johnw

There's noway that this is going to be practical within the current laws of physics. You can't use a wide beam to cover an area because the amount of energy available drops by orders of magnitude the further you get from the transmitter. If you used a focussed beam (which is what they are suggesting) then you need a separate beam that tracks and follows the location of each device. So to cover a very small area you'd need multiple transmitters tracking and beaming sound to the exact location of each device. And the transmitters are going to have to be very close by, and then there are all the obstacles between your pocket and the transmitter that will block the beam. You might as well just use an inductive charger. But still, just like solar freaking roadways and perpetual motion machines we want to believe and since most people don't understand the science these ridiculous and impossible ideas draw people in again and again.

There's a more in depth analysis of why this won't work here: http://www.eevblog.com/2014/08/07/ubeam-ultrasonic-wireless-...

Does anyone know how you actually use this? I built the project and ran it then enabled Bluetooth on my Mac and iPhone somewhat expecting to receive a notification of the iBeacon but got nothing. Does it have to be coupled with an iOS app to work or can it send notifications even without an app installed?

EDIT: Figured it out - You need an iOS app as well. There's one that can locate and display iBeacon info here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/locate-for-ibeacon/id7387090...

I'm a little disappointed. The use case I had in mind was: Customer walks into a store with iBeacons and is given a notification that they tap which installs the app. I suppose this would have too much potential for abuse though.

One big hole in this theory is that its been widely reported [1] that a transponder was switched off before the pilots last radio contact. The pilots would have had no reason to pull the breakers before the last communication if they weren't already aware of a fire.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/malaysia-airlin...

Also interesting is the amount of damage being done to the wheels as it drives around up there. Some good pictures of that here[1]. Apparently the wheels are designed to leave a mark so they can keep track of the rovers location by looking at the tracks[2]. The tracks spell out JPL in morse code.

[1] http://news.discovery.com/space/martian-wear-and-tear-curios...

[2] http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2013/1002210...

Absolutely agree, free software has so much to offer and yet here we see it being promoted using the most desperate and ineffective means possible: dressing up in costumes and handing out flyers to people - people who quite likely just had a positive buying experience at an Apple store which offered real products and solutions and not some half thought out nonsense on a piece of paper that only a few geeks are likely to understand.

They need to find another way, because this isn't going to win over anyone, and it may lead some to believe that free software folk are desperate nutcases (which couldn't be further from the truth). There is just no thought or substance to this campaign at all.

Alright, but how do you explain the instructor who had 3,200 hours on the 777 who was sitting beside the pilot not making any mention of a too low airspeed or incorrect landing configuration right up until it was to late? Makes me wonder if there was some ambiguity in the instrument display or procedures for neither pilot to make mention of any problems.

Thanks. Really glad you're enjoying it. The code is a real mess, but I'm hoping to gradually improve it now it's open source.

This is amazing. The UI is absolutely gorgeous. A few minor things I noticed:

-Scrolling seems very laggy when scrolling with the mouse wheel, although dragging with the scrollbar seems fine. This only seems to be happening in the Popular (Now), view. This is under 10.9.

-When I favorite songs, they don't show up in the favorite section although they did after relaunching the app.

-It would be nice if when you moused over a song in the list if it scrolled the full song name into view - at the moment they get cut off and you can't see the full name.

-The song list scrollbar on the right is obscured by the controller at the bottom. I like what you've done with having the songs scroll underneath the slightly transparent controller but the scrollbar should really end where the controller starts.

-I don't seem to be getting notifications from the app even though it's listed in the Notifications app list under the Notifications section of System Preferences.

You're welcome :) I'd love to see some other platforms supported as well.

Yep, it's for messaging using Dropbox shared folders.

Hi HNers - I posted the below explanation to GitHub but I'm reposting it below as well in case you don't see it:

I originally did this project as a Mac app that I was intending to sell but unfortunately it didn't take off the way I'd hoped. When Apple rejected it from the Mac App Store for depending on Dropbox that was the final nail in the coffin and I had to abandon it and move onto other projects. I'm now open sourcing it and making it free - mostly because I'm still using it and don't want it to die. Others have emailed me and asked if I would consider open sourcing it. So here we are.

Let me know if you have questions. I'd love to have some help improving the app.

Fun fact: If you stacked this many iPhones screen to back on top of each other the stack would be at least 82 times the height of the worlds tallest building[1] (assuming they were all the thinner 5S - Apple didn't say how many of this 9 million was the 5S versus the 5C).

[1] Burj Khalifa at 830m

This reminds me of Quartz Composer[1] in a lot of ways: you wire the inputs and outputs of a bunch of different nodes together (called patches in QC) and each patch gets you a step closer to the solution. This seems to work especially well for graphics programming type problems where there are many different variables to tweak and you're applying many transformations to the image at each stage.

The problem is each component in the process still needs to be written in code. In QC I would often be frustrated when a patch didn't quite do what I needed and I had to keep trying to make my idea fit the limitations of the available patches.

So while this might help non-programmers understand on a big picture level what's happening, to go beyond that they're still going to have to learn how the individual components work which comes back to learning to code textually.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_composer

Everything I've heard about Nest contradicts this. I'd love to hear in more detail why this didn't work out.

Sounds like the writings been on the wall for a while now. They were fined by the CFTC in late 2012 and had to withdraw from the US market for not being a licensed exchange [1].

Most of their customers were in the US so this was a major blow to their business.

I wonder if there's an opportunity here for a Bitcoin based predictions market?

[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-the-us-killed-intrade

All engineering involves trade-offs. Ideally, we'd prefer to have maintainable code that ships on time, but this usually isn't possible.

So you have to look at how much payoff you're getting from maintainable code versus shipping late. I would say that how to manage this tradeoff depends on the type of software being developed - If you're creating throwaway apps for the app stores then shipping fast is probably a more important consideration than having a maintainable codebase. If you're writing banking software for the enterprise the balance probably tips in favor of maintainable code.

You also have to take into account the constantly shifting goalposts in software development. That class you spent all day refactoring gets thrown out tomorrow.

Yes, I dropped the price to $9.99. So we'll see how that goes. I don't know what I'm doing at all with regard to pricing but the result from this sale does make me think that $14 may be too high.

I have no customers who were angry about this. Not one. So this fear I had of upsetting customers who missed the discount appears to be unfounded.

Thank you! And I agree with what you're saying (although it pains me greatly to admit it). It really is difficult to make a sustainable living from the App Store. Even the top apps don't pull in all that much and sales always drop off very rapidly after the initial hype wears off.

I think you'd be crazy to abandon a salaried job in the hope of making it big on the app store. I've been working on Dropzone pretty much full-time for almost 5 years now and only now am I starting to see some payoff. I'm wondering whether having multiple apps might be the key to a more sustainable income. Then you can cross sell and hopefully make more money overall.

Relying on Apple to distribute your apps is also very frightening. I feel that policy changes with regards to things like sandboxing could easily put me out of business, and there's no money to speak of to be found from selling outside App Store.

I love writing apps though so I really hope I can continue to do so.