would letting employees blog or pre-announcing products. Apple's policy of secrecy and Job's showmanship have been a winning combination.
Connections may be fast for you and the people you know but the last surveys I've seen show that over 40% of the US is still on dialup. And broadband in the US is defined as 128K or faster not the 1.5 megabit connection used for calculations in the article. Upload speeds are correspondingly slow.
Maybe if you are living in a place where more people enjoy faster connections you can ignore load times. You certainly can't for commercial sites in America.
What practical effect will this have? As long as browsers will render junk (X)HTML most people won't bother with an updated standard any more than they do the present one. Learning any proper coding system is work. What's the incentive other than pride in the craft? Firefox, IE, etc. make learning standards optional, which is just another word for more work.
Slashdot Mirror
What the article didn't mention is that with Scrivener projects you can use MultiMarkdown, a derivative of John Gruber's excellent Markdown plain text to HTML converter to format text for other uses. You can then export the marked up Markdown files to HTML or LaTeX. That makes Scrivener not only an excellent writing program but a brilliant formatting one.
You can, of course, also read and write RTF and DOC formats if you don't want to manually format text.
So if solar power isn't abundant enough for northern and southern climates, how efficient will a solar coal plant scrubber be?
2.5 gallons of fuel produced per plant, per day? It's nice that it might scrub pollutants but it seems the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity.
I wonder if this is the start of Microsoft finally unburdening themselves from all that awful legacy code that's been such an albatross and has contributed to such bloated apps and OS?
I use my iMac's Wi-Fi capability and use it as a base station and don't have to buy an extra router. I then connect with my MacBook Pro as does my wife with her iMac, which she uses in her studio building. There's no phone line out there for DSL.
We have a company that was successful when the founder was running then foundered under his replacement. Now the founder returns and is righting the ship. Who would have thought that Dell would follow Apple's business model?
The problem with Xbox isn't that with its capabilities but the fact that Microsoft is using them as a loss leader. They're still loosing money on them. When MS decides to start selling them for a profit and tries to leverage their monopoly position then we'll see five versions, the bottom end of which will be crippled and the top end with unnecessary features we would have to pay through the nose for.
80% of the time adjusting for IE? Wow.
I know that it's popular to trash IE. We all do it, But its bugs are well documented and workarounds have been posted for the vast majority of them. It's a wonderful thought to want to build for browsers that have full version 2 CSS (and JavaScript) compliance, let's see that's, uh... Well someday a browser might support all of the existing recommendation. All browsers are deficient. IE is just more so.
Working with IE requires an attitude adjustment as much as technical skills. Knowing what you can do and coding for the shortest IE conditional style sheet(s) from the beginning should shorten development time to something reasonable. Also communicating amongst different departments might be encouraged. If designs that require full alpha transparency in IE 5 are coming to you often, a friendly little sit down earlier in the process would be helpful.
If you haven't spent time with the thing you are just blowing smoke out your a##.
I spent an afternoon with a friend's Kindle. It's amazing how a couple of hours reading with the thing shot down most of my negative preconceptions. Bottom line: it just disappeared and I was reading a book.
Is it perfect? No.
Is it ugly? A bit, but remember what momma said, "Don't judge a book by its cover."
Is the page flash annoying? For the first 10 minutes or so.
Does it cost too much? Most likely.
Will I buy one? Someday. I won't pay the early adopter premium. I'd like to see more titles and want better conversion software for the Kindle format, etc., etc., etc.. But given Amazon's track record I expect those considerations to be addressed within the next year or two.
I had hoped for a better better reader from Sony but their recent track record in digital media and product innovation is awful. With Amazon on it, e-books might actually become worth the expense and effort. The Kindle is a promising version 1 effort.
You're right, it's hyperbole. On the other hand, access to 911 is not precluded if cell phones are jammed. Businesses still have land lines. A cry of "Please call an ambulance," will get a 911 call out in the extremely rare case of actual need. I owned a restaurant for 10 years and in all those thousands of hours of operation had exactly 1 emergency call need. If I were starting out today I would seriously consider offering Cell and non-cell seating. It would be terrific marketing.
I know, you don't have to read or pay for a book. There's all the information online. But a well written reference can save a lot of time. Following links and ending up finding content that is poorly written and confusing or that requires reading a previous entry that in turn references yet another entry is not something that I want to waste otherwise billable hours doing.
Like a lot of other people, I've looked at a number of JavaScript libraries and decided that jQuery was the best fit for my needs. What appeals to me most is that jQuery handles most of the cross browser headaches that JavaScript brings as baggage. So I bought Learning jQuery and have been quite satisfied. jQuery is enough different from plain vanilla JavaScript that I was having a bit of trouble wrapping my head around it. A couple of hours spent working quickly through the first few chapters cleared that up.
This is a worthwhile addition to my library. The writing is clear and concepts are presented in a logical order, and the examples are actually useful. Anyone with a solid grounding in HTML and CSS who has even a basic understanding of the DOM will quickly be able to write useful scripts that tap into this lean and efficient framework. I've worked my way through most of the book and have a pretty solid intermediate grasp of jQuery and have been able to easily add it to my last couple of projects as progressive enhancement that leaves pages still usable with JavaScript turned off.
As you would expect from a book with the title, Learning jQuery, it doesn't take you into true expert territory and that's a plus. It's just the right length to provide a solid grounding without being a doorstop that never gets opened. I've bought too many "Bibles" or "Definitive Guides" in the past and never got around to working through them. Start simple and take learning 0ne-step-at-a-time works for me. Having somebody do the hard work of learning the framework, distilling the concepts down and serving them in a concise and logical order makes my learning curve so much shorter that I consider the price to be money well spent.
It's not like the current version of OS X, Tiger isn't already winning converts. After the pain of buying a new PC with Vista then going through the hassle of getting the reseller to supply a copy of XP and all the time spent installing the older OS, I'd honestly be a bit leery of a following that experience up by buying a Mac with a brand new version of OS X. If people are going to like the Mac experience they will like the current version just fine, if not they'll go back to XP. A new OS isn't going the change the differences in design philosophy between Apple and Microsoft.
In Apple's place I would have delayed a new OS and concentrated on the iPhone too.
What if websites had to meet 508 accessibility standards? Why they might actually have to be created be designers/developers with a clue. The sites might also get more usable in the process, benefiting all of us.
Actually in the larger corporations it often isn't the technical people who are clueless it's upper management that is more interested in scraping the last little bit of profit out of the website and deliberately making it less usable. Add that influence to the marketing people who are more interested in Flash and sizzle than in usability. Knowing some corporate IT people, I can see a lot of them being happy about the possibility of lawsuits forcing management to insist on making sites accessible.
Not ever envisioning writing the next social app mega hit I find comparisons to Twitter a bit amusing. I just finished my first Rails site, an intranet calendar that may see a couple of thousand visits a day if the entire company uses the thing to its full potential, which isn't likely. Even taking into account the time learning RoR it took me about as long as it would have had I done it in PHP. That's amazing. I bid the job on my old time scale and got paid for on the job training. From now on out I should be able to do more work in less time. That's the scalability I'm interested in, the kind that makes me more productive and brings home more income.
Like many self taught web designer/developers I started with CGI/Perl then moved to PHP, now Rails. Each move has been in the direction of increased productivity. I'm a just good enough programmer and am blown away by the MVC framework, DRY and Active Record. Real programmers may say, "Yeah, no big deal," but for the humble masses that just want the ability to deliver a custom site that will never see high traffic volume, the processing effeciency of a framework just isn't an issue. If you want to create the next coming of Face Book hire real programmers. If you want your website to do what you want and not force-fit your expectations to the constraints of an out of the box CRM or CMS, all at a reasonable price, then RoR looks really fine.
A development grade Mac costs slightly less than an equivalent Dell.
And why not?
Because something is easy to get going with doesn't mean that gaining mastery of it isn't helped by reading good instructional material.
Haven't read this book, but can see its value (if well written). Even though WP has extensive online documentation many still find that a good step-by-step tutorial is easier to learn from.
I'm just to busy being productive and I can't remember which stack of papers my keyboard is under.
That's an excellent synopsis but you're forgetting the non profit site. True, only a few people care about the content but they are often passionate about it, wanting current information about their organization. Forget that the sites for all volunteer organizations look 10 years old and ugly. Non profits are one of the few places where the webmaster is alive and well, though not remunerated.
You're right. The comment title was not carefully chosen.
One of the reasons that Moore's law has so accurately predicted the continual doubling of storage and speed is that it offers companies an excellent guideline for product roll-out. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customers expect computers to get more-bigger-better-faster at that rate, so companies have a production target. That provides a much more stable product ecosystem than one that is marked by a punctuated equilibrium of sudden large advances followed by unpredictable periods of status quo.
Apple gets too much attention from their current way of doing things to want to change. They probably get more blog attention from outsiders guessing what is coming out at the next conference than they would letting employees blog or pre-announcing products. Apple's policy of secrecy and Job's showmanship have been a winning combination.
Does this hint at an alliance of the "enemy of my enemy is my ally" type or it just the currently cool kids getting together to be, well, cool?
Connections may be fast for you and the people you know but the last surveys I've seen show that over 40% of the US is still on dialup. And broadband in the US is defined as 128K or faster not the 1.5 megabit connection used for calculations in the article. Upload speeds are correspondingly slow.
Maybe if you are living in a place where more people enjoy faster connections you can ignore load times. You certainly can't for commercial sites in America.
Yes, and we'll have so much more fun!!!!
What practical effect will this have? As long as browsers will render junk (X)HTML most people won't bother with an updated standard any more than they do the present one. Learning any proper coding system is work. What's the incentive other than pride in the craft? Firefox, IE, etc. make learning standards optional, which is just another word for more work.