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Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

polypane.app

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#51

Should consumers start pushing back against subscription-based pricing models more actively at this point?

Maybe a weird but honest question: How is/was software even able to finance itself without subscriptions? People expect updates and support which are continuous expenses.

One alternative, I guess, are full-price major revisions at semi-regular intervals. But won't that result in many people never getting an upgrade because they feel it's not worth it?

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#52

The SaaS pricing of these tools is getting out of hand. €108/year for this. Another hundred for retool, another hundred for Postman, mmhmm / camera apps, Notion, Gmail, Trello/Jira, Github/Gitlab, Slack, an image resizing service, some load testing tool, Figma.. now every developer has a $1000+ monthly burn rate (!). Can we go back to buying plain software licenses?

s/monthly/yearly

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody, Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting. You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other…

I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by chance this morning and found it deserved to be better known. So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no impact on the web site I've developped with it. Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing access to your data (looking at…

Are there particular Adobe product that do this? I use Adobe XD which is subscription-based but it allows saving my work locally.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please, do not try to be smart about these things. There must be some sort of sales benefit to it, otherwise websites wouldn't be doing it. I'm guessing the main advantage is when it gets the currency right, it's easier to buy the product.

Stripe recommends setting the currency based on the detected country, as that apparently increases conversion.

Speaking anecdotally, it does. Sometimes (not as much in the past couple years with Adafruit) I’ve been shopping for electronics kits on the internet and would usually bounce when the prices weren’t in USD. Occasionally I’d see the magic switch currency button, but usually it’s 10px wide somewhere I don’t see it.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#55
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as there’s an easy way for the user to choose a different language and currency, it seems defaulting based on location would be correct for the highest percentage of users, unless you have some reason to believe it’s more likely that your audience is, say, English-speaking users who prefer to see prices in USD.

In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site. This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops. Larger entities like Google can just send you into redirection hell sometimes if you try to set a language (where you can even find the option). Others decline to show you the content since it is not "available in your part of the world" eve…

> In the vast amount of cases there is never any (clear or otherwise) option to set the language of the site.

Unless manually disabled for privacy reasons (in which case... well yeah) your browser sends a weighted list of your language preferences with the HTTP request, the option on the site should only be an override.

> This has held true for Google as well as small mom and pops web shops.

Google follows the above language list unless your account or temporary session settings override it. Mom and pop probably don't know how to support more than one language let alone how to implement it well.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I rarely speak the language of the country I may be in atm. I rarely use the currency of the country I may be in atm. Please, do not try to be smart about these things.

The language thing is terrible. I use the English version of Chrome on an English language MacOS, configured English as my preferred language with Spanish as the second option (which are sent to the site)… and of I travel to Germany many internationalized sites decide I want to read in German… or Portuguese in Brazil. Language options and localization are old as time but sites use defaults based on IP addresses.

Some websites on mobile still display in swiss french for me, because I lived there in 2015. And I have changed 4 smartphones since then, but some websites that I registered or logged from years ago in switzerland still assume I'm living there. Worse of all? I cannot change the currency, and everything is shown in CHF.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#57
post #7

Keep in mind that mobile Safari behaves differently and a resized Chrome is not enough.

Yes, my issue with these types of 'services' always is that it only 'emulates' the screen resolution. They might as well just be iframes locked to specific resolutions; the result is that it's still my own browser doing the rendering. What I want is some kind of reverse-polyfill that accurately reflects the rendering capabilities.

And they always miss the most important feature: a webkit browser emulation (which is obviously nearly impossible).

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. "Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." -- Dr. Ian Malcolm.

> Not true. I've made i8n features like that in the past for companies where they thought it would be nice and did not put any research, before or after launch, into whether there was any benefit whatsoever. That makes sense in a way. Managers tend to implement features nonsensically, as Hacker News constantly reminds me :-) What would be the best compromise in your opinion, then: doing this magic automatically and g…

Don't do i8n unless you can afford to pay/hire people who know the cultures that you are adding. You'll hit all sorts of weirdness. And don't argue with the weirdness.

I had to translate a site into dozens of languages. Our German staff member translated the text. She would keep writing "e-mail" as "eMail" and I would change it back without her knowledge. Just recently I realized that the capitalization is a German quirk and is expected - it wasn't just a quirk of the translator. I feel bad for "fixing" her work now, simply because I didn't understand.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#59
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's an economic model that is certainly not for everybody, Not calling you out directly OP (in fact, I quite like your project), but the subscription model is pretty badly thought out most of the time IMO. Especially in a commercial setting. You really should not have to pay a company a monthly fee to operate cameras you bought, on your property. These trojan horse subscriptions are then normally paired with other…

I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by chance this morning and found it deserved to be better known. So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no impact on the web site I've developped with it. Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing access to your data (looking at…

Ahh, my apologies for assuming you were the developer.

Re: Polypane: A browser for responsive and accessible development

#60
post #53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not affiliated with the project; just discovered it by chance this morning and found it deserved to be better known. So, when I said 'My site will still be online", I meant as a web developper using Polypane, when and if I decide to stop paying the subscription, this will have no impact on the web site I've developped with it. Subscriptions might be a problem when you risk loosing access to your data (looking at…

Are there particular Adobe product that do this? I use Adobe XD which is subscription-based but it allows saving my work locally.

Most of them? If you stop paying for Creative Clouds, your Lightroom database is of no use anymore; you'll probably be able to open photoshop/illustrator files with other apps, but maybe not with all their subtleties.

On the other hand, non-subscription based software was only good as long as they were maintained for your current OS… So I don't care much if my software is subscription based or not, but I care a lot about them saving my data using open standards.

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