I'm a dedicated GMail user, but I think it's good to give credit where credit is due.
Autosave was definitely not first in GMail. Thunderbird also allowed messages to be sorted by thread a while back (which you could argue was a rough precursor to GMail's conversation view).
Help me understand this, is the issue that IE users are not willing to upgrade to newer versions? or is it that Firefox/Chrome force users to upgrade while IE doesn't?
Why is the fast release cycle a problem for IE but not for Firefox and Chrome? why are the adoption charts different for IE than the rest?
The issue is mainly with the large companies, who primarily seem to be using IE. Due to their size, they can't auto-upgrade without incurring massive costs.
For the average consumer, it's not really a problem.
I don't get it. I am an Erlanger and I don't understand in what sense is this supposed to be like Erlang. The provided documentation is to be insufficient.
What is hook.io all about? Is it mainly a framework for sending/receiving events (messages) between different processes?
Good god! Isn't it too early to prejudge iCloud? It will likely get a lot of users (it's mostly free and automatically integrated into their products after all), and it will likely succeed given mobility trends. But it is also too early to judge the future success or failure of Microsoft's cloud offering (though from what I'm seeing now, I guess it is likely to succeed as well).
At this point in time, Apple's success in the "software+cloud" model is the same as that of Microsoft (in that neither have seen mass wide adoption).
The use of "humiliation" in the title is an obvious exaggeration. But I guess without such title, that article wouldn't end up on the front page of HN.
It'll get a lot of users because a lot of people own iDevices. The product can completely suck and people will still use it because it's Apple and unlike MobileMe, it's free. Microsoft doesn't understand the cult following that Apple has.
Apple is far bigger than their cult following. If you attribute their success to the cult you are only fooling yourself. A cult alone doesn't buy 200,000,000+ iOS devices.
People generally do not use Apple products that suck, not everything they do takes off. They are just vocal about things that take off and very quiet on the rest, e.g. dismissing AppleTV as a "hobby" even though they clearly want it to take off.
You can attribute Apple's success to marketing, cult, whatever you want but at the end of the day Apple makes good products and puts a lot of care into them, and that's why they sell.
They do put a lot of care into their products, but their cult following does seem to play an important part in protecting their image. There's another thread on the front page of HN where people are describing how their Apple laptop power adapters burst into flames.
I am typing this on an iPad that periodically loses its wifi connection. Googling the problem yields dozens of complaints about this issue. Apple supporters on these forums blame wifi routers, even though the iPad is the only device with these issues.
I like the App Store, but, by default, I can't buy games on my iPad - why? Because I live in South Africa, and unlike every other device manufacturer with an app store here Apple hasn't applied for self rating games, which, according to most sources, is a straightforward process. Again, Apple and its supporters don't bother mentioning this little detail.
Apple does put a lot of care into their devices, but I also think there is a tendency to deny issues, to brush them over and to rely on the cult to impart an aura of invincibility.
Apple is not invincible, look at the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco.
I agree that it's bad that they deny most problems instead of being transparent about them. It can be extremely frustrating, you file a Radar ticket and then it goes into a black hole and the only feedback you might get is that someone else had the problem too. They are by no means perfect and neither are their products, I didn't mean to imply anything like that.
It seems to me that as far as photos go iCloud is only a temporary home while you sync your devices up (the so-called Photo Stream http://www.apple.com/icloud/features/photo-stream.html ) . So it is still a very device-centric view of the world, with the cloud as a backend assistant. Did I misinterpret what they said?
Obviously it is too early to know now, and we'll only know for sure when it comes out, but still, thoughts?
This actually looks like a great touch UI, and it would make a great tablet UX too given that users will never have to see the standard start menu and icons (at least for tablets).
I know it might be fashionable to bash Microsoft, but this demo looks great. While I'm at it, the Metro UI and Windows Phone 7 are actually good. Current market adoption is not equivalent to "goodness". I use it personally and I'm very satisfied .. even as a Linux user and an iPad owner.
Autosave was definitely not first in GMail. Thunderbird also allowed messages to be sorted by thread a while back (which you could argue was a rough precursor to GMail's conversation view).