fpotter's comments

fpotter | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: Ship 2.0 – A macOS Native Interface to GitHub Issues

Thanks! We think the subscription model is the best fit for our product. While Ship is a native Mac app, it also relies on a backend service so we have ongoing costs to cover there.

Also, with subscriptions we don't have to play the upgrade game with our customers. We can release features as they're ready instead of holding them all back so we can justify a $50 upgrade for version 3.0.

That said, we would certainly accomodate companies that find it easier to pay annually. And, if we end up doing an enterprise, on-premise version, that may have a different pricing structure.

fpotter | 9 years ago | on: Show HN: Ship 2.0 – A macOS Native Interface to GitHub Issues

Sure. The unique thing about Ship is that it is backed by a continuously synchronized local database of your issues, across all of your repos. This lets Ship run incredibly quickly. Because all of your data is already on hand and up to date, you never wait on the network.

fpotter | 14 years ago | on: Show HN: Test Drive The RubyMotion Console From Your Browser

Glad you like it! We spent all weekend hacking away on this - really excited to show it to everyone.

Behind the scenes we're running iOS apps on Macs and streaming the screen to you - sort of like a remote-desktop connection into a running app. We've built up a bunch of infrastructure to do that for our main product.

To make the RubyMotion REPL magic happen, we looked at the how RubyMotion launcher worked. RubyMotion apps expose the REPL over a UNIX socket, and you can write expressions and read results from there. So, we connect into that.

If anyone is curious, here's a DTrace script for peeking at the traffic going over the RubyMotion REPL socket: https://gist.github.com/2624774

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (June 2011)

San Francisco, CA (full-time, part-time, remote possible)

Pieceable is looking to change the way mobile mobile apps are developed, much like how WordPress changed the way many web sites are developed. We have consumer facing stuff, some developer facing stuff - fun tech to work with (iOS, Cappuccino).

Recently launched part of our product -- http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/pieceable-viewer/

Looking to find a great generalist engineer that can help us shape and build the product. We were recently funded by i/o ventures.

Interested? Drop me a note at [email protected]

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (May 2011)

San Francisco, CA - Looking for first engineering hire!

Pieceable Software is part of the current I/O Ventures class. We're building tools and services that make mobile developers' lives easier. We're also making mobile development accessible to a much wider, non-developer audience.

We just launched our first product, Pieceable Viewer -- http://www.pieceable.com/viewer http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/pieceable-viewer/

Looking for an engineering generalist with great taste. We hop between web front-end, backend, and native mobile code. Sometimes we hop into Photoshop to make UI. We're using Cappuccino, Objective-C, some Java, and some Ruby, but we're not worried if you don't have experience in some of those as long as you're excited to pick them up!

Email me for more info -- [email protected]

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer

Hey - I'm one of the Pieceable founders.

The pricing plans we've put up so far are definitely intended for agencies / dev shops that want to share apps-in-progress with clients. We know there's a lot more we could do with this, though - we're just waiting for everyone to tell us what they want before we add new pricing :-)

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: 19, developer, burnt out, advice please

Yes, go to college but don't go for the piece of paper, and don't go to a community college if you can help it.

I was in almost exactly the same situation as you at 19 (28 now). I screwed up HS to the point where no good university would accept me, and spent 18-20 doing web dev and not really growing. I realized I had to get out of there.

My advice: go to whatever 4-year, brick and mortar university will accept you and WORK HARD to prove your HS transcript is not an accurate assessment of your abilities. Live on campus. Then transfer to the best school you can that's going to give you the most opportunities for growth. I ended up at a big research university where you could get involved in research as an undergrad, and loved it.

Another thing: hang out with the right people. I think people, to a certain extent, are just a product of their peer group. If you're surrounded by smart, motivated people, it's going to rub off on you.

If you have a choice, I'd recommend not starting at a community college. It's harder. You're not going to be surrounded by people with the same mindset and goals.

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who is hiring interns? (October 2010 Edition)

Early startup based in San Francisco, working out of Dogpatch Labs. We're building Pieceable, a tool for creating native iPhone apps by piecing together different components (e.g. photo gallery, chat, blog content, etc). Would love to chat with folks interested in engineering / bizdev roles - email [email protected]

fpotter | 15 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who Is Hiring? (October 2010 Edition)

San Francisco @ Dogpatch Labs / Pieceable Software / http://pieceable.com

We're making Pieceable, a web service that enables almost anyone to build native mobile applications. The apps are assembled from pre-built "pieces", and the user only has to focus on content + styling instead of development.

We're launching v1 later this month but it only scratches the surface. There's so much more to do. We use Objective-C (w/ Three20) on iPhone, Cappuccino on the web, and (gasp!) Java on the backend.

We're looking for help on the engineering & biz-dev fronts. Email [email protected]

fpotter | 16 years ago | on: Using Thrift with Cappuccino

I think I'm guilty of that. :-)

It took me a really long time to figure out what RESTful design meant. As best I can tell, it's CRUD mapped onto the HTTP verbs.

fpotter | 16 years ago | on: Using Thrift with Cappuccino

I agree, and it's certainly what I want as a developer.

But, if I was building a web service that was supposed to be widely used (maybe some like the Yelp or Facebook API), I might think about REST. You know it's going to be immediately understood by everyone, and you don't have to worry about weird dependencies. And, being able to show examples using just curl is kind of nice, too.

fpotter | 16 years ago | on: Using Thrift with Cappuccino

Thrift solves the same problem as pretty much any other remote procedure call (RPC) system. Among RPC systems, I'd say it's notable because it works easily with over a dozen different languages and is fairly transport agnostic (you could use it over TCP, HTTP, or whatever else you like). Some care is also taken to be byte efficient, so it's not as heavy as something XML-based like SOAP or XML-RPC.

But, is your question more why would you use something like Thrift over just plain REST with JSON? You could accomplish the same things with REST/JSON, but in a lot of languages, I think the REST route involves writing more code. Instead of just making a method call and having it all happen for you, you encode some structure to JSON, do some HTTP operation, decode. I like it when that's hidden from me.

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