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Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

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Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#71

Post by Sujan »

gyardley wrote: post #69
dools wrote: post #64

" It seemed like a decision that had everything to do with what’s in the best interests of the business, and nothing to do with what’s good for the customer. " They already told you they're a small team, with mostly windows users and AIR allowed them to offer a cross platform solution. This is a polite way of saying "you're an outlier, you're not our target user, please go away and stop bothering us". " People seem t…

"People seem to hate AIR. Wherever you see AIR apps, there are support forum threads opened by customers begging for a native alternative" I've personally never noticed this, got any examples? In the post you're quoting, he linked to four forum threads for four separate products, along with a couple of blog posts.

Won't there be even more complaining how shitty a native software is?

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#72

Post by swombat »

tptacek wrote: post #51
X-Istence wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java apps done right on Mac OS X look, feel and behave like actual Mac OS X applications, Cyberduck is a free FTP client written in Java for Mac OS X. It is a great example of what is possible in Java. But there are plenty of apps out there that are mere ports (Qt, or Java) and you can feel it. The drag handles are in the wrong location, the app doesn't behave right when you resize it, the buttons are in the wrong pl…

First, I disagree that well-done Java apps on OS X actually hold up as OS X applications. It is as Alex says; there's an uncanny valley, and Java apps fall right into it. Cyberduck is as good as it gets, and, compare it to Panic's Transmit. Second, if you've seen Bingo Card Creator, you know that his users weren't buying it for its elegant OS X-ish interface.

I've used Cyberduck for years, I'm a fairly technical person, I care about native apps... and yet I never realised that Cyberduck was written in Java.

So they've done a pretty amazing job. Perhaps that's possible in AIR too, but I don't know of any such apps (then again, I didn't know of any such Java apps until a moment ago).

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#73

Post by Sujan »

swombat wrote: post #70
dools wrote: post #64

" It seemed like a decision that had everything to do with what’s in the best interests of the business, and nothing to do with what’s good for the customer. " They already told you they're a small team, with mostly windows users and AIR allowed them to offer a cross platform solution. This is a polite way of saying "you're an outlier, you're not our target user, please go away and stop bothering us". " People seem t…

They already told you they're a small team, with mostly windows users and AIR allowed them to offer a cross platform solution. This is a polite way of saying "you're an outlier, you're not our target user, please go away and stop bothering us". Alex's point is that they should have built a native windows app in that case. Even on Windows, AIR apps kinda suck. It all comes down to the oft-rehashed point from 37signals…

Sometimes.

I like Tweetdeck and Balsamiq Mockups and don't care they use AIR.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#74

Post by gyardley »

Sujan wrote: post #71
gyardley wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People seem to hate AIR. Wherever you see AIR apps, there are support forum threads opened by customers begging for a native alternative" I've personally never noticed this, got any examples? In the post you're quoting, he linked to four forum threads for four separate products, along with a couple of blog posts.

Won't there be even more complaining how shitty a native software is?

Probably. However, that's not what the parent asked for.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#75

Post by powdahound »

dools wrote: post #64

" It seemed like a decision that had everything to do with what’s in the best interests of the business, and nothing to do with what’s good for the customer. " They already told you they're a small team, with mostly windows users and AIR allowed them to offer a cross platform solution. This is a polite way of saying "you're an outlier, you're not our target user, please go away and stop bothering us". " People seem t…

Very well said, dools. I'm a co-founder of the app in question, which is HipChat (http://www.hipchat.com).

If we'd started out making native apps for every platform we wouldn't be where we are today. Sure AIR isn't perfect but it's allowed a 3-man bootstrapped team to create a product that hundreds of companies love to use every day and are happy to pay for.

Alex mentioned his team was going to try setting up their own IRC or Jabber server. That's awesome! The whole reason we're creating HipChat is because the vast majority of business have absolutely NO IDEA how to do that. The fact that more technical teams are willing to invest their precious work hours setting up and maintaining their own group chat system is a testament to how powerful a tool it is.

Of course if you set up your own chat system you won't get drag + drop file sharing, archived history, or inline image previews no matter how technical your team is. :)

Oh and we'll be opening up XMPP access soon so anyone who really needs a native app is more than welcome to build one.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#77

Post by strandev »

arpit wrote: post #76

I really need to write a post on "Shortchanging your blog readers by spewing opinion but disabling comments". Whats with this? DaringFireball is the worst of the lot. Is this some new trend?

Daring Fireball doesn't present itself as a forum for comments. There's a very detailed post on why it doesn't accept comments - http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#78

Post by LiveTheDream »

jwr wrote: post #62

Very good article. We use Yammer and their AIR client is a constant source of frustration. Bloated, CPU-eating, inconsistent and annoying. I use Balsamiq Mockups when I have to, but I always find the experience annoying. If there was a Mac-native app with similar functionality, I'd switch in an instant.

I thought this article's unnamed product was Yammer.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#79

Post by mmcdan »

I've used AIR apps(as a consumer, not a developer) and there are times when I get a little frustrated with the experience. Still, I use the software because it saves me time and makes my life 10x easier. Overall if customers are criticizing your use of AIR as a platform rather than praising you for solving their problem, then you have bigger problems than the AIR vs. Native debate. Many users will tolerate even the crappiest of experiences, see IE6-IE8, so long as it solves their needs.

Re: Shortchanging Your Business with User-Hostile Platforms

#80

Post by stephen »

cmelbye wrote: post #60
stephen wrote: post #35

Funny--he started out "after another Campfire outage this week", I thought the post was going to be about the unreliability of Campfire, its platform (ruby, dash of C, AFAIK), and the uptime issues causing user-hostility amongst 37signal's customers. Which was going to be (and still is) ironic since BankSimple is likely using the same technology stack. After being down voted: so Alex can call all AIR developers lazy…

Wow, really? First of all, 37signals DID step out of their comfort zone by using Erlang rather than Ruby for their backend to handle sending chat messages out to clients. Secondly, I was under the impression that BankSimple was essentially using Ruby on Rails for their front end, and Scala and other JVM-based languages on the backend. Finally, how is Ruby at all related to the Adobe AIR client in question?

Thanks for the correction--I last used campfire pre-erlang and missed the switch:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1728-nuts-bolts-campfire-love...

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