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Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by MattGaiser on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:28AM (#26436149)
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by emdowling on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:40AM (#26436281)
Wasn't a unified place for communications, with connections and feeds from all the services you and your company used, the original goal of Slack?
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by sofixa on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:25AM (#26436778)
Yep, and IMHo it does a pretty good job at it with some integrations.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by Sebb767 on Friday March 12, 2021 @01:38PM (#26439193)
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by andrewprock on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:45AM (#26437690)
Honestly, the last thing I want is a unified inbox. I get inputs from a dozen different streams and have segregated them by platform to better manage my time.

I want it to be really easy for people to get a hold of me if the information is important or if they are important to me, e.g. via SMS or voice.

I want it to be very difficult to be overwhelmed by low signal content unless that is my focus at the time, e.g. mailing lists, work email, etc.

And I want to be able to select my focus. When I am reading about mountain bikes, I want to read about mountain bikes. I don't want to sort through work messages, family memes, or tech news at the same time.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by rchaud on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:15PM (#26438085)
Agreed. Slack + Outlook is for work, Whatsapp/Messenger is for friends, Gmail for personal stuff.

The last thing I want is for all of those to be jammed into one app.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by WrtCdEvrydy on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:31AM (#26436175)
Yeah, I worked at BB during that time when the Blackberry Hub on BB10 came out. Shit was awesome to see internally.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by 2cb on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:49AM (#26436358)
Man I really wish BB10 had come to the market earlier. I honestly don't doubt it'd still be around today if it wasn't for the fact it entered the market so late. BB were too busy dragging their feet for years after iOS and Android hit the scene. If they started work on BB10 as soon as the iPhone was released, I think we'd still have BlackBerries and more importantly a third platform. The Apple/Google duopoly benefits no one except Apple and Google.

I still have a Q10 somewhere, it's such a nice phone too.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by WrtCdEvrydy on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:54AM (#26436421)
There's still a lot of things I can't talk about because some of the people who I worked with, who are great people still work there.

Internally, 33% of every dollar went to the Blackberry Wireless division because Blackberry was created before commoditized mobile chips existed. In effect, this means we paid for the chips, paid an extra fee to unlock it just so we could flash our software.

It was an ongoing battle between the spec for Bluetooth being released and having our own version, validating it against every single thing out there that could connect to it and then shipping it out. This made it extremely pricy to deliver a feature on the wireless stack and often things just weren't supported which came with the original chipset.

It's difficult to turn the ship around without just firing everyone involved and going "just grab what's there just like Android is doing"

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by MattGaiser on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:36AM (#26436227)
That was excellent and I stuck with my Z30 for a long time because of it.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by WrtCdEvrydy on Friday March 12, 2021 @09:45AM (#26436321)
I still have a special Z10 that I was allowed to keep after working there.

It's a red Z10 running an unlocked bootloader which allows you to hold down volume up-volume down and boot into Android 5.0 environment.

Sadly "Project Exodus" was considered inappropriate at the time just like the original Android Player on BB10 since it was considered inappropriate to think anything other than BB10 was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Edit: 2 years after I left, Blackberry devices became Android devices... so I guess I was ahead of the curve or something?

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by westmeal on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:08AM (#26436578)
Can you ask your friends how to unlock the bootloader on my key2? Pretty please?
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by WrtCdEvrydy on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:15AM (#26436666)
It is probably not possible, you have to unlock on premises using a signed version of the tooling on a beta version of the OS on the device.

Your key2 probably has a customer version of the OS running it, so it would never be able to be unlocked :(

I argued about this but eventually the security of the "ecosystem" takes over the usability of unlocking older devices so they can be used for something else.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by drcongo on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:41AM (#26436942)
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by goatinaboat on Friday March 12, 2021 @10:58AM (#26437130)
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means?

BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by gorgonzolachz on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:15AM (#26437329)
Isn't this just notification center? I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it, but most services have some form of notification support that will redirect you to the proper app context
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by goatinaboat on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:25AM (#26437444)
I don't think you can reply to say, a slack message from it

I think Slack post-dates BlackBerry but you could definitely reply to e.g. a FB message from within it. BB wrote and maintained their own FB connector to facilitate it, FB never shipped a BB app.

Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by drcongo on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:10PM (#26438025)
Yeah, this is the other thing I'm baffled about here. My iPhone is my unified notification inbox and I can do all of those things right from the lock screen. I definitely never have to visit sites to check notifications.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by jdsully on Friday March 12, 2021 @02:10PM (#26439610)
The point is you didn't need to be redirected.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by Grustaf on Friday March 12, 2021 @11:58AM (#26437873)
What's wrong with the existing notification inbox in macos? It's available quicker, by just swiping in from the right side.
Re:Has Y Combinator lost its way when the latest company is ... by ideamotor on Friday March 12, 2021 @12:19PM (#26438144)
And you can add calendar, todo, notes, etc etc widgets to it. It is slow and you can’t use the keyboard to navigate it. I think developers are very limited in what they can do with it. That said, it covers 80% of what users are looking for here ...