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The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

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Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#111

Post by briandear »

kalleboo wrote: post #67
meric wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had just finished implementing RSS on a website I was working for a client, making sure it worked for Safari, and that was yesterday. =\

Your work is not in vain, it's not as if everyone is going to switch to Mountain Lion anyway, if we look at the poor adoption numbers of Lion. http://imgb.mp/ivu.jpg

For more fun, let's look at the adoption numbers of Jelly Belly or whatever the Android crowd calls it these days. Let's not even open the can of worms that is Windows adoption rates.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#112

Post by briandear »

javajosh wrote: post #19
bstar77 wrote: post #13

Apple removed rss from Mail because it was pretty crappy. Anyone interested in RSS should hit the appstore and snag one of many RSS readers that blows Apple's offering off the planet. When I discovered Reeder I knew my browsing habits would change forever, it's that much better.

Yes, but this misses the point: An OS upgrade hosed her data. Only the fact that she is (apparently) a small minority prevents this from being a big deal, a fact which itself sort of concerns me.

Perhaps she should have invested in Time Machine backups?

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#113

Post by msbarnett »

jseliger wrote: post #36
jws wrote: post #8

We've found the only user in the world that used RSS in Mail! I feel a bond, as I was apparently the only user of RSS in Safari. (as confirmed by informal polling of friends and family). I moved my stuff into Google Reader and also went to Reeder on the Mac, but tried Newsify on the iOS devices and have to say that a custom newspaper is a much better experience than the hundred takes on master-detail drill down you f…

And I'm the last person who uses the NetNewsWire desktop client. It's kind of buggy, and a better user interface would be nice, but it works well enough most of the time.

I still use it too.

It's the only RSS reader I can find for OS X that lets me set it up in my preferred "River of News" display format (what NNW calls 'combined view'). All feeds in one big stream, no 3-panel Mail-style separation of titles and content. Just scroll and read.

If anyone knows a cleaner, less ugly, less buggy RSS reader for OS X that can display feeds in this way, I'd love to hear about it.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#114

Post by chc »

5teev wrote: post #52
vladd wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that Apple didn't even think to solve it is, in fact, disheartening Probably Jobs would have caught it, his attention to such details was painful, probably both for him and the ones at the other end of the table. Simplicity is an amazing difficult thing to get right. If you don't have the right man, well, just look at Gnome3's Unity or even at this incident: RSS removal could have easily been done in the n…

Would this be the Steve Jobs who ditched floppy disk drives when people still had piles of disks around, and Firewire ports when people still had plenty of devices requiring them, etc.?

Dropping a feature is one thing. Silently making a user's data disappear is something else altogether.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#116

Post by skymt »

smsm42 wrote: post #106
frankc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So many people are missing the key point...it is never ok to to remove data without warning.

I think the even bigger point is it's never ok to organize data in a way that removal of the UI leaves you with no access to the data at all, even though you could use another tool to do UI if only the vendor gave you proper access to the data. E.g. if Apple stored their RSS feeds, say, in OPML - migration would be easy. If they exported the feed to OPML on upgrade - migration would be not very hard too. Since Apple…

I don't think Firefox has stored bookmarks in HTML since the bookmark and history systems were unified in Firefox 3. Now they're stored in a single SQLite database. The schema is sensible, so it's easy enough for a programmer to work with, but it doesn't have the automatic portability/transparency of a text-based format like HTML.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#117

Post by stcredzero »

georgemcbay wrote: post #62
stcredzero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

Other than the fact that RSS and NNTP are both built on TCP, they have virtually nothing in common neither technically, architecturally nor in terms of use case they are trying to solve. IOW, wat

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

In particular, my friend asked what people use RSS for. At the time, lots of people used it to stay current on news.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#118

Post by stcredzero »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #83
stcredzero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

"No, because RSS actually exists, while no one has yet successfully reimplemented USENET."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#119

Post by stcredzero »

smsm42 wrote: post #99
stcredzero wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that you are in the minority because you used a tool and technology (RSS) that is passe if not unpopular, should be no excuse to ignore this kind of treatment. It seems like just yesterday my NASA rocket scientist friend was asking me what this new-fangled RSS thing was. I explained, and his response was, "So they just reimplemented USENET?"

Looks like your explanation of RSS was not entirely successful, as RSS has very little in common with Usenet except for the fact that they both deliver information using pull model. RSS resources are individual data streams, Usenet groups are unstructured assemblies of multiple messages. RSS resources are delivered automatically by site aggregators, Usenet messages have to be posted. Usenet needs NNTP servers that st…

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4306232

What you say is true, but my friend asked what it's used for. At the time, it was largely used too keep up with news.

Re: The Disappointing Surprise From Apple

#120

Post by lazugod »

briandear wrote: post #111
kalleboo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your work is not in vain, it's not as if everyone is going to switch to Mountain Lion anyway, if we look at the poor adoption numbers of Lion. http://imgb.mp/ivu.jpg

For more fun, let's look at the adoption numbers of Jelly Belly or whatever the Android crowd calls it these days. Let's not even open the can of worms that is Windows adoption rates.

...in this case, poor adoption is useful.
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