nickgeiger

Springshot | Lead Mobile engineer, Android and iOS | San Francisco Onsite

We're looking for a Lead Mobile Engineer to spearhead development of our Android and iOS applications. We're a small but growing company providing task-management for the aviation industry and a foundation for branching out into other industries. We solve real-world problems in industries underserved by technology, such as mobile apps for aircraft cleaners and smartwatch apps for airport baggage handlers.

Feel free to email me with questions: nick.geiger@springshot.com

I found this Apple page that appears to offer battery service for $129: https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=Unite...

I have the same "Service Battery" warning and I was hoping to eventually get this service on my 13" MacBook Air.

For families with children, I've noticed that most airports (I've been to anyway) now have a family security line, which uses traditional metal detectors instead of body scanners and doesn't try to make kids go through the scanners. The lines are also usually shorter and friendlier to the extra time it takes getting kids through the line. However, I'm usually slower than the kids because I have to get all my laptops out, belt and shoes off, etc.

If I'm by myself or somehow end up with body scanner as the only option, I always opt-out. I guess part of the theater is designed to embarrass me, but I wonder why I should be more embarrassed than the dude squatting down below me to give me the feel in front of everybody (and no, I don't want a private screening, get down there and feel me up right here in the open). Like someone else suggested, I think they're as embarrassed as I am (or am supposed to be).

Yeah, I second that. The tablet sounds great, so I placed a pre-order on Jun 28. Never got an estimated ship date then and seeing this post reminded me about it. I checked my order status on Google Wallet just now and it still gives no estimated ship date or any status whatsoever. Sorry, in a world of Amazon and Apple that have this basic delivery status down, this is a failure for Google. I'm hoping it will eventually ship and that it does prove to wow me, but this experience is definitely bad. I'm left to basically hope it arrives someday. If they just said, it'll be 5 weeks or 6 months or whatever, that would be far superior to saying nothing. Setting expectations is a key part of customer service that is missing here.

> Want to learn about the world? Dont travel! Learn a language.

I read that to mean "Learn English", which makes sense, but is not very helpful to an American because only learning English as a second language gives the advantages you described.

I totally understand your point, but coming from the other side as an American, what language should we learn?

Disclaimer: my kids will be learning Mandarin Chinese.

I didn't know what you were talking about until I went back and accidentally kudos'd the post myself. The creators "defense" sounds more like an FU or maybe that the whole thing is really more of a joke. In the end, I'm not upset that I accidentally kudos'd since to me it's pretty clear that the whole feature is meaningless anyway.

>> They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites.

PadMapper already has an app so couldn't they continue to use the listings in the app?

6 hours later still getting "unexpected error occurred"... wish I could've seen this

I also remember reading a while back that trying to disguise your email with the "username (at) gmail (dot) com" approach is worse than just putting the raw email out there because it's not only just as easy to sniff out on the page, but you can also search for it in search engines: try searching for "at gmail dot com" vs "@gmail.com" in various search engines

edit: source: http://varenhor.st/2010/01/email-at-domain-dot-com-is-making...

> Good voice recognition would also work, but I haven't seen this yet in a car.

Ditto. This seems like the obvious solution to the future of UIs, especially when driving or something else that occupies your main concentration (walking, etc). In the age of Siri and Google Maps, you'd think your car could handle simple commands like "find 123 StreetName" and map to it in the city you're in or close to. I've hated the concept of voice recognition for a long time, primarily because I don't speak clearly enough for most of the technologies to understand me, but now that it's getting better I truly believe this is the future.

Now it's like (press button, wait for beep) "Find 123 StreetName". Response: "Tuning radio to 1100 AM". "Wait, no..."

For the future think Star Trek: "Computer, where is the nearest gas station?" (note: addressing the computer to activate instead of pressing a button on the steering wheel = genius). Then a kindly female voice responds: "There is a Chevron and a 76 at the next exit, would you like me to route you to one of those?". "Yes, route me to the Chevron", etc.

Agreed. We should enforce laws and we shouldn't make laws where the cost of enforcement outweighs the benefit to society of having those laws.

Great point, making something illegal doesn't stop it, but it just raises the price. Drugs come to mind as I read this. It becomes a problem to me when making something illegal raises the cost to society overall versus actually solving whatever problem it claimed to solve. Again, drugs is a great example because we have great costs as a society for law enforcement and prisons dedicated to making drugs illegal versus quite possibly less costs if at least some drugs were legal.

To tie this back to the issue, I think SOPA taxes the Google's, Facebook's, etc of the world in an attempt to deal with piracy, which will only increase our costs as citizens for those services and not really solve the problem. Similarly, we also pay taxes to imprison drug offenders whilst drugs continue to be consumed at will.

Fair enough point and I do agree that this guy's article is perhaps lacking in proposing solutions or fully explaining the problem.

The problem as I see it is that technology allows someone to avoid paying those "other authors that specific price for their work" as long as they are willing to spend some time and energy to pirate it. I believe people with more time than money will always exist. SOPA may make piracy more difficult, but it's not going to stop it, just as killing napster didn't stop music piracy. Is it really going to create more jobs other than employing people to respond to the new SOPA takedown requests?

I think iTunes/Netflix/Rhapsody-type services are the right solution to this problem. Sure, a college kid can always pirate stuff for the sake of pirating or because they have no money, but most busy people that can afford to pay for it, as long as the asking price of the studios is not too egregious, they will usually pay it happily as long as it's easy. Simple paid options are the real solution here.

I deleted all WSJ cookies then clicked the link from the Google search results and it worked.

I can't find it via searching the app store and from the direct link (on my iPad) I get "Your request cannot be completed". Guess I'll try back tomorrow or in a few days.

Fair points all. What I read was that he'd prefer more hands-on (i.e. watch me do the craft) types of presentations, whether at school or academia, rather than didactic rules to follow or some other form. This is one type of instruction and I think it can be useful to see more of it. Nevertheless, I don't see a particular shortage of such how-tos and I think there's room for multiple types of instruction. As the author and commentators seem to agree: there is no replacement to practicing it to actually learn how to do something.

It might be unfair to compare the stock price to Google and Apple, but if you compare Gates to Ballmer, you can see that the stock has completely flattened since he took over. The rest of the article does point out some moves by him that sound really embarrassing. Having seen some videos of him doing interviews and presentations, I've had a very negative view of him and these points just reinforce that. Microsoft definitely seems on its way to irrelevance.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/chart-microsofts-performance-u...

But if we never dreamed it so, then we never would have tried and never would have broken down those other barriers. Just the fact that we've broken down all those other barriers inspires me to believe.

Sounds interesting, but shouldn't they have a huge user base before this kind of money comes in? There are a lot of interesting things going on in this space (and with this app), but minus user base and revenue, I just can't help but wonder if this kind of funding is an example of the bubble that we may well be in. Kudos to them if I'm wrong and they're actually able to mint cash from this app.

Can you elaborate on what was so incompetent on the part of humans? From my understanding, it seems like they got the crisis under control without any major radiation exposure, unlike some previous nuclear disasters, such as Chernobyl. This seems like a huge step forward and a vindication of nuclear power. If we can manage the risks (and this incident may prove that), nuclear power is our best hope to get off of fossil fuels and enter a world of zero carbon emissions. This sounds like a win to me, what am I missing?

For what it's worth, I talked to a yoga studio owner who had a horrible experience (with Living Social, not Groupon). It turns out that people looking for a cheap deal on yoga classes aren't good long-term customers so the loss never paid off. I agree that we've only heard horror stories, but I'd be curious if there are small business success stories or is the service only good for big companies who can take the loss?

Great site and thanks for the background info. As a developer, I'm always in need of good design. I love the site design and the story of how you found the designer. I hadn't heard of Forrst. If anyone has a spare invite to kick my way, I applied for membership.

Agreed. I just tried instapaper based on this statement. I use delicious for saving things for reference and tagging them, mostly as an alternative to bookmarking, particularly for saving obscure stuff that I don't want cluttering my bookmarks and I may never return to, but I really want to be able to find again if I have to. Instapaper looks cool, but doesn't seem like a replacement for that at all.

Yes, I think what you allude to is that Java is just too verbose and unnecessarily complex and I agree. That said, the tools available for Java (i.e. eclipse) are pretty nice.

Is this really due to impatience though? You've picked the cream of the crop to make your point, but arguably I'd say these guys were visionaries that stuck to their guns (skated to where the puck was going) more than they were impatient. If anything, they were very patient to let the world catch up to their ideas.

Seems like he's talking more about patience to stick with your business through "the dip" even if it's not an overnight success rather than patience to first launch. Launch away and iterate, but be patient if it's not an overnight success when you first launch it. It's a good message. Along these lines, I always like to remember that most overnight success stories were 3+ years in the making before the "overnight" success.

This has great potential if I understand it correctly. One of the things facebook doesn't seem to address for me is the need to have groups of friends. I've always wanted facebook to implement the idea of "circles" (i.e. high school friends, college friends, current friends, co-workers, etc) so I could post stuff specific to that circle of friends rather than blasting all of my FB friends, which may include all of those groups.

Maybe this feature is on the horizon in facebook, or maybe something like this new service will address it, or both. FB seems to be pretty good at quickly copying features that other services provide that are popular and align well with the whole social graph (e.g. twitter, foursquare).

I played with thefridge a bit just to try it out and it seems very alpha: it basically didn't work for me at all. It seems many features require email verification and although I followed the email link, I exited out of the password prompt and wasn't able to do much.

Maybe it's because I came in from the HN link, but I was extremely confused by this. I had never seen the draft page before so when I saw the task for "put together draft like product page", I was trying to understand what that meant and find a reference and the page was obviously not helpful so I had to read the HN comments and go find the draft page to get it. Perhaps the same idea of screenshots would work better with a different example that doesn't require as much background knowledge.