Laptops with touch screens started to become standard around that time. Simplifying the UI was targeting these devices. Ubuntu’s Unity was another DE that came out targeting touch.
I’m not saying I liked GNOME 3, or agreed with their decision to make life more difficult for mouse navigation and longtime power users, but it was easier to navigate with a finger. That was the obvious reason why they did it.
Heh. Laptops with touchscreens are really bad for hopefully obvious ergonomic reasons ("gorilla arm syndrome"). I've had such laptops and I never use the touchscreen except by accident. I thought it might be useful to test multi-touch interactions, but actually! you can multi-touch the touchpad and that does the same things as multitouch on a touchscreen.
When I worked at an insurance company I heard this all the time, that we were “an IT company selling insurance”. They had 3k IT staff, more staff than any other department.
We were also still operating T1s, lotus notes, windows xp in 2014. So I always took it with a grain of salt.
The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time, though it’s still not a perfect replacement.
Scrolling through the Dark Sky screenshots, I can recognize many of the same things now incorporated with Apple’s. And Apple does offer location specific notifications of rain which I find to be pretty accurate, about as accurate as Dark Sky.
There’s largely a perception problem with Apple. People loved Dark Sky as an independent small app that worked well, before Apple took it and destroyed it. Now, even if Apple incorporated all of the same data and features, it still wouldn’t give that same spark of joy people had.
I still think DarkSky made it easier to visualize the day. With Apple, when I tap on a day to see the details, the temperature and rain forecasts are in two separate graphs, instead of being unified into one easily glanceable view.
This is what I really liked about DarkSky. I didn’t have to read and understand the forecast, I could simply glance at it and intuitively have an understanding of the day’s weather. Apple lost this, and I think it is what gave DarkSky so much value.
Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change:
- Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot.
- The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days.
I find Apple weather incredibly frustrating… I keep wanting to use it like I used dark sky, but it’s just not there… And I still don’t think it’s as accurate. At least not in Europe. I remember with dark sky being able to know if it’s rain, and for how long it will continue raining to the minute
Huge bag of data for you to mess around with. I've started to use it to do my own weather forecasting instead of relying on forecasting services. Where I live has a radar gap(Oregon) and ridiculously varied terrain, so forecasts aren't great anyway.
> The Apple Weather app has gotten better over time
Interesting, I think it's gotten worse over time. Even basics like what the temperature will be in a few days. It's consistently ~5+ degrees off on the low side.
I have a set of Speed Queen appliances, and it was a relay that went bad that forced a board replacement in my washing machine, and not any of the digital components you're complaining about. Sometimes things fail. I think it's more important to buy a quality appliance that local shops know how to repair, rather than buying the cheapest Samsung model on the floor or buying the oldest mechanical machine you can find.
I recently stumbled across my lastfm login from late middle and early high school days. Talk about a blast from the past. This is a good idea, to keep the history going.
That CNN website is great, except it still has a huge cookie banner. Looking at the cookies of the site, I think the only cookie it sets is that i clicked on the banner. Most of the size of the page is also related to the banner it seems.
If I’ve understood the grandparent post correctly, they don’t need the banner. They wouldn’t need it if the only cookie they set were a functional 1st-party cookie, and since that sole cookie is just to track cookie banner status, they especially don’t need it.
But taking the time to investigate that, get it approved by legal, etc. all takes longer than just slapping a cookie banner component on it.
This is why people complain about the unclear and bureaucratic nature of these laws, it leads to an over complicated investigation and compliance isn't always simple - meaning the safest option is to comply at the highest level and degrade the user experience.
Eh, it took me all of 2 days to strip all the unnecessary cookies out of our product, and convince management to leave out the giant unnecessary cookie banner.
The sites plastering those everywhere are doing a malicious compliance, pure and simple
I looked at a CNN "lite" article, and it includes 560KB of stuff (lots and lots of CSS declarations) in addition to the actual 11KB of article content.
While still wasteful, CSS is one of those things you can do astronomically wrong before it starts being noticeable. Case in point here: inlining 560 kb of CSS with the page and just sending it with the entire HTML file each time is only ~61 kb of actual network transfer to load the article (due to brotli encoding).
It is, the content loads first, then the js for the cookie banner, then the favicon. If the js fails to load (I blocked the request as a test) the page loads just fine, it isn't blocked by that.
Which is cool but it's not web, and few people have working TV reception that supports it at the moment. The web version of Teletekst (https://nos.nl/teletekst) is over 3 MB in size.
It's better than web! You don't usually view it with Internet. You view it with either an antenna or with broadcast cable. It's up even when the Internet is down.
Using the lite subdomain is a great way to read all the subscriber articles as well. Was reminded of the lite site during some annoyingly aggressive A/B testing CNN was doing a few months back.
Google also used to have a go app which they deprecated later on, while now i think about it what is the use of having a go app, if the websites which are shown in search results are not optimised for slower networks.
Thanks for sharing, i almost was not sure if the last part was sarcasm. Html itself was the standard, then when it got bloated we got rss. This seems like it’s not a problem of a lack of standards. It’s the company choosing not to promote it.
It is more to do with the fact that vast majority of people aren't going to bother subscribing to an RSS feed. I am on a freelancer slack group that supposed to have a RSS feed for jobs. The feed is often broken for weeks because most people don't use it.
Even when it isn't broken the display output is broken in Thunderbird because the dev isn't going to bother checking Thunderbird as many people don't use email clients like that anymore and instead use webmail.
I never have used RSS that much as normally if I want to check for new things on a site, I will just go to the site and look myself.
I suppose I meant more of a best practice - if every news site could be found at the subdomain of lite.XYZ.com, or perhaps some way for the browser to request specifically no images or styles, it’d be easier for the end user to find.
RSS is a good point that I didn’t consider. Although it tends to be a summary and hyperlink to the main site.
Ideally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser).
This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.
WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.
I spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008.
I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.
RSS is just a list of links to webpages, maybe with summaries. The readers generally fetch those webpages and filter out the text, but every browser has equivalent functionality now. You can do it with literally any HTML page, though some websites try to fight it (since depending on the reader, it neuters ads).
RSS still contains full articles on a lot of personal sites. As you said, it’s about monetisation and control and when you’re writing with no plan to monetize there’s no point in not serving full content.
Yeah, and that’s my point. The problem is not technological, you can make a super readable HTML site by just putting text in <p> tags, and RSS readers for blogs that didn’t rug-pull their content still work fine. People lost interest in giving out something for nothing, so now the web is an ad-infested mess.
If someone makes a new tech that makes that impossible, 10 principled FSF-enjoyers will write content for it and nobody else. Web standard bloat is bad, but it didn’t cause this problem, and you can’t fix it by creating a new spec.
The phone activation process has moved to a website instead of a phone number. It doesn’t mean the OS to be activated needs an internet connection. You can still activate offline systems.
My solution was to stop using Instagram and use YouTube (shorts) instead. A lot of the short-form video content from Instagram can be found there, and sharing actually works.
I’m not saying I liked GNOME 3, or agreed with their decision to make life more difficult for mouse navigation and longtime power users, but it was easier to navigate with a finger. That was the obvious reason why they did it.
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