stevenp

My experience has been that finding mobile developers in general is extremely difficult, primarily because there are so many opportunities for mobile developers to make a ton of money freelancing that they don't necessarily feel the desire to commit to working for a company. Recruiting is hard in general, but looking for a skill set that's so in demand makes it much harder.

PaintCode 2 supports direct import of PSDs and adds a ton of additional features as well, like the ability to use variables and expressions to drive attributes of shapes.

If anything, this story calls out the sensationalism of a tech press that just sucks up anything it can find and runs with it as a story. We've seen unsubstantiated "reporting" of Apple rumors like this for years, and these stories never add anything valuable to the discussion. I'm glad this fake rumor got so much traction. Maybe enough people have egg on their faces that we will do better in the future. But probably not.

It's the same concept as having footnotes in printed books. Adding lots of commentary in the middle of a document breaks the flow of the text. On RG, you can read the text intact in its original form if the annotations don't interest you, and drill into the things that catch your attention. It sounds like you're questioning the concept of footnotes and annotations in general, rather than just on Rap Genius.

Ah, this is one of the problems with isolated ecosystems, I guess. Until Apple opens up AirPlay (never), I'm stuck with whatever they give me. :/

For me, AirPlay is the killer Apple TV feature. Any time a new app comes out for iOS that supports streaming video, I know I'm going to be able to play it on my television. The local content provider apps on the device don't really matter that much to me. I can even stream Amazon Prime video to my Apple TV, so I'm having a hard time seeing why I would want this instead of waiting for the next generation Apple TV.

Now I'm paranoid that I might be a weirdo for holding my phone primarily in my left hand even though I'm right-handed. Am I alone in that? I think the reason I do it is because text and navigation are generally left-to-right, so having my thumb on the left side of the screen feels more natural. The animation in this post seems to confirm that.

This is true, and Foursquare does use Background Refresh, but I don't believe that encompasses background location updates, so changing the setting to disable them in Foursquare is still necessary.

Where?

Seriously? It's not trying too hard at all.

If there's a job you really want and you're really passionate about getting it no matter what, you should do anything in your power to try to get it. If you fail, you can at least say that you tried as hard as you could and it just didn't work out.

Aww, thank you. That always makes me feel good to hear.

I've been employed as a software engineer since age 19, and I'm almost 33 now. I've worked for companies like MetLife, Tommy Hilfiger, Yahoo!, and IMVU, and my lack of a degree has never been an issue.

It helps that I was always a hobbyist (I started playing with my dad's Commodore 64 when I was 6). For the most part, everything I learned I learned by building stuff. I dropped out of college when I was 19 because my financial aid fell through, and instead of continuing with my bachelor's degree, I decided to enroll in a 9 month program at a technical school. That allowed me to fill in some of the gaps that my own tinkering didn't really cover -- things like object-oriented programming.

After that, I got my first job programming online surveys in Perl, and I've been employed ever since. Getting your foot in the door is the most important thing. You only need to find one person who believes you can do the job, and if you're intellectually curious enough, you can easily learn by doing. My first job was with a small business that didn't have anyone doing any programming, so there was nobody to tell me I wasn't good enough during the hiring process, so I was able to fake my way into having a job that gave me the employment history to work my way into bigger companies and higher salaries.

My mobile app, Routesy (http://routesy.com), falls into this category through a combination of sales of the paid version and advertising in the free version. It was one of the first 500 apps in the App Store when it launched in 2008 and has been pretty consistent in its earnings ever since then.

I'm red-green colorblind and the dots are extremely hard to see (at least for me). Any chance you might change them to be further apart in color, or use different colors? Blue and red, for instance, would not cause the same issue for me. Love the idea, though!

I will happily sell my apps for the price listed. Who should I contact for my check? :)

I had the extreme honor of seeing former Marketplace host Tess Vigeland give this speech at the World Domination Summit in Portland earlier this month. Although reading it isn't the same as hearing it spoken by her famous golden voice, I think this community will probably find it moving.

Developers get 70%, and Apple gets 30%, not the other way around. The sum paid to developers is substantially larger than the sum paid to Apple.

The pagination is dead in Safari and Chrome when looking through the company list, so I'm unable to browse the companies. Changing the number of results per page doesn't do anything either, and the "page" dropdown is empty.

That's an awesome domain name! Did you acquire it for this project, or did you already have it?

We've got two dogs at turntable.fm: my chihuahua, Miss Cleo, and a corgi puppy named Newton. Having them around is probably one of the best things about working in our office. They're both well-behaved (although Miss Cleo does bark at the food delivery people to let them know she's in charge), and they add a lot to the fun atmosphere of the office. I also am extremely grateful that I can bring her to work with me each day, because I always felt bad about leaving her at home at past jobs, especially since startup employees tend to work long hours. The relief of not having to worry about leaving her at home actually adds substantially to my own productivity.

I guess he took my advice. :)

At my current job at turntable.fm, we only have standups twice a week (Tuesday and Thursday), and I honestly was surprised at how effective that is. I've always operated under the assumption that a standup needs to happen daily to be valuable, but trying them 2x weekly has changed my mind.

I think the real problem is when a standup is the only way that a team actually communicates status. At turntable we rely heavily on chat, which also contains messages indicating when new things are being pushed, and we also make it a point to have a lot of face-to-face communication. Our twice-weekly standups are a good way to fill in the gaps, if there are any, but they are by no means the only way that people find out what's going on.

This is really cool, and the info is super-useful.

However, your SEO links at the bottom of the page make your site look unnecessarily spammy, especially because the color and font size makes it look like you're trying to hide the links, like someone might have done in GeoCities in the 90's. I understand what you're trying to achieve, but I think you could present it in a way that doesn't look so manipulative. If you make it easy to link to one of your pages, lots of travel blogs and sites will give you backlinks without you needing to create links to every possible combination on your site.

Even the URLs look unnecessarily verbose:

http://www.doineedavisafor.com/visa/us-citizen/travelling/af...

Why is the word "travelling" in the URL? I assume it's because you feel strongly that you will get indexed more prominently if someone uses that word in their search. I wouldn't count on that. You'd do better to rely on the value of your content, instead of trying to artificially game the system. If the URL was http://www.doineedavisafor.com/united-states/afghanistan, you'd still have friendly, easy-to-construct URLs, without the extra cruft.

You honestly don't believe that, if the allegations are true, Heroku has done something wrong?

Agreed. This article is completely useless.

For me, not being able to try the library in my app is a deal-breaker. I'm not willing to shell out $199 on faith alone.

The concept is interesting, although OkCupid actually launched this service in 2007 and it never really caught on. I'm guessing that they're betting mobile will change things significantly.

What I really don't understand is why the design is so bad. OkCupid has always looked reasonably impressive (at least in my opinion), and this new site feels flat and amateurish. The mobile apps don't look good either.

It almost feels like they've fallen for the new "me-too" trend of exceptionally flat design, inspired by Metro, but the execution here is just not good. The typography is particularly bad. Maybe it's just me, but I think it could really use some additional polish.

That's me! Thanks for the kind words! I'm currently working on routing, and hope to have something ready to ship really soon. :)

Latitude is already available for iOS. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-latitude/id306586497?m...

Will there be a sequel? I want to be in it! :) I'm sure there are lots of us here that would be happy to participate.