Helios is also the moniker of a very "cloud-like" (ambient) composer named Keith Kenniff. His music is excellent for coding when you need that superior downtempo thinking background noise.
While we're discussing him, it's worth checking out another project of his, Goldmund. It's piano centric music that really embraces the minimalist aspects of some of the newer neo-classical artists (think Ólafur Arnalds, Max Richter, Nils Frahm or Dustin O'Halloran).
I thought the same thing when I saw this. Even if you haven't heard of Helios you've probably heard Keith's music on TV or online. The website for his film, tv, and ad work is http://www.unseen-music.com/
Off topic: The ultra light custom fonts a lot of websites use nowadays (looks like "Bariol" on this site), do they look bad to anyone other than me? Both in Firefox and Opera (Linux) many of the lines are invisible or barely visible (example: http://i.imgur.com/Yk0Q83G.png ). In Chrome they look a little bit better.
Same on my iPhone, all the 'd' characters don't show up properly at all. Had to read the article zoomed right up so that the spider thin d characters were visible at all.
Please change the font.
In my experience, the issues w/ thin font weights tend to be worse on Windows & Linux. Worth keeping in mind if you're using these fonts (particularly if you're using some of the free fonts from Google Web Fonts that aren't necessarily well-hinted)
I havn't done enough iOS to really speak intelligently about it, but this looks like a great place to start without limiting flexibility.
Although "an extensible open-source
mobile backend framework" seems to say that it also applies to non iOS, it doesn't seem that it does. Is it more suited for iOS, or iOS only?
Many services that Helios provides are either iOS specific backend integrations (Push Notifications & Store Kit transaction verifications) or has client-side components (A/B testing, better client-side networking libraries)
Just FYI, Helios Software Solutions in England is the maker of the longstanding and widely distributed TextPad text editor for Windows. In case this would present a potential name conflict. (I don't know -- just mentioning.)
I've been thinking that Parse (and StackMob, Kinvey et al) need to provide a similar self-deployable solution at a reasonable price; this might be the motivation they need to do so.
This might cannibalise their business model in such an undeveloped market, they are all about lock in currently. There is definitely space in the market for an open source based MBaaS/BaaS that allows you to roll your own or use their hosted version.
I've been debating using something like Parse or Azure as a backend, and this looks like a nice alternative as I'm usually a roll-your-own-solution kinda guy.
A massive limitation of Parse.com is with their Javascript SDK - you have to expose your app keys to the client and the SDK doesn't work at all on any version of IE unless you have SSL enabled.
1) There are Access Control Lists which should help with that. Also, note that Parse gives you a Javascript key which is separate from your master key. Though I'm a longtime Parse user, I have not spent much time with the JS SDK on the client (as opposed to Cloud Code, where no keys are exposed), so I can't really say that this just "solves the problem."
2) Wouldn't any similarly-situated Javascript library face the same problems, with Access Control Lists probably being the most practical solution?
3) Moreover, with any mobile backend, you must assume that the keys that ship within the code of your native app will be public. So you should be using Access Control Lists if you're using the iOS SDK, for example.
I've recently been working on a Node backend for IAP verification and providing signed S3 URLs for downloadable content - something like this would have halved the time it took. Good work Matt!
It is a great start. The passbook implementation looks to be basic right now. I would love to be able to combine this with https://github.com/frozon/passbook for passbook support and git@github.com:grocer/grocer.git for push notifications.
The code would have better test coverage and more people to support the project.
Not to rain on the parade, but I just got started with ios and I gave up on getting AFIncrementalStore to work properly. RestKit looks much more solid to me. Can any actual ios developers (e.g. someone with more than 14 days of experience) comment on that?
It's really awesome to see Heroku getting into the mobile BaaS industry. I think they have a lot of expertise that they can lend and I'm even more excited that the project is open source, free, and deployable. Looking forward to using this!
Saw Mattt and his Helios project at Paris.rb meetup yesterday evening. Quite interesting :)
I wondered in the subway while coming back home if Helios helps to sync backend-made changes to the app through push notifications, in an automagically fashion.
Mobile backends is definitely a hot topic nowadays and this is one of the greatest contributions. A small part of me wishes it was a more "Pythonic" though.. :)
This looks fantastic, I'll definitely be checking this out!