toddheasley

I agree with you, but I think you just landed the elusive "half-Godwin."

I get the author's point, but I also strongly disagree that the economy was doing "incredibly well." I think it was fairly obvious even 5 years prior to 2007 that the wheels were coming off. For me it felt like a slow motion accident. Same with mobile; you're only startled by the impact if you were looking the other direction.

Can we at least agree that if we attempted a list of all the Xs a programmer needs to know before doing Y and made it law that nobody could write any software at all?

I'm mostly wondering how long these lunches were that they even rate mentioning, let alone mentioning BEFORE code quality?

Great examples. I think even the WebKit touch events version of Google Maps is broken, but, not being a Gmail user, I had no idea they were blowing it that badly. I use both Maps and Twitter every single day, but -- and here's another facet of the problem -- always through applications. I encounter Maps embedded in (WebKit) pages only enough to be annoyed by them, and I haven't been to twitter.com in at least a year. This is eye-opening. Clearly we're not just talking about drop shadows.

This is something that the discussion hasnt touched yet, but I don't know that you can assume that devs are omitting the vendor-specific prefixed border radius out of laziness. I'm frequently guilty of coding base lowest-common-denominator CSS, then enhancing the WebKit experience -- not because I'm not aware of the vendor-specific attributes for other rendering engines or because I'm too lazy to type them out, but because only the WebKit rendering is satisfactory.

I'm not entirely certain about this approach though, so what is the real harm in a web where boxes have slightly rounded corners in one browser and not another? I'm also curious if anybody has examples of WebKit-only sites (that don't actually function in other browsers) that don't fall under the heading of "look at this cool new CSS thing that this site exists to demonstrate."

Admittedly this is just a guess, but might the Carson velodrome explain Orange County's dominance in this index? There's precious little overlap in the Venn diagram of people who race track bikes (on tracks) and people who ride track bikes because bike messengers ride track bikes.

I work for a very large (Fortune 500) retailer whose customers are overwhelmingly Mac users. Safari users make up just shy of 50% of all of our traffic, with Chrome accounting for 25%.

I'd guess that's as much because Safari is the built-in, default option on OS X and iOS as it is because Safari is just super awesome. The more interesting thing to me is that all of my (Mac-using)coworkers have switched over (mostly from Firefox) to Chrome, despite Chrome's overall jankyness on OS X.

Gruber's assessment is more reasonable, but watching the video, I completely fail to see the controversy. In context, Schmidt's response seems almost humble, and he seems to be addressing two separate concerns raised by the question: 1) The actual challenges for developers (in terms of both the software being good enough to deliver killer apps and the store being able to generate money for developers) and 2) The perceived uncoolness of Android/perceived lack of developer interest

On the first point, he's conceding that Android, up until ICS, fell short. On the second point, he's saying that, whether Android suddenly sparks developer interest or not, it's gonna be on so many devices that developers won't be able to say no (to the fame and fortune). I can't say whether he'll be correct, but I think he could be. It's an honest, if not direct, answer to the question asked -- and doesn't come across as a threat.

I concede that I'm not being completely fair. I actually don't develop in Firefox and only have a few versions installed on VMs for testing, no bookmarks or extensions. And, as I said in another comment, over the last 10 years, Gecko has become like a trusted friend; I know what will work and don't usually test in Firefox until way later than I should.

I was responding to YOUR stipulation that browsing experience degrades the more you use Firefox. IF it does, that seems like emergency problem #1 to fix if Firefox wants to stop hemmorrhaging users. But then, I'm speaking completely out of turn, since I haven't been a Firefox user for years.

EDIT: ...since I haven't used Firefox as my primary browser in years. I use it daily; not as a "power user."

> Much like how a computer gets slow and needs to be reformatted, people who are browser power users need to clean out Firefox every few years.

Maybe I'm asking to much, but this seems totally unacceptable to me -- both things seem totally unacceptable to me. And while it may still be just true, Firefox suffers worse from this problem than any OS, software or other browser that I use.

> on several matters its in direct conflict on the w3c standards with other major players.

Yeah, this is false. Gecko is still arguably the gold, um, standard for page rendering.

That said, I dread using Firefox now, for reasons that are completely emotional. There's too much UI, and web pages have an unfortunate uncanny valley thing happening when compared side-by-side with Webkit-rendered pages. The best way I can a explain it is that it's like when you see a photo of a Russian Buran, and your mind goes, "There's something not quite right about that Space Shuttle."

I can assure you that this was in the United States.

My wife's friend recently moved from a large city, where she didn't have a car, to live with her boyfriend in a smaller town. It's a smaller town without much public transit. My wife's friend knows how to drive, but her boyfriend's car has a manual transmission. On a recent visit, the friend is complaining that her boyfriend won't teach her how to drive his car. Being proud of the fact that I (barely) know how to drive a stick, I volunteer to teach her. Her boyfriend doesn't object, so out to the car we go. I drive to a nearby empty parking lot and trade seats with my wife's friend. She's ready to learn.

"The pedal to the left of the brake is the clutch. Push it all the way to the floor," I begin. She takes her left foot off the brake and pushes in the clutch...

I'd argue that you can hand an iPad to your grandmother with severe arthritis or your toddler for the first time and they wouldn't have nearly as much trouble as the presenter in the video.

The APNs token is unique to the install of iOS, not the hardware. So if a user moves to new hardware (with a different UDID), and they restore from a backup of their previous device, the token stays the same. Similarly, if a user does a complete restore of an iOS device (same UDID), but sets the existing device up as a new device, a new token is assigned.

I have about a year of data from providing push to ~100K active device tokens. The former scenario, where a user upgrades to a new device and restores from a backup of their old device is really common. The latter almost never happens. So the UDID is marginally useful, in that it allows you to abstract push-enabled iOS systems from iOS devices.

For doing something like user authentication, the APNs token is actually preferable, because it gets transported along with app data when a user upgrades to a new device. I'm guessing that developers use the UDID, because when you register with the system to get the APNs token, the user is prompted to accept or deny push notifications.

Edit: And, yes, tokens aren't specific to an app; there's one per system that all the apps share.

I agree. I do not like this idea that lots of zany shit = fun and comfort. Having worked in a number of different office cultures, the people with all the crazy junk all over their desks are almost always the sad ones -- people who go home alone after work and cry in their apartments, surrounded by cats with various illnesses. It's actually a red flag for me whenever I interview. It says, "I'm doing my best to cope."

Maybe "web video" is too lazy of a term. What I'm talking about is video transferred via HTTP (or other protocol) from one computer to another. So, yes, that would be Netflix, iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, BitTorrent... Everything. I couldn't even guess what percentage of that whole is video embedded into HTML pages.

I make the distinction because, I think it's important to consider the problem in the larger context of digital media and connected devices, not just in the specific context of HTML rendered in a browser window. Right now we're talking about which video format is right for the HTML video tag, but the implications beyond that are huge. My response to the parent comment was not so much that I think "H.264 rulez," but that discussion of this subject was anything but "stupid" or "pointless whining." I'd like to see this discussion go on.

Late last year, my employer decided to walk away from a project that I had devoted 14 months of my life to because they were sued over SMS patents. This shouldn't be a debate about how much Apple fanboys love patents, when the debate is really about which compromises to make so that we can all make things with computers before we die. For example:

Is H.264 more of a threat to Internet video than fractured video support in web browsers? If you want to keep the debate to embedded video, that's a better question. H.264 made video finally good enough to watch on the Internet. Hardware-decoding made it possible to watch web video without melting your laptop battery. It solved real problems. And the promise of HTML5 video reinvigorated a whole lot of beleaguered content producers and developers. People are understandably reluctant to trade those things back. If you want to persuade them, explain what they get in that trade.

I think that if we talked about it, rather than calling names, we'd find that not many people are great lovers of software patents as they exist now. But then we'd have to be honest about what we're really fighting about: which battles to pick and who's children (HTML5 video, in this case) get sacrificed on the battlefield.

> We're talking about video that is embedded in web-pages. Are you watching those during your 6 hour flight?

Increasingly, yes, I am watching those during my 6-hour flights. But I'm not talking about video embedded in web pages exclusively; I'm talking about video delivered via the web.

> Internet Explorer still has a larger market share than Safari

No doubt. But if you re-read what I wrote, I was trying to refute the parent comment's statement that "of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go" without playing the IE card. I think IE's relevance ("in the arenas of both web video and The Future") is extremely questionable, so I don't want argument built on it. But if you accept that IE is relevant, then "of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go" sounds even more crazy.

You're right that MPEG-LA does not indemnify licensees of H.264, no. Licensing doesn't eliminate the risk of adoption. It substantially reduces that risk. (Largely because patent licensing also function as a protection racket.) MPEG-LA will defend their patents, though.

See, it's not gonna be the content producers (like Google) that the patent trolls go after for WebM; it's gonna be the makers of the WebM-decoding graphics chips. I guess it remains to be seen where Google will be in that fight.

>The same argument applies to video sites. We shouldn't be held back and stuck on a proprietary format just because you don't want to write a script to go through and re-encode everything to WebM.

Here's a question: If it's no biggie to re-encode everything as WebM, can't we wait to see if this threat of unreasonable H.264 licensing terms becomes reality and switch to WebM then?

I've been trying to refrain from commenting, too, so that's one thing that we have... had in common.

> ...of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be supporting it in the near future...

First of all, including Opera in the list of those in favor of WebM is a lot like including Iceland in the Coalition of the Willing. If you live in Iceland, you probably overestimate Iceland's importance, but it undermines the intent of making a list in the first place. The flip side of this is that, while Internet Explorer probably won't support WebM unless Google indemnifies adopters, IE is almost as irrelevant as Opera in the arenas of both web video and The Future. Here's where we really are:

* Apple likes H.264 for the following reasons: * The licensing and liability is known, and Apple can afford to pay. They don't care if web video ends up being a high stakes poker table, because they're a high roller. * H.264-encoded video looks better than WebM video and takes up slightly less space. * Most current graphics silicon supports hardware decoding of H.264, which allows for video playback that is both gorgeous and economical. * Mozilla liked Theora because they can't or won't pay to license H.264, and Theora was the only open source candidate they could find to run in the election. Free is more important than good. * Google likes WebM for the following reasons: * They can control its development. * It is, so far as anyone knows, unencumbered by patents, so no licensing.

I say "so far as anyone knows" because that's what Google is saying by not indemnifying WebM adopters. If you're worried about a theoretical MPEG-LA licensing gotcha, then you have to be equally worried that, if/when WebM adoption is significant, patent trolls won't show up with claims of infringement. At least with H.264, the licensing terms have been stated. YOU personally may not be worried about either scenario, but you're probably not weighing whether you should produce graphics chips that decode WebM. Does anybody on this forum want to argue whether the chipmakers who've pledged to do WebM decoding aren't nervously watching to see if more Android hardware makers get sued? By not indemnifying adopters, Google is essentially picking an open source fight in a crowded bar and then ducking out the side door.

>The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how much you want it to.

That is a very big component to the complaining: I can't watch your idealism on my iPad for the duration of a 6-hour flight. And you're right, the world does not revolve around iOS, but the video world does revolve around H.264 right now. If you're not shooting with actual film, then your video workflow literally starts and ends with H.264.

And maybe more to the point web video does revolve around iOS devices, because iOS users watch orders of magnitude more video than anybody else.

> WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality

If by "features" you're excluding fast, economical encoding and decoding and by "quality" you're excluding picture quality. "Roughly equivalent" is just weaseling around admitting H.264 looks and works better. Someday... who knows? Someday GM might make a better car than Toyota, but for now, GM is stuck saying things like "[our] quality can't be beat by Toyota."

> I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.

And the hipster-fanboys doing the pointless whining harbor deep suspicions that people who are willing to trade their audio and video playback quality today for the open source promise of adequate video someday don't really care much about audio or video.

Even if Apple ultimately intends to close the Mac to non-App Store applications -- I'm guessing not, but a valid concern anyway -- it's unlikely to happen in the next five years for two key reasons: Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. Half the App Store fear is the Kafka-esque approval process (the other half being the 70/30 revenue split), and neither Adobe or Microsoft could do ground-up rewrites even if they wanted to.

Yours is clearly a case of being downvoted unfairly.

Clarification: Even if other companies can figure out how to make a decent tablet, still a pretty big if, who knows if tablets will be a "big thing" for the computer industry as a whole. The iPad is clearly already the next big thing for Apple. The ruling concern among Mac users -- a large enough concern that Apple made a point of addressing today -- is that Apple is focusing too much on iOS devices and "straying" from the Mac.

Do you think that maybe your desire for tablets to not be "the next big thing" is shading your assessment of iPad sales? The iPad outsold ALL Macs this quarter, so no, Apple is not likely cooling its heels on the tablet thing.

> The story is very much the opposite in enterprise apps; I can't remember the last REST interface I saw, but we see SOAP interfaces every week, in new apps.

That's kind of like saying "I can't remember the last hybrid car I saw here in Cuba."

> This makes the assumption that all apps are dumb frontends to a database.

I think the commenter is talking specifically about templating languages, not all server-side logic. In terms of MVC, I think the idea is that now you can move the entire view layer to the client, rather than doing half on the server and half in JavaScript.

Voting based on agreement/disagreement, rather than based on quality and relevance is thuggery. It's also human nature; we're passionate, lazy animals. The question is whether or not the problem is widespread enough to threaten the overall value of HN.

I also agree with the sentiment that nothing is ever as simple as it seems. But, yeah, isn't this what relational databases are for?