MehdiEG's comments

As far as I can see from a completely outsider perspective, the Maemo / Meego / Jolla team have always been severely under-resourced, have always been the underdog and have always deeply suffered from the political turmoil happening above their head while they were at Nokia.

One thing they have never been however is vaporware. They have always delivered. And what they've delivered, particularly with Meego, was superb. Meego was especially impressive given that in the last few months before its release, they had for all intent and purpose already been fired from Nokia. That they managed to pull together, keep working on it and release something of that caliber when they knew that Meego had no future at Nokia is pretty incredible.

It's obvious that Jolla is extremely unlikely to ever go mainstream. But that's not the point. They're clearly a team of talented, passionate and persistent hackers that can create products that manage to be delightful to use, open source and very hackable. That's why I find the lack of interest from the HN community, which is usually all over these type of projects, to be surprising.

For those who are wondering why this is up on the front page: Jolla is launching their first handset tonight in Helsinki: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/jolla-sailfish-os-phone-...

I always wondered why Jolla is getting so little love from HN. To me and from a geek / hacker point of view, Jolla is an awful lot more interesting than Android.

Anyone who's had the chance to own a Meego device knows how incredibly talented and passionate the team behind Jolla is. I'm really looking forward to see how the OS and apps feel on Jolla. The OS also appears to be a lot more open and hackable than Android (although the proof will be in the pudding so we'll see how it all pans out).

It's already been done. Get yourself an N9 (same hardware as the lumia 800) or an N950 (most beautiful phone hardware I've ever had the chance to use but hard to come by as only a few thousand units were produced) and install nitdroid.

The problem is that the OS and hardware really go hand in hand. Installing a completely different OS than the one the hardware was designed for often results in a disappointing device. The N950 running Meego for example is still to this day what I would consider the pinnacle of hardware and software engineering when it comes to smartphones. It looks gorgeous, it feels amazing - no other smartphone I've ever used (and I've used many) comes close.

But install Android on it and it suddenly looks and feels like an unsightly brick. The way android looks like, the UI gestures, the way Android is meant to be used in general is different than Meego and it doesn't fit the hardware at all. It's loads of subtle and seemingly small details but the end result is a very unpleasant device.

I actually went to OVH a couple of days ago. I needed a new server and wanted to give them a try. But they're not accepting new clients anymore: http://www.ovh.co.uk/a1186.SoldOut

I didn't know about online.net. Shame I didn't see this a few days earlier. I would have given them a try.

It's worth putting this in context. Hetzner provides really beefy dedicated servers for ridiculously low prices [1].

You get great support (always had phone calls answered pretty much instantly and emails answered within a few minutes and all the techs I've dealt with knew what they were doing).

You can issue automated hardware resets and even get a remotely-controlled KVM attached to tweak the BIOS or regain access to your machine if you messed up the networking config (usually only takes a few minutes to get the KVM attached).

Orders for new hardware are also really fast - dealt with within the hour and often in under 15 minutes.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch. If you host at Hetnzer, you have to be aware of the reasons why they're so cheap, namely:

1) The servers are 100% unmanaged. They'll install new hardware for you if you ask them but everything else is up to you.

2) A lot of their hardware is desktop-grade, e.g. Intel Core i7 CPUs and non-ECC RAM. They do have some server-grade hardware in their high-end range however.

3) Their servers are in Germany. So you get quite a bit of latency if accessed from Asia or the West Coast of the US (see [2]).

4) They don't have any DDoS protection. In case of a DDoS, your server will get null-routed (but they tell you first). Again: 100% unmanaged. Up to you to deal with it. I've been lucky enough to not have to deal with a DDoS but my first port of call would probably be CloudFlare it it happened.

Provided that you're happy to do some sys admin, Hetzner is brilliant for a personal server, a CI server or even a prod server for a bootstrapped startup.

For literally next to nothing, you get a really powerful machine that will easily handle big traffic spikes without a breaking a sweat. And dedicated machine means that you get excellent and consistent CPU performance and disk I/O. If and when your startup takes off and you get funding, you can then choose between hiring a sys admin or moving to a more expensive host that offers a more managed setup.

[1] http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver-pr...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898714

I researched this 3 years ago for our startups and couldn't find anything really good that lets me easily and securely share passwords on a need-to-know basis to team members and see who has access to what. Which baffles me because this is a problem that every single startup and small company must have.

In the end, we went for https://www.passpack.com/. They're clearly a small shop but it's been designed from the ground up for teams, they appear to care and know what they're doing when it comes to security (only have their word for it though obviously). Their web interface doesn't look like much but it's insanely fast and really well thought out, making inputing and looking for password really quick and easy. For some reason their pricing is ridiculously low - it costs next to nothing.

Two bad points: no native mobile app, making it a huge pain to look up password on the go + paranoid on the security front, which means that logging in is always a big pain. That unfortunately means that we were never able to convince anyone to really embrace it. Convenience and security is always a balancing act and Passpack is definitely leaning on the security side (understandable obviously). TBH, if they had a good native iOS app, I think it could make a difference for them. Instead of being this really annoying tool you're forced to use at work, they could become something that everyone uses as part of their daily personal life which would make it easier to get it adopted at work.

This is very much what I feel every single time I read a tech-related article in mainstream press. The cluelessness of most mainstream "tech journalists" is spectacular. I see no reason why reporting on other matters would be any better, which is quite scary.

Add CRMs to that list. There are probably more CRM applications out there than there are companies on this planet :)

In the same situation here. A couple of things that made a huge difference on the food and grocery front for us were:

- Ordering regular organic vegetable and meat boxes (we get a vegetable box once a week and meat once a fortnight). Find who does that in your area and give it a try. We use http://www.riverford.co.uk/ and I can't say enough good things about them.

- Online groceries. For the longest time, I thought people shopping for groceries online were weird. Now I understand. Give it a try - it will save you so much time and energy. The first shop is a bit of a pain but the subsequent ones are really quick as you can just go through what you bought previously and pick what you're running out of. In the UK, we tried ASDA (messed up every delivery - awful customer service), Tesco (can't remember why we don't use them anymore. Think they were neither really good nor really bad) and Ocado (absolutely wonderful in every respect. And, just as they say, not more expensive than ASDA or Tesco).

If you believe that success if proportional to the amount of time you dedicated to the project, brace yourself for a very cruel disappointment. This is just not how it works in startup-land, sorry :)

But don't obsess about trying to crack a big-bang launch. Big-bang launches are the ones we all hear about. But they're the exception rather than the rule. And they're not necessarily a good thing (remember Color?).

Far more startups become successful the old-fashioned way: by getting one customer at a time over weeks, months and years. In your case, you've got the ideal business for this: you've got a very niche product aimed at a fairly small, well-defined and reasonably easy-to-reach audience.

So forget about getting to the front page of HN, TechCrunch or other startup hipster places. Just go and get your customers: - contribute to discussion forums about windows development and have your product in your signature. Promote it there if allowed - reach out to relevant bloggers - attend local Windows developer meetups. Some have open-mic opportunities for local startups to promote themselves. - join BizSpark and see if Microsoft would be interested in helping - experiment with a few Google Adwords campaigns - ...

There are two main reasons why people attend conferences.

For some people (typically execs, sales people, recruiters, PR people, consultants, freelance professionals, etc), conferences are mostly or entirely about networking. They don't attend the sessions or, when they do, it's because it's the only place in the venue where they can sit down and catch up on emails.

At larger events like Mobile World Congress, those who know how networking works don't even waste their time attending the main event. They have pre-arranged meetings with all the key people they want to meet. And when they're not in a pre-arranged meeting, they are at one of the unofficial fringe events or parties, which is where the real networking happens (and they have, of course, arranged to get an invitation to the key fringe events as the best networking events are often invite-only).

For others, and most software developers would fall in that category I guess, conferences are mostly about personal development. No, you won't hear anything at a conference that you wouldn't have been able to find online. But a good speaker will instill a sense of energy and enthusiasm that you would never get from reading an article or even watching a YouTube video.

Because you're away from your daily grind and because of the way the content is delivered (you have to sit through an entire session and listen - unlike an article, a book or a video, you can't stop half way through or skim it), you also think very differently and tend to be a lot more open-minded and receptive to new ideas. So you almost always end up learning things that wouldn't normally have bothered to even read about otherwise or that you wouldn't have properly understood.

Not to mention the fact that you're surrounded with people coming from very difference backgrounds and industries than those at your workplace. You'll often pick up very different ways of thinking that might very well change your approach to your work.

Personally, in the good old days when I was "just" a software developer and didn't care much about networking, I loved attending conferences. I would leave a good conference bursting with energy and enthusiasm. My best work would always happen after a conference. That's when you feel the most ready to tackle hard problems and don't mind powering through the statu-quo to make things better.

Try it - if you're passionate about your craft, chances are good conferences will make you a better craftsman.

One last tip that bit us hard: beware of universal apps (apps designed for both iPhone and iPad).

Once you've published your app as universal, there is no way back. You can't decide in a subsequent update to revert to an iPhone-only or iPad-only app - Apple won't let you.

So if you start with an iPhone app, and then put together an iPad version of the UI just to try out and publish it as a universal app, you'll be stuck with having to provide an iPad version of your app for the rest of times. Even if you realize that the iPad version isn't worth it for your app and that nobody uses it, you won't be able to discontinue it.

So think very carefully before flicking that switch.

For a moment here, I thought I was reading The Onion :) Anyone knows who is this outsourcing company? They seem to be doing a decent enough job.

A surprisingly good list. Beyond the xib issue, which other have talked about, I would add a couple of points:

- If developing a trivial utility app you're expecting to release quickly, target iOS version N-1. Any user who is more that one major iOS version behind won't be the type of user who will download your app (or any app really).

If developing anything more ambitious, target the latest iOS version only and take full advantage its new APIs. By the time you're ready to go mainstream (a few iterations of the app under your belt, nailed your marketing strategy, etc), there will have been at least one new major iOS version released and any time and effort you spent writing code for older iOS versions will have been wasted.

(talking from experience here :)

- Before writing a single line of code, sort out your logging. At the very least, use a handful of macros like [0] to print the class, message name and line number when logging and to exclude debug log statements from release builds. Or check out something like CocoaLumberjack (haven't tried myself yet but writing this made me realize I need to sort out my own logging system so will give it a shot).

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/969130/how-to-print-out-t...

Completely agree on that. That's actually the very first Facebook feature that got me excited and that might make me go back to Facebook.

This is also the obvious next step for social networks and one that quite a few startups (including ourselves) have been working on for the past couple of years under the "people discovery" banner. Can't wait to see this in action.

Like many, it's probably one of the first "feature" I bumped into with Gmail and that still annoys the hell out of me years later.

Wow, this is going to be one spectacular flop.

Or how to turn something ridiculously simple (go to here.com to get Nokia Maps on your iPhone, since this is probably what Nokia is aiming at here) into an incomprehensible buzzword soup.

Very nice. I actually thought of implementing this a few months ago but a quick Google search brought up http://hackerslide.com/ (also open source), which works fine as well.

Instinctive understanding of programming constructs can vary widely from person to person. I never had any problems understanding loops - it always seemed obvious to me. I was happily coding away in Turbo Pascal at the age of 8 with nobody but a big fat programming book to help me.

On the other side, I was pair-programming with a friend during an intro to programming course in my first year of college and he just couldn't get his head around loops. He was smart and incredibly hard-working (and went on to complete two MSc in parallel). But loops, the difference between a while loop and a for loop, and programming constructs in general just didn't make sense to him. He had to work really hard to figure out how to use them.

I'm sure there have been studies that explain this but I should get back to now rather than start doing some academic research....

I haven't tried the game yet but at first sight, it seems to be heavily inspired by Meego Harmattan / Symbian Belle - a beautifully designed UI (at least in its Meego implementation) that unfortunately never went anywhere due to Nokia killing both Meego and Symbian before it was even released.