Maybe I'm just cynical, but I would not expect a far better experience for anybody with more competition. We have that in a bunch of other areas of tech, and it always ends up being a race to the bottom. You end up only being able to choose between ad and malware riddled garbage or being heavily surveilled, and yet still under the threat of losing everything if an arbitrary algorithm decides it dislikes you. I would expect the same for developer experiences with other app stores, but with less upside because nobody is going to install those other app stores.
I think some competition would be healthy for the App Store. For example, referral systems for iPhone apps are basically impossible to write with Apple's in-app subscriptions: the App Store API only allows two requests per user per year for extending subscriptions, meaning I can only reward users for two invites, but not beyond that. I can only assume this limitation exists to avoid some other loophole, but still, basic referral systems - like Dropbox' "invite a user and get 100mb storage" style - don't work.
Deferred deep linking is also broken. Of course, nobody likes tracking, but referral links also don't work anymore. You used to be able to send someone a single link to install the app and redeem a voucher/discount/special, now you always have to say "install the app, open it (!), then go back here and click this link".
I soooooo hope that this will improve with competition - at least point 1). And my biggest hope is that Apple will fix it in their store because of competition.
The visuals were a lot of fun, but I don’t understand why I, as a viewer/consumer/whatever of this sort of thing, would ever want these things:
> Unknown runtime
I like to know whether I’m going to have time to view all of something or not. I might want to set aside some time to watch something if it’s too long for the break I’m taking right now.
> No rewinding, no skipping ahead
Ugh. Just … no. If I saw something cool or missed something, I want to see it again without having to watch the preceding 20 minutes again. Also seems like the kind of thing that would eventually be used to try and force you to watch ads, which I don’t need in my life.
> Extremely dense patterns that would get destroyed by video compression
This I can understand! See also SVG.
> Moiré effects that change if you mess with the zoom setting on your browser
OK, if that’s your thing, go with it.
> Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle
So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.
Anyway, love the visuals, and we could use more stuff like that, but really dislike the above points.
I wouldn't say any of those bullet points are inherently better - just differences for you to contemplate. For all the downsides of these things, there are artistic uses of each that sadly are not an option on modern video platforms.
Example - mystery runtime, while inconvenient to someone in a hurry, is useful in keeping suspense or surprise. It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.
Do the pros outweigh the cons? Probably not. Should it at least be an option on modern video platforms? Maybe. But the important thing to me, is that we remember how such a thing changes the viewing experience before every film for the rest of time comes with a progress meter attached.
Would you consider putting this on youtube or something? I grew up with flash (my first paid job was an as3 project for a medical teaching team) and was always interested in the artistic side of flash
I got to the point where you are talking with the older guy but wanted to get back to work and reference something. I noticed whenever I tabbed to something else the video/audio would stop, so I dragged the tab out of firefox create its own window and it continued playing for about 30 seconds then for some reason it stopped and when I looked it was back at the prompt from the start
> It's kind of hard to convince a reader that the hero is at risk of dying when there's obviously 2/3rds of a book left.
This is what George R. R. Martin wanted to do. He will kill the fake-out protagonist at any time.
This is supposed to mean that he is a great writer. But really it just means he's bad at storytelling - you'd tell a better story by just focusing on the actual protagonists instead of random redshirts. Focusing the correct characters has no effect on the plot.
This is only true if you accept an extremely myopic view of storytelling.
A Song of Ice and Fire is about the illegitimacy of the Lannisters' reign, the choice to execute Ned Stark for discovering it, and the ensuing civil wars. Ned Stark isn't a "fake protagonist" because he dies. He's a protagonist and he dies, and then the story continues. Not every story needs to be a Save The Cat Hollywood screenplay to be "correct," and not every character arc needs to be satisfyingly resolved.
You not getting Boss Baby vibes from Martin's writing doesn't mean he's done anything wrong.
I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all. Flash Player was awful.
But...
The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.
I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.
I still wonder what browsers would be today if adobe had open sourced flash player and worked on making SWF and action scripts standards to be natively integrated in browsers rather than letting the player die as an annoying badly maintained plugin.
Agree - the success of flash was that it was designer-first rather than developer-first (and I miss that!).
Things like theatre.js look great, but very quickly their documentation make it clear that you are expected to use javascript.
Flash expected you to just draw stuff, animate stuff, and if you like there is an optional scripting environment. The first few iterations of flash didn't really even have much of a scripting environment at all (AS1 was incredibly limited!).
I think that is part of the nostalgia of that period - things were so easy to make that you got some really creative and crazy stuff.
I'm with you. I stopped watching not because of the visuals (which I hated - I immediately got eyestrain - but I can appreciate others might like them), but because I reached the point in the video where I wanted to know how much longer there was. I was interested enough for a couple more minutes, but for all I know, this doesn't get to the point until 10 minutes in. I just don't want that in my life.
Everything on the 'different' list is unambiguously bad to me except maybe the compression thing. I don't want effects that change with zoom settings - that just excludes people who need to be zoomed in to see stuff.
I'm not happy that Flash died. I spent a lot of time playing really fun games in Flash. I'm happy this can exist, but please let's keep doing video essays in videos. That said, now I know Newgrounds still exists I wonder if I can find the impossible quiz...
Keep in mind that flash is not simply a linear media to be played back like a movie or song, it's interactive.. What's the run-time in a strategy game ? What does rewind and fast-forward even mean in a story-driven one ?
You could take the perspective that this is art, and sometimes art sets constraints on how the viewer can experience it that be a limitation of the medium or something deliberate on the part of the artist.
I was happy enough to go with it, even though the flashing at first made me feel a bit uneasy. I'm glad people still find joy in this stuff - I remember building Flash animations in the early 2000s and quite enjoying learning about all this cool animation stuff and laying background music I'd ripped off a disc.
Could this be manually inserted by a specific flash applet? Just like, you know, Youtube started as a flash applet and it had a (custom made) seekable progress bar
This should make animation only slightly harder (it would receive a parameter t instead of mutating things as the time goes forward, but that's best practice for animations anyway I think, at least in gamedev it is)
> > Effects that change depending on if you're using flash player or Ruffle
> So a friend might suggest I watch something, but then when I watch it, I might see something different if I just use a different player? That seems less than ideal.
Sounds like a bug/limitation of Ruffle that might or might not be addressed by future versions, not an inherent thing with Flash
I'm not on Facebook, but from talking with friends who have related conditions, that's where everyone is online. You have to be aware that some of these groups promote quackery and others are reasonable. (There are always good intentioned people who don't know whether something is or could be quackery because everyone can't know everything. But the responses will usually tell you whether the group is trustworthy or not.)
While those people certainly exist, what I've seen is a lot of people who are treated like less-than-human because they have minor differences from the general population. You can even see replies here stating opinions that people with long covid are crazy, or that it's a "them" problem and nobody else should have to lift a finger or change any aspect of their lives for them. They get told that if they're high risk they should just stay inside for the rest of their lives and not interact with the rest of humanity.
Meanwhile, when they do go out, they have nut jobs who say the above things to their faces, or in extreme cases try to do things like rip their masks off their faces because someone on TV said that would be a good idea.
Point being that they're already marginalized and if they don't publicly display it, they get more marginalized. So yeah, they wear it as a badge (sometimes even literally!) because the general population needs to start seeing them and dealing with them and not just shoving them into a corner and telling them to be quiet and expect to have reasonable accommodations made for them. Even simple things like having a sidewalk that fits a wheelchair is apparently an affront to some people.
>You can even see replies here stating opinions that people with long covid are crazy, or that it's a "them" problem and nobody else should have to lift a finger or change any aspect of their lives for them
To be fair, it is a them problem, as in it is literally their problem.
I totally agree that nobody should be treated with hostility, but that doesn't change matters. Why exactly should someone else have to lift a finger or change their lives? They can ask for accommodations, and people can choose to give them. They should not get to unilaterally force and expect compliance.
People have problems, but they're not necessarily other people's problems
Mini, if not most, people will willingly help others within reason. The second that people in need start demanding help and that others must do as they say, most people will classify them as enemies
Factually, it is a "them" problem. In most countries, all restrictions are lifted and COVID is now considered endemic. The public has fully embraced the return to an open society and importantly, across the entire political spectrum.
If you're vulnerable to COVID, it is up to you to protect yourself. As you do that, you should absolutely not be ridiculed for it.
The opposite case though, scolding the public because they don't restrict society just for your sake, is unrealistic. An example:
In this rant (read it in full), this person blames conference organizers, attendees (including close friends and coworkers) for not masking and even implies a link with fascism. If you do not forever mask in every in-door space, you're a murderer.
If you believe 99.999% of the world is evil and should adjust to you, you have some thinking to do.
Does that still happen? I set up my AppleTV device to tell my TV to use the frame rate of the media and it almost always goes into 24Hz mode when watching anything on streaming. I thought all services were using 24Hz video these days, unless they’re showing something that was broadcast over-the-air originally.
I can kind of understand making it the default sort, but not getting rid of the others. Most users don’t know they can sort the list of things in a folder. They just want to see the thing they just created, or the thing they were last working on. So sort by either creation date, modification date, or date added is what will be most helpful to most of them and result in the least open tickets for Microsoft. But to remove the other options, that’s just bad.
This is stupid, but if I recall correctly, if you click the close box “x” in the upper left corner of the notification, it will stop asking, but if you say “remind me later” it continues to ask you. It is utterly infuriating that they use this dark pattern.
This seems like something we’ll get to see play out over the next few years. Given that GM has decided that they don’t care if customers want CarPlay, we’ll see if customers say “No thanks” to buying cars from GM because of that.
At the last house we lived in, we were renting. We got a constant stream of real estate agents knocking on our door asking if we’d be willing to let them sell it. So when we got a knock one morning I opened the door and kind of yelled at the person, “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” It was a new neighbor that had moved in a few doors down bringing us a bottle of wine and to let us know they were new to the neighborhood. I apologized for my boorish behavior, but they were apparently too shaken to get over it. Every time I saw them after that we’d wave at each other, but it was clear they wanted nothing to do with me. Until we decided to move out. Then they were very interested in the house and possibly buying it (I assume to flip it). The neighbor stopped me one day and said, “let us know as soon as you can when you’re moving out. We’d like to talk to the owners about buying it.” I never let them know. The entire act of bringing over a bottle of wine was just to try to get on our good side in case they ever wanted some favor from us. Meanwhile, the other neighbors we met there were great, and we still talk to them from time-to-time.
I can easily see your neighbors in Kirkland assuming you were either real estate agents, sales people, or trying to convert them to another religion or something like that.
That’s a fair point given what I’ve written above. However, there’s more to it that I didn’t get into. Suffice it to say that I’m not basing that solely on the two interactions described above.
> I can easily see your neighbors in Kirkland assuming you were either real estate agents, sales people, or trying to convert them to another religion or something like that.
Given that I had lived there for 6+ months, they should in the very least have recognized me!
It wasn't like we had just moved in or anything.
We actually found that a lot of the renters there were more friendly than the owners, and over time we made friends with some of the neighbors, largely those who had moved in from overseas.
The results of the Hilbert and Hilbert-like curves look similar to the Robinson’s aperiodic tiling of the plane[0]. In that picture they use squares and rounded squares, but if you did all rounded squares, I think it would look more similar.
