Predictions for 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Predictions for 2010

erickerr.com

65 pointstreblig39 comments

     20. Adobe CS5 makes biggest splash in the “Objective-C 
     is hard, here’s another way to make iPhone applications”
     space.

This can be pretty big. Specially if Apple releases the fabled iSlate with an iPhone-like OS (although I hope it's a touch based feline). All the little flash games and apps out there would suddenly become deployable in Apple hardware and Steve Jobs would all of a sudden get a gazilion more developers (for free) to help him push all of his lovely hardware.

There's still a number of factors this depends on before it becomes big.

I'm guessing how it will work is the iPhone apps will consist of an embedded (in the app) flash platform that just plays the native flash code. This will require Adobe to build a native flash player that doesn't suck

Flash devs have to be willing to get a Mac and pay Apple their $99

I'm guessing (again) that Flash based games won't be able to have the same performance as native ones. The Flash player need to be able to be fast enough for some decent games that people will be willing to pay for

The iPhone UI is quite different from kb + mouse based UI, so most things will require a bit of a rethink regarding how the user interacts

It's interesting the tech media has not covered the fact that Adobe failed to deliver on their promises of a beta of Flash 10 for Android (October) and the Palm Pre ("by the end of the year") Makes me think things aren't going swimmingly behind the scenes at Adobe.

Not quite.

Adobe is using LLVM to translate ActionScript into native ARM assembly. No flash needed. See http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/abansod_iphone.html and http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Applications_for_iPhone...

thanks, didn't know about this. Be interesting to see what happens

That just replaces their Actionscript interpreter + VM + JIT implementation toolchain, which was already awesome.

What everyone complains about the terrible quality of is the Runtime, which sucks ass on every platform but desktop Windows (where it is decent), and will continue to for the forseeable future.

doesn't Adobe all ready have a LLVM backend to target the iPhone from ActionScript3?

I heard the frame-rate is les horrible! 12fps for very simple flash games when running on mobile platforms. Maybe the tablet will run flash better, but I don't really see Apple having much of an interest in enabling this.

The Droid is hands-down the best non-iPhone phone on the market.

Huh? I just tried the Droid tonight at the Verizon kiosk, and I found it slow and confusing. HTC Sense on the HTC Hero is better by leaps and bounds.

the Samsung moment has all of the features of the droid (including a superior slide out keyboard). I love mine and haven't had any battery life complaints.

Yeah, that's just it. The Droid is pretty much a stock Android device if I'm understanding correctly. HTC has actually created a slick, usable, and fast interface for the phone, and that's a key feature in my mind.

Now let me put on my troll face for a minute.

My Sharp SH001 has an autofocus 8.0MP camera, GPS, TV receiver, microSD card port, flashlight, bluetooth, infrared emitter/receiver, internet & emails (via cellphone network), built-in japanese & english OCR and QR code reader and misc apps (GPS maps, train planner, dictionary, banking, alarm, calendar, etc). Of course it can play music/videos, install apps and do what a phone does. All that for a flexible contract (costs me 15$-20$ per month, I email a lot, do a little internet, but almost never call) for 2 years and the phone itself is free.

Sure, there's no WiFi and the user interface is sometimes frustrating. But I'm not impressed by the iPhone. What makes it so great? The usable interface and the app market?

Sorry for the trollish post. I have a hard time understanding the hype for some american phones when a generic, free phone in Asia has better specs and decent design. Why don't they import them back home? :/

Mostly the UI and App Store but more importantly Apple has done a huge amount of advertising which serves to educate consumers on why they might want a SmartPhone. They show really compelling & practical uses for the iPhone. They show off impressive games. They show how easy it is to use. I kind of feel like the average consumer may not even be aware other phones offer similar features at this point. Apple just leaped out ahead on marketing SmartPhones to a wider market. Meanwhile their competition is spending their money on weird ads like the Palm Pre & Droid marketing campaign that don't bother showing off the device/software much at all.

Thanks. That's quite it I guess.

I'm still puzzled by Sharp though. They do sell phones in America, but the models they sell are vastly inferior to their Japanese offer. Perhaps as you say people in general don't see a practical use for the extra features yet.

Compare http://k-tai.sharp.co.jp/lineup/d/ and http://sharp-world.com/products/smartphone/index.html . They have waterproof 12.1MP camera smartphones...

I do not own a smart phone, and I think your position is basically reasonable. That said:

"Sure, there's no WiFi" to me is actually a complete deal killer. Even in areas with great 3G reception, I would always prefer to be using WiFi. You say yourself that you rarely use the phone functionality. That means that, of the functionality you use most, you can't do it as well as an iPhone. Maybe you'd be doing more than "a little" internet if your phone supported WiFi.

This is characteristic to me of the philosophical divide between Mac and PC users (I'm actually not allied with either one). PC users just don't expect things to be perfect, but they expect any feature they want, and they're not disappointed with a lackluster UI or faulty design decisions like a lack of WiFi. Mac users are OK with limiting functionality, so long as what is included is designed well and comprehensively (here I mean interconnected components work well together).

With phones, it seems people value that design more than computers. You can't take apart a phone and fix its problems. For the most part, you can't download hacks to sidestep poor design decisions. If you have the "Mac" mindset, everything else seems like death by a thousand paper cuts.

For the vast majority of users (ie people who aren't tech geeks) usable interface trumps all. Look at all the features missing on the first iPhone, and it still sold like hot cakes simply because of its interface.

I just got a Droid recently. I'm reasonably happy with it (I was die-hard Blackberry user.) I am thrilled with the Verizon network coverage etc. The software has rough edges in places but feels like it's moving pretty quickly.

Disclosure, I work at Google. Not on Android, though.

Are Dropbox and GitHub wanting to get acquired?

We have no reason to sell GitHub, the business is doing very well and we're all having a great time.

How about for $500m?

Not saying that's what would be offered, just noting that there is probably a monetary threshold where "having a great time" no longer is relevant.

Also known as "everybody has their price". ;)

I like this one: Bonus: RSS faces death as filtered content recommendation systems on social services emerge. They, along with most real-time startups, struggle to find a revenue model (in 2010). People almost get enjoyment out of claiming “RSS Is Dead”. The main problem with completely switching off RSS and on to Twitter is that there is a lot of noise – not to say that RSS isn’t noisy either, but it’s at least generally focused. The complete switch for me will occur when a service can leverage the vast amount of data collected by these social services and curate it in to a personalized feed just for me. Companies and investors are bullish on the real-time space, and I expect to see this service come to light this year. That being said, It is unclear to me that real-time content services have any significant revenue advantages over almost-real-time services. Accordingly, I don’t predict any services will figure out a way to monetize the added value of extreme recency in 2010.

I just don't get this. My RSS reader automatically receives articles from sites I like, or subsections of sites I like, and in most cases the entire article is fed through to my browser/phone in a nice readable format. Perfect.

I don't see why it's broken and why we need to reinvent the wheel. Maybe I haven't subscribed to sufficiently noisy feeds. Can someone explain?

With RSS, you get a deep view at very narrow topics (a full feed by one blog). You can set up filters and whatnot, but it's still a very narrow model.

A more social system leveraging your interests, your peers, and all that other crap could surface good content you might otherwise have never seen, plus the best content you were already seeing. It's a pipe dream, but I imagine that a service will figure it out sooner rather than later. As I mention in the article, whether or not they actually manage to make money remains to be seen.

Right. For most of the things I follow I would want to get all the posts, but I wouldn't mind a sprinkling of content I would be unlikely to find.

However isn't there a fundamental problem with trying to create an automated system that delivers content interesting to you and doesn't simply amplify what's already popular (this one's called Google)? At some point humans with taste and judgement have to read content, so I take the skeptical view that an rss feed (or something functionally equivalent) from aggregated news site read by like minded people is as good as it gets.

For a recent example see the Left Fold weekly newsletter. Almost every article has had a good run on HN/Slashdot/similar.

Google Reader is already trying to do this with its social features. So far, not particularly well: I just use a combo of RSS and reddit to find things which interest me.

I use TweetDeck. I have found it to be an incredibly powerful application. At any given time I have about 5 columns up and I see trends and interesting content on the those subjects in real time. The noise is already reduced a lot by the more pertinent info getting retweeted more making it easy to spot.

For example, during PDC, I had a #PDC column up, and I almost completely effortlessly kept up with all the latest info. A #monotouch column is a more permanent member of my collection, it alone has me staying on top of that community, again, just about effortlessly.

I've actually completely abandoned RSS altogether.

I guess the other part of this is also that on Twitter I mostly only follow... well, my actual friends. The whole "follow 10,000 people and get a client app to sort what they're saying" workflow just doesn't appeal to me, and it seems that in order to do what you're doing you'd have to follow a huge number of people.

That's the beauty of TweetDeck. I only follow about 20 people. In TweetDeck you can set up additional search columns and it will show you tweets across all of Twitter (updated in real time) that match your search. IMO TweetDeck takes Twitter to another level (and actually makes Twitter useful :) )

I don't understand why anyone expects RSS, the transport and encoding format, to contain filters, recommendations, and social aspects. Where do you think all those people who post (shortened) links on twitter get them from? Visiting all the websites by hand? How many of them are retweeted without actual having visited the site and read/consumed the content? Can sub-140 characters contain enough information to allow the next level of filtering, social or otherwise, to be really effective?

There are two rss readers 1) Feeds of slashdot and 500 other urls leading to 10,000 "news" items a day.

These stories are stuff you would like to read, not that you must read. This might die as it is just overwhelming and it will be replaced with filtered/recommended content.

2) Specific feeds of items that don't come up that often or don't have that much content where every post must be read.

This will never die. This is extremely valuable. Subscribing to a blog where the author posts every six months, subscribing to information about a bill going through congress, subscribing to a feed telling you whenever someone assigns a bug to you, a feed notifying you when someone posts a FooBar up on ebay (once every 8 years). Whenever you want to get notified about something and you will read every story rss is extremely good. The alternatives are you manually checking (time waste) or email (spam heaven).

RSS is infrastructure. It doesn't die. RSS readers as we know them might go away, but RSS readers are just a way to consume it, probably not even the best one.

RSS will likely stick around for quite a while, transparently powering features & products that's don't have "RSS" anywhere in their name.

Or "RSS" anywhere in their implementation! Dave Winer poisoned that well quite thoroughly: everyone else produces Atom by default (or exclusively), and his products (which only he uses) are the only ones that don't consume Atom. Feedburner automatically uses older formats for known-shitty clients all from one URL.

OK, read RSS as RSS/Atom :)

But I wouldn't go as far as saying Winer is the only RSS publisher - HN feed is RSS based, Google News is RSS, NYT uses some RSS/Atom hybrid, Flickr offers both and so on..

You're wrong. River2 reads Atom feeds.

AT&T/Verizon/Apple: Apple's affections change quickly. In a span of about 8 months we had Jobs cracking jokes on Intel to Paul Otellini on stage in a bunny costume at an Apple event. If Verizon & Apple cannot reach a deal I suspect we'll see the CDMA iPhone on Sprint instead. Is there anything Sprint wouldn't do to get the iPhone?

All of these predictions are so vague, one will never be able to judge if they are right or wrong.

A few of these are predicated on an improved economy, which is probably right.

> 10. Square realizes its bottleneck is additional hardware, so it gives card reader away for free.

Isn't this what PayPal was originally trying to do back in the day? Interesting concept.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com