Consider taking your iPad back, it may be faulty. I've used an iPad or iPad 2 most days since they were launched a couple of years ago and can't recall Safari ever crashing on me, so I'd be worried if it happened multiple times in two weeks.
Skype, on the other hand, is a buggy piece of crap on any platform.
I think the difference there is that UNIX/Linux are platforms. Without independent compatible competition, people depending on that platform are locked in. That makes independent reimplementations a very valuable thing for the market.
A better example that somebody brought up elsewhere in the discussion is Tetris, and even then it's limited to exact Tetris clones, not the endless variations that people have come up with.
I'm a freelancer and I exchange information all the time with clients. It's called an FTP site and they've been around forever.
I don't care to teach clients how to use FTP, and FTP is not the medium they choose of their own accord to send me.
They aren't all that expensive and if you are doing it professionally you should have one.
No professional should be using FTP. It's insecure and has been obsolete for well over a decade. It's a protocol from 1971 FFS. How on earth are you recommending it and calling yourself a professional?
I've never in my life heard of a freelancer using an open site to exchange files with a client.
You still haven't. I specifically said that it was the clients using them.
Do you really, honestly think that the record companies and studios care about you sharing personal files? Please. Let's be realistic here. Argue about copyrights, fine, but arguing that you now can't exchange files with clients is laughable.
Don't put words in my mouth. My argument was that this kind of service is relevant for more than "personal backups". My argument was not that record companies and studios were trying to stop uses like this. My argument was not that I cannot now exchange files with clients. My argument was not about copyright. Good job knocking down those straw men though.
If this type of service was only meant for personal backups and not illegal file sharing, this would have been the standard in the first place.
This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?
File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.
Disturbingly enough, even the youngest participants started declining immediately
Surely that means that cognitive decline begins earlier than 45 and the age range they studied was inadequate for measuring the onset of cognitive decline?
At the time, Internet Explorer 6 was a good browser too. The problem is that Microsoft have shown that they are willing to abuse their market share in anti-competitive ways. When Internet Explorer 6 had a dominant position in the web browser market, they killed development on the project and held the web back for years. Microsoft can't be trusted with browsers.
It's also standards compliant and supports HTML5.
No, it doesn't support HTML 5. Nothing does. HTML 5 isn't finished. At best you can say it has partial, unfinished support for HTML 5. And if Microsoft decide it's in their best interests to hold the web back again, that's what we'll be stuck with until Internet Explorer loses market share.
You are right. The infinite, perfect reproduction of digital tools and culture is far, far better than mere lending. It's damn near magical! It is truly a quantum leap in civilisation, which makes it all the more repugnant that such a wonderful ability is locked away so that the proles can't do it. Anybody who wants that kind of restriction is essentially advocating for a modern day dark ages.
It's not as simple as you are making out, but yes, there are better heuristics they could use these days. That heuristic was designed when virtually nobody used CSS media queries and virtually no software supported them. In those cases, it works quite well to get websites designed for typical desktop resolutions to display on small screens. As media queries become more popular, you may well see this heuristic change.
In practice, most of the "apps" are features already available on a website.
I've just done a quick spot check of the iTunes Store front page, the top charts, and my devices. You are way off base. There are certainly some applications that are redundant with a website, but it's certainly not a majority. Right now, the iTunes Store front page for the UK is showing things like Infinity Blade 2, djay and Grand Theft Auto 3. The charts show FIFA, Scrabble, Garage Band, Skype, etc. The number of apps that are just front-ends for web content is small, even smaller than I would have expected.
I'm not talking angry birds
That explains your skewed opinion. If you ignore all the counterexamples to your claim, of course it looks stronger.
tell me exactly what is "fundamentally" different between the CNN app and the CNN website, or the eBay app and the eBay website, or the Groupon app and the Groupon website (etc.). Nothing.
I don't use the latter two, and I only rarely use the CNN app, but right away I can tell you that when a big story is breaking, CNN pushes a notification to my devices that wakes up the screen and gives me the opportunity to read them. That is certainly not "web-like".
But the main reason why they are fundamentally different things is that applications are programs running on a computer, while websites are collections of documents that are leaves in a distributed global library. They are fundamentally different concepts. Yes, you can make applications that are redundant because all you do with them is view documents that you could use a generic browser application to view, but that doesn't mean that they are the same thing.
I would politely point out that your vision of mobile computing appears to be slightly biased.
Yes, I'm an iOS developer, I assume you've seen that from my comment history. If you read further, you'll also see that I use Android phones - I'm no fanboy. I've made several points that can be evaluated in a relatively objective way and you are hiding behind claims of bias. Sorry, that won't wash.
Are you claiming that Apple didn't push people to use the mobile web originally? Are you claiming that Mobile Safari wasn't a huge leap forward for the mobile web? Are you claiming that Apple forced native apps on people when they were happy with the mobile web? Are you claiming that Apple haven't invested in and improved Mobile Safari over the years?
The simple fact of the matter is that the comment I was responding to was utterly clueless and as an iOS developer I am in a position to say exactly why it was so clueless. Whining about "bias" when you can't give reasons as to why I am wrong does not move the conversation forward in any way.
Wow, it's rare to see a comment that is this clueless.
An app is an Objective-C equivalent of a website
No, "app" is short for "application". The concept has been around for a long time, it certainly predates the web. Native apps aren't the equivalent of websites. They are fundamentally different things. Apps aren't the shoddy knock-offs of websites you seem to think they are.
When Apple first launched the iPhone, they didn't include an SDK for native applications and wanted everybody to use web applications instead. Mobile Safari was a huge leap forward - at the time, most mobile browsers were junk that couldn't render normal websites. It doesn't need "fixing" so that it "works properly" - this is simply delusional. It's been ahead of the pack from day one.
Native iOS applications came about because there was a strong demand for them. Apple didn't push them on anybody, and they certainly didn't do it at the expense of Mobile Safari - they have continued to improve it including adding new features that would ordinarily require native applications (e.g. geolocation). Apple have clearly, inarguably invested in Mobile Safari, and your entire opinion is utterly backwards.
He's got a > 100% annual staff turnover, and practically everything that comes out of his mouth screams "I have no clue about what people want even if it's common sense and even if they tell me to my face".
Seriously could you imagine the amount of buzz/free advertising that would be generated by targeting only Men for example, and the number of women who would buy the product just to say "screw you I'll eat it anyways"?
Yorkie (chocolate bars) did this in the UK. The slogan was "It's not for girls". Then they did a special pink version that was for girls. Last time I checked, women didn't need any more incentive to eat chocolate though.
The survey in the first link is extremely suspicious. It says that sales of the black 16GB iPhone 4 are at around 10%. Yet sales of other capacities are apparently so tiny they don't even chart - under 0.17%! The iPhone 4 isn't even sold in 16GB from Apple any more - it's 8GB only. The same applies to the iPhone 4S - it comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models, yet apparently nobody is buying two of those models.
This is incredibly difficult to believe. So we look at the source for the figures. ~5,000 phones sold online across major UK retailers in November 2011. That's a tiny sliver of the market. I would guess, based on the small numbers and the fact that only a single capacity of iPhone is represented, that only a single vendor was considered, or perhaps just a couple. Given that they don't provide detailed information on their sources, it's impossible to know for sure, but it's a hell of a lot more likely than Apple unfathomably being unable to sell the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S in any capacity other than 16GB.
If you're a shareholder, a manufacturer, or a back-seat CEO, Apple has the biggest market. But if you're a consumer or an app developer, Android has the biggest market.
I'm an app developer. The Android market is bigger, but far fewer people are willing to part with their money. It's far less profitable. The rate of growth for the Android developer community is shrinking. There are far, far fewer apps for Android tablets than there are for the iPad. Very few clients of mine are interested in Android. I only recommend Android versions of the apps I build occasionally. It's usually iOS only. For personal projects, I don't target Android unless it's something I would use myself (I have an Android phone because I like a physical keyboard. I hate the software because it's embarrassingly low quality).
It's playing itself out just like it did with Windows and Macs.
It is, but I suspect you are thinking of it the wrong way around. Apple are Microsoft in this scenario. They dominate the market, and their proprietary platform is locking people in. People spend a lot of money on apps, and if they switch to a different mobile OS, they can't take their apps with them. Apple own the developer mindshare. Windows Mobile is by all accounts finally a decent competitor in theory, but they can't get people to come on board. The size of the app market there is tiny and not worth targeting. Apple are now leveraging their developer mindshare and expanding it to other markets (the Mac App Store).
Yes, Android may be open like the PC was open, but if you look at control of the market, the rest of the analogy needs to be flipped around.
Xcode is not a wonderful IDE. It's incredibly buggy. By far the buggiest desktop application I've ever used from Apple. It's still quite a bit faster than Eclipse, but Xcode 4 was noticeably slower than Xcode 3 and it seems to be getting worse. There are lots of regressions from release to release and it's nowhere near as extendable - not in the "write crazy plugins to change the whole UI paradigm", but basic things like "create a project template" or "create a custom view that can be used in the nib editor" features either not existing or only available through undocumented hacks.
They are asking you, indeed pressuring you, to log into Facebook from an entry point of their choosing.
What were you seeing? When I clicked the button, I saw a pop up window that included a URL bar. That URL bar showed an HTTPS URL on the facebook.com domain. That is a legitimate Facebook Connect dialog that is not under their control. My browser auto-filled the form, which is further evidence of its authenticity.
Are you in any way familiar with Facebook Connect? It doesn't disclose passwords. Unless they have somehow bypassed the cross-domain security of browsers, spoofed the URL bar, or performed a man-in-the-middle attack with a compromised certificate, they cannot phish your Facebook password from this popup window, which is what you claimed they were doing.
Now, if you want to argue that they aren't being honest when they tell you they will remove you from the list, then go right ahead and argue that. But if you argue that they are phishing passwords, you're going to have to give solid reasons, because the available evidence says otherwise.
I've been in similar situations and I think you're almost spot on, except for this:
I give it two years before slashdot is indistinguishable from the Yahoo! main page.
There's clearly no significant ongoing investment in Slashdot, they wouldn't have the budget for a redesign. It looks more like they are slashing the budget, not increasing it. That may be the reason why CmdrTaco left, by choice or otherwise. I would expect Slashdot to stay almost identical to how it is now from a technology perspective, with a few minor tweaks to "monetize" the site. Any big changes will be things they can do without expensive development projects.
They aren't concerned with ruining Ask Slashdot because the tech-savvy people do Reddit AMAs now instead.
Remember when Netscape 4 was cancelled? They released several new versions with no user-visible changes except for that stupid "Shop" button on the toolbar. Imagine the same thing, but with a website.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider taking your iPad back, it may be faulty. I've used an iPad or iPad 2 most days since they were launched a couple of years ago and can't recall Safari ever crashing on me, so I'd be worried if it happened multiple times in two weeks.
Skype, on the other hand, is a buggy piece of crap on any platform.
I think the difference there is that UNIX/Linux are platforms. Without independent compatible competition, people depending on that platform are locked in. That makes independent reimplementations a very valuable thing for the market.
A better example that somebody brought up elsewhere in the discussion is Tetris, and even then it's limited to exact Tetris clones, not the endless variations that people have come up with.
I don't care to teach clients how to use FTP, and FTP is not the medium they choose of their own accord to send me.
No professional should be using FTP. It's insecure and has been obsolete for well over a decade. It's a protocol from 1971 FFS. How on earth are you recommending it and calling yourself a professional?
You still haven't. I specifically said that it was the clients using them.
Don't put words in my mouth. My argument was that this kind of service is relevant for more than "personal backups". My argument was not that record companies and studios were trying to stop uses like this. My argument was not that I cannot now exchange files with clients. My argument was not about copyright. Good job knocking down those straw men though.
This is nonsense. "Personal backups" are by no means the only legitimate use of services such as this. As a freelance developer, I've had several clients use services like this to send me files. Is your imagination really so limited that you can't think of a single reason why you might want to share a file you have the rights to with another person?
File sharing is not intrinsically illegal. File sharing is fundamental to the Internet. Right now, Slashdot is sharing many, many files with people accessing it, including you. Are you a criminal? Copyright infringement is a particular type of file sharing. The two concepts are not synonymous, they are quite distinct.
Fukushima might have been a disaster, but it's not something that can cause the end of the world. What's the point in including it?
Surely that means that cognitive decline begins earlier than 45 and the age range they studied was inadequate for measuring the onset of cognitive decline?
Apple keyboards are the first I've been happy with since the Model M. What's wrong with them?
At the time, Internet Explorer 6 was a good browser too. The problem is that Microsoft have shown that they are willing to abuse their market share in anti-competitive ways. When Internet Explorer 6 had a dominant position in the web browser market, they killed development on the project and held the web back for years. Microsoft can't be trusted with browsers.
No, it doesn't support HTML 5. Nothing does. HTML 5 isn't finished. At best you can say it has partial, unfinished support for HTML 5. And if Microsoft decide it's in their best interests to hold the web back again, that's what we'll be stuck with until Internet Explorer loses market share.
You are right. The infinite, perfect reproduction of digital tools and culture is far, far better than mere lending. It's damn near magical! It is truly a quantum leap in civilisation, which makes it all the more repugnant that such a wonderful ability is locked away so that the proles can't do it. Anybody who wants that kind of restriction is essentially advocating for a modern day dark ages.
When that comment is clueless and I explain why in detail? Yes, that's a valuable comment. A very wrong opinion ceases to misinform people.
Why the sudden sexism?
It's not as simple as you are making out, but yes, there are better heuristics they could use these days. That heuristic was designed when virtually nobody used CSS media queries and virtually no software supported them. In those cases, it works quite well to get websites designed for typical desktop resolutions to display on small screens. As media queries become more popular, you may well see this heuristic change.
I've just done a quick spot check of the iTunes Store front page, the top charts, and my devices. You are way off base. There are certainly some applications that are redundant with a website, but it's certainly not a majority. Right now, the iTunes Store front page for the UK is showing things like Infinity Blade 2, djay and Grand Theft Auto 3. The charts show FIFA, Scrabble, Garage Band, Skype, etc. The number of apps that are just front-ends for web content is small, even smaller than I would have expected.
That explains your skewed opinion. If you ignore all the counterexamples to your claim, of course it looks stronger.
I don't use the latter two, and I only rarely use the CNN app, but right away I can tell you that when a big story is breaking, CNN pushes a notification to my devices that wakes up the screen and gives me the opportunity to read them. That is certainly not "web-like".
But the main reason why they are fundamentally different things is that applications are programs running on a computer, while websites are collections of documents that are leaves in a distributed global library. They are fundamentally different concepts. Yes, you can make applications that are redundant because all you do with them is view documents that you could use a generic browser application to view, but that doesn't mean that they are the same thing.
Yes, I'm an iOS developer, I assume you've seen that from my comment history. If you read further, you'll also see that I use Android phones - I'm no fanboy. I've made several points that can be evaluated in a relatively objective way and you are hiding behind claims of bias. Sorry, that won't wash.
Are you claiming that Apple didn't push people to use the mobile web originally? Are you claiming that Mobile Safari wasn't a huge leap forward for the mobile web? Are you claiming that Apple forced native apps on people when they were happy with the mobile web? Are you claiming that Apple haven't invested in and improved Mobile Safari over the years?
The simple fact of the matter is that the comment I was responding to was utterly clueless and as an iOS developer I am in a position to say exactly why it was so clueless. Whining about "bias" when you can't give reasons as to why I am wrong does not move the conversation forward in any way.
Wow, it's rare to see a comment that is this clueless.
No, "app" is short for "application". The concept has been around for a long time, it certainly predates the web. Native apps aren't the equivalent of websites. They are fundamentally different things. Apps aren't the shoddy knock-offs of websites you seem to think they are.
When Apple first launched the iPhone, they didn't include an SDK for native applications and wanted everybody to use web applications instead. Mobile Safari was a huge leap forward - at the time, most mobile browsers were junk that couldn't render normal websites. It doesn't need "fixing" so that it "works properly" - this is simply delusional. It's been ahead of the pack from day one.
Native iOS applications came about because there was a strong demand for them. Apple didn't push them on anybody, and they certainly didn't do it at the expense of Mobile Safari - they have continued to improve it including adding new features that would ordinarily require native applications (e.g. geolocation). Apple have clearly, inarguably invested in Mobile Safari, and your entire opinion is utterly backwards.
He's got a > 100% annual staff turnover, and practically everything that comes out of his mouth screams "I have no clue about what people want even if it's common sense and even if they tell me to my face".
Yorkie (chocolate bars) did this in the UK. The slogan was "It's not for girls". Then they did a special pink version that was for girls. Last time I checked, women didn't need any more incentive to eat chocolate though.
First they came for the pudding, and I didn't speak out because I was on a diet...
The survey in the first link is extremely suspicious. It says that sales of the black 16GB iPhone 4 are at around 10%. Yet sales of other capacities are apparently so tiny they don't even chart - under 0.17%! The iPhone 4 isn't even sold in 16GB from Apple any more - it's 8GB only. The same applies to the iPhone 4S - it comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models, yet apparently nobody is buying two of those models.
This is incredibly difficult to believe. So we look at the source for the figures. ~5,000 phones sold online across major UK retailers in November 2011. That's a tiny sliver of the market. I would guess, based on the small numbers and the fact that only a single capacity of iPhone is represented, that only a single vendor was considered, or perhaps just a couple. Given that they don't provide detailed information on their sources, it's impossible to know for sure, but it's a hell of a lot more likely than Apple unfathomably being unable to sell the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S in any capacity other than 16GB.
I'm an app developer. The Android market is bigger, but far fewer people are willing to part with their money. It's far less profitable. The rate of growth for the Android developer community is shrinking. There are far, far fewer apps for Android tablets than there are for the iPad. Very few clients of mine are interested in Android. I only recommend Android versions of the apps I build occasionally. It's usually iOS only. For personal projects, I don't target Android unless it's something I would use myself (I have an Android phone because I like a physical keyboard. I hate the software because it's embarrassingly low quality).
It is, but I suspect you are thinking of it the wrong way around. Apple are Microsoft in this scenario. They dominate the market, and their proprietary platform is locking people in. People spend a lot of money on apps, and if they switch to a different mobile OS, they can't take their apps with them. Apple own the developer mindshare. Windows Mobile is by all accounts finally a decent competitor in theory, but they can't get people to come on board. The size of the app market there is tiny and not worth targeting. Apple are now leveraging their developer mindshare and expanding it to other markets (the Mac App Store).
Yes, Android may be open like the PC was open, but if you look at control of the market, the rest of the analogy needs to be flipped around.
It's possible you could cash it legally.
Reminds me of this.
Xcode is not a wonderful IDE. It's incredibly buggy. By far the buggiest desktop application I've ever used from Apple. It's still quite a bit faster than Eclipse, but Xcode 4 was noticeably slower than Xcode 3 and it seems to be getting worse. There are lots of regressions from release to release and it's nowhere near as extendable - not in the "write crazy plugins to change the whole UI paradigm", but basic things like "create a project template" or "create a custom view that can be used in the nib editor" features either not existing or only available through undocumented hacks.
What were you seeing? When I clicked the button, I saw a pop up window that included a URL bar. That URL bar showed an HTTPS URL on the facebook.com domain. That is a legitimate Facebook Connect dialog that is not under their control. My browser auto-filled the form, which is further evidence of its authenticity.
Are you in any way familiar with Facebook Connect? It doesn't disclose passwords. Unless they have somehow bypassed the cross-domain security of browsers, spoofed the URL bar, or performed a man-in-the-middle attack with a compromised certificate, they cannot phish your Facebook password from this popup window, which is what you claimed they were doing.
Now, if you want to argue that they aren't being honest when they tell you they will remove you from the list, then go right ahead and argue that. But if you argue that they are phishing passwords, you're going to have to give solid reasons, because the available evidence says otherwise.
Doesn't look that way to me - it's the standard Facebook Connect popup window that connects to Facebook.com via HTTPS.
What part of it looks like phishing for passwords to you?
You know you have problems when you have fewer buttons than the equivalent Apple device.
I've been in similar situations and I think you're almost spot on, except for this:
There's clearly no significant ongoing investment in Slashdot, they wouldn't have the budget for a redesign. It looks more like they are slashing the budget, not increasing it. That may be the reason why CmdrTaco left, by choice or otherwise. I would expect Slashdot to stay almost identical to how it is now from a technology perspective, with a few minor tweaks to "monetize" the site. Any big changes will be things they can do without expensive development projects.
They aren't concerned with ruining Ask Slashdot because the tech-savvy people do Reddit AMAs now instead.
Remember when Netscape 4 was cancelled? They released several new versions with no user-visible changes except for that stupid "Shop" button on the toolbar. Imagine the same thing, but with a website.