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How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

blurity.com

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Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#81

Post by coderdude »

gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

A good example of this can be found on SoundCloud. They load a placeholder image that represents the common sharing widgets and then let the real widgets load over them. The problem is that the font rendering makes it look weird on any platform except the dev platform: http://i.imgur.com/lejjI.png

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#82

Post by fluxon »

On the subject of conversion rates, the Download and Buy links are separate, with no mention of an unregistered trial or watermarked demo mode. That uncertainty might be affecting your tryout rate. If the "Download" button said "Try it!", then the certainty that there is some usable trial would be higher. Side note: I notice that the (watermarked) saved images lack EXIF info - is that preserved in the registered version? This is very important for many photographers...

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#83

Post by caf »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #18
Hario wrote: post #10

I'm no expert on these sorts of things, but it seems like the story goes something like this: 1. Dev checks out his site using IE 2. Dev realizes that IE users were getting scary warnings about his software 3. Dev has to pay up money to a third company to make the scary warnings go away. Seems like a bad state of affairs to me.

I'd love to hear how this isn't grounds for a product disparagement lawsuit. Are any attorneys familiar with SmartScreen Filter? A couple of relevant points that may be overlooked: 1) Signing your code, even with an expensive class-3 Authenticode certificate from Verisign that allows you to sign kernel drivers, is no guarantee that IE will not accuse you of distributing potential malware. 2) Contrary to various posti…

The "commonly downloaded" criterion seems especially odd. "We only stop unsuccessful malware"?

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#84

Post by fluxon »

teuobk wrote: post #58
sp332 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like a completely different product. He would need to maintain infrastructure and an entire software stack under his deblurring program, design an API and/or security-hardened web interface to upload and retrieve photos, and consider bandwidth costs for every photo uploaded and downloaded.

Pretty much spot on. Deblurring is extremely CPU intensive, so it would take a lot of hardware on the server side. Or, I could do something like a CUDA port, but then that would mean owning and grooming my own servers, since decent GPUs are still rare beasts on leased dedicated servers. The more likely route for Mac support is to release a native OS X version, since the GUI is written in Python and the underlying dec…

Back in May, Jeff wrote on his blog: https://www.blurity.com/blog/2012/05/01/blurity-is-back/ "What happened to the web version? In short, the market happened: nobody wanted web-based photo blur removal. A minor pivot, but a pivot nonetheless!"

This seems to be that effort: http://fixblurryphotos.com/ Blurity is mentioned after the deblur is performed.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#85

Post by jabits »

briandear wrote: post #31
sliverstorm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certification costs money, and certification is a thing in many industries. I notice nobody is banging pots about ASE certification for automotive techs? I mean, it's true, there is a difference here- the active "This software isn't certified" notification- but is that a critical distinction?

The difference is that ASE techs don't have to pay to certify each car they fix.

Bogus analogy. One ASE mechanic, one cert. One dev, one cert.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#86

Post by NinetyNine »

achal wrote: post #80
gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

> font and font size choices Agreed. I don't know if it's just me, but Helvetica looks rather bad on Windows. I've found that Segoe UI almost always looks more pleasing, and yet Helvetica is omnipresent on the web (partially because of Twitter bootstrap).

I can't verify this, but unless you installed Helvetica manually, windows installations won't have it and will fall back to whatever is specified next in the family (usually Arial or the default Sans Serif).

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#87

Post by jcbrand »

antidoh wrote: post #72
chris_wot wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN is not there for the marketing purposes of companies.

HN and all other web sites are there for whatever purposes their users wish to use it for, within the constraints of whatever actions are implemented on a site. This is one of the things that infuriates me about StackOverflow and its army of article closing moderators. A real community will change its practices and perceptions over time according to the needs of the community. If you have a subset of people who decid…

So if the community (through an influx of new users) decides that the purpose of HN is to spread cat pictures and memes, you'll be cool with that?

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#90

Post by protomyth »

justindocanto wrote: post #37
gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

5% of 'the market' does not translate to 5% of users on your site. Depending on the site's demographic, as a developer, I see approx 15% Mac users making up traffic. Not to mention an ADDITIONAL 25% iPhone users. That's an average of 40% of apple traffic on the sites I work on. Some of which are getting 30k - 60k hits a month. Obviously this isnt the same stats across the board on all websites... but It is by no mean…

Your Mac number is not far off from Apple's Mac percentage in the US - 12%.
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