There's a huge difference. 99 Designs works on the premise that only the best should/will survive, a brutal winner takes all system. None of the participants in 99 designs are contributing their efforts as charity... they hope to get paid. While SO is the exact opposite. Contributions made as pure charity with no money changing hands.
Not sure how you could miss the distinction.
Just to clarify - I'm not passing judgement on 99D one way or the other. The people that participate there are free to do so if they think it is the best use of their time.
There's good reasons to believe that the portfolio that designers develop through 99designs is likely to be worth far more to them than the win itself.
I was simply pointing out the obvious difference between SO and 99D. I'm neither for nor against the 99D way of doing things. I'm sure there are many secondary benefits to be had from participating in these kinds of competitions, not least of which would be improving ones skills and (potential) work prospects.
I find virtual desktops to be most useful on small screens. So on my laptop which has limited screen real estate I have a text editor on one desktop and by moving my mouse to the top left I switch to my browser desktop - v.useful
Only problem is that this has become so ingrained that I keep doing it on computers without this setup!
I use dexpot for virtual desktops. Very customizable. You can bind hotkeys, or screen hotspots (mine is top left pixel) for switching between desktops. I use it on an underpowered laptop with no performance issues.
I agree that the current suite of Metro apps is crap, but that hardly makes the OS a mess. I've been using it as my primary OS for about 6 months and my usage hasn't really changed from Win7. All my work is done from the desktop, with the new start screen working as a useful short cut organiser.
Multitasking is boned
Not sure what you mean there.
...it works badly with multi monitors.
Depends on your definition of 'works badly'. I think they've made smart choices. You can easily nominate which monitor is your Start Screen monitor and all Metro apps will launch there. You can't seem to run metro apps on more than one screen, but you can have 2 visible on the same screen using docking.
Try running multiple metro remote desktops on two different monitors. You can't.
Metro apps are not made for multiple screens and this is what they are pushing for as future software. All full screen tabs.
There us a lot of hot corner action that is painful when those hot corners are in between the two monitors. I had to offset the screens so I could catch the mouse to hit the start button area.
Interesting concept, well done for shipping. Just a couple of points:
- You id="mask" element has a higher z-order than your formatting popup making it impossible to select styles in the demo.
- The blink from the original to the edited content is kind of jarring. Not sure where your servers are, but here from AUS the lag was very noticable.
- This is a peeve I have with all editors: When you select a H1,2,3 etc style the entire block is styled. This is the opposite of what users expect. Instead you should break that fragment out and run your execCommand on it. This way only the selected text receives the style and your users aren't left scratching their heads :)
- Consider adding an in-line editor for in-line images. Popping over a modal editor onmouseup is not intuitive for your average Joe.
Copybar cofounder here, thanks for the great feedback. We'll take a look at the mask issue asap. Delivery will continue to be optimized and I dig your ideas on the styling and image editing, look for those enhancements soon.
Absolutely agree. The hundreds of websites devoted to explaining how to achieve a X-column fluid layout are testament to CSS's failings in this regard - seriously, layout as a problem has been solved for 15+ years [1].
We're finally getting some progress on constraint-based layout in the form of the flexible box model (great modern browser support), and CSS grid layout, which surprisingly enough is coming from MS.
I agree, the fact that it's almost 2013 and we're still wasting valuable brainpower on f*ing around with what should be trivial layouts is a bit of a shame.
Maybe the source is not special or unique, but not everyone wants to give away their work. Eg you just spent 6 months developing a product feature and by coincidence your competitor also launches the same feature 2 weeks later :|
Of course minified code is also usable, however it makes things just that little bit more difficult for rip off artists.
I'm all for free and open software, but some aren't, and they're free to feel that way.
Everyone is different. Speaking for myself, I never found books or tutorials useful. My mind simply balks at the prospect of doing exercises for the sake of it.
Instead what worked really well for me is to find a practical problem that I wanted to solve (maybe with the goal of making money from it). It turns out that just about any interesting project that you dream up for yourself will have aspects that are outside of your current knowledge/ability. Then as soon as you hit these parts start looking for reference materials, documentation or tutorials specifically related to this problem. Before you know it you're learning new stuff.
And the upshot of this approach is, that if you stick with it you may end up with a functional product at the end, which you can sell.
Also read other people's code. I find it really humbling to read well crafted code. It also motivates me to continue refining my own code.
And I'm the exact opposite. I love exercises. You should find what works for you and stick with it until it doesn't work for you! For a while, I would read a section out of a programming book, think to myself "Could I explain this better?", and if I could, I'd write an article. If I came across an exercise in a book, I'd think to myself "What if these requirements had to be met? What if this needs to be read in from a keyboard? A database?", and I'd expand the exercise into a full fledged project. Just do your best to keep yourself interested. Find a reason to stay excited.
- First they said JS couldn't be useful for building 'rich internet apps'
- Then they said it couldn't be fast
- Then they said it couldn't be fixed
- Then it couldn't do multicore/GPU
- Wrong every time
- My advise: always bet on JS
It turns out that JS might soon be a mature language which can be used to build real apps. That future has arrived (or at least you can see the train).
es6/7+hardware accelerated graphics+ continued broadband adoption and speed increases (gigabit internet) make the 'web as a platform' dream a reality. I'd love to peek at Microsoft's medium term plan to deal with this.
Also: I wonder how long until we see a full replacement for something like eg:3DSMAX with GUI on the client and rendering done in the 'cloud'?
It's disingenuous to claim that javascript is not a "real" language already. This is like claiming that PHP or VB aren't "real" languages. You may not like it, you may think it's missing crucial, key features, but there is a lot of JS code out there in the wild producing value for businesses and customers and generating billions of dollars in revenue.
Edit: looks like I misread the parent post, my apologies.
Looks like I didn't communicate too well. I wholeheartedly agree that JS is a real language. It's my main language and I've written tens of thousands of lines of the stuff. It has it's quirks but I like coding in it. My "JS as a 'real' language" was a tongue-in-cheek go at those who constantly criticise it for being a toy language. I've edited my original comment.
The crux of the argument is, "As a software developer, I am happiest writing software that gets used. What's the point of all this craftsmanship if your software ends up locked away in a binary executable, which has to be purchased and licensed and shipped and downloaded and installed and maintained and upgraded? With all those old, traditional barriers between programmers and users, it's a wonder the software industry managed to exist at all. But in the brave new world of web applications, those limitations fall away. There are no boundaries. Software can be everywhere."
Any toolkit that attempts to shoehorn a consistent experience on the web is doomed to failure. People have made efforts, earnest efforts, at solving the problem (dojo, ext, closure, capuccino). None have caught on and at the moment I'm assuming none will.
Bakground paragraph: I've been thinking about the issue since 2004 or so and always assumed that a widget toolkit would develop like it did for desktop environemnts and one or two would eventually win. The launch of mobile app development changed things. The kinds of apps being delivered were outright better than what equivalent web apps were delivering. Not the perf, I assume perf is going to be solved by better hardware and engine improvements, but what the apps accomplish. My conclusion is that every project has a semi-fixed budget of resources and that web developers burn roughly 50% of that budget on building a custom one-off interface solution for every project they work on. The obvious answer is components but component frameworks had not been catching on so the question is why.
The normally cited problem is the composition problem. It's incredibly difficult to achieve component isolation in the DOM and the Web Components effort is attempting to address. I approve the effort but I do not believe it will solve the problem. It's possible(ref yui3) to write components that will cleanly drop into pages that keep their CSS tweaks class based and that restriction isn't unreasonable in an app. Component use happens more frequently in apps but is not the default like it needs to be to escape the one-off tar pit. The issue is social.
The web's roots in documents mean that pretty much everybody wants a custom UI. All existing component libraries, following desktop toolit precedents, come as a packaged markup/CSS/behavior combo. These two requirements are opposed and that opposition is the core problem. I have never used a component library and not had to customize a signfiicant number of components. When doing so, I either have to maintain a private fork of the component or suffer in download/perf as the framework is super heavy and caters to all possibilities. The yui3 (and looks like current dojo) approach of core+plugin composition with auto dependency resolution is the best solution I know of but overriding is still non-trivial. Tweaking the CSS usually means having to build a complete theme and using generated markup is hit and miss.
My current thinking is that Web Components are a start but there needs to be a good solution for selectively overriding a part of the markup and for overriding style. CSS preprocessor features are also required to achieve styling goals efficiently. The rise of Bootstrap might prove me wrong by starting as an incomplete system, getting buy in (multiple themes, adoption for simple uses), and growing to a more complete one but we'll see.
Yeah and we'll probably only have to wait another 5 years!
It's funny how .NET languages can have a consistent, predictable and precision framework built up around them and yet somehow we're supposed to believe that JS is better than bytecode.
Not sure how you could miss the distinction.
Just to clarify - I'm not passing judgement on 99D one way or the other. The people that participate there are free to do so if they think it is the best use of their time.