I used it primarily as a travel & underwater cam. The software is pretty terrible out of the box, and I ended up having a decent # of pictures that were either never saved or "lost" from the memory card. (The card was fairly old - so this could have been an issue with the card...) Also the camera stopped working completely (as in wouldn't take any pictures, and wouldn't turn off without taking the battery out) after about two months of use.
Given it was $50, and the shots I was able to pull off the memory card were great, I am not too upset. However, caveat emptor.
I can't say for the privacy policy, but I used Clue for over a year without an account. Since I forgot to do a final export of the data before resetting my phone (I know, I know...), I subsequently lost all the locally stored data for the past few months. When I contacted Clue, they said their was no way to retrieve it. So my guess is that they are telling the truth re: nothing sent to the cloud unless you explicitly choose to.
My team also recently built a chat service into a mobile app for a cruise line, and had to have high resiliency to network drops and offline users - while having a mission-critical "guaranteed delivery" requirement. We also chose OpenFire since it was an off-the-shelf XMPP server, and (presumably) was easily extensibile via plugins.
After working with (hacking around) OpenFire for two years, I 100% agree with your statement. The clustering plugin routinely fails (to the point where we have actually investigated not even clustering it anymore), the admin interface routinely displays "wrong" data, and other fun bugs we found along the way.
Does it work for us (with a lot of client XEPs and additional custom plugins)? Yes, it does an acceptable job. Would I choose the same product again, if given the choice? No.
We use this at the (very large) corp that I work at, with very large, complex, high-traffic/revenue sites. Each component in the architecture has it's own "light/dark" deployment (in each environment), so any piece can be staged/tested/deployed/rolled-back with zero downtime. It has worked fairly well, with the majority of hiccups occuring during the ramp-up on the process.
Regarding juggling sim cards: I recently traveled between a few EU countries using a 3 UK pay-as-you-go card (with the their roaming package http://www.three.co.uk/Discover/Phones/Feel_At_Home). It worked well, and even in the middle of nowhere in Italy, I had good coverage. It was a PITA to top-up before I left from the US. But if you are already in the UK, that is probably a non-issue. I think it was 15EUR for unlimited data + N/minutes & texts.
I am sure there are probably downsides, but it might be something to look into while Fi is still in infancy.
This! It would be nice if the places recommended were aggregated from the typical go-tos for travel (Yelp, TripAdvisor) - rather than starting yet-another place for reviews/opinion content. Also potential integration or partnership with Rome2Rio and/or Uber transport suggestions.
Currently I am doing all this manually in various apps, and entering the data into TripIt (which is also sort of ugly).
As a woman engineer I understand what the OP is trying to say, but it sounds callous and (surprisingly) oblivious to the realities of this field.
As someone else pointed out: "1) What is the nature of hackathons? Many are pitchathons."
I have also lost "hackathons" to projects that were objectively NOT technical (mocked-up images of an app, without a single line of code). It happens often, and it's always a bummer to lose, but often they might actually be solving a bigger issue than me or my team.
For the group of women (girls?) that won - as you pointed out - maybe they will continue doing hackathons (and maybe - despite your doubt - they even eventually progressing beyond the Wix stage) because they won an encouragement award at their first hackathon. It's like a consolation prize for mustering up the courage to present their product that was obviously not as technically advanced as some other products. That takes guts, a lot of people (men/women/other...) might just slink out the back door after the first few presentations.
So good for them, in that sense - they indeed are an inspiration for people just starting out.
Yeah, one of the huge problems our field has is that it doesn't give people a solid sense of how you upgrade your skills and what kind of waypoint you're at relative to others (and that that's okay!).
It is magnificent to encourage newcomers to the field. We should also have level playing fields for folks to participate with everyone (and not stratify further than we already do). But it sucks when these sorts of objectives collide and end up alienating people. (and heck sports have awards for rookies for example!)
The other thing that's really gear-grinding about OP is that... we're judging our worth based on what happens in hackathons? I hope to $deity most people aren't doing that, because hackathons are super slanted POVs on the world.
Actually no, in most professional leagues the rookie of the year/season award is handed out to the best rookie whether that rookie performed below, above, or at the same level as their more experienced peers. They are graded only against other rookies.
Agreed. The tech community is rabidly hypercritical and even those considered part of the "typical" programmer demographic are often met with biting vitriol when publishing code or projects that the community views as bad, poor form, too ambitious or reinventing the wheel. That type of hostility will really intimidate novices, especially if they already feel like an outsider. I think it's a positive step to encourage the less represented demographics because it says "we see you, and there is a place for you, even if you're just taking baby steps"
I actually find both 2 & 3 to be more prevalent in self-taught programmers (especially those who know enough "officially" taught people to have an inferiority complex. (i.e. why re-invent the wheel when (surely) someone else has already re-invented it better).
Also, I find that most CS students miss the "forest for the trees", and focus on the technical - rather than the immediate reality (Big-O < shipping features) at a small company.
Overall, none of those qualities are bad, but both can contribute to the success or failure, of a company.
Morale: caveat emptor. Culture & Diversity is important.
How would you say the stability of this release compares to the last version?
I understand it's very new software, but the last version I played with (1-2 weeks ago) was incredibly buggy. Not just in terms of core functionality (hanging packages etc - some of which I see you have addressed https://github.com/kitematic/kitematic/milestones/v0.4.0) but just in terms of the general UI, buttons randomly disappearing/appearing.
I was/am really looking forward to using this but the bugginess did not give me a lot of confidence that the behind the scenes logic was behaving as expected.
Hi kaylarose. Really sorry about the app being buggy and thank you for understanding that we're still very new. Previous versions of Kitematic relied on too many dependencies: VirtualBox, boot2docker, a DNS server inside the boot2docker VM and Unison for file syncing. The current version removed the need for the DNS server inside the VM and Unison, slimmed down the app and fixed a lot of the critical installer issues.
We're working hard to make the app reliable. In terms of UI, there are plans on making things more consistent and easier to understand as well.
Thank you again for trying out Kitematic! Definitely let us know if there are suggestions on things we can improve on :)
I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me.
For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".
So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?
Redfin is an actual real estate brokerage, and are therefore real members of the MLS, with access to the data that provides. The others are simply scraping via publicly available data. This is a major difference.
Is it a major difference, or just a matter of timeliness? The actual data that Zillow etc. has seems identical to any other service, and the same as the printouts that realtors give out that they are printing from MLS.
This is Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO. Thanks for using Redfin and glad to hear that we gave you a jump on getting a place.
To answer your question about Zillow, Trulia and Redfin: Zillow and Trulia are media portals; Redfin is a brokerage, started by software entrepreneurs but with our own real estate agents to represent people buying or selling a home.
As a brokerage, Redfin has complete access to the local Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) used by brokerages and their agents to list homes and record sales. In addition to MLS listings, Redfin shows for-sale-by-owner listings, foreclosures, and new-construction listings, but most of the listings on our site come from MLSs.
There are hundreds of local MLSs, each with different data publication rules, but nearly all MLSs only accept as members brokerages willing to contribute their own listings to the MLS database. As a result, Redfin has the most complete and most timely listing data of any major real estate app or website, but only covers about half the U.S.
Zillow and Trulia get some listing data through services that syndicate a selection of listings from the MLS and some by asking real estate agents to upload their listings. A variety of studies, sponsored by Realtor.com, ZipRealty and Redfin, have shown that Redfin and other MLS-powered sites have significantly more agent-listed homes than the portals; Redfin also gets data much sooner, both to show new listings and to recognize when old listings have been sold.
Given it was $50, and the shots I was able to pull off the memory card were great, I am not too upset. However, caveat emptor.