Just as bad are websites that go over-the-top in changing functionality and layout to seemingly cater to tablets and mobile devices. Vertically scrolling an article on an iPad is a pretty good experience and has the benefit of keeping your site consistent with your web version, does it really need to horizontal paged scrolling?
No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
151–160 of 222 posts
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#152The iOS version of Safari has the "reading list" feature which downloads an article for offline reading (Instapaper is better IMO, but the functionality is largely the same that if you didn't want to buy another app it's built into your iOS device for free). The browser is well equipped to deal with textual information. I too fail to see the point of "bullshit" apps.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#153Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#154Apple could solve this problem on iOS by giving us a button that forces the browser to appear to be desktop Safari, but apparently this is all part of their overall apps strategy or something. The best is when after you go through all the nonsense, you get "This article is not available on your device." It's like when you want to watch a video, and you have to watch a 30 second ad first, and after the ad you get an e…
>apparently this is all part of their overall apps strategy or something.
Actually, in iOS 6, Apple added a graceful way to handle this case. The site can use a special HTML tag to indicate they have an app available, and that will show a tasteful banner at the top of the Safari screen that can be easily dismissed and that can launch the app, with context of the current page. Much better than some homebrew Javascript solution.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#155I agree for the most part with this article. I think the major problem is that apps are being developed that offer absolutely no advantage over viewing the website in a browser - in fact many offer disadvantages. This is what happens when a market crowded with some shockingly bad app developers is combined with ignorant executive mandates that companies must have apps simply to be able to say that they have them.
We've been conditioned to want apps. Or... many people have. iPhone is synonymous with 'apps'. My grandmother understands 'apps' (well, mostly!) I was on a project last year, and we built a mobile website (could work in iPhone/Android and probably winphone, but we didn't test). Got a lot of immediate "yeah that's great" from some people. Partners reached out for potential customers/sales - every single one returned w…
They don't necessarily know what they need. Perhaps all they need is a bookmark for your site, exposed as a big button choice. You'd have to follow up with some testing to find out what this really meant.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#156Apple could solve this problem on iOS by giving us a button that forces the browser to appear to be desktop Safari, but apparently this is all part of their overall apps strategy or something. The best is when after you go through all the nonsense, you get "This article is not available on your device." It's like when you want to watch a video, and you have to watch a 30 second ad first, and after the ad you get an e…
>apparently this is all part of their overall apps strategy or something. Actually, in iOS 6, Apple added a graceful way to handle this case. The site can use a special HTML tag to indicate they have an app available, and that will show a tasteful banner at the top of the Safari screen that can be easily dismissed and that can launch the app, with context of the current page. Much better than some homebrew Javascript…
But site developers still have the option to completely block you from their content when they detect you're using iOS Safari. Which is what so many news sites are doing.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I really really don't like about the Android app model is that an app will come along and demand over a dozen permissions. And I either accept them all or don't download the app.
I have seen an app (probably root-only) that can restrict specific permissions on applications. There are no promises if it will break the app or not, though.
Currently, removing an individual permission from an app will almost certainly cause an unhandled exception, since having that permission makes security exceptions for the corresponding API calls unexpected.
This could be changed without breaking existing apps.
Google could modify Android's app model just slightly, to enable apps to declare in their manifest that they support "a la carte" permissions and then enable users to select individual permissions. To work under this new permission model, apps would have to test for permissions, or handle security exceptions - small modifications.
I think this kind of change would be well worth it. For example, I prefer to trust the OS is preventing location tracking than that the app developer is being honest about turning it off in a setting.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
All these are sort of explainable, Hardware and Audio is to allow the user to control volume or widgets for feeds and multimedia. Network access is usually reserved for multimedia Phone Calls - status - is usually because if you receive a phone call any multimedia knows when to stop storage - to store things to your sd card or move the app to your sd card prevent from sleeping - if you're watching a video you don't w…
They may be explainable but do you really want to install an app that _could_ keep track of the numbers you call and then send them back to a central server? In this case it is the BBC, so its probably only likely that the british government, the metropolitan police or mi 5/6 would be able to convince them to do it but a whole lot of less scrupulous organisations ask for that permission.
Looks like android needs to fix it's permissions system.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#159Just an angry dude trying to recruit more anger to justify his lack of pleasure in life. First-First world problems at best.
Re: No, I'm not going to download your bullshit app
#160Apple could solve this problem on iOS by giving us a button that forces the browser to appear to be desktop Safari, but apparently this is all part of their overall apps strategy or something. The best is when after you go through all the nonsense, you get "This article is not available on your device." It's like when you want to watch a video, and you have to watch a 30 second ad first, and after the ad you get an e…
I hope you know Chrome for iOS has that exact feature. It makes the iPad a lot more useful for me.