51–60 of 135 posts
Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.
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As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'. Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it... In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occ…
I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.
So, your happy with the VHS and don't need to play Beta tapes.
PS: Sounds like your happy with a walled guarden and want something that just works. Did you get a Blueray player or a conbo that also handels HD-DVD's?
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As much as the tech world loves to hate Apple, walled gardens are a huge part of why their stuff 'just works'. Suppose you want an app to play videos. If your app uses a custom format no problem. If you support an open standard, the file might not, it might require more processing power than you have, it's probably for a different screen resolution, it... In the end tech people are willing to trade stuff breaking occ…
I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.
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Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
There already are Twitter apps for phones that don't display advertising.
Perhaps a bit naive - these companies that start by embracing open standards then pull back from them are just pulling a classic bait-and-switch, with a bit of freeriding off open-source efforts thrown in. They bootstrap their user base and arrive to market quickly by using tools built by others. Then once they grow and gain market and mind share, they can start closing themselves off, walling the garden. And it's ju…
Here's an idea: there should be a maximum number N of employees a company can have. This enforces companies to think about the greater good, because if you're in a company that is split because of size, you might end up in a different company. Also, a maximum on the number of employees stimulates the "modularity" of the market: large conglomerates with internal markets will not be possible anymore. I'm not sure of al…
Flipboard addresses the accessibility issue in their article. While moving to canvas limits it for now, at least they are making an effort to incorporate it, which is more than can be said for most sites.
They're saying " Whooshy effects are more important than disabled people accessing our app. We'll let those people in when it doesn't impact our fancy UI. " It could definitely be worse, because they could ignore accessibility completely, but that doesn't make their approach good.
It's a world of trade-offs. There are contexts where accessibility is obvious more important than most other concerns -- the IRS's web site should obviously be as accessible as possible because everybody needs to pay their taxes. On the flip side of things, the point of Flipboard IS the UI. Flipboard is all about aggregating other people's content and providing a different user interface to it. What Flipboard is doing is it is taking limited resources and trying to allocate them, and they're choosing to focus on improving the user experience for the vast majority of their users. Is that the right choice? I dunno. But I don't think condescendingly referring to their focus on user experience as "whooshy effects" adds anything to the conversation.
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No, just don't be greedy and don't try to capture all the value you're creating. Using open protocols, you can let your users build stuff that you could have never imagined yourself, and guess what - that only means more users for you.
You realize any CEO that didn't capture all value that the company created would probably be sued into the ground by the shareholders for not maximizing the return on their investment ?
But anyway, you can't have cake and eat it too. If you care only about maximizing shareholder value, then don't lie to customers that you care about providing them value.
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Nonsense. Why does Apple have their own plug format instead of supporting USB? Is it somehow better? Easier? Blatantly not. This is just vendor lock in, the opposite of the fundamental ethic of the Internet.
While their plug can be defended on engineering grounds, I'd ask a different question - why lock down Bluetooth to Apple devices only? iPhones were perfectly able to exchange data with non-Apple devices until at some point they weren't.
If you mean accessories like wireless keyboards I think the same 'just works' arguments directly apply. There are lot's of terrable 3rd party products out there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Native apps and open standards are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, there are ways to make the data exportable both on the app side and cloud side. The reason companies tend to go for their own protocols is mostly greed. "Because why should I support RSS if I can't monetize it?". That's basically exploiting the common good without giving anything back.
I don't think it's fair to describe that as greed. The fact that a business can't monetise a service it provides is a bad thing; if Twitter for example provided access to everything over an RSS feed, the first thing you'd see would be applications that simply stripped or refused to display advertising etc. I don't see why it 'exploits the common good' to want to charge or monetise a service you provide.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want a VCR that can play any VHS I have and that I can plug to any TV I can find - not something that plays only iCassettes on BananaCRT which is expensive and my friends don't have.
DVDs have been region locked for a long time, and yet still took off.