Taxis in general don't fully turk the concept, at least not in areas without reliable taxi volume. It's reasonable as long as you can rely on the taxi to show up within a decent amount of time of requesting it or expect to see one in passing in a short amount of time.
Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the immediate vicinity. Calling the cab company has often led to lots of waiting, not knowing when the car will get there, with cars sometimes never showing up at all. Knowing that the car is definitely coming to you (whether it's a self driving car, Uber, or any other service that tracks the vehicle's location) help remove that uncertainty and definitely makes it an acceptable option in more areas.
That reliability and knowledge justify the extra cost for taking Uber (or requesting a self driving car some day) to me, more than the comfort or style of a town car compared to a cab.
Agreed on all parts - for me, I live in DC, in a neighborhood with good cab density, and Uber is in the cab business as well as the swanky car business. I'll launch the app, hail a cab, and by the time I ride down the elevator of my building, there's a cab parked out front waiting for me. It's a reasonable approximation of the future.
I've had mine for a couple of weeks, using it with an iPhone, and so far it's a neat toy that doesn't do very much. I can see text messages, and I can see the phone number of the person calling me (not their name yet, though). I can control the music playing on my phone. That's about it right now. I haven't tried Runkeeper yet.
I've heard that Android users can hook in to a lot more. Hopefully iOS opens up more access for other apps to send notifications to it.
The feature I probably use the most is the watch itself - I don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket to check the time, and flicking my wrist to activate the backlight works really well.
It looks like there could be a lot of interesting things on the horizon:
Watchfaces augmented with data from the internet
Remote controls for internet connected devices
Multi-player Pebble games
4sq/Facebook/Yelp Check-in Apps
Sports/Weather/News/Traffic tickers
Emergency beacon activator
Deeper sports integration (skiing, hiking, surfing, tennis, soccer score keeping)!
Bitcoin price trackers (most important watchapp?)
Exactly what I was about to write. Went back to my Nike Fuel band almost immediately. As a watch, it's just ok. Beyond that, it just isn't that useful. And as phones continue to get thinner and lighter -- I guess I don't see the point.
The Fuel Band is the worst watch I've ever owned. It drives me mad how many times I have to hit the button, and how long I have to wait, just to find out the time.
It's not known if Maps was removed because of Apple or Google or both. So while there's no choice on having Google's Maps removed in iOS 6, the reason it happend isn't clear. When it came time to renew the contract one or both parties could have made unacceptable demands, leading to the current situation.
Yes, it's interesting how everyone has been assuming Apple booted Google off of iOS as an act of vindictive retribution. Everybody assumed that Apple's maps would have magical qualities that would leave Google looking second rate. Now that it seems to be the other way around you have to wonder if it was actually Google that pressed the big red button on the maps contract.
I think it's not really a case of who booted who off. I assume that Google wouldn't let Apple have any of the good features like vector maps or turn-by-turn navigation. Google Maps on iOS was already the shittiest mapping app across all platforms. So Apple have replaced it with an even worse alternative but at least it has some headroom to improve vs 2004 Google maps experience which was never going to get any new features.
I think Apple made the right move. Even if Google is 10 years ahead in mapping, the experience you got on the iPhone was Google maps from 2004. So Apple is only 2 years behind 'iOS 5 Google Maps' and given the resources they have to throw at the problem it'll probably improve quicker than that.
I believe Exceptional was acquired by Jon Siegel, and then Exceptional, under its new ownership, acquired Airbrake. I haven't seen anything that indicates which brand will take precedence or if both will continue running.
The beta currently contains about half of the chapters. More chapters will be added in the coming weeks as they work their through the review process, but they're not in the beta copy that you'll get today.
Thanks. By the way, I've been a back end developer for many years and have only dabbled in the front. The table of contents alone make we want to buy this book (probably will) as it appears to run the entire gamut of front end development and appears to be very up to date with what people are doing these day. For me it would be a "survey of front end best practices" that I can use to dig in deeper.
You don't need to know any RoR. There are a couple chapters where we use some Ruby (Jekyll and Cucubmer-driven Selenium Testing), but we walk you through getting things set up properly if you want to use them.
Does that mean that whenever you recommend server-side solutions that the server must have Ruby set up?
[OT question that has blocked this PHP-hobbyist from dabbling in RoR: do professionals ever add a new functionality as part of a web app via RoR when the bulk of project has already been built with something like PHP? (looking for motivation to start some experimentation in Ruby)]
Nope, we don't only talk about Ruby. We have a few PHP examples as well, but there's a lot more on CSS, JS, Git, server administration, etc.
There's not a lot of server-side code in the book, to be honest. Chapters like Creating a Widget focus on the client-side code - loading content in to your page and providing an example for what the data looks like, without getting in to "here's how you'd' do this in Ruby or PHP or .NET".
Another author here - To answer your first question, no, this book is very front-end driven. We will have one server-side recipe that will use PHP. The rest of the recipes that use a backend use a "no setup required" server I wrote called QEDServer (http://qedserver.napcs.com/) which provides a JSON API full of records and a way to serve HTML pages so you can work with things like Knockout and Backbone without having to set up an API. We use it in a few recipes.
But we really wanted to keep the server-side stuff to a minimum, and while we all use Rails, it's not the answer to all web development - especially with things moving more client-side.
Your second question, yes you certainly can. I've done it and the only tricky part is making them work together, and thanks to web services, that's not terrible. I even have a new Rails app consuming some XML I wrote with classic ASP.
In reply to your OT question - does your PHP app have an API at all? You could make a small standalone app that pulls from your existing API. Or go the other direction and create a Ruby app in Rails or Sinatra that aggregates some information for you and makes it available for your existing app to consume.
The core of the project I'm working on is built in PHP. However, we found that there were a few things that would make more sense in RoR, and there are many features in the future that will be better served as RoR apps. Basically, we are using mod_proxy to redirect to the Rails app.
If you'd like to talk more about it, I'd be more than happy.
This is definitely one of my biggest complaints as well. I'd love to see them follow the lead of Amazon Prime and let me specify other accounts within my household that I want to be able to share books (and perhaps other media) with.
As for S3, we work in Ruby and use RightAWS (http://rubygems.org/gems/right_aws). That would handle the transfer of files from your users to S3. If you're using another language I'd recommend checking online for an S3 library compatible with your language.
Uber et al. have done a lot to help with this in my experience, but I've had many times where I'm in a location that taxis aren't typically in the immediate vicinity. Calling the cab company has often led to lots of waiting, not knowing when the car will get there, with cars sometimes never showing up at all. Knowing that the car is definitely coming to you (whether it's a self driving car, Uber, or any other service that tracks the vehicle's location) help remove that uncertainty and definitely makes it an acceptable option in more areas.
That reliability and knowledge justify the extra cost for taking Uber (or requesting a self driving car some day) to me, more than the comfort or style of a town car compared to a cab.