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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

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Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#151

Post by danaris »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #136
danaris wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends entirely on how you have your workflow set up.

Sure, it's a matter of how complicated you want your workflow to be. The way things are right now, the author can edit the markdown file directly and be done with it. It's simple and straight-forward, low-effort and low cognitive load.

I would imagine it would be possible to set up their system such that they could edit the Markdown file, and a helper process would immediately pick up that the file had been edited and re-run the local rendering to static HTML.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#152

Post by anderspitman »

babypuncher wrote: post #51
jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

There are set top boxes (Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc.) that offer a much better user experience with thriving app ecosystems and regular feature updates, if you don't want the rigamarole of trying to use desktop software in a living room. I used to do the whole HTPC thing but having to use an actual web browser to access half my content felt obnoxious and cumbersome. As for avoiding smart TVs, I found it pretty easy…

Are you aware of any that support the "play this URL" use case I talk about in the blog post?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#153

Post by ysavir »

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #132
mumblemumble wrote: post #59

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it. But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, her…

As much as HN wants to whine about it, the truth is that Javascript is a primitive, basic, use case of the internet.

The very purpose of JavaScript is to be dynamic and changing. "Primitive" and "Basic" are not apt adjectives, especially when the page in question is entirely static.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#154

Post by justinclift »

tmountain wrote: post #29
jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

Worse yet, Smart TVs often brick themselves due to failed software updates. My last Sony TV did an overnight Android update, and I found it in a state where it'd show the Android boot logo and subsequently shut down. Some Google research showed that this has happened to hundreds of people (youtube videos outlining the problem, etc). Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty, and no amount of hac…

> Sony refused to do anything due to the TV being out of warranty.

Interestingly, apparently in the UK (or maybe EU?) there's a defined period an appliance is required to work for, to be "fit for purpose". Note - not a warranty thing, it's a consumer goods thing.

Not living in the UK any more (thanks Brexit), so don't remember off hand the period of time though.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#155

Post by satysin »

jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

I agree with your frustrations about smart TVs but I also like the setup I have with my TV.

I bought an LG OLED last summer (a 55" C9) and to be honest I don't hate the software (webOS) on it. However my setup is not really normal.

Firstly my TV is connected via Ethernet to my router and is restricted to only Netflix, the LG web store and my internal network.

I don't watch live TV, instead my viewing is limited to Netflix and content on my Plex server. Turns out the LG Plex app is very good. The TV supports pretty much every video and audio codec so I can do Direct Play from my Plex server. I mostly have direct Blu-ray streams extracted and remuxed into mkv files so there is no quality difference with using Plex vs. the actual Blu-ray. The rest is a mixture of H.264 and H.265 video with AAC and DTS audio in mp4 or mkv files. Everything plays perfectly with quality on par with or exceeding Netflix to give a comparison.

This setup works great for me. I only really interact with the TV OS to switch between Netflix and Plex which isn't a big deal and the picture quality of the OLED panel is incredible with 4K HDR content.

The real star of the show is Plex though which is just god damn fantastic. As everything I have is Direct Play compatible I can (and have) run the Plex server on a Raspberry Pi with a USB HDD attached and it works perfectly. Even for 80GB 4K HDR movies (direct Blu-ray remux files are large!) plays back from a Pi running openmediavault and Plex media server in Docker.

In the past I have tried a few different solutions such as a HTPC running Windows plugged directly into the TV but nothing gave me as good picture quality with the same flexibility as using the native TV apps.

In fact the Plex on a Pi setup works so well for me I set one up for my mother when I visited over the new year. She can watch any content on my Plex server as well as anything I upload to hers (as she often wants things I don't care for so don't want using up my disk space :)

If you haven't looked into Plex I highly recommend you check it out. It really does 'just work' which is so nice when you want to sit down and watch a movie without having to deal with all the adverts and junk before the movie on a Blu-ray disc.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#156

Post by anderspitman »

mumblemumble wrote: post #59

> Here is my plea: when you build hardware/software, please make it support the primitive, simple case. Says a webpage that is just a couple empty divs w/o JS, and, with JS, is 4 hyperlinks, a few paragraphs of text, and absolutley nothing (aside from google-analytics) that ever needed any JS in the first place, let alone 5 or 6 files' worth of it. But, I think that conflict really speaks to the funamental issue, her…

Please see my explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22038862

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#157

Post by jefftk »

JohnFen wrote: post #96
jefftk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page. It's a cheap transformation, and it means you don't need any sort of server-side build process. Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.

> anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted. I never whitelist sites that don't work without JS unless the site is actually critical for some reason (doing so is too risky). I expect that this means some parts of the web effectively no longer exist for people like me, and accept that, but I wonder if the authors of these badly engineered pages really…

> I wonder if the authors of these badly engineered pages really know that they're excluding people

People who choose to turn off JS are excluding themselves. JS is part of the web platform, and there are tons of amazing things it allows you to do. Being able to write a site in markdown with static hosting and have it instantly rendered in user's browsers is one of those things!

If you choose to browse with IE6 and complain that sites using HTML5 are excluding you, I'm not going to be sympathetic either.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#158

Post by justinclift »

duxup wrote: post #31
jchw wrote: post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

My standard operating procedure for TVs is: Setup sound bar. Connect new TV to HDMI switch. Get the TV working with my remote. Throw TV remote in a corner somewhere.... I don't even try to use a smart TV's internal functions anymore. They're just big monitors to me.

Don't some smart tv's scan the local wifi networks and try to find one they can connect back home through? eg no password on it.

Guessing they haven't started shipping with a dictionary to try brute forcing the most common passwords. :D

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#159

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

apitman wrote: post #98

Author here. Sorry for those having trouble viewing the site. That's obviously never the intention. The current incarnation is actually a bit of an experiment. Unfortunately, my blog is only occasionally tested against front page traffic so I don't always get a feel for what's not working. That said, I assure you I am intimately familiar with the tradeoffs of different methods of delivering HTML. TL;DR it's my person…

>I'm optimizing for first-time visitors

As a first-time visitor I had a very bad experience while waiting for your JS to download and generate the content - in the meantime I was looking at a completely empty black screen.

Optimizing for first-time user experience means giving your visitors the content they came for as soon as possible, which is not what you’re doing.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#160

Post by phcordner »

mbreese wrote: post #118
babypuncher wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirPlay doesn't have this design philosophy and wouldn't have given this user a problem. Unfortunately AirPlay itself is proprietary and only supported by Apple devices and some TVs.

You know, I was going to reply that the AppleTV isn't a good comparison here because they specifically wanted something that worked with URLs. But then I thought about it, and the URL thing is a red herring. That's not what they really want -- that's an implementation detail. What they really want is the ability to play something from their local server on their TV. This is totally do-able in the Apple eco-system. Th…

AppleTV + iPhone + VLC iOS app will give you the URL option too. I did this to watch Terrace House Boys x Girls Next Door when I ran out of Netflix episodes.
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