I like the Cloud 9 IDE but it isn’t integrated into my workflow.
nide, OTOH, is installed on my servers. On first try, I love it already. Editing code in the browser is so much easier than using console Emacs/VIM or SFTP remotely. It looks like they have tied Git support in too.
They need to add some sort of simple access control soon and I’ll be a complete convert.
Try it.
Ask many people of a certain age (around 40) where they first encountered a computer and you will invariably hear “Tomorrow’s World in the Grafton Arcade”. Yet strangely if you google it, most of the mentions online are by me since 2005.
I can’t overstate how important that shop was for several years in the 1980s. Just like the first McDonald’s on Grafton Street was a Mecca for us muckers up for our Christmas shopping in the 80s, so too was Tomorrow’s World for anyone who knew what a home computer was.
It was a school trip to Dublin by St Kieran’s College Kilkenny in 1982 that led me to where I am today. And that is no exaggeration. BASIC -> Forth -> Z80 Assembler -> Fortran -> C -> C++ -> Python -> JavaScript. 1982 -> 2011.
One of the lads on the trip had been to Tomorrow’s World before and brought a bunch of us with him. They had a variety of US machines like the TI-99/4A (the first and last time I touched one) but they also had the ZX81, and it was love at first sight.
I badgered my parents for one in the latter part of 1982 and luckily for me, Sinclair released the ZX Spectrum around that time. My Dad arranged for a co-worker in the UK to grab one from WH Smith and a secret meeting in a hotel in Portlaoise landed the 16K model in my lap.
I have genuinely never looked back. I also still have that Spectrum and it still works.
I googled Tomorrow’s World this evening and finally found some other mentions of it in New Scientist. It was an ad for a HP Scientific Calculator from December 1982. Poor HP, always launching things at exactly the wrong time.
Some screenshots from Google Books of the Ad in question:
Plus the ZX81
And of course the legendary ZX Spectrum:
But what is the modern Spectrum of the 201x years? It’s certainly not the iPad, which is the Nordmende TV to our Spectrums. It is (mainly) a consumption device, just like most consoles. Can I suggest that it is Android phones and Google App Inventor. If I’d had tools like that back in 1982, I’d have been doing a hell of a lot more than drawing circles on the screen in BASIC. The future is mobile and we need all of our kids to be completely adept with everything mobile.
I’ll do an updated report on how things are going with App Inventor lessons in my kids’ school over the Christmas. Suffice to say that it has been very very very slow but we are finally seeing some great results, particularly from kids who have never used a PC or smartphone before. I am optimistic for their futures as creators, not consumers.
But back to Tomorrow’s World. I think it’s time for a plaque on a wall on Grafton Street like those ones for famous authors: “Tomorrow’s World 198x-198x. They accidentally kick-started the entire IT industry in Ireland.”
I listened to last night’s TWiT podcast in the car this morning on the way from Cork to Dublin. The bulk of it is a brilliant debate between host Leo Laporte and guest Nilay Patel about online piracy, SOPA and intellectual property rights.
What’s marvellous about it is that both of them seem to initially be in opposition to each other but both have extremely relevant points to make and refine their arguments. Of course the Louis CK experiment comes up too.
So before some junior Minister, along with some Civil Servants, devise some nonsense piece of legislation to “block illegal downloading sites”, they need to listen very closely to both people in the podcast.
You will never, ever, stop copying of media once it becomes “bits”, but there are ways of minimising it to the benefit of all.
And that means providing all media, to anyone, anywhere in the world, when they want it and where they want it, for a fair price. (cf Louis CK). It’s 2011, the internet is global. Time for media companies to accept it and stop treating their customers like they are all potential thieves.
Sidenote: More of this kind of thing please Leo, I nearly unsubbed from TWiT recently due to the repetitiveness of it in the past few months.
These guys started out building a plugin for WordPress to make it use MongoDB instead of MySQL but found it was almost impossible. So they decided to build an alternative called MongoPress based on many of the good things about WordPress and hopefully none of the bad things (Die-WordPress-Editor-Die-Die-Die).
I’ve got to hand it to Google, ICS is an absolute pleasure to use. Everything feels integrated and consistent and beautiful. It’s really interesting how much of a difference even a font change can make.
I just played around with an early community Alpha firmware of it for the HTC Sensation and even at this buggy stage, I want to switch. The iPad2 I’ve been using for the past 10 days feels like a clunky locked-down VTech toy in comparison. Looking forward to trying out ICS on the Asus Transformer Prime.
Here’s a few lovely screenshots.
Wayyyy back in Feb 2008, the iGo Stowaway keyboard was being end-of-lined due to its non-HID compatibility and I managed to snare one for £18 in the UK. It had previously been north of £100.
It’s one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. Over the years I have used it with a Nokia N770 tablet, an N95-8GB phone, a HTC Desire, Boxee/XBMC on our TV PC and now, drum-roll, hurrah, it works on the iPad2 too!
Yes of couse it’s as stable as a ball on top of a cone in that config, but with the iPad tilted up on the smartcase, it works beautifully too.
Now to jailbreak the iPad so that I’m in control of it, instead of Steve from beyond the grave.
Today, we are announcing that we will remove all App Profile Pages on February 1st, 2012. Though similar in appearance, the automatically generated App Profile Pages differ in features from traditional Facebook Pages, and over time the inconsistencies between the two, such as different Insights, APIs, and distribution channels, have become more apparent.
If you have an App that you add to Pages as a Tab by sending Page Owners to the App’s own Profile Page, then you need to change how you do things.
The easiest way is the URL example they give. You can set that up and just tell people to go there and click on the Page which needs the Tab.
Probably a bigger documentation issue for companies like ours rather than being a technical issue.
I could be crabby and point out we should have had this for a decade, considering it’s all CIE. But at least we have it now. Yay! Buying one now.
We’re now on the Microsoft BizSpark program and one thing I want to try out over the next few weeks is getting our Node.js+MongoDB back-end running on Azure.
I spotted this yesterday on the Node mailing list and it shows how Microsoft now lists Node after .Net but before Java and PHP! It’s now “Tier 1″ inside MSFT which is fantastic news.
There is also a very very cool video by Steve Marx introducing Node on Azure, if you want to see how it all works. I was stunned how easy it was. And both npm and Express work fine!
Anyone know what the story is with WebSockets tho? That was a limitation in first release of Cloud Foundry but I don’t know if it still is or if it is on Azure.
Very interesting to see Steve using Sublime Text as his editor. I bought v2 of this recently and absolutely love it. Seen by many as a Textmate for Windows.
Cross Dominant is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache
