The main thing you want to do when learning Rails is to make sure you're pretty solid in Ruby. David Black's Well-Grounded Rubyist covers a lot of Ruby.
As for Rails, I have nothing but good things to about Foundation Rails 2 by Eldon Alameda. He gives a brief introduction to Ruby at the beginning, and doesn't rely on scaffolding/plugins, something a lot of early Rails developers try and overuse. Although, now that I think about it, the routing chapter was a little weak. Of course there's also the standard Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd Edition) which was written by the creator of Rails.
After that, the best place is to start writing apps and get some hands-on experience. If you want, there's another book that Eldon Alameda wrote called "Practical Rails Projects" which does exactly that -- guides you through 6 or 7 Rails projects to teach you all about Rails. However, it uses an older version of Rails (1.2.3 compared to the current 2.3.3) but I'm sure a lot of the concepts will still apply. You can always install an older version of Rails to follow along.
Yup, that's exactly right. But honestly, what if I want this to happen? Apple assumes that people will get confused. At least put some warning note or something. Though I'm sure that most people who download GV will be aware of what's happening...
Are you serious? You couldn't possibly be smarter than Apple! And, since you pay $299+ to effectively rent your device, because of the DMCA, you're out of luck.
That computes to around 515 applications per day. Can't really blame them for taking too long, eh?
Yes, you can. Apple could easily afford hiring 250 people to review applications - at 2 applications a day, they should be able to thoroughly test apps the same day they get them.
With >600% YOY growth in iPhone sales, margins of approximately 36% and quarterly revenues/profit of $8.3/$1.2 bn, I think Apple can afford to hire and train plenty of people.
Recruiting, training and retaining 100 employees at a salary of $48k/yr - which seems like a pretty good starting wage to me - would only run them about $8-10 million a year, or ~0.2% of that profit margin. What the hell, double that amount if you need to rent/build a new office block for them. It would still pay itself in terms of positive press and developer relations.
40 reviewers each testing 40 apps per day is absurd, that's less than 15 minutes each. OK I know a lot of iPhone 'apps' do only one thing and have a novelty half-life of 90 seconds, but still.
They wouldn't have to train so many if they easily allowed 3rd party app stores. If you don't like the wait in Apple's official store, go to the alternative. As long as they insist on being the bottleneck, this will be a problem.
More people = less consistency. A common complaint among developers has been the inconsistency of approvals, where one app may be rejected while another one with similar features is improved.
Right now the approval delay is about two weeks - that's not bad. Your testing cycle should be longer than that. An extra two weeks should not be a big deal.
Its actually pretty hard to get valuable feedback from a lot of users. Either users don't think too much about how the site could be improved or they're just too lazy to type it all out.
But yeah, being a little more specific would help. Looking for UI feedback? (Try this http://www.clicktale.com/) General feedback about the company?
The best thing to do is make it easier for people to give feedback.
That's actually a good idea. What would be better though is an "mini" version of the site with just the player controls and basic navigation functions. Would look super slick in the menu bar :)
Haha, irc is definitely the best place to start a flamewar on stuff like this :P
But I'm not arguing for one or the other, just wondering what people's thoughts are on it and if they're using it in a public environment. Peaceful discussion :)
