So true about the documentation and APIs. In the network stack for example, if you do certain things to a POST, Flash actually stops using HTTP and starts using "XML Sockets" which runs over a different port, and AFAIK is something Abobe just made up one day. This happens silently and can be triggered in a couple different subtle ways. They need to fix nonsense like this before I can take Flash seriously again.
It's not completely new functionality. Adobe Alchemy, for example, has been free since 2008 and is used by a number of popular Flash apps and games. Of course they can charge for it if they want, but they're now competing with Unity, NaCL, UDK, and HTML5, so it is going to be a hard sell.
Summary: It's probably not that any given customer actually uses even a third of the features, but that for any customer there is a feature that is very important to them, and those "I need X" features span the whole set of creative suite functionality.
To me these patents seem less transparently silly than many of those often at issue in high-profile cases, and yet they end up providing an even harsher argument against software patents. With the silly patents a couple tweaks to the system might get them thrown out, but I don't think any patent system that accepts software patents could find a basis for rejecting these. From that starker viewpoint its as crazy an idea as ever that the person who typed these abstract descriptions and made these shoddy diagrams deserves more ownership than Apple, who actually made the concepts real.
As a relatively new user I'm genuinely interested: which 3 or 4 types of comments and posts do you find interesting or representative of the old HN? I'm willing to change what I comment on or just move on, but I'm just not clear what the old HN did consist of? For an example of my confusion, I find current HN threads can mistake disagreement for originality, so "I disagree" comments are much more respected than "I agree, and also" comments. But then I read complaints about HN and it seems some users actually want more of an always-disagree culture and not less.
Great point. I think this concept of "disruption" is out of place anyway when the existing site is mostly free and works fine on mobile devices. You might be able to steal traffic bit by bit by doing a better job, but there's nothing to really disrupt in a dramatic way.
For me the biggest goal is fewer lines to organize in the first place rather than any particular scheme for grouping. What I do is:
1) Use as few separate stylesheets site-wide as possible so any contradicting or repetitive rules will be obvious.
2) Use one line per rule so I can scan the selectors quickly, then scroll horizontally if necessary
3) I prefer complex comma-separated selectors which set one or two properties to simple selectors which set many properties. Grouping in this way gets me closer to having constants, e.g. a specific hex color won't be rewritten again and again, it will just follow a complex selector list.
4) Once a selector works, I try to make it more general, e.g. "div.info { font-size: 12px }" can probably just be ".info { font-size: 12px }". More general rules will apply in more cases, so fewer overall rules will be necessary.
But is it reasonable to say that Google has "sacrificed any idea of openness" by delaying the release of source code for one iteration of its platform?
Yeah I think this sort of backlash hurts the overall push towards openness because for example Adobe probably looks at the possibility of publishing Flash player source but they know that instead of being celebrated that move will just create angry blog posts because of the license or that they don't accept patches etc.
I think some HNers aren't bothering to distinguish between satire/parody and silly memes. So they kill great posts like that one off just to be sure, and then we're left with a bunch of posts where people make the exact same points using more serious-sounding language.
So true. I've often read interviews with founders and things get very vague around the "how did you pay bills before you had revenue" question. It becomes pretty clear that there was some family money, but it's not talked about since it takes away from the pure bootstrapped ideal. I wish there would be more honesty about it though, because it's still an amazing accomplishment to start a company, and it might help founders to get a more accurate picture of what's involved.
And it's $180/year for an experience that is going to be diluted by their continuing need to please advertisers. It would be a stronger strategy if they said that serving the needs of their $180/year customers is going to be the sole driver of the design and direction of their site.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think the original post went much further. Even with respect to what you're saying I think the paradox is that if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door. And the lessons you learn from customers saying "it doesn't look that valuable" may or may not outweigh the effort it took to launch quickly. Sort of like the way A/B testing can help you make small corrections but probably won't actually create value where there is little to begin with.
So products which take a long time to initially build and release simply can't be successful? That just seems like an extreme and limiting economic theory to me, and one which requires a lot more data and lot less rhetoric than the current hype about launching quickly is producing.
What a classic strawman response. TechCrunch says Moviefone "asked us to change our post". Movefone responds "We never told TechCrunch to change the post in any way". But Moviefone very obviously did "ask", which was the original accusation.
Right, we're getting a nice snapshot of technology with IE9, and if that doesn't include Web Workers or some other feature, fine. But the key advantage of Chrome is that WebGL barely worked a few weeks ago, it's better now, and it will be much better a few weeks in the future. Without agressive updating, IE9 will be out of date in a very real way by September.
Yes, the name "Circles" is awesome. It's agressive and appealing when seen from the perspective of "what do you offer that's better than Facebook", but also generically pleasant if you just encountered it as a product.
Cool. Small copy change you might consider is something like "We export your Gmail contacts. And email them to you." Maybe also a sample of what the email's going to look like.
Yeah I can't figure out if "end of the low-cost startup" means that VCs are going to have to pay a lot since there have been so many big investments recently, or if it's about the infrastructure costs you noted.
You needed a service, so you searched for it based on features and cost? When I need to solve a problem, I wait for my social graph to to create buzz OR a lean startup to convince me to pay for a product that doesn't exist, but they promise to build and launch for me in a weekend ;-)
It's also an area where businesses have to work constantly to resist legitimate forces: the desire to know more about customers, the desire to reduce piracy, and the desire to outsource tricky business processes. VMWare might be an extreme example, but most checkout processes trend in this direction without conscious effort.
They have a history of this too. I remember trying to sign up for Palm Pilot development, and the form demanded a "DIRECT phone number", I think with the word "DIRECT" actually in caps. They need to understand that developers and customers are supposed to be sizing up Palm at this point in the process and not vice versa.
I wonder if it might also be that Microsoft has 1st-party knowledge of its own OS, and this biases them towards depending on specific new features of the OS in their applications, whereas Google et al have a 3rd-party mentality of just looking at the most obvious and stable APIs.
Right, and Firefox just switched to a Chrome-like iterative release schedule. The main problem with IE9 is that we're even talking about a specific version. If Chrome 9 was finalized today and a new one didn't ship for months/years, it wouldn't stand a chance feature-wise either.
But "inside the app" means Apple In-App Purchase, right? I'm sure Amazon and Sony are capable of storing a user's credentials in an app, and then making the appropriate network requests when you click Buy or Subscribe. But from my understanding that wouldn't qualify since it doesn't go through Apple.
Great point - the implied equivalance between posting on the internet with a real name and having a real-world conversation is wrong. Posting on an archived system available to everyone is more like writing an editorial or giving a speech, something which many are uncomfortable with.
One thing I'm interested in is any skew in the questions from normal. In particular I hope they ask linguistically tricky questions where you can't even figure out what's being asked at first. I felt like they went a bit easy on that front in the preview round:
I use it quite a bit, though not professionally so far. Their 2.5 redesign is incredible from a usability perspective, however its not quite stable yet in my experience. Documentation is also inconsistent: there are great resource like http://blendercookie.com for video tutorials, yet sometimes simple questions like how to split a view into two can mean searching forums etc due to lack of real documentation for version 2.5.