Major mobile operating systems only recently got the ability to show multiple applications side-by-side on one tablet screen.
Why would I want to see two apps at once on my phone?
It isn't about your phone as much as it is about your tablet, which runs the same operating system as your phone and has a screen with two to four times as much surface area.
Thanks for explaining your terms. I'll rephrase my opinion based on them:
People are content to purchase devices that support the Consumer role but not the Creator role. In a Discord text chat I'm in, I often see excuses being made: "sorry, can't; on mobile and don't have a PC". I find this unfortunate because it dissuades people from performing the Creator role much if at all.
If only they would give us a lumpy sheet of glass.
There was supposed to be a touch screen that would extrude temporary lumps when the virtual keyboard popped up, so that the user could feel whether his thumbs were correctly lined up over each key. (See video: Tactus Morphing Touchscreen Keyboard hands-on (2013, 2:54)) But it never ended up coming to market.
If you want a phone with updates, do the free market thing and buy an iPhone.
What do I do if I need a phone with both updates and apps distributed as free software? The App Store model will never accommodate a counterpart to F-Droid.
If you think there's some negative connotation attached to consumer, that's on you.
I'm not the only one who sees "consumer" as connoting one who views works of authorship created by others and does not create works. From the GNU project's list of loaded words:
In addition, describing the users of software as “consumers” refers to a framing in which people are limited to selecting between whatever “products” are available in the “market.” There is no room in this framing for the idea that users can directly exercise control over what a program does.
To describe people who are not limited to passive use of works, we suggest terms such as “individuals” and “citizens,” rather than “consumers.”
I guess describing users of Apple iOS and Android as "consumers" is correlated with the unsuitability of a flat sheet of glass for creating works longer than a paragraph.
I'm pretty sure my TV is going to have a really hard time connecting to the internet for some unknown reasons.
What might those be? What stops Samsung from, say, putting the baseband of a low-end Galaxy phone in each TV and leasing airtime from some MVNO for the uplink?
Britannica is superior in writing clarity, actual practical reliability, and every other metric that isn't an arbitrary one including obscure articles on yak variants as part of a generalized statistical measure.
The account is used to synchronize the links stored in Pocket on one of your devices that runs Pocket with the links stored in Pocket on another of your devices that runs Pocket. How would you recommend that this be accomplished without an account?
this firm would go with a product that works on the PCs we already have rather than buy new equipment. And I can almost guarantee that if this kind of CMS is available for Mac, there is at least one similar product for Windows.
But how likely is it that a single native document revision system would allow mainstream employees with Windows, graphic designer employees with macOS, developer employees with X11/Linux, and employees in the field with iOS and Android devices all to contribute?
Distributing a Qt app to an audience of comparable size to that of a web app requires the developer to make and publish six executable forms of each app: Win32 (Windows 7-10), UWP (Windows 10 and 10 S), macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android. For a 1- or 2-man micro-ISV, reaching all platforms can prove so expensive and time-consuming that the developer is likely to settle for the tradeoff of deliberately limiting his market by not shipping an executable at all for one or more minority platforms. And even then, Chrome OS and game consoles with a web browser are still left out.
Would you consider it reasonable for a developer to offer use of a web app without charge but paywall the Qt app in order to cover the cost of maintaining executable forms of the Qt app for all six major desktop and mobile platforms?
Please go on defending the multi-platform advantage of web browsers, though. Web apps have literally nothing else to recommend them.
On platforms with a monopoly app store, such as iOS, Windows 10 S, and game consoles, the platform's owner cens^W curates its own app store. It's generally not quite as interested in cens^W curating web applications. Thus an app whose content that violates Apple's App Store Review Guidelines can be published either as a web application or not at all.
Thank you for being willing to engage with actual numbers. I don't see that often, as a lot of users in Slashdot's comment section seem to run out of steam once things get quantitative.
Between the design/layout gaffes, unresponsive interaction, frequent errors/restarts and general sluggishness, [a web application that we use] has probably cost my employer many thousands of dollars in wasteful inefficiency
Thousands of dollars total, or thousands of dollars per employee? Would it have made up for, say, the price of replacing every employee's desktop PC with an iMac and laptop PC with a comparable MacBook?
With only HTML5 and CSS3, how do you build a collaborative real-time whiteboard application?
you don't because that's a desktop application
Good luck running a desktop application for Mac on a Windows PC, or on a GNU/Linux PC, or on an iPhone or iPad, or on an Android phone or Android tablet. The advantage of a web application is that it reaches users of more than just one operating system.
Even if you accept as an axiom that a web application must be more "crappy" than an OS-specific native application, you end up having to weigh one flaw against another. In this case, you'd be weighing some (currently amorphous) definition of "crappy" vs. requiring purchase of a specific brand of computer on which to run the application. In my opinion, the greater number of potential users of a web application compared to a native application is likely to outweigh the magnitude of its "crappiness". In order to convince me otherwise, you'll have to state or cite a clear definition of "crappy".
My malicious app just stores the data it wants to send out and it goes out 'when the settings activity is frontmost'. I don't know why you thought this was a solution.
You have a point. Let me revise my mitigation:
Do not obtain assistive apps from Google Play Store. Instead, obtain them from F-Droid, which rebuilds each package from source code before making it available to users, and audit the source code that F-Droid built.
Slashdot Mirror
Major mobile operating systems only recently got the ability to show multiple applications side-by-side on one tablet screen.
Why would I want to see two apps at once on my phone?
It isn't about your phone as much as it is about your tablet, which runs the same operating system as your phone and has a screen with two to four times as much surface area.
Thanks for explaining your terms. I'll rephrase my opinion based on them:
People are content to purchase devices that support the Consumer role but not the Creator role. In a Discord text chat I'm in, I often see excuses being made: "sorry, can't; on mobile and don't have a PC". I find this unfortunate because it dissuades people from performing the Creator role much if at all.
If only they would give us a lumpy sheet of glass.
There was supposed to be a touch screen that would extrude temporary lumps when the virtual keyboard popped up, so that the user could feel whether his thumbs were correctly lined up over each key. (See video: Tactus Morphing Touchscreen Keyboard hands-on (2013, 2:54)) But it never ended up coming to market.
A "phone call" is a form of voice chat that allows the other party to use (less expensive) legacy technology.
Tell that to your carrier then. They are the ones who decided to customize your Android experience
Since when has Comcast, my wired home ISP, customized my Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8", an Android tablet with only Wi-Fi?
A decade-old ThinkPad X61 made in the Windows Vista era will run Windows 10 or Debian 9 acceptably. What makes Macs and phones different?
If you want a phone with updates, do the free market thing and buy an iPhone.
What do I do if I need a phone with both updates and apps distributed as free software? The App Store model will never accommodate a counterpart to F-Droid.
Mobile phone OSes [...] are mature, feature rich, and quite frankly upgrades lack killer features which make them enticing.
Major mobile operating systems only recently got the ability to show multiple applications side-by-side on one tablet screen.
If you think there's some negative connotation attached to consumer, that's on you.
I'm not the only one who sees "consumer" as connoting one who views works of authorship created by others and does not create works. From the GNU project's list of loaded words:
I guess describing users of Apple iOS and Android as "consumers" is correlated with the unsuitability of a flat sheet of glass for creating works longer than a paragraph.
Cisco iOS (used in routers) or BroadOn iOS (used in Wii)?
I'm pretty sure my TV is going to have a really hard time connecting to the internet for some unknown reasons.
What might those be? What stops Samsung from, say, putting the baseband of a low-end Galaxy phone in each TV and leasing airtime from some MVNO for the uplink?
Britannica is superior in writing clarity, actual practical reliability, and every other metric that isn't an arbitrary one including obscure articles on yak variants as part of a generalized statistical measure.
Britannica is also paywalled. Are you buying?
Why do I need an account to use Pocket?
The account is used to synchronize the links stored in Pocket on one of your devices that runs Pocket with the links stored in Pocket on another of your devices that runs Pocket. How would you recommend that this be accomplished without an account?
Discordapp.com is usable in Chromium and unusably slow in Firefox ESR 52.
Without a straight majority, the species dies.
this firm would go with a product that works on the PCs we already have rather than buy new equipment. And I can almost guarantee that if this kind of CMS is available for Mac, there is at least one similar product for Windows.
But how likely is it that a single native document revision system would allow mainstream employees with Windows, graphic designer employees with macOS, developer employees with X11/Linux, and employees in the field with iOS and Android devices all to contribute?
Here's why you probably ducked.
Distributing a Qt app to an audience of comparable size to that of a web app requires the developer to make and publish six executable forms of each app: Win32 (Windows 7-10), UWP (Windows 10 and 10 S), macOS, X11/Linux, iOS, and Android. For a 1- or 2-man micro-ISV, reaching all platforms can prove so expensive and time-consuming that the developer is likely to settle for the tradeoff of deliberately limiting his market by not shipping an executable at all for one or more minority platforms. And even then, Chrome OS and game consoles with a web browser are still left out.
Would you consider it reasonable for a developer to offer use of a web app without charge but paywall the Qt app in order to cover the cost of maintaining executable forms of the Qt app for all six major desktop and mobile platforms?
Please go on defending the multi-platform advantage of web browsers, though. Web apps have literally nothing else to recommend them.
On platforms with a monopoly app store, such as iOS, Windows 10 S, and game consoles, the platform's owner cens^W curates its own app store. It's generally not quite as interested in cens^W curating web applications. Thus an app whose content that violates Apple's App Store Review Guidelines can be published either as a web application or not at all.
The reality is if you have already purchased a domain for your internal network
Most homeowners have not.
Nobody obtains certs or bothers with TLS just to play videos from home file servers.
Until web browser publishers stop allowing use of Fullscreen API in cleartext HTTP documents. (See citations in my reply to Anonymous Coward.)
What multi-platform applications platform doesn't suck as an applications platform?
Thank you for being willing to engage with actual numbers. I don't see that often, as a lot of users in Slashdot's comment section seem to run out of steam once things get quantitative.
Between the design/layout gaffes, unresponsive interaction, frequent errors/restarts and general sluggishness, [a web application that we use] has probably cost my employer many thousands of dollars in wasteful inefficiency
Thousands of dollars total, or thousands of dollars per employee? Would it have made up for, say, the price of replacing every employee's desktop PC with an iMac and laptop PC with a comparable MacBook?
With only HTML5 and CSS3, how do you build a collaborative real-time whiteboard application?
you don't because that's a desktop application
Good luck running a desktop application for Mac on a Windows PC, or on a GNU/Linux PC, or on an iPhone or iPad, or on an Android phone or Android tablet. The advantage of a web application is that it reaches users of more than just one operating system.
Even if you accept as an axiom that a web application must be more "crappy" than an OS-specific native application, you end up having to weigh one flaw against another. In this case, you'd be weighing some (currently amorphous) definition of "crappy" vs. requiring purchase of a specific brand of computer on which to run the application. In my opinion, the greater number of potential users of a web application compared to a native application is likely to outweigh the magnitude of its "crappiness". In order to convince me otherwise, you'll have to state or cite a clear definition of "crappy".
My malicious app just stores the data it wants to send out and it goes out 'when the settings activity is frontmost'. I don't know why you thought this was a solution.
You have a point. Let me revise my mitigation:
Do not obtain assistive apps from Google Play Store. Instead, obtain them from F-Droid, which rebuilds each package from source code before making it available to users, and audit the source code that F-Droid built.
What reaches more users: a native application for Mac or a web application for HTML+CSS+JS?