I agree, a discussion of ventilation seems like a critical omission from the article. Do vent hoods help, and to what degree? Is installing more effective / higher CFM hoods a productive avenue to explore, vs replacing the whole stove? What about the impact of air purifiers? Or opening a window? I hope these things are covered in part three.
(I'm the author of the library) I'm almost certain you're correct - we (thought) we had compression enabled on our feature builder and never found the root cause, but regardless we're happy with how BTables ended up for the other reasons detailed. For future use cases we'll definitely be re-evaluating HDF5!
I like this idea! Having spent so long in Ruby land, I'm not as familiar with the Scala|Clojure|Haskell library scene, but I'm sure that's easily remedied.
You would be surprised how easy it is! Often when new to a language, especially if it crosses paradigms, contributing to an existing project is difficult. Wrapping another library that may be obscure or niche allows you the freedom to fail and learn from your mistakes.
Goodmate looks fantastic! You definitely have a lot of features that I would love to try and build into Payback. I'm actually thinking of doing my next project in Backbone too - do you recommend any particular resources for getting started?
Sorry for the delay, highly recommend using backbone-rails [1]. Reading the docs for Backbone and then the source for the adapters in that gem was really helpful. Ryan Bates also does a screen cast on it, but it costs money [2]. Nonetheless, his pro-line of casts are great if you can swing the $10/mo.
I also think backbone looks great in CoffeeScript, and since rails prefers it anyway, I think it works out. Here's a good tutorial on that: [3]
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're looking for, but you should be able to do this already. For the first one, you can select specific group members (a 'group' expense is just the default) and then do the split option. For the second, just select the user and the payback option!
I think the same can be said of windows phone :p In all seriousness, I love the design of the app! I would definitely use it if I wasn't on Android. How do you have 'taking' set up?
Very cool! Flatmin looks like an awesome service! Payback is definitely still feature-minimal :p Everything you suggested is actually a major item on my to-do list! Facebook integration has been brought up several times and I very much agree about the hex string scheme - the next thing I'm going to do is look into an invite by email/ join with referral link, etc. I have no intention of trying to monetize either - I made it purely as a learning experience for my own apartment, and it does seem like a difficult space to get into.
Ha, I'm aware this is a well populated space! I made this mostly as a learning experience for myself - I'm trying to improve my skills with Rails and I wanted to make something useful for my apartment and this is the result! I'm not trying to beat out any existing services by any means, just wanted to share my take on it.
Awesome, it's an excellent project to learn with. Simple data model, a clear problem, easily solved by a web app, with a high requirement for usability and simplicity. Glad to see your take on it too, keep it up!
Is your version still available? I would love to check out your take on it! I built this for the exact same reason - I'm in a shared apartment of 6, so I'm hoping people in similar situations will be able to get some use out of it.
Good suggestion about screenshots - I'll put more up soon!
Back on my computer (commented from my phone earlier). I don't know if you just added more screenshots already, or if you were just hiding from the mobile view! They look good tho!
Unfortunately my old version is not generally available, but you can take a look at a few screenshots! Feel free to leave comments with questions: http://flickr.com/gp/aaronpk/LAMz1d/
Ah yeah, the screenshots that are on there are hidden from small views. I really like your version, especially the graph idea - I would imagine there are lots of possibilities for interesting visualizations!
