There's a 25% discount for Path Finder right now. The discount code is LADRUPAL and it will work until the end of April, 2010. Read more about the deal at http://knurl.us/url/66zpaut
There also used to be events called "Geek Dinners" but they were mostly attended by "social media gurus" and the like. Not really my cup of tea.
I'm on the westside and am always looking for hacker events. My company is a big sponsor of Drupal events in Boston and Los Angeles and that's where much of my focus has been.
It runs for me, but I have no tab completion. Puzzling.
Edit: scratch that. I have tab completion of things in the database, but not of paths! Much, much less usable than cd for going to places I haven't been before, which is probably half of my usage. Oh well.
Outraged? Not really. As a webdev I'm glad the display has a standard 1024x768 resolution and not something weird. (As a consumer, I'm disappointed that it's 4:3 and not widescreen.)
The iPad display's 132dpi is what I'm more worried about. Most images on the web are 72dpi.
DPI does not mean what you think it means. At all. DPI metadata is completely irrelevant to the web.
It's a piece of metadata about an image that says how densely it should be when formatted for print. Unfortunately that's almost completely useless, because you can't just tell someone to give you an image at $X dpi, because what you actually care about is how big you can print it, so you end up specifying 3 pieces of metadata: W x H @ DPI. It's always much better to just ask for an image at a specific pixel size.
Even programs for a print workflow have to essentially ignore most DPI metadata, because it's usually set to bullshit values like '72' and '96' by asinine applications doing their best to perpetuate irrelevant platform-specifc details. It's marginally better when new Photoshop documents default to shit like 5" x 7" @ 300dpi, but that's still a pointless artifact of people insisting on using a bitmap photo editor for digital painting.
Regarding 132 dpi (well, ppi--displays have pixels, not dots), 132 is pretty dense, but 72 ppi displays are not the standard anymore. In fact, a 15" diagonal display with 1024x768 resolution has 85 ppi, and I think that's about as low density as you'll find. Netbooks are around 120 ppi or more. A cheap 15" Dell LCD is 110 ppi. I'd guess the average is now closer to 100-110 than 72. And all the higher density means is that your images will appear physically a bit smaller, but since the detail is exactly the same (a 300x400px image is 300x400 regardless of your display's pixel density), I'm not sure it matters much.
I thought the dimensions and aspect ratio sounded a little weird at first, until I realized that they were almost exactly the same as the marble-covered composition books that pretty much everybody who has ever held a pencil has used at some point.
I've been carrying one around since the announcement, and I gotta say that aside from video, it's probably the most perfect size they could have picked.
My larger point was that web apps will take a back seat on the iPad as they have on the iPhone. If you want something that looks great and performs - you have to go through the Apple ecosystem. I think that's pretty clear.
This is in direct opposition to the upcoming Chrome OS netbooks where web apps will be at the forefront and central to the device's operation, being given better access to the GPU and so forth...
I actually think that web apps are almost perfectly suited to the iPad. With HTML5's local storage engine and users locked in to Safari* there should be some great innovation in this space. The line between native app and web app may even start to blur with this technology.
* I agree that user lockin is usually a bad thing, but knowing the full and unchanging specs of the machine should allow developers to do some really interesting things.
Just wanted to add that you can create an icon for a web app that on the home screen and it will look and act like a native application (e.g. the mobile safari tool bar and address bar won't appear).
Compiled C on a local device is always going to be faster than JavaScript interfacing with a web site. I don't see what they could be doing that they aren't in terms of performance for web apps.
Yeah true.. It's nice to code once though. I feel immense pressure to make a native app for the iPad b/c it's the preferred method of interfacing with the device for obvious reasons.
With the iPhone the pressure is a little less b/c people aren't expected to interact with a web app or any app for hours on end on a small mobile device like that.. For the iPad, a laptop replacement in some sense, users will be interacting with it quite a bit more.
From what I can tell, SoftLayer's offerings are similar and the prices are better when compared to Rackspace Cloud. $99 at SoftLayer gets 250GB of storage and 2000GB of bandwidth while it gets only 50GB of storage and 500GB of bandwidth at Rackspace Cloud.
"Utility billing is essential for any Cloud platform and something else you will not find from a VPS provider. You pay for your server instances on a per hour basis, so if you only need an instance for a certain amount of days/weeks that is all you pay for."
SoftLayer does this, although they call each instance a "CCI" (cloud computing instance) instead of VPS.
