That's one thing I can't understand about Twitter — how can you have a conversation with arbitrary people, and have others view that conversation, if only Tweets inside follow-cliques appear on a person's timeline? Do conversations instead happen on hashtag streams, or Is it expected that one should monitor the "mention" tab so you can talk with people you don't follow (even though people watching your timeline will only see your side of the conversation).
When it was getting of the ground, Twitter made a big deal about how it was unlike email because it allowed people to receive messages without an expectation of having to reply. They've quietened-down about this, possibly because the concept of speaking without listening is a rather elitist one (which is why the elite love it).
But I can see how Twitter crushed RSS. It's much easier to create a personal feed via Twitter that RSS, just like pre-fab blogs killed off personal Geocities-type websites.
So, I watched the whole thing when it aired, but I would never want to watch it again, and certainly wouldn't buy it on DVD.
Exactly. Lost gave me new respect for series with mostly standalone episodes. Star Trek TNG is still re-watchable, even though the quality varies. Lost is not. After a less than stunning "big reveal", all run-up plots become fatuous and tedious, particularly when there's hundreds of hours of them.
Thanks for the info. The ad offered a good price on a range you knew about from work.
I'm just thinking that if there were no ads would you have still considered that option, and would you have been able to find a good & cheap vendor from a search-engine search or a price-comparison site; and if you weren't already familiar with the model, without ads would there still be good places to read up about them?
I'd be interested to know whether you'd already used non-ad info to pick out a laptop model, and just used the ad to get a good price and vendor, or whether the ad influenced your choice of laptop.
It'd be wonderful if there were some sort of option whereby an app could allow you to see a list of your friends, invite them, etc, without the actual app being able to see that information, but Facebook doesn't really provide that level of detail.
An app can display a Request Dialog that prompts the user to invite selected friends to use the app. But because the app gets a callback about who was invited, it's possible that apps can't do this without being given access to the user's public or private friend list. As you say, this should be possible even if an app hasn't requested access to anything. The docs don't make it clear what permissions are required.
Yes, I think you'll see just the first few episodes of a new series being broadcast or streamed (with or without ads) as an ad for the series, followed by direct sales of streams and media, followed months or years later by ad-supported syndication. Similar to what they did for the Family Guy Star Wars episodes.
I said "there is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining". Specifically, that you were saying Apple sells the iPads at a loss because they will make up the difference after the sale. They don't.
I was suggesting something weaker than this — that a partially captive software and media market can allow Apple to have lower hardware margins than they've traditionally had. Apple also want to build market share for their platform before their competitors catch up.
Yes, [buyers of Apple hardware] *can* [easily spend more than their device's purchase price on iTunes-purchased software and media], but they don't.
I'd like to see some figures. I think it'd be getting up there for heavy music and video buyers, as well as for users of niche and expensive business apps. There's a huge potential for growth given that Apple has positioned itself as the only or the preferred vendor for media and software.
So I see Apple deriving a greater and greater share of their profits from their "platform".
Yes, but "greater and greater" in this case is going from "break even" to "a little better than break even". Apple makes billions in profits from each of their major hardware categories every year, they make millions from their iTunes stores.
The money they make from increased hardware sales *as a result* of the stores exceeds the money they make from the stores themselves. That's the part that people who think as you do are missing. For Apple, hardware is king, and always will be. The day it's not is the day Apple will have stumbled.
Apple has a new hardware-software synergy. In their last quarterly results Apple received $1.1b in revenue from iTunes, 5% of their total revenue, and growing rapidly. Do you have a link for your suggestion that this is margin-wise less rather than more profitable than their hardware?
Apple have over two-thirds of the audio and video download market, which doesn't just cater to owners of Apple devices. Yes this is a low-margin business, but revenue will grow as physical media declines.
And rapidly coming online is the higher-margin revenue from software (including the new Mac app store), books, newspapers and magazines.
Thanks for the info, though you could have been nicer about it. We're here to find the truth, and no-one is the font of knowledge on everything. I hope people have found my other points helpful.
Mobile Safari would rely on HTML5 to access the microphone and the camera. Can anyone provide a summary of the extent to which this is currently implemented, and the extent to which a website would be able do what a native app can? It looks like HTML5 has some deficiencies compared to Flash and Silverlight, both for reading and playback.
Mobile Safari supports the W3C Geolocation API, and support for the DeviceOrientation API was added in the recently-released iOS 4.2 update. Standard support is good news.
There is some commonality between JavaScript touch support on Android and iOS, I hope this can be standardized.
Perhaps there's a chance for the Web to fight back against native apps.
Buyers of Apple hardware can easily spend more than their device's purchase price on iTunes-purchased software and media.
That's a lot of songs and games for (mostly) a a buck a piece. Would you care to cite your sources?
Music and games and movies and TV shows and podcasts and tools and books and periodical issues and periodical subscriptions. The most expensive app is $1000. Content is king. I often see DVDs sold with a free DVD player.
There is no lock-in because nobody is forced to purchase apps or media from iTunes. The iPad is perfectly capable right out of the box with its built-in Web browser and other apps.
Web apps running under iOS will always be harder to use than native apps because Apple bans native APIs like Flash and non-Apple JavaScript. This means that web apps can't make use of device I/O such as multi-touch, sound, GPS, accelerometer, etc.
And when users prefer native apps, Apple is more likely to get a cut of media sales because Apple requires that apps that link to web-based purchases must also allow in-app purchases through iTunes.
That 30% is not margin; it is the cost of running an e-commerce enterprise, complete with electronic payment and content delivery systems, none of which the developer has to bother with.
Yes the 30% is revenue not margin. I'm arguing that although Apple's hardware revenue share is higher (probably in the 80-90% range), the low fixed and marginal costs to run their online software and media store compared to designing, making, and selling devices would make the margin gap a lot narrower than this revenue gap.
No developer is forced to use iAds. As a matter of fact, AdMob and other advertisement networks were rather well established before iAds came in. If developers chose to use iAds it is because they find it superior or more convenient than other services.
Apple makes a direct profit on every piece of hardware they sell, including iPads. App Store (and music store) profits are minuscule compared to their hardware profits. There is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining.
Why do you say there's no lock in? Apple is the exclusive agent for native apps (including publications), in-app book sales, and analytics-capable in-app advertising. Buyers of Apple hardware can easily spend more than their device's purchase price on iTunes-purchased software and media. Sure Apple's revenue cut is 30% rather than 100% (less for music), but their margins on software and media can be comparable to their hardware margins because their cost of sales is so much less.Then there's the on-going revenue from ad views.
So I see Apple deriving a greater and greater share of their profits from their "platform".
I suppose this is the (evil) genius of lock-in: subsidise the hardware with app-store profits. Defer consumers seeing higher prices until they buy apps, or rely on the cut-throat app-store market forcing developers to absorb the discount.
The message it sends is that women are not self-determined and able to decide for themselves, but rather, are some kind of commodity to be traded or prize to be won. For some reason this is celebrated with lofty talk about diversity and such... I don't understand why so few see it as the insult that it really is. It can be phrased as "we know what you women want even better than you do and clearly your failure to recognize that is why our percentage of women is so low."
You're assuming that all women are making perfect decisions based on perfect information and neutral influences.
While women are now free in the sense that the law no longer discriminates, there's still a cultural milieu that influences decisions, plus a legacy that still affects behaviour, whether or not the woman's consciousness has been raised by being taught about other ways of doing things.
So while I'm loath to support quotas which discriminate against men and taint the women, and neglect that fully free and informed women may still choose to do certain things more or less than the average man, I'm in favour of things like outreach programs and consciousness-raising about things like women's greater total work burden (paid plus domestic), which means they have less free time to devote to things like Wikipedia.
A lot of what makes papers such as the New York Times valuable is not its coverage of events, but its investigations. And these investigations aren't usually the types that first come to mind; you know, uncovering crime, corruption, or the story behind the story. Most investigations are about exposing trends.
It's this is valuable and unique material that could carry a subscription. Its uniqueness means that if others cover it briefly then a click through to the original source is quite likely, while if others cover it in more detail then there would be a case for syndication fees or some other form of revenue sharing.
The Daily looks to be ignoring this lesson in mainly covering events and political manoeuvring.
In the video attached to TFA I only spotted one possible ad. It was static and full-screen. Will subscribers put up with auto-activated animated or audio ads?
Yes, it allows the advertisers to lie more effectively so they can bilk you out of more of your money than they could otherwise.
How so? How does me knowing that the model of guitar I'm looking for is available from some out-of-state dealer (who's offering free shipping, to boot!) for about 10% less than I can find it near where I live bilk me out of money?
Yes, ads are most likely to be helpful in finding the best vendor for a particular item. But how did you choose what model to buy? Ads provide less trustworthy information than editorial.
That ad is only being displayed because that vendor was the one willing to pay the most for that exposure, not because they offer the best price. A perusal of organic search results may turn up something better. There's also price comparison sites where the prominence and presence of a listing is less correlated to payment than pure advertising.
The act of advertising a service, or a product, is not intrinsically evil. And the act of connecting businesses advertising a product or service with customers who are more likely to be looking for that product or service means two things:
1) People not looking for that product or service are less likely to see those ads and have their time wasted by nonsense;
2) Advertisers have to spend less money connecting to the people who are interested in their products or services, which has a long-term effect of lowering prices through competition.
Advertising that is pushed to you is less likely to be helpful than advertising you request through search engines, deal sites, and manufacturer's websites, no matter how well-targeted they are. It's no coincidence that all these are going gangbusters, while display ads are in the doldrums, particularly due to their increasingly intrusive nature (both visually and privacy-wise).
Unfortunately this is bad news for publishers, who have relied on charging for surrounding their material with material they don't control. I think this will change, with greater use of affiliate-like systems that still allow publishers to retain editorial integrity.(Disclosure: I'm involved in one.) Publishers need to better cover the one good point that advertising provides -- discovery/awareness -- through better-compiled "what's new" and "real deal" lists.
How is it being injected into the process? In the course of doing my research, I decided to buy a particular Yamaha guitar, based on the reviews I found in several and my own experience with them.
So... I know the model I want, and now I want to look and see if I can find a good deal on it, and perhaps find people in my area who offer lessons and supplies... why wouldn't it be helpful to be able to compare prices of vendors who do business both online, and in my area? In some cases, the advertisements I've found are for businesses that I had no idea even existed, because they're miles away in towns I rarely visit - but easily found once I know they exist.
Do you think you clicked on enough ads on the review sites in order to properly compensate them for the help they gave you?
The reason is that anything and everything that can be written in Javascript can be written to look better and perform better using native APIs.
There's no reason JS apps have to look worse. But yes, they're currently harder to make look good. Better JS libraries will overcome this.
It's madness that we'd need to write the same software multiple times.
Ok, you gain one thing. But Java failed at that, and Javascript + HTML is worse than Java.
Client-side Java failed because it wasn't sufficiently lightweight and easy to install, and didn't have good looking and easy-to-use UI libraries. HTML+JS trumps Java on all these, though there's still a way to go on the last of them.
Plus applications that ignore platform conventions and instead implement their own look and feel are always worse than the same application that doesn't do that. And every web application does that, because there is no standard look and feel for "the web".
HTML already provides standard widgets like checkboxes and dropdowns, with which most are very familiar. Not to mention the advantage of having to control just a single platform-tuned native app (the browser).
Both HTML5 and popular JavaScript libraries can help standardize other widgets suitable for a more interactive and touch-driven era (video player, grid data, gestures, etc.)
Besides a single language, another major advantage of web apps is their ability to link to each other, suck data from each other (for which there are standards like REST and SOAP), and embed themselves in each other (widgets). By default an app is a world to itself.
Given these advantages I'd take Web anarchy over an app-land dictatorship any day.
There is no "yet". It will never be, because Javascript + HTML will never be as good as the tools available for developing on the native platform.
I don't see any reason why web apps can't be as easily to develop, as feature-rich, as fast, and as easy to use as native apps. The browser just has to use on-the-fly compilation of JavaScript, support local storage, and expose a common API for device I/O (the first two are already here). And the web app itself just has to be able to adjust its UI for the screen size.
It is madness that people think the whole world should standardize on a typeless scripting language and a klunky markup language for graphical layout, running on a VM that is always embedded in a window that allows the user to do things that will break your application.
The ubiquity of HTML+JS+CSS viewers (web browsers) greatly reduces the need to code separately for each viewing device. It's madness that we'd need to write the same software multiple times.
Not really. you know what ads are. You might accidentally trust editorial content.
Yes, editorial can be corrupted. At the moment one of the most common ways this happens is through the favouring of advertisers, which makes advertising doubly corrupt.
That's why you have to find a trusted source, based on their reputation, their policies, or your experience.
No one is going to spend money to tell you, zippthorne, about something that might be useful to you unless they will benefit from your purchase of the item, either directly ( as the retailer or producer ) or indirectly ( magazines ).
True, with two exceptions: When the full cost of a publication or service is borne by the users; and when people take the time (= money) to give word-of-mouth advice for nice reasons.
However the first usually means a prohibitive paywall, while the second usually delivers information that is either highly-subjective or has been derived from the very same professionals.
What about the other message that advertising sometimes sends, "Here's something you may not know about that might be useful to you."
Isn't a less intrusive, better filtered, and more trustworthy way of learning about new things through editorial content rather than ads?
There are ways to fund publishers of helpful product-related information such as reviews and "what's new" lists other than via up-front charges or advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the most popular form of gaming? Gambling.
What's the best motiivator? Money.
Same thing.
Status pales.
That's one thing I can't understand about Twitter — how can you have a conversation with arbitrary people, and have others view that conversation, if only Tweets inside follow-cliques appear on a person's timeline? Do conversations instead happen on hashtag streams, or Is it expected that one should monitor the "mention" tab so you can talk with people you don't follow (even though people watching your timeline will only see your side of the conversation).
When it was getting of the ground, Twitter made a big deal about how it was unlike email because it allowed people to receive messages without an expectation of having to reply. They've quietened-down about this, possibly because the concept of speaking without listening is a rather elitist one (which is why the elite love it).
But I can see how Twitter crushed RSS. It's much easier to create a personal feed via Twitter that RSS, just like pre-fab blogs killed off personal Geocities-type websites.
So, I watched the whole thing when it aired, but I would never want to watch it again, and certainly wouldn't buy it on DVD.
Exactly. Lost gave me new respect for series with mostly standalone episodes. Star Trek TNG is still re-watchable, even though the quality varies. Lost is not. After a less than stunning "big reveal", all run-up plots become fatuous and tedious, particularly when there's hundreds of hours of them.
Thanks for the info. The ad offered a good price on a range you knew about from work.
I'm just thinking that if there were no ads would you have still considered that option, and would you have been able to find a good & cheap vendor from a search-engine search or a price-comparison site; and if you weren't already familiar with the model, without ads would there still be good places to read up about them?
I'd be interested to know whether you'd already used non-ad info to pick out a laptop model, and just used the ad to get a good price and vendor, or whether the ad influenced your choice of laptop.
It'd be wonderful if there were some sort of option whereby an app could allow you to see a list of your friends, invite them, etc, without the actual app being able to see that information, but Facebook doesn't really provide that level of detail.
An app can display a Request Dialog that prompts the user to invite selected friends to use the app. But because the app gets a callback about who was invited, it's possible that apps can't do this without being given access to the user's public or private friend list. As you say, this should be possible even if an app hasn't requested access to anything. The docs don't make it clear what permissions are required.
Yes, I think you'll see just the first few episodes of a new series being broadcast or streamed (with or without ads) as an ad for the series, followed by direct sales of streams and media, followed months or years later by ad-supported syndication. Similar to what they did for the Family Guy Star Wars episodes.
I said "there is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining". Specifically, that you were saying Apple sells the iPads at a loss because they will make up the difference after the sale. They don't.
I was suggesting something weaker than this — that a partially captive software and media market can allow Apple to have lower hardware margins than they've traditionally had. Apple also want to build market share for their platform before their competitors catch up.
Yes, [buyers of Apple hardware] *can* [easily spend more than their device's purchase price on iTunes-purchased software and media], but they don't.
I'd like to see some figures. I think it'd be getting up there for heavy music and video buyers, as well as for users of niche and expensive business apps. There's a huge potential for growth given that Apple has positioned itself as the only or the preferred vendor for media and software.
So I see Apple deriving a greater and greater share of their profits from their "platform".
Yes, but "greater and greater" in this case is going from "break even" to "a little better than break even". Apple makes billions in profits from each of their major hardware categories every year, they make millions from their iTunes stores.
The money they make from increased hardware sales *as a result* of the stores exceeds the money they make from the stores themselves. That's the part that people who think as you do are missing. For Apple, hardware is king, and always will be. The day it's not is the day Apple will have stumbled.
Apple has a new hardware-software synergy. In their last quarterly results Apple received $1.1b in revenue from iTunes, 5% of their total revenue, and growing rapidly. Do you have a link for your suggestion that this is margin-wise less rather than more profitable than their hardware?
Apple have over two-thirds of the audio and video download market, which doesn't just cater to owners of Apple devices. Yes this is a low-margin business, but revenue will grow as physical media declines.
And rapidly coming online is the higher-margin revenue from software (including the new Mac app store), books, newspapers and magazines.
Thanks for the info, though you could have been nicer about it. We're here to find the truth, and no-one is the font of knowledge on everything. I hope people have found my other points helpful.
Mobile Safari would rely on HTML5 to access the microphone and the camera. Can anyone provide a summary of the extent to which this is currently implemented, and the extent to which a website would be able do what a native app can? It looks like HTML5 has some deficiencies compared to Flash and Silverlight, both for reading and playback.
Mobile Safari supports the W3C Geolocation API, and support for the DeviceOrientation API was added in the recently-released iOS 4.2 update. Standard support is good news.
There is some commonality between JavaScript touch support on Android and iOS, I hope this can be standardized.
Perhaps there's a chance for the Web to fight back against native apps.
That's a lot of songs and games for (mostly) a a buck a piece. Would you care to cite your sources?
Music and games and movies and TV shows and podcasts and tools and books and periodical issues and periodical subscriptions. The most expensive app is $1000. Content is king. I often see DVDs sold with a free DVD player.
There is no lock-in because nobody is forced to purchase apps or media from iTunes. The iPad is perfectly capable right out of the box with its built-in Web browser and other apps.
Web apps running under iOS will always be harder to use than native apps because Apple bans native APIs like Flash and non-Apple JavaScript. This means that web apps can't make use of device I/O such as multi-touch, sound, GPS, accelerometer, etc.
And when users prefer native apps, Apple is more likely to get a cut of media sales because Apple requires that apps that link to web-based purchases must also allow in-app purchases through iTunes.
That 30% is not margin; it is the cost of running an e-commerce enterprise, complete with electronic payment and content delivery systems, none of which the developer has to bother with.
Yes the 30% is revenue not margin. I'm arguing that although Apple's hardware revenue share is higher (probably in the 80-90% range), the low fixed and marginal costs to run their online software and media store compared to designing, making, and selling devices would make the margin gap a lot narrower than this revenue gap.
No developer is forced to use iAds. As a matter of fact, AdMob and other advertisement networks were rather well established before iAds came in. If developers chose to use iAds it is because they find it superior or more convenient than other services.
Only iAds give advertisers high quality analytics data, meaning that iAds are likely to pay better, meaning that developers are likely to prefer them to ads from other networks.
Apple makes a direct profit on every piece of hardware they sell, including iPads. App Store (and music store) profits are minuscule compared to their hardware profits. There is no lock-in dynamic like you are imagining.
Why do you say there's no lock in? Apple is the exclusive agent for native apps (including publications), in-app book sales, and analytics-capable in-app advertising. Buyers of Apple hardware can easily spend more than their device's purchase price on iTunes-purchased software and media. Sure Apple's revenue cut is 30% rather than 100% (less for music), but their margins on software and media can be comparable to their hardware margins because their cost of sales is so much less.Then there's the on-going revenue from ad views.
So I see Apple deriving a greater and greater share of their profits from their "platform".
So, pray tell, what "app-store profits" does Apple make on the numerous FREE titles on the App Store?
A 40% cut of iAd revenue. Plus perhaps some profit on the SDKs.
I suppose this is the (evil) genius of lock-in: subsidise the hardware with app-store profits. Defer consumers seeing higher prices until they buy apps, or rely on the cut-throat app-store market forcing developers to absorb the discount.
The message it sends is that women are not self-determined and able to decide for themselves, but rather, are some kind of commodity to be traded or prize to be won. For some reason this is celebrated with lofty talk about diversity and such... I don't understand why so few see it as the insult that it really is. It can be phrased as "we know what you women want even better than you do and clearly your failure to recognize that is why our percentage of women is so low."
You're assuming that all women are making perfect decisions based on perfect information and neutral influences.
While women are now free in the sense that the law no longer discriminates, there's still a cultural milieu that influences decisions, plus a legacy that still affects behaviour, whether or not the woman's consciousness has been raised by being taught about other ways of doing things.
So while I'm loath to support quotas which discriminate against men and taint the women, and neglect that fully free and informed women may still choose to do certain things more or less than the average man, I'm in favour of things like outreach programs and consciousness-raising about things like women's greater total work burden (paid plus domestic), which means they have less free time to devote to things like Wikipedia.
A lot of what makes papers such as the New York Times valuable is not its coverage of events, but its investigations. And these investigations aren't usually the types that first come to mind; you know, uncovering crime, corruption, or the story behind the story. Most investigations are about exposing trends.
It's this is valuable and unique material that could carry a subscription. Its uniqueness means that if others cover it briefly then a click through to the original source is quite likely, while if others cover it in more detail then there would be a case for syndication fees or some other form of revenue sharing.
The Daily looks to be ignoring this lesson in mainly covering events and political manoeuvring.
In the video attached to TFA I only spotted one possible ad. It was static and full-screen. Will subscribers put up with auto-activated animated or audio ads?
Does Apple force Apple Store prices to be set no higher than alternative stores, (ironically) just like Amazon is doing with its Android market?
If not, Amazon can just price 30% higher in the Apple Store.
How so? How does me knowing that the model of guitar I'm looking for is available from some out-of-state dealer (who's offering free shipping, to boot!) for about 10% less than I can find it near where I live bilk me out of money?
Yes, ads are most likely to be helpful in finding the best vendor for a particular item. But how did you choose what model to buy? Ads provide less trustworthy information than editorial.
That ad is only being displayed because that vendor was the one willing to pay the most for that exposure, not because they offer the best price. A perusal of organic search results may turn up something better. There's also price comparison sites where the prominence and presence of a listing is less correlated to payment than pure advertising.
The act of advertising a service, or a product, is not intrinsically evil. And the act of connecting businesses advertising a product or service with customers who are more likely to be looking for that product or service means two things:
1) People not looking for that product or service are less likely to see those ads and have their time wasted by nonsense;
2) Advertisers have to spend less money connecting to the people who are interested in their products or services, which has a long-term effect of lowering prices through competition.
Advertising that is pushed to you is less likely to be helpful than advertising you request through search engines, deal sites, and manufacturer's websites, no matter how well-targeted they are. It's no coincidence that all these are going gangbusters, while display ads are in the doldrums, particularly due to their increasingly intrusive nature (both visually and privacy-wise).
Unfortunately this is bad news for publishers, who have relied on charging for surrounding their material with material they don't control. I think this will change, with greater use of affiliate-like systems that still allow publishers to retain editorial integrity.(Disclosure: I'm involved in one.) Publishers need to better cover the one good point that advertising provides -- discovery/awareness -- through better-compiled "what's new" and "real deal" lists.
How is it being injected into the process? In the course of doing my research, I decided to buy a particular Yamaha guitar, based on the reviews I found in several and my own experience with them.
So... I know the model I want, and now I want to look and see if I can find a good deal on it, and perhaps find people in my area who offer lessons and supplies... why wouldn't it be helpful to be able to compare prices of vendors who do business both online, and in my area? In some cases, the advertisements I've found are for businesses that I had no idea even existed, because they're miles away in towns I rarely visit - but easily found once I know they exist.
Do you think you clicked on enough ads on the review sites in order to properly compensate them for the help they gave you?
what does P stand for?
Portman.
No no. We know that P is Porter.
For Samsung the cost of producing an update is non-zero.
Yes, it's better that paid updates be available than nothing at all.
The reason is that anything and everything that can be written in Javascript can be written to look better and perform better using native APIs.
There's no reason JS apps have to look worse. But yes, they're currently harder to make look good. Better JS libraries will overcome this.
Ok, you gain one thing. But Java failed at that, and Javascript + HTML is worse than Java.
Client-side Java failed because it wasn't sufficiently lightweight and easy to install, and didn't have good looking and easy-to-use UI libraries. HTML+JS trumps Java on all these, though there's still a way to go on the last of them.
Plus applications that ignore platform conventions and instead implement their own look and feel are always worse than the same application that doesn't do that. And every web application does that, because there is no standard look and feel for "the web".
HTML already provides standard widgets like checkboxes and dropdowns, with which most are very familiar. Not to mention the advantage of having to control just a single platform-tuned native app (the browser).
Both HTML5 and popular JavaScript libraries can help standardize other widgets suitable for a more interactive and touch-driven era (video player, grid data, gestures, etc.)
Besides a single language, another major advantage of web apps is their ability to link to each other, suck data from each other (for which there are standards like REST and SOAP), and embed themselves in each other (widgets). By default an app is a world to itself.
Given these advantages I'd take Web anarchy over an app-land dictatorship any day.
There is no "yet". It will never be, because Javascript + HTML will never be as good as the tools available for developing on the native platform.
I don't see any reason why web apps can't be as easily to develop, as feature-rich, as fast, and as easy to use as native apps. The browser just has to use on-the-fly compilation of JavaScript, support local storage, and expose a common API for device I/O (the first two are already here). And the web app itself just has to be able to adjust its UI for the screen size.
It is madness that people think the whole world should standardize on a typeless scripting language and a klunky markup language for graphical layout, running on a VM that is always embedded in a window that allows the user to do things that will break your application.
The ubiquity of HTML+JS+CSS viewers (web browsers) greatly reduces the need to code separately for each viewing device. It's madness that we'd need to write the same software multiple times.
Not really. you know what ads are. You might accidentally trust editorial content.
Yes, editorial can be corrupted. At the moment one of the most common ways this happens is through the favouring of advertisers, which makes advertising doubly corrupt.
That's why you have to find a trusted source, based on their reputation, their policies, or your experience.
No one is going to spend money to tell you, zippthorne, about something that might be useful to you unless they will benefit from your purchase of the item, either directly ( as the retailer or producer ) or indirectly ( magazines ).
True, with two exceptions: When the full cost of a publication or service is borne by the users; and when people take the time (= money) to give word-of-mouth advice for nice reasons.
However the first usually means a prohibitive paywall, while the second usually delivers information that is either highly-subjective or has been derived from the very same professionals.
What about the other message that advertising sometimes sends, "Here's something you may not know about that might be useful to you."
Isn't a less intrusive, better filtered, and more trustworthy way of learning about new things through editorial content rather than ads?
There are ways to fund publishers of helpful product-related information such as reviews and "what's new" lists other than via up-front charges or advertising.
Ah OK, thanks.
I'm hung up on conservation of momentum issues, when it may not apply (inelastic collisions?).
The nozzle probably works in the same way that sail shape allows a boat to beat upwind, and a wing's angle of attack generates lift.