HN user
Howdy!
https://www.philcrosby.com https://github.com/philc
(I'm one of the authors) Love seeing this on HN today! It seems to get some front page attention every couple of years. Thank you everyone for the encouragement!
Related: last week I published a very similar extension, but for Google Sheets. https://github.com/philc/sheetkeys
You crushed it Jez! I wish we could work on more projects together.
The five of us who built this spend a lot of time reviewing code each day and thought it should be less depressing and more fun. Let us know if you have improvement ideas, or even better, pull requests on Github. Thanks, and enjoy!
I wrote this for TextMate. Not nearly as good as built-in support, but I program 10 hours a day with it and it's saved me millions of keystrokes. https://github.com/philc/textmatevim
I wrote LiveCSS for this purpose.
https://github.com/ooyala/livecss
It's far simpler in that it just reloads your CSS continually. We use it all the time at Ooyala to put our favorite text editor and a web browser side-by-side and hack away.
Ooyala in Mountain View. http://www.ooyala.com/about/careers
For those who really want "TextMate + vim", until the newer options mature, you can try this.
Additionally, try typing fewer characters when you cd in the general case: https://github.com/philc/fuzzycd
I've been using this for a few years and it's been a joy.
Won't CTRL+T (or CMD+T) open a new tab and focus the URL bar?
In addition to escape, link hints (type "f") also work on that [x] button.
Unfortunately Safari doesn't really have a well-developed extensions system. Until they add one, extensions like this will only be available for chrome and firefox.
I'm one of the developers for Ninjawords. Thanks everyone for sharing in our frustration. I thought this was a bit ridiculous as we were going back and forth with Apple, but I didn't know it would cause such public outrage. I guess Apple is really striking a nerve recently in exercising their totalitarian App Store powers. I hope they're interested in rectifying the developer experience, because it really is a great device to build software for. It's just that months of rejection over an innocuous educational utility tends to crush any excitement, you know?
Also consider Heroku if it's a ruby webapp you're building. It's free until you need more resources, and is zero-fuss to get something deployed and set up.
Great idea. I'd like to see what new stuff people have been doing with js. I built http://ninjawords.com and http://jjot.com about a year ago.
I feel like 200 would be too many. with 40, you can meet most everyone there and remember faces.
That's really neat. Nice work.
I've wanted a good implementation of web-irc for a long time. That alone is cool enough for me.
However, the UI is really bad; I'm not sure where to begin. Once I log into an irc server, how do I play games? I remember seeing a selection for it when I first came to mibbit, but now it is gone.
When I first start chatting my messages aren't visible (because they're scrolled offscreen).
And it's really, painfully ugly. You might want to recruit a UI designer, or steal some styles from adium or xchat.
stikkit is cool, but doesn't quite hit the nail we're aiming for. It turns out to be another wiki product, similar to BaseCamp, while Jjot is a light-weight WYSIWYG notes application. Try playing with Jjot for a few minutes to see what I mean. An example:
To edit one of my notes on Stikkit, I have to
- scan through the titles of my notes
- guess which one contains the info I need, click it, (hit back and click again if I'm wrong)
- find a small "edit" button somewhere on the page
- wait for the page to reload
- enter some text using some markup language
- hit save
With Jjot:
- scan the contents of my notes (they're all on the same page, fully editable)
- Edit the one I'm looking for, using a visual editor
That's it. No save buttons to worry about, no markup language (Jjot uses a rich text editor), and everything is on the same page. It really is sticky notes on the web.
I think Stikkit is a promising product, but I wouldn't say it meets the same needs as Jjot. If I wanted something heavier than Jjot, I might consider Stikkit, BaseCamp, or maybe an online word processor like writewith.
I also find it mildly annoying that they label my contacts "peeps," but to each his own.
Hey, glad to find this here. I was just about to post it.
This is my startup; I'm working with one other guy full time on it. We applied to ycombinator, got the in-person interview, but didn't make the summer program. You can't win them all.
I made this because I felt there's really no simple & fast way to take down short notes (meeting/class notes, todos, brainstorming, random links) online. I don't know about you, but I've been using Gmail drafts, writely, and 37signals stuff for some time and it's not really designed for this use case. I find myself thinking "just show me my notes -- don't make me click on a link to see each one" when I use products like Gmail drafts.
So here's our stab at this market. It follows the same design philosophy I try to use everywhere -- simple, lean, focused. If you've ever watched a casual computer user flounder when trying a new web2.0 app, you'll know the value of being brutally straight-forward and obvious. Jjot is obvious: you've got a bunch of boxes that look like paper notes, and you can type in them. There's a lot more to it, but that's the gist.
We launched recently and the reception has been pretty good. We were on delicious popular over the weekend, and were (inexplicably) moved from that list to web2.0 popular- http://del.icio.us/popular/web2.0
There's been a few posts about Jjot on the web, including one from lifehacker. Now that we've got a few users to get feedback from and improve the service, we can really work on getting some more traction. Running a service with users is 5x as fun as the building stage. All of a sudden, a lot of people care about and take notice of each change you make.
I'd love to hear any comments/ideas/criticisms; news.yc always has good product feedback. If anyone is curious as to how this thing is built (it uses some fancy client-side coding), I'd be happy to talk about it.
Both of those sound just fine, and I think the extra clutter you'll have in your namcespaces will be worth the extra exposure you get from not forcing people to sign up.
Juwo, this is the most confusing thing I've ever looked at. I have a feeling the product is not very focused itself, and thus is hard to convey. If you can't convey it in a single page with a few terse sentences (ala skype.com), you might need to redesign and make it simpler.
I'm glad you're a Christian, but a company-about page is probably not the best place for pro/con links. It's distracting.
And consider that they their products thus far are outlook-based. MS does a lot of the work for you if you use their tools and language.
Why do you have ads on your about page?
I don't think you'd join something like Xobni and also do a startup on the side; Matt didn't mean that. The point of joining a startup this early is that it becomes your startup. Same concept as finding someone who's already tackling the same problem you were planning to, and joining up.
"Job opportunities" usually give Benefits and Work-life Balance. Xobni would give you (hopefully) lucrative equity and the sprint-or-die startup pace that most people here are looking for (along with the rewards that come with it).
Rails + Mysql
My webapps are requiring a lot of client side logic to be really interactive, so I've found that the biggest producivity factor is what I'm doing with Javascript. The Rails code I've been writing is mostly trivial; as long as it lets me talk to the database easily, I feel like any language could be used on the backend. However, I do love scripting in Ruby, and Rails makes it easy to use its DB abstractions in external scripts.
The best gains on the client-side come from using a good library. I've gone from Prototype/scriptaculous to YUI-ext to Mootools. I love Mootools. I've never been able to bring myself to try Dojo; it seems like it's trying to put the Java back into Javascript. What do you think?
Kudos for adding (useful) complexity to the application without requiring any extra user interaction. This is the way to implement features.
I remember meeting someone during the WFP interviews that was still employed. What constraints do you have on people still working at tech firms like Google or MS?
Have you ever had any issues with IP?
Not necessarily, but building a web app turns out to be a good way to build a product. He wrote about some advantages of doing so here- http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html
I'm afraid of sites like tech crunch destroying me. I had some trouble with a read-only site when it started getting hundreds of digg users a minute, and it was a simple application. God help you if you have a dynamic front page and a web app that does lots of reads and writes.
Scaling for mass media traffic seems like such a waste -- the big-news-site traffic comes right when you launch, and then that's just the time you want lots of capacity and don't have it yet. After the traffic leaves, you don't want it anymore.
Has anyone tried something like media temple for temporary scaling? I'd be tempted to throw a site on there to see if they can handle a tech crunching.
Great idea; it sounds like someone at Yahoo is taking Christensen's advice.
This will only work well if the division is given enough autonomy. If a small division is trying to help meet the massive revenue goals of mainstream Yahoo, it's just not going to work. They're not going to get the resources or motivation that they need.
That's the problem with Google's 20% time. You're not really encouraged to do little projects, something that a startup might do. Instead, you're encouraged to contribute to the bottom line of Google, which severely limits the kind of things you can work on (i.e., "do search or you're wasting your time"). This is compounded by the fact that your 20% time is inconsistently factored into your employee evaluation (for better or for worse).