BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Celebrating 4 years: from a better web, to your web
BobPalmer's comments
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Show HN: My Github résumé
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: ToS;DR — TL;DR for Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
I could understand lack of support for IE7 (or perhaps crappy formatting), would raise an eyebrow at lack of support for IE8 (given the nature of the domain and that there's no compelling reason for a lack of graceful fallback in this case), but lack of IE9 support is a bit... suprising.
I certainly hope the team plans on addressing this, otherwise you're cutting a large chunk of browser users out of the picture for (from what I can see) no compelling reason related to the technical requirements of the kind of content you are delivering.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Introducing Outlook.com - Modern Email for the Next Billion Mailboxes
One complaint I heard was the lack of sorting features (sorting your inbox by subject, sender, etc.) which also drives me nuts when I use Gmail on my personal account.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump
While not directly related, this is exactly the same reason I have a beater guitar hanging directly next to my workstation - if I get into a bit of tough code, I just take a break, strum a few chords, and then get back down to business.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: It’s Time To Stop Blaming Internet Explorer
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: E-Tailer Customization: Convenient or Creepy?
If I am heading into an online retailer, or searching on the web, I'd much rather see relevant content.
I find this kind of customized experience a lot less intrusive/creepy than, say, having stuff randomly posted to my Facebook timeline, or ads showing up with my implied endorsement to my friends.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
That being said, in this specific case I think that whether or not there is a moral obligation to let a third party scrape and mix-in your data is very debatable (given that Craigslist does not provide an API).
Sure, people should play nice. And some may interpret playing nice as 'don't scrape other people's stuff for your own startup'. Or at least don't be suprised when they get pissed ;)
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
My god, I hope not. The last thing we need is legislation that determines, because I went through the work of building up and creating a successful product and now have a massive amount of valuable data, I have to share it in the interest of 'leveling the playing field'.
I've been on the side of being a content creator with a very successful site, that was promptly scraped by a competitor because I had ammassed a large amount of very useful data. This data that was, through my site, freely available to the public, and the ad revenue helped pay the bills.
So I really don't have a lot of sympathy for someone who had, as part of their business model, the practice of scraping content from someone else's site, nor do I agree that we, as developers, should have free and unrestricted access to someone else's API... they are the ones gathering/storing the data, building the network, etc.. and any use they decide to allow us is at their discretion and a gift. Nothing wrong with that.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
For example, It's probably fair to say that Monsanto is not a constructive part of the marketplace and community, but they sure do have a sustainable profit generating engine.
Edit - if you're going to downvote, how about some discussion as to how this comment does not add to the conversation... since I'm sure there was some other reason for the downvote other than not agreeing with me :)
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft’s developer problem
For web dev in general the split is pretty even, but if I am looking more at startups or small shops, the balance shifts towards Python/RoR (with Javascript being pretty ubiquitous whether you are on .Net, Java, RoR, or Python).
Still see this more of a tooling cost issue though, which makes sense. MS licensing is not cheap, although I've worked with a suprising number of startups that are on the MS stack, or using a combination of languages.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft’s developer problem
Since the article is talking about Windows Developers, it's probably fair to assume that most of them are knocking out code in Visual Studio. And regardless of one's opinions on Microsoft, it's hard to argue with the quality of their developer tools.
I'd agree then that Windows is not an ideal environment for Ruby development, but not all web dev is in Ruby, and windows is an excellent web development environment if you're building out on the Microsoft stack.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Microsoft’s developer problem
I'd expect the shift to be more a function of cost, since it's a lot easier for a startup to spin up on OSS vs. procure Windows licensing, and it's also a lot easier to get free hosting deals like Heroku, etc. than Windows (although I expect BizSpark is changing some of that).
So I do agree that there are some appealing reasons to start projects on nix and OSS, but ease of development and quality of tooling (i.e. a 'better development experience') is likely not at the top of the list.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Announcing Windows Phone 8
So if you have existing .net code, I'd try to plug it into the PCL and see which namespaces, etc. are missing then work backwards from there - even if you can only get some of your code, it's a better start than copy/pasting everything IMO.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: This page crashes Internet Explorer, even version 9 and 10.
(FYI here's some HTML/JS for the Firefox bug... Resizing the browser caused the issue to manifest in Win7 with FF 13.0.1:)
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd>;
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml>;
<head>
<title>Test</title>
<script type="text/javascript"> window.onresize = function () { alert("gg"); }; </script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>
(edited to acknowledge that this is a JS bug). And for the downvotes, at least provide a reason and/or a discussion.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: Announcing Windows Phone 8
I actually did a talk at a user group where I showed a few different apps, then translated them live between the phone, the web, and the tablet.
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: A standing desk for $22
BobPalmer | 13 years ago | on: A standing desk for $22
Best part is that I was able to precisely size it for my home office, and have it at exactly the right height. Took a bit of getting used to, but it's one of the best investments I've made. Only issue now is that my window AC unit only keeps my feet cold, since the desktop is a few inches higher than the AC unit..
BobPalmer | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Hoodsup, meet those you should meet
It would be one thing (and a lot easier to explain/understand) if it was because it's core functionality was based on a feature only implemented in Chrome - quite another if it is because the project simply is not finished.
BobPalmer | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Hoodsup, meet those you should meet
Advice: If you are intending to ride the initial wave of eyeballs from HN, best to get those kinds of kinks worked out first. I'm hard pressed to find an example of an idea where pushing it out unfinished justified the loss of initial traffic.
Like some other commentors, if I go to a site that will not grab my attention in two of the three browsers that I use in that initial click, I'm never going to go back to it again.