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Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

al3x.net

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Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#51

Post by tptacek »

X-Istence wrote: post #43
patio11 wrote: post #20

I think developers frequently suffer from "This doesn't flatter my sensibilities, so it must be crap. There is a sense of cosmic justice, so this will hurt the business." I was told, repeatedly, that Mac owners are Jobs-loving HIG fascists who look down on Java apps. Separately, their conversion rate was double PC owners. Who am I supposed to believe, the experts or my lying eyes?

Java apps done right on Mac OS X look, feel and behave like actual Mac OS X applications, Cyberduck is a free FTP client written in Java for Mac OS X. It is a great example of what is possible in Java. But there are plenty of apps out there that are mere ports (Qt, or Java) and you can feel it. The drag handles are in the wrong location, the app doesn't behave right when you resize it, the buttons are in the wrong pl…

First, I disagree that well-done Java apps on OS X actually hold up as OS X applications. It is as Alex says; there's an uncanny valley, and Java apps fall right into it. Cyberduck is as good as it gets, and, compare it to Panic's Transmit.

Second, if you've seen Bingo Card Creator, you know that his users weren't buying it for its elegant OS X-ish interface.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#52

Post by jarek »

al3x wrote: post #45
jarek wrote: post #29

Would he have considered the product at all if it was Windows-native only?

Nope.

Do you think an AIR application will result in less users overall than a Windows only application?

edit: make that less "paying users", by whichever standard the application in question uses

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#53

Post by X-Istence »

tptacek wrote: post #51
X-Istence wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java apps done right on Mac OS X look, feel and behave like actual Mac OS X applications, Cyberduck is a free FTP client written in Java for Mac OS X. It is a great example of what is possible in Java. But there are plenty of apps out there that are mere ports (Qt, or Java) and you can feel it. The drag handles are in the wrong location, the app doesn't behave right when you resize it, the buttons are in the wrong pl…

First, I disagree that well-done Java apps on OS X actually hold up as OS X applications. It is as Alex says; there's an uncanny valley, and Java apps fall right into it. Cyberduck is as good as it gets, and, compare it to Panic's Transmit. Second, if you've seen Bingo Card Creator, you know that his users weren't buying it for its elegant OS X-ish interface.

I have used Transmit and found it to be less easy to use than Cyberduck, that and I am cheap, I used to pirate software, since I switched to Mac OS X entirely at the beginning of my college career I refuse to pirate software that runs on my Mac.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#54

Post by gruseom »

patio11 wrote: post #39
gruseom wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this an argument against making a native app? Don't you have to make the native app before you can AB test it?

It is an argument about competing priorities when resource constrained: try the cheap stuff prior to dropping six figures of dev time on a feature to rescue business which all available evidence says is one account worth $20 a month. (You could go try to find evidence that users actually want to download native apps. For example, put a download button on your page, then see if anyone clicks it. If nobody does, send m…

I agree with your last sentence, but not the one before it. Alex isn't arguing that users consciously prefer native apps; most don't even know what "native app" means. He's arguing that native apps feel better to users and that this feeling is worth something. How much it's worth is hard to quantify. The test you describe wouldn't answer that. As for this:

which all available evidence says is one account worth $20 a month

... surely you haven't reviewed all available evidence on this question? Or did God give it to us when he gave us AB testing? I'm joking, but I think you're trivializing a nontrivial question. I'd like to know how to find "all available evidence"; my experience is that this kind of thing can be very hard to measure.

Edit: it's worth remembering that Steve Jobs made almost an identical argument to Alex's in his critique of Flash last year, even emphasizing that it was his most important point: "We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps" (http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/). Sub-standard apps are exactly what the OP is about.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#55

Post by jcsalterego »

There's a lot to be said about the potential of the WebKit HTML/JS portion of AIR that's far less used than the Flash or Flex counterparts.

In my experience, the lack of a sane garbage collector burned me in the end. I believe the reasoning was that Flash apps were ephemeral, from page load to page load, and definitely not meant for a desktop application with a long life.

It was very hard to ever really free memory, and I remember writing a fairly straight-forward AIR app which would start at 70MB RSS, and balloon to 1GB the next morning.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#56

Post by gruseom »

myth_drannon wrote: post #33

It's all about getting shit done and bringing value to clients. Design fetishism affects very small percentage of both users and builders (which are also sophisticated users)

"Design fetishist", by all accounts I've read, is an excellent description of Steve Jobs and Apple. Therefore design fetishism does not affect a small percentage of users.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#57

Post by aaronblohowiak »

al3x wrote: post #46
stephen wrote: post #35

Funny--he started out "after another Campfire outage this week", I thought the post was going to be about the unreliability of Campfire, its platform (ruby, dash of C, AFAIK), and the uptime issues causing user-hostility amongst 37signal's customers. Which was going to be (and still is) ironic since BankSimple is likely using the same technology stack. After being down voted: so Alex can call all AIR developers lazy…

We're using a bit of Ruby, but not C, and mostly Scala and Clojure. Either way, I think reliability is a process thing, not a technology thing.

I meant to up vote you, but missed (iPad.)

Can you elaborate on heat you mean by process and not technology?

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#58

Post by jad »

aditya wrote: post #11

This is a fascinating question. AIR and the new mobile app frameworks are great for prototyping and getting an app out there really quickly, and perhaps then you can make the decision to either build native apps for your biggest platforms; or not. Alex is obviously pointing to the verbal minority (of which he is a part), because for every person out there that speaks out against, say, the Tweetdeck AIR app; there are…

In marketing circles, this "verbal minority" is referred to as "tastemakers":

"One that determines or strongly influences current trends or styles"

from: http://www.yourdictionary.com/tastemaker

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#59

Post by wladimir »

In my experience there is a difference between applications that feel 'a bit off' (in that they don't completely honor the platforms interface guidelines but aren't opposed either), and really user-hostile platforms.

In the first, the user interface is fast, stable, and does its job on every platform. The developers didn't have time to make a real native application, but have made sure of usability on every platform. Widget kits like QT allow to get very close to native look&feel. In this case, the usefulness of the software can make up for the non-nativeness.

On the other hand, really horrifying user-hostile platforms also exist. I've frequently experienced these in "enterprise software". Makers of such products seem to think that user experience doesn't matter at all. The interfaces, feel bulky and slow and generic, sometimes based on 80s screen scraping, and live in a world of their own, ignoring any user friendliness guideline since the same era. Not even starting about the web-applications that only support IE6... This is not the uncanny valley, this is stuff straight out of nightmares.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#60

Post by cmelbye »

stephen wrote: post #35

Funny--he started out "after another Campfire outage this week", I thought the post was going to be about the unreliability of Campfire, its platform (ruby, dash of C, AFAIK), and the uptime issues causing user-hostility amongst 37signal's customers. Which was going to be (and still is) ironic since BankSimple is likely using the same technology stack. After being down voted: so Alex can call all AIR developers lazy…

Wow, really? First of all, 37signals DID step out of their comfort zone by using Erlang rather than Ruby for their backend to handle sending chat messages out to clients. Secondly, I was under the impression that BankSimple was essentially using Ruby on Rails for their front end, and Scala and other JVM-based languages on the backend. Finally, how is Ruby at all related to the Adobe AIR client in question?
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