The era of closed, "finished product" social networking is long over.
Really, so releasing Google+ in an unfinished state will allow Google to build it up incrementally and this will lead to eventual critical mass in the mainstream, right?
How's that working out so far?
Google landed a ton of users, initially. The problem is there's very little to do there. And there's no way for Google to compete alone against the millions of people that are actively making FB more "feature rich" every single day.
I see. So perhaps Google should have released a more "finished product" with some APIs for 3rd party developers, maybe a richer ecosystem with a couple of apps from close partners.
The "era of closed, "finished product" social networking" may be long over, but the era of "start with crap, build incrementally, and they will all come to you eventually" may not be here yet.
No, the product is the data--your data. The service is an expense, the cost of doing business, the means to acquire and aggregate that data to be sold.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like have already gone far from trying to offer a good service which is subsidized by advertising. The advertising and data brokering is now their business model and their main focus, and the service is collateral that is maximized to fulfill that model.
In a very real sense, users of the service are the product.
The problem of staying relevant in an increasingly "Mobile App"-driven world.
Keep in mind that Opera makes its money as a broker for advertising networks. Reading the examples provided by the CTO within that context, it's clear that they are intended to increase the efficacy of web adverts: it not only breaks the content into pages, which forces multiple page views, but allows for the automatic inclusion of floating images on the content boundaries--perfect for guaranteeing that banner ads are always within the view-port.
No, you are still missing the point. The reason iOS looks so smooth and "polished" is because intuitively it makes sense. It doesn't necessarily give you a visual queue of how to interact with a function; as you suggest, this may be useless when the user has already activated it. Sometimes functionality is best left to experimentation by inviting the user to perform actions that are non-destructive but that behave in predictable ways. As long as these behaviours are consistent across the entire system, users pick up on them quickly without needing to be told how it works.
Transitions should be functional as well as pretty and smooth. They give the user a sense of spatial and functional orientation within their mental model of the system. There is of course an element of "eye-candy," but I think it is greatly overstated.
For instance, in iOS swiping right-to-left scrolls a new view into the screen, not from the top nor at an angle, but from the side from which the user started, following the user's motion. It may look pretty and purely aesthetic, but it gives the sense that the view is just a small port and that the user is moving the content within it. This feels right because it's how it would work on a real, tangible object, say a Roll-O-Deck.
Moreover, this defines the OS interaction language throughout the entire system: Once the user scrolls a screen one time he knows how to scroll the rest of the views.
If I were to swipe right-to-left and a screen just "pops in" from nowhere, it may look cool and interesting at a glance, but it would not give me any indication as to what is going on in my mental model of interaction. Moreover there is no intuitive way to reconcile or associate the physical action (a right-to-left swipe) with the visual result (a screen popping in), mostly because there is no analogue to it in the real world, which is the model the user starts with. It does not provide any new information.
Those are the sort of animations that feel as if they were gratuitous rather than useful, and eventually lead to sense that the UI is "unpolished" because it does not feel right. Notice how everybody now agrees how older versions of Android seem unpolished, while I remember them being touted as prettier and nicer than iOS when they were first introduced. We both agree that animations and transitions for the sake of eye-candy eventually get tiresome.
You are right, desktops haven't had smooth transitions at all and people got along without them. Then again, there was a time when humans had no mode of transportation apart from their own two feet; there also was a time when they lived without electricity and running hot water. Yet people managed to survive. There was a time when there were no mechanical or electronic computers, and people managed to build some impressive architecture. This does not mean that cars, airplanes, electricity, and computers are useless.
Likewise, modern touch interfaces are more convenient and feel nicer and more intuitive than their desktop counterparts by the mere fact that they try to model the world in a more direct way, where the user interacts directly with objects using his fingers in much the same way he would a physical object.
All this is missed by asserting that smooth transitions are "mostly eye candy." This is made worse by acknowledging that people react positively to them, while at the same time misunderstanding the reasons why.
Until this is recognized, user interfaces that use visual flare for mere eye-candy will continue to be regarded as "less polished" by those who actually use them--irrespective of how cool and pretty they look.
Google needed to implement animations for screen transitions because that's how transitions should be. It doesn't matter what they look like or what information they convey as long as they look "polished" and smooth. It just happens that some of the most "polished" ones have been patented by Apple, so Google cannot use them; but it's OK, they found some others. They'll do the job because they look cool and smooth and "polished."
I don't mean to troll, but honestly it seems like you and Google missed the point of the transitions. Hint: they serve a purpose other than eye candy.
Wow, you really don't know what younger talking about. The case against Microsoft involved copyrights, and most of the claims in the lawsuit were denied because of a previous license agreement with MS, not because they were invalid.
Moreover, the copyrights they claimed turned out to not be sufficient for their offensive, which is precisely why they opted to use patents this time around.
I concur. The few times I've tried it, I've left not knowing whether I actually meta-moderated or not. First of all, it seems to require JavaScript. I normally have JS disabled while browsing the web, and certainly while reading Slashdot (I find the UI much less annoying that way).
Second, I'm not sure how it works. If I click on the link to review the story, I may come back to find all my moderation was reset. And even after submitting, sometimes the page breaks and I'm not sure if the changes were committed.
The old way worked fine. Perhaps I'm old and set in my ways, but I can't stand the new system and I tend to avoid it.
Or, you could create an automatic playlist of all your music and set-up the iPad to just fill all available space with music sourced from that playlist.
Aha! But the question is, are bubbles created fully formed or inflated to shape? And if the latter, can they "pop" while in the process of inflating?
The headline says, "before it fully inflates," implying that a bubble was formed, then while in the process of filling up, it popped before reaching it's full capacity.
Years of experience blowing soap bubbles confirms that the analogy is apt.
It's telling that you chose Pac-Man, a 30 year old game, for your example.
The point is that web technologies are now catching up to what native applications could do a few years ago. This is great, and I expect it to get even better. However predictions of the web overshadowing native applications are predicated on the former advancing rapidly and the latter remaining static.
Why is it so hard to imagine that the technologies available to native applications will also continue advancing at a fast pace?
Sure, today native applications are able to apply hardware accelerated graphics, and soon web applications will do so too. But this does not preclude native applications having access to the next big hardware technologies, while web applications would have to build these into their standards and common frameworks.
Although you may be right, all that means is that in 5 to 10 years Web applications will reach the state of the art of current native applications. This furthermore assumes that the latter will remain static during that time.
So, yes, perhaps in 5 years you'll finally be able to play Angry Birds or WoW on your browser, but I would expect native applications by then to offer an even richer experience.
Basically, yes, crappy-looking, light-weight Flash-like games sure will run with a combination of HTML5 and JS and without Flash, but then again, they're still crappy-looking, light-weight Flash-like games.
You are right, but I think TFA refers to a much sinister future. When every single game produced is a Bejewel or Tetris clone, the end of "installed games" will come to pass.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but would he hold yours...
Really, so releasing Google+ in an unfinished state will allow Google to build it up incrementally and this will lead to eventual critical mass in the mainstream, right?
How's that working out so far?
I see. So perhaps Google should have released a more "finished product" with some APIs for 3rd party developers, maybe a richer ecosystem with a couple of apps from close partners.
The "era of closed, "finished product" social networking" may be long over, but the era of "start with crap, build incrementally, and they will all come to you eventually" may not be here yet.
-dZ.
You forgot to add some synergy and mix in some paradigms.
-dZ.
No, the product is the data--your data. The service is an expense, the cost of doing business, the means to acquire and aggregate that data to be sold.
Facebook, Twitter, Google and the like have already gone far from trying to offer a good service which is subsidized by advertising. The advertising and data brokering is now their business model and their main focus, and the service is collateral that is maximized to fulfill that model.
In a very real sense, users of the service are the product.
-dZ.
And interstitial ads between each of them.
-dZ.
Did I miss something? Is HP begin run by Reed Hastings now?
-dZ.
The problem of staying relevant in an increasingly "Mobile App"-driven world.
Keep in mind that Opera makes its money as a broker for advertising networks. Reading the examples provided by the CTO within that context, it's clear that they are intended to increase the efficacy of web adverts: it not only breaks the content into pages, which forces multiple page views, but allows for the automatic inclusion of floating images on the content boundaries--perfect for guaranteeing that banner ads are always within the view-port.
-dZ.
No, you are still missing the point. The reason iOS looks so smooth and "polished" is because intuitively it makes sense. It doesn't necessarily give you a visual queue of how to interact with a function; as you suggest, this may be useless when the user has already activated it. Sometimes functionality is best left to experimentation by inviting the user to perform actions that are non-destructive but that behave in predictable ways. As long as these behaviours are consistent across the entire system, users pick up on them quickly without needing to be told how it works.
Transitions should be functional as well as pretty and smooth. They give the user a sense of spatial and functional orientation within their mental model of the system. There is of course an element of "eye-candy," but I think it is greatly overstated.
For instance, in iOS swiping right-to-left scrolls a new view into the screen, not from the top nor at an angle, but from the side from which the user started, following the user's motion. It may look pretty and purely aesthetic, but it gives the sense that the view is just a small port and that the user is moving the content within it. This feels right because it's how it would work on a real, tangible object, say a Roll-O-Deck.
Moreover, this defines the OS interaction language throughout the entire system: Once the user scrolls a screen one time he knows how to scroll the rest of the views.
If I were to swipe right-to-left and a screen just "pops in" from nowhere, it may look cool and interesting at a glance, but it would not give me any indication as to what is going on in my mental model of interaction. Moreover there is no intuitive way to reconcile or associate the physical action (a right-to-left swipe) with the visual result (a screen popping in), mostly because there is no analogue to it in the real world, which is the model the user starts with. It does not provide any new information.
Those are the sort of animations that feel as if they were gratuitous rather than useful, and eventually lead to sense that the UI is "unpolished" because it does not feel right. Notice how everybody now agrees how older versions of Android seem unpolished, while I remember them being touted as prettier and nicer than iOS when they were first introduced. We both agree that animations and transitions for the sake of eye-candy eventually get tiresome.
You are right, desktops haven't had smooth transitions at all and people got along without them. Then again, there was a time when humans had no mode of transportation apart from their own two feet; there also was a time when they lived without electricity and running hot water. Yet people managed to survive. There was a time when there were no mechanical or electronic computers, and people managed to build some impressive architecture. This does not mean that cars, airplanes, electricity, and computers are useless.
Likewise, modern touch interfaces are more convenient and feel nicer and more intuitive than their desktop counterparts by the mere fact that they try to model the world in a more direct way, where the user interacts directly with objects using his fingers in much the same way he would a physical object.
All this is missed by asserting that smooth transitions are "mostly eye candy." This is made worse by acknowledging that people react positively to them, while at the same time misunderstanding the reasons why.
Until this is recognized, user interfaces that use visual flare for mere eye-candy will continue to be regarded as "less polished" by those who actually use them--irrespective of how cool and pretty they look.
-dZ.
"The sandwich is not a lie."
-- HAL 9000, from the game "Dead Space"
I read your post and what I understood was this:
I don't mean to troll, but honestly it seems like you and Google missed the point of the transitions. Hint: they serve a purpose other than eye candy.
dZ.
>> Wow, you really don't know what younger talking about
That should be "you're" not "younger.". Damn you, auto-correct!!
Wow, you really don't know what younger talking about. The case against Microsoft involved copyrights, and most of the claims in the lawsuit were denied because of a previous license agreement with MS, not because they were invalid.
Moreover, the copyrights they claimed turned out to not be sufficient for their offensive, which is precisely why they opted to use patents this time around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
Knowledge, it's a wondrous thing.
dZ.
You know, I heard it's very common amongst forest rangers too.
I concur. The few times I've tried it, I've left not knowing whether I actually meta-moderated or not. First of all, it seems to require JavaScript. I normally have JS disabled while browsing the web, and certainly while reading Slashdot (I find the UI much less annoying that way).
Second, I'm not sure how it works. If I click on the link to review the story, I may come back to find all my moderation was reset. And even after submitting, sometimes the page breaks and I'm not sure if the changes were committed.
The old way worked fine. Perhaps I'm old and set in my ways, but I can't stand the new system and I tend to avoid it.
-dZ.
If a post gets modded up, the poster receives a pot of gold delivered in person by a unicorn. If a post gets modded down, we hang the fucker.
At the beginning of fall season, announce 10 free mod points to all new comers by posting it in a Facebook public wall.
The problem will be sorted out in no time.
-dZ.
I just came across this post and I felt compelled to respond: I disagree with you completely.
That's all I'll say right now. I'll continue reading the rest of the posts now.
"Happy Christmas, honey-- Here you go!
I know it's not an iPad, but it's cheaper. Just as good, right?
Just thinking of you...
what??
Or, you could create an automatic playlist of all your music and set-up the iPad to just fill all available space with music sourced from that playlist.
No lists to maintain.
-dZ.
How do you know it was their parents and not their big brother, or some random weirdo playing with the kid.
> GET LAMP
Aha! But the question is, are bubbles created fully formed or inflated to shape? And if the latter, can they "pop" while in the process of inflating?
The headline says, "before it fully inflates," implying that a bubble was formed, then while in the process of filling up, it popped before reaching it's full capacity.
Years of experience blowing soap bubbles confirms that the analogy is apt.
dZ.
Or, you know, instead of better you could go for accurate:
http://mcaf.ee/3h8mg
-dZ.
It's telling that you chose Pac-Man, a 30 year old game, for your example.
The point is that web technologies are now catching up to what native applications could do a few years ago. This is great, and I expect it to get even better. However predictions of the web overshadowing native applications are predicated on the former advancing rapidly and the latter remaining static.
Why is it so hard to imagine that the technologies available to native applications will also continue advancing at a fast pace?
Sure, today native applications are able to apply hardware accelerated graphics, and soon web applications will do so too. But this does not preclude native applications having access to the next big hardware technologies, while web applications would have to build these into their standards and common frameworks.
dZ.
Although you may be right, all that means is that in 5 to 10 years Web applications will reach the state of the art of current native applications. This furthermore assumes that the latter will remain static during that time.
So, yes, perhaps in 5 years you'll finally be able to play Angry Birds or WoW on your browser, but I would expect native applications by then to offer an even richer experience.
dZ.
You are right, but I think TFA refers to a much sinister future. When every single game produced is a Bejewel or Tetris clone, the end of "installed games" will come to pass.
-dZ.