Categories
Product Review

Rails for Zombies Redux/Rails for Zombies 2 – Course Review

I recently took the Rails for Zombies Redux and Rails for Zombies 2 courses on CodeSchool. I had already learned some Rails on a Software Engineering Course , but I thought these would be helpful, specially since I didn't touch anything on Rails after I finished the course. I also intend to rewrite the user key generation/retrieval of my software to use either a Rails app or WordPress.

The courses are interesting and fairly light. They consist of short videos and usually very simple challenges, that mostly just require you to read the notes. There is a zombie theme on the code (which is mostly about a Twitter for Zombies), that lightens up the topic somehow. The challenges take place in an easy to use in browser coding system. You just type some code and click submit (keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work on Chrome), and get the results.

Challenges always worked fine, but I found that on some courses on CodeSchool video simply refuses to play. However, I just downloaded these, so problem solved  (except for not having closed captions).

On the subject of Ruby and Rails, every time I learn something new about it I am usually more impressed about how clever and easy things are.

Overall, the courses are quite useful, but they don't really compare to the Software Engineering Course – which covers much more material and had actually challenging course work. However, it took me about 30 hours, while both of these took around 8 hours, so it is not really a fair comparison.

And I also learned some stuff on the Zombie courses that were not on the Software Engineering Course (including some new bits introduced in the latest versions of Rails).

Rails for Zombies Redux is a free course, so if you are interested in the topic it is a good place to start.

Categories
Product Review

Oxygene – Review

Recently, Embarcadero has released their new Delphi XE5, which has iOS support (and will have Android by the end of they year) as part of a Mobile Pack.

I have used Delphi since the first beta (and earlier, I used Turbo Pascal), and given how tablets and smartphones are more and more surpassing the numbers of PCs, I am naturally interested in my options.

But one other option for Object Pascal fans is Oxygene – a RemObjects product that was sold for a few years as Delphi Prism.

Language

So, what are Oxygene's advantages vs Delphi? To start up, the language has a bunch of really, really cool features – such as:

– Future Types – you assign a variable, and the value is calculated in a separate thread – it only blocks execution if you need it before the calculation is done.

– Parallel Loops – for parallel i:Integer :=0 to 10 do will complete the work of the loop in multiple threads, automatically.

– Asynchronous statements

– Class contracts – for those that are not familiar, contracts add pre and post conditions (as well as invariants) to a method, so that you can guarantee that all input and output went as predicted.

– Colon operator – calls member if not nil – object:a:b just returns nil if any of them are nil. This saves a lot of conditionals testing for nil at each step.

– declaring variables (and assigning!) as they are used – very useful for smaller variable scopes, which really help readability.

Oxygene also comes with a converter for Delphi, C# and Java code. It is not perfect, but it is quite helpful, and depending on the code it might work right away with no changes required.

Components and Platforms

Oxygene already has support for native compilation to .Net (Windows as well as Mac and Linux via mono), Java (including Android) and Cocoa (iOS and Mac OS X). Note that support is fully native, not through a library as Delphi uses Firemonkey. The advantage of that is that every control is fully native, and you can use any library or component.

However, that has the disadvantage that you will be doing a new UI for each platform you target. And you will need to learn how to program to each of those, as they are quite different.

Oxygene has a clear advantage as far as components go – most (if not all) .Net components will work seamlessly. If you use Delphi and Firemonkey, your choices are extremely limited (although TMS Software has released a few nice ones).

And I am afraid that Firemonkey components might never show up – specially for developers that went through Kylix (such as Developer Express, who took a huge loss developing for it and only getting tiny amount of sales as a result) and Delphi.net – products that only lasted a few years.

Speaking of TMS Software, they have released Firemonkey components that have native Mac and iOS control sets. Of course, at this point, you are back to developing several different UIs.

Price

As far as price goes, here in Brazil Oxygene has a clear advantage. The product with support to all platforms is available for US$700 (ask sales for your Delphi cross-grade price, specially if you have a Prism license!).

Embarcadero Brazil only provides prices through quotes (and I can't see the US prices through their sites).

The quotes I have received for the Pro version with the Mobile Pack comes to US$2380 (or US$1650 for the Pro upgrade plus Mobile Pack). Ouch!

IDE

Oxygene comes with Visual Studio Shell. I only used it briefly on my Oxygene trial, but I have always heard great things about it. In my minimal testing, it loads up pretty fast (around 15s). I have tried a few of the included samples, and they all compile in a few seconds. Intellisense is much, much faster than what I usually get on Delphi.

It takes quite a while to install, but probably less than Delphi XE3 did (I didn't measure it). Needed a few system restarts, so it couldn't just be left unattended.

Refactoring support on Oxygene currently has only a Rename refactoring. Delphi has plenty of refactorings available, plus extra from third-parties such as Castalia or ModelMaker Code Explorer. I have used both of these and they are pretty good – the built-in Delphi refactoring often fails for me.

Mobile – Android and iOS

After installing the Android SDK, it is very easy to compile Android apps in Oxygene. You just do a build normally and the APK and JAR files are created in a matter of seconds. You can copy the APK to your Android device and use it right way, or run it in the emulator – which works well but is really, really slow. It is usable for simple programs, though.

I didn't test the iOS part – it requires a Mac. I imagine a service like MacInCloud would work, too.

Documentation

Oxygene documentation is weak. They have a wiki, but it is clearly a work in progress. Of course, except for the specific language stuff you should be able to use .Net (or Android/Cocoa) books, of which there are plenty. I have only seen Bob Swart‘s books for the latest Delphi versions (they are good, though).

Conclusion?

Frankly, so far I have no idea which one to choose.

Oxygene already supports native Cocoa/Android, as well as Linux/Mac via mono. They have a clear advantage on components for Windows. Documentation seems weak. They are also bound to get new tech from Microsoft simply by being .Net – which also helps on framework documention (Microsoft Documentation, as well as .Net books).

BTW, Hydrogene is a related product to Oxygene. It isn't public yet (however, I asked sales, and they told me what it is) but the idea is very good and I imagine it will be big.

[box type=”info” style=”rounded”]Update (31/Mar/2014): It is now public, and Hydrogene has a new name: RemObjects C#. It is a C# compiler just like Oxygene that compiles natively to iOS/Mac/Android and .Net. And you can mix and match (for example, if you already have Pascal code in Oxygene, or if you have experienced C# programmers) modules in both C# and Oxygene.[/box]

Delphi's advantage for me (and I imagine, for many interested in Oxygene) is that I am already well familiar with it, having used it for many years. I have tons of components as well as several programs released using it. Not having to learn about Cocoa or Android to develop for them is also a major plus. No talk of Linux support so far, though.

I'll update this review as I learn more.

Update (07/Oct/2013): I have been reading on the wiki and there are a ton of other language features. Here are some I particularly liked:

-extended constructors: create new objects and assign to fields at once – with p := new Point(param1, param1, x := 10, y := 20) do.

– Case with strings and case with types

– if and case expressions – inline, like ternary syntax but with case support too:

MessageBox.Show( (if SingleUser then
‘Are you sure you want to remove this user?'
else
‘Are you sure you want to remove these users?'),
MessageBoxButtons.YesNo)

and

result := ‘text: ‘ + case aValue of
0: ‘none';
1: ‘one';
2: ‘two';
3..5 : ‘several';
else
‘many';
end;

– Duck Typing/Soft Interfaces – basically allow you to use any class that has the same methods as the interface as if it was the interface (without having it implement the interface formally). Can also work even if not all methods in the interface are implemented, but then it is not type-safe at compile type.

 

 

Categories
Product Review

Udemy iPad App – Review

Udemy has plenty of cool video courses.  I have reviewed a few of them before on this blog, too.

They have been talking for a while about their iPad app, so I decided to try it out.

I am glad I did – it is very, very good. You can just get it for free at iTunes, and enter your Udemy login. Very quickly you will get a list of all your courses (presuming you have any, of course).

That was pretty much what anyone would expect. However, there were a few nice extras:

– It knew exactly where I had last stopped, in the middle of a video.

– It can quickly download all the video of the course so that you can watch off-line.

– My favorite – it can play videos at any speed from 0.5x to 2x (1.25x and 1.5x seems to be the sweet spot for me on the iPad – more than that distorts the audio too much). I used to do this by downloading the videos myself and playing on GOM Player, but most courses don't allow video downloads lately (seems silly to me, as they are not hard to download anyway – but it is much more time consuming).

Overall, a very good way to watch your courses, specially to make the best of time waiting on the bus, subway, doctor's office, etc.

Categories
Product Review

Pluralis Conversion Optimization – Review

Pluralis is a service that requires a more complex description than most, because as far as I know it is unique. The best way I can think to describe it is a cross from design contest sites with conversion optimization.

The basic idea looks like pure genius. Essentially, you pick up anything you want to optimize on your site, create a contest and allow conversion specialists to improve it however they want. At this point you choose what versions you want to test, and their A/B Testing system (presumably you have to add a javascript snippet on your page) shows who won. You can then award the prize or restart.

Looks great in theory – you don't have to find your own expert (and figure out if he is an expert in practice). And unlike general design contests, you can have hard data on which option is better.

(I apologize if I got anything wrong – their current pages are not clear at all and for reasons I will mention below, I just saw the basics)

If you subscribe, you can also use their A/B Testing system yourself, for US$19 per month.

I did start up the “Try out for free” part, but all you get is to enter minimal information about a contest, and on your first login they already ask for your credit card (without any mention of any free time period). That is not what I'd expect as “Try out for free”. This is effectively less informative than their video.

It is probably worth mentioning that I was invited to check the site out, based on my Optimizely review. I also got what seems to be a generic invite to try them on an e-mail that is only used on the Whois of my domain.

Overall, all I can say that Pluralis seems like a great idea.

I'll update this if I ever do get a full trial with them.

Update (18/Sep/2013): I got an e-mail from them asking the number of hits per month of my page (from the Try out for Free thing). The plan they suggested would be US$19 per month, plus US$387 for 3 expert revisions (this is the minimum). Obviously at these prices, if you have any sort of reasonable sales numbers, you'd get your money back very soon.

However, I'll probably not try them out myself, given how new the service is and the lack of reviews.

Categories
Product Review

Pair Networks Review

Recently I have moved all of my WordPress based domains to Pair.com – mostly because of the recent downtime and occasional low speeds at Dewahost. This includes this blog and my micro-sites –  Print FoldersDisk Usage and Directory Printer .

The reason I chose Pair is that I've been hearing about their reliability for years from colleagues in the ASP (Association of Software Professionals). I also asked a question before joining and while the answer wasn't particularly fast, it was very complete and friendly. They have a very nice 100 day money back guarantee , too.

I ended up going with the Webmaster plan. Basic is a bit too basic, and if you need SSL the Advanced plan has an extra charge. If you get their 1 year 25% promotion, Webmaster (US$22.50) ends up being cheaper than Advanced with SSL. It is not cheap by anyone's measure, but I'd rather get reliable service than get annoyed by constant outages and low speeds.

Moving

Moving was fairly easy. I used BackWPUp on the old site – which allows me to include databases for all sites (it is a WordPress multi-site install), and almost all site files (more on this later) in a ZIP file. Then you can just FTP this file to Pair, login using SSH and unzip it. This is obviously ridiculously fast.

Of course, I also needed to create the sites and the database (and change wp-config). Pair has their own interface, which isn't bad but is fairly different from CPanel. It is very simple to use, but lacks a bunch of CPanel options (thankfully, mostly the ones I never used). You also need to pay a monthly fee of US$2.95 for the Software Installation Manager (for WordPress, Joomla!, and other – see the full list). However, unless you really plan on installing a bunch of these programs, it seems like a silly expense – most of them are easy to install manually and Pair even has articles on how to manually install them.

I did have a couple of problems with the move – one of Pair's DNS servers took a LONG time to start responding to query about my domains (like 6-8 hours!), which made me worried about moving the sites.

After I moved the sites, I realized that none of the plugins worked. Turns out that for whatever reason, BackWPUp does not include the plugin files in the backup! I imagine that if you only have plugins from the repository (and a few), the list of plugin names is enough – but I have not only quite a few plugins installed, several were paid plugins. So I ended up having to upload all of those by hand. After doing that, everything just worked.

Speed

I am fairly pleased about the speed of my sites on Pair. I was getting 6 second average page loads with this site on the other host, but after minor tuning (gzip and expire changes) I am getting about 2 seconds here.

File speeds are also very good. On both my sites, I was getting sub 10 K/s speeds on both Crystaltech and Dewahost at peak times. No doubt that is partly because of my connection (20Mbit/s cable in Brazil), but even at those times I am getting 100K/s or more for downloads on my Pair site. Usually it hovers around 500-700K/s.

You can test the speed by downloading one of my programs, STG FolderPrint Plus . It is only about 8MB, so speed might still be climbing when you finish.

Another nice surprise was FTP speed. I usually get around 20K/s for Crystaltech, but I am getting my upload speed limit for Pair – about 120K/s. This really speeds up my software releases! I still have to upload to the other site for now, though 🙁 .

Support

I have contacted support a few times, to set up my SSL (it requires manual setup by them, but that is free) and for FTP problems. My problem was that extra FTP logins can't use secure FTP connections – that is quite weird and unexpected.

I have never made an urgent request yet (there is a category for that on their interface), so I have no idea how fast they are. For my regular questions, support speed was usually a few hours. I'll update this post if I ever need urgent support.

Conclusion

Overall, I am fairly satisfied with my sites at Pair Networks. They are pretty fast, the interface is OK,  and support is good. They are also eco-friendly. Recommended.

I'll update this post over time if needed.

Found the review useful? Please use this link to sign up, so I get hosting credit. Thanks.

Categories
Product Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint – Course Review

Guest Blogging Blueprint, by Joel Widmer, is a course that covers pretty much all you'd need to know to start guest blogging.

It goes from why, through searching for adequate blogs, to writing and promoting your guest blog posts.

Why?

The reason most people have to want to guest blog is simple: links. Most blogs you'd want to post in are going to give you a link or two in your post, which can really improve your ranking on search engines and give you traffic.

The course also mentions some other reasons:

  • Increase your credibility, or that of your brand
  • Get targeted traffic from those blog readers – for sales, awareness or to build and e-mail list
  • Promoting a product
  • Getting job offers

There are many more on the course, but these are probably enough to get anyone interested in being a guest blogger.

Content

The course covers:

  • Goals
  • How to find Search keywords – that influences the blogs you will find
  • How to find blogs – some nice advice, and plenty of search engine tricks to help you find useful blogs
  • How to qualify the blogs you found – no point in getting a blog post on worthless blogs!
  • Choosing your topic – covers idea generation, how to see and match the tone of the blog, etc
  • How to Pitch your post to the blog – ideas on how to get the blog to accept your blog post, includes e-mail templates
  • Promoting your post – after you get your post in, it is useful to make it as visible as possible, and this include some techniques.

Conclusion

The course took me about 2.5 hours to conclude (I didn't actually do the exercises – but you probably should!), and it covers pretty much everything you'd want to know to start guest blogging.

There are also PDFs with e-mail templates, and the videos are downloadable – great if you want to watch on a tablet or cell phone.

Guest blogging Blueprint is money and time well spent if you are interested in the subject (which you probably should be, given the free traffic you can get!). Recommended.

I was able to get my readers a 50% discount coupon. At this price point (US$14!) the course is really a great deal.

Get Guest Blogging Blueprint – 50% off

Note: I got a free review copy of the course from the author. This didn't change this review in any way, however.

 

Categories
Product Review

Sleep Hacking: Course Review

Sleep Hacking 101: Have more Energy spend less time in bed is a course on Udemy on how to optimize your sleep.

The idea of the course is that there are practices you can take that can enable you to sleep less and still have more energy.

The course consists mostly of videos (with a few PDFs with mostly the same content and a Excel file for you to work on your habits), and took me about 2 hours to watch, while writing notes.

What it covers is the nature of sleep, and what you can do to improve yours, such as:

  • Get more light in the day, specially right after you wake up, and avoid it before sleep and if you wake up during sleep
  • Avoid too much coffee, and also food and drinks near your bed time
  • Minor advice on sleep monitors and smart wake alarm such as the Zeo (which I understand is no longer available); I would really like to have seen more on this area, specially reviews of products that are still available
  • Some suggestions on what to do before sleep
  • Suggestions on naps, which mostly is that they are useful and that they should be short enough that you don't enter deep sleep and wake up groggy

Overall, I'd say that the course does have some useful advice, although I already heard almost everything on the course before. I feel I wasn't taking enough natural light during the day, though, and following the course advice already helped a bit. It was good to be reminded of some of the other stuff, which I hadn't forgotten but started ignoring.

What remained was enough for the price I paid, but if I had paid full price (US$49 right now) I might have asked for a refund. If you get a nice discount, it is worth it.

Update (19/Nov/2013): I asked the course's author (Scott Britton) for a discount for my blog readers. And he offered a 100% discount! So you can get the course for free! Considering this I have changed my rating from 3 to 5 stars.

[button link=”http://stgsys.net/sleep” window=”yes”]Get the Course for Free[/button]

Categories
Product Review

Data Analysis Course – Course Review

I took the Data Analysis course, by Jeff Leek, on Coursera some time ago.

The course covers how to do data analysis. The useful parts if you are not a data analyst or planning on becoming one, is that you learn some statistics, how to explore data and see correlations, and also how to use R, which is an interesting language for statistics. It is also fairly easy to use for graphs, and you can achieve quite a lot with very little code.

The course is mostly in video, and you have a weekly quizzes as well as 2 data analyses that you have to make.

It took me about 23 hours to complete the course, including quizzes and data analyses.

Overall I found the course to be good, although I found some of the later quizzes to be a little hard. I think it could have used more practical exercises and quizzes, and some of the later classes could be more clear.

Recommended if you are interested in the area.

Don't have a lot of time? Some of what is covered here is also in Visualize This – and even if you end up taking the course, you will probably be able to use some of what you learned in the book.

Categories
Product Review

Ace Reader – Speed Reading Software Review

Ace Reader is a program designed to help speed up your reading. It has a series of tests and exercises designed to make you read faster.

These include:

– the basic tests, which measure your speed and recall. When you start a course you can also select the grade – from 1 to 13, corresponding to school grades. Newspapers are in 5th or 6th grade level according to the program.

– eye exercises, such as following objects around the screen, or focusing on the center of the screen while the numbers widen (to widen your focus).

– flashing lines one (or more) at a time (to help you read a whole line at once and avoid backtracking).Ace Reader

– texts in multiple columns with flashing highlights you should follow.

– games where you must quickly say if the words are the same, or pick them up from a selection later.

– games where you must search a list of names for a particular name (to help you find things in lists).

I think that their system works well. I always read pretty fast and I did do a regular speed reading course about 20 years ago, so I started at 381 Words/Min and Grade 3 (the default) – the program keeps logs. I don't know if the type of exercises changed with the speed, but I don't think so.

Two weeks later, with a bit less than 10 minutes practice per day,  I usually test at 500-600 words for Grade 7 texts, and I feel the speed difference both when reading and also when scanning lists.

The only problem I have is that the program likes opening certain windows in Monitor 1, even if it is not the primary monitor. Unfortunately, this a known problem and support doesn't seem to plan to fix this. Obviously, this can only affect you if you have a multi-monitor system (in which monitor 1 is not the primary). I just drag the windows myself, for some of the exercises.

The program is expensive (about US$69 for the Pro version and US$99 for the Elite Version) – but it is often featured on Bits Du Jour (a software discount site), so if you wait you can get a nice discount. I got the Elite version at 50% off.

Overall, very much recommended if you would like to read faster.

 

Categories
Product Review

SurveyMonkey – Review

While I have completed surveys using SurveyMonkey for many years now, I had never used their system to make a survey, till last week.

I decided that there was too much I didn't know about STG FolderPrint Plus users, and that this got in the way of deciding on new features and products. So I used SurveyMonkey, with the MailChimp integration.

First of all, it was very easy to sign up for SurveyMonkey and get started. Their portuguese translation isn't very good, but thankfully I was able to change the language to english.

The free version has many limitations, but none is all that bad. You can only ask 10 questions, but more than that would be annoying anyway, and you can pack a lot of stuff into a single question matrix (see below).

Question Matrix
Question Matrix

There is also a limit of 100 visible responses. I got less than that so far, and if I get more, I can just sign up for their basic service then.

There are also a ton of extras on other versions, but mostly aren't that interesting. Some that I miss is the ability to download the raw data and use filters and crosstabs. For example, I'd like to know what features business users want vs home users, but that is not possible with the free version (you can see each response, so I imagine you could spider or hand copy and paste each one…) .

Sending the survey was very easy using MailChimp (not related, despite the simian names). You just have to authorize with your SurveyMonkey account, and use a special template to get started. At this point you just pick the survey, and send to an existing list.

The nice part about the integration is the extra abilities that you get (otherwise you'd just do a normal campaign and send the survey link).  You can see right at MailChimp which users answered your survey, and see their responses. You can also send follow-ups thanking them (and maybe sending them something extra), or requesting people that didn't take the survey to do so.  I'm not going to do that though – seems quite annoying!

Overall, I liked SurveyMonkey. For free, it is a very good service, and I've gotten plenty of useful information from the survey, which I plan to share in a few posts later.