anti-pattern

One more reason I avoid flying them whenever possible.

Ah, that isn't something I considered. I don't write my apps multi-threaded, so it shouldn't be an issue, but definitely good to be aware of.

Ah, well, nothing is foolproof. Yes, if you don't update your dependency list when dependencies are removed, they might get stale. But I keep up on that stuff and haven't ran into that problem yet. Even if I did, I'd rather have that problem than an app where all the dependencies are global.

Yes, but, if you test your classes in isolation, then you'll be forced to manually require each dependency at the top of the file.

Interesting. Why would the requires go stale? And how would you use a dependency you don't require? It wouldn't be possible to use it unless you required it. This of course assumes you're testing your classes in isolation.

I think a lot of this unfortunately comes from Rails. Rails hides a lot of complexity which creates "magic". And since most Rubyists come to Ruby from Rails, a lot of Rubyists have the bad habit of hiding complexity wherever possible. I was guilty of that myself. But I've noticed it slowly starting to change.

The best code is no code.

Thanks! Probably not, there aren't really any other products I get that excited about, and I like the idea of keeping it very niche.

Oh, interesting. Did they give a reason? Was it legal? MacRumors has been doing this for some time, I can't imagine that there's anything illegal about it.

Indeed. Maybe I'll post the data on GitHub or something.

Actually, the entire reason I made this site was because I thought the way MacRumors visualized the data wasn't very good. If they had done a better job, I wouldn't have needed to make this.

As for credit... what should I be crediting them for? I'm just collecting a list of dates and then visualizing the data.

I guess it depends on how you quantify usefulness. There's less info, but I think I visualized the information that I do show much better than MacRumors.

They probably meant whether or not I "took" the information from somewhere else. But yeah, actually scraping the information would have been ridiculous. It's all just in a static YAML file.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining it! This was my first time using SVG. So, what is the best solution? Defining SVG styles in a style tag?

Yeah, for some reason Firefox won't show the gradient. Not sure why. In the meantime I made it so it would fallback to a solid color.

I built my own because their design, and I mean literally the way they visualize the data, isn't very good. Or rather, it's not as good as it could be. They even updated the design a year or two ago and all they did was give it a coat of paint, rather than rethinking how to best visualize the data.

Whoops, it looks like Firefox doesn't like SVG gradients. I'll look into that. Thanks!

Oh I remember seeing that when it came out. Did you take it down?

I want all of those things.

I've looked at their data, but I believe I've dropped some things that they consider releases. The whole thing is kind of subjective as to what constitutes a release or not. But no, I didn't just scrape their site. I compiled my own data from a variety of different freely available sources.

You're very welcome :)

Yeah I was trying to decide whether it needed one or not. So far people seem to be getting it, but I might still add one.

Right now I'm just doing a simple average, but I'll definitely starting adding weighting and other ways of influencing the estimate.

Hmm, what OS, browser, and version are you on?