Throwing out software that works | Hacker News Reader

Throwing out software that works

scripting.com

27 pointsbrilliant7 comments

Since any discussion of the merits of iOS tends to involve a lot of biases, I'll state mine up front: I don't like the closed, controlled ecosystem. For that reason, I will likely prefer Android for the foreseeable future.

I have yet to try Flash on Android 2.2, but from everything I've heard, it isn't quite "software that works", and closed betas for iOS weren't either. The mismatch between touchscreens and a lot of existing flash content using hover for input is well known. There was a post to HN yesterday reporting that some video content had unusably bad performance, and Flash having a greater impact on battery life than video playback by other means is pretty well established.

As a user, I'd rather have a buggy flash implementation providing a poor user experience than be unable to access Flash content at all, but over the long term, I won't be sad to see Flash go. It's buggy and slow, especially on anything that isn't x86 or Windows. Even on the desktop, Flash just isn't "software that works"

We're entering an era of deliberate degradation of the user experience and throwing overboard of software that works, for corporate reasons.

No, we are throwing out over generalised software that most people can't use well for software that people delight in using. In order to do that we are sacrificing flash and finding that parts of the web aren't very well written for different display options (shock, horror).

The revolution isn't for corporate reasons. It's for usability.

And that is why it's succeeding.

The author was more than welcome to buy the joojoo instead, but he went for the iPad. I wonder why.

Actually Dave buys about every new gadget. So I wouldn't be surprised if he has a joojoo as well.

People "delight" in not seeing videos/pictures etc?

Granted the iPad has a nice experience. But as with the iPhone, the release of Android tables will crack open the market.

I held on the iPad for just these reasons. I don't want "massa Steve" http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2008/07/18/Mobile-Net... telling me what I can and cant' do on my $900 device.

My personal opinion is that Steve is keeping flash off the phone to control add revenue and media buys. Since most players are flash based, denying flash keeps you away from slacker, pandora etc (iTunes revenue). Steve has a way in with ads now. He can say, hey content producers (news sites, etc) check your stats, you flash ads aren't showing up, come talk to me about what will work on those nice juicy devices that rich people buy (targeted ads).

Btw, flash works on my HTC Incredible on adroid 2.1. It's not a great experience but it is a phone. (I personally don't like flash, but so many sites use it, it's a necessity to be a first class citizen on the net).

A significant number of people consider the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad to be a feature, not a bug. But this is normal for Apple; I'm old enough to remember when people said the original iMac would fail because it had no floppy drive.

Don't forget when they 'killed' slots… and serial ports… and SCSI…

tl;dr: No Flash on iPad; differences in book formats from vendors; proprietary formats; oh, scary.

Mr Winer needs to upgrade the version of blog-post generation software in use over there, too.

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