Introducing Slingshot: A Creative Labs App | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Slingshot: A Creative Labs App

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Old is remembering it as sound blaster, young is remembering it as facebook.

So begins the gap.

Care to explain what you mean by "sound blaster"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster

It's a family of sound cards from the Win 9X era.

Ha! Couldn't figure out the connection until I re-read the title.

> It's a family of sound cards from the Win 9X era.

As the Wikipedia article you cite notes, SB isn't from the Win 9X era, it was a de facto standard prior to the Win 9X (i.e., late DOS era.)

I suddenly feel very old.

Make an appointment with Dr. Sbaitso. He'll get you checked out.

Thanks for the reminder - Creative Labs and 3DFX to me bring back a ton of memories of high school.

I was gonna say something about feeling old because I remember the ISA bus. It was dying right around the time I started installing the family's PC upgrades myself. Nice stuff was PCI but our cheap modems and sound cards were still ISA.

I guess gamers still know about PCI, but the average undergrad has probably never heard of a sound card.

What's the point of withholding from non-US appstores?

Isn't it MORE WORK to selectively publish to specific appstores instead of just leaving the "all countries" checkbox checked in iTunesConnect?

So tired of announcement after announcement from fb just leading to blank pages on my devices.

Agreed. Paper is still US only too. With Paper I can understand it a bit more (work out the bugs) but this is a social app. The more people who have access the more successful it will be especially considering you needs friends using it to able to use it.

For Paper I actually bothered to sign out of my non-US account, in to my US-account, download it, sign out of my US-account, sign in to my non-US account to check it out. Hope their servers are happy serving old clients for a long while because I certainly can't be bothered to perform that dance every time they have an upgrade.

I did the same. Paper is excellent. Problem with this app is none of my non-US friends will do it. So even though I can download it - I can't use it.

The premise seems really intriguing, essentially Snapchat with an incentive to keep the interaction going. But Facebook seems to be deliberately hindering their own viral growth, because I can't download the app: http://i.imgur.com/UAlGmV9.png - presumably Europe doesn't matter?

I think I've crashed in the iOS version of the app no less than 15 times in the brief time I've been playing with it. The app is pretty, but all the pretty in the world doesn't matter if it's not functional.

Mine's worked fine thus far. What iOS version are you on?

iOS 7, on an iPhone 4s.

Ah, that may explain it. I'm pretty sure no one at Facebook is testing on a 4-series these days, if performance of the main app is anything to go by.

I highly doubt that's true. They'd be missing 50% of the iPhone market if so.

Interesting that they released this, having just shuttered their very similar app Poke 2 months ago.

The big difference? Slingshot doesn't use the Facebook branding. That's very telling.

Plus poke is a 'brand' as old as Facebook and nobody really knows what it means. They took a word nobody understood and threw it on a new, totally different product.

Very interesting idea to make people contribute more contents...but I'm not too sure how this would change or contribute to the existing paradigm of mobile conversations.

I don't blame apps or app-makers for people's choices and actions, but this seems like the perfect app to cause texting while driving even if the recipient had no intention of doing-so. Requiring a "recipient" to send a message in order to receive a pending message sounds like it'd be more-likely to create that scenario.

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