Tough to figure out a menu icon: how can you immediately know what a menu looks like, maybe a rectangle with some fake lines of "text" and a wine glass pic? I've seen that somewhere...personally I think maybe the bite was my mistake (despite our chosen name) because it doesn't scale down well.
That was my original plan but I needed something for Twitter, etc. Maybe I could do what HN does (along with many others) and just use the first letter in a box when I need a smaller graphic. Thanks for the suggestion!
I created that logo and I hate it too. Any other ideas? I'm a horrendous graphic designer but I'm down to try again, and I agree with your points entirely. We were sort of pushing to get it done at the time. We could consider 99designs.com at this point I suppose.
It's a paradox: restaurant owners are often disdainful/fearful of technology, so they are the most easily swindled when it comes to understanding a value equation involving technology.
No offense, but that may be the most abstract sentence on Earth. Certainly it is possible that they could write some software, possibly taking the form of a plugin architecture, to store menu modifiers (options and choices), and that it would likely be on their server, for download and use by their client app during customer menu creation. It is also possible that they could move to reading RFID cards, or form a softball league. So many possibilities.
McDonald's definitely does have a limited menu and with very limited customizations. I've worked at 17 restaurants (seriously, and I am aware of the jokes which could be made about this). Now imagine working at place where the customer says to you: "I'd like a martini, but dry, with 4 olives, shaken, and can I have Belvedere vodka? And not a chilled glass, please. And for my appetizer I'd like your asparagus soup, but without the croutons. And I'm allergic to garlic, so could I get that steak medium rare with extra crispy fries but without any garlic anywhere near it or I'll probably die? Thanks!" Now try that out on a PDA in real-time with a stylus. I've worked with those PDAs--Micros makes a good percentage of them--and I wasn't too impressed. But I'd like to code something better, on a better device.
Square is badass but it doesn't offer simple menu capabilities such as modifiers. Restaurants have fairly particular needs in terms of data structures. Also, doesn't Square only support personal accounts at this time and has specific weekly transaction limits based on a credit check?
Additionally, Square can't control cash drawers, etc, and if you take in a lot of cash (restaurants often do), you need a place to put it and a way to correlate it at the end of the night.
But seriously, Square has the most beautiful iPad app/control panel, and for the most part it is very intuitive to use.
I think the iPod Touch is too small to be effective as an order taking tool. Maybe something closer to a Nook size. After all, if you're a server and you need to take down kitchen instructions or find a drink fast, a slightly larger device is exponentially more useful. But in terms of weight and price point I think the iPod Touch is perfect.
I think the reason there has been so much analysis is that not having Flash on the iPhone affects the end user dramatically, and Apple is all about user experience. If Apple wanted to "keep development and apps locked in that platform", they could do so with their app store and still show Flash content on the browser, in theory, to keep the end user happy. The meta-argument here is twofold, really: 1) Does Apple have the "right", as a business, to ban cross-compilers, which can be very efficient for developers and not necessary lower coding standards, and 2) Does this represent a reckoning for Flash, which has always been CPU-intensive at its own peril, when the GPU was the proper place for its vector calculations, and will Flash/Adobe lose marketshare and CS5 purchases as a result?
Bindings in themselves might be relatively simple to keep up to date, but binding documentation, error handling, etc, are not. Take a look at the Python bindings for Clutter (C graphics library w/Linux roots). Clutter is sponsored by Intel and well-maintained, and yet the Python bindings are several versions behind and the documentation is a mess. In a consistently evolving language and/or framework, every linkage creates delays.
Personally I'm of the opinion that it's a free market: Twitter, Apple, Adobe, etc, etc, are swearing allegiance not to the developers of third party apps for their product, but to the customer, which is how it should be. For instance, Apple's choice not to display Flash on the iPhone browser was not arbitrary and meant to hurt developers, it was focused on lowering CPU usage and maintaining battery life.
Companies stay in business by understanding the needs of their customer, and if other developers/companies are casualties of that, well, hey, welcome to the free market.
I find it ironic that while Brimelow claims: "Any real developer would not in good conscience be able to support this. The trouble is that we will never hear their discontent because Apple employees are forbidden from blogging, posting to social networks, or other things that we at companies with an open culture take for granted." it seems unlikely that he's actually able to take his "open culture" much for granted when they've openly censored several parts of his post, as he freely admits.
Yup, george_morgan is right, you were being downvoted for using abstract corporate language to solve real problems. In a forum like this, most of us have heard it before: "We'll resolve this by applying creativity and resourcefulness." "But how exactly?" "We're going to give it our all, and it will work out!" As engineers, we're the ones who actually do the resolving, and we like to apply concrete, tenable options to problems.