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bryne

525 karma · joined September 16, 2010

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bryne··on A List Apart 5.0
It's much more likely that you're creating websites that fail accessibility guidelines and that many people are forced to zoom in to read.

100%/16px is standard for article body copy.

bryne··on Tizen - new Android competitor
It might succeed in distribution because they have market share in a portion of the market largely unconcerned about user experience.

Has any software produced by Samsung ever made you say "I wish I could use more of this"? Touchwiz?

bryne··on Tizen - new Android competitor
It's a Samsung platform, Linux-based. Like Windows 8, many of the services are HTML5-based; the bundled browser is Webkit and actually tops HTML5 test benchmarks among mobile browsers: http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html

I worked with a company that was halfheartedly pitched a couple of demo hardware units last year running Tizen 1.0 for evaluation purposes - they wanted HTML5-based games and apps to bundle with the system or feature prominently on what I assume is an upcoming app store. I wasn't impressed with its broken JS support at the time and didn't look into what it would have taken to rewrite the games to run properly on the platform, but maybe they've come a long way since then?

bryne··on "Office Space" creator Mike Judge shooting new HBO parody of Silicon Valley
I think it's more important for this project that they choose talented, entertaining comedic actors and leave the real-life involvement to the writing staff.
bryne··on Thinking of Selling on eBay using Paypal? Think Again
Which in this case is zero, because eBay is rife with scammers preying on the *well-educated?

Gazelle and Amazon present almost zero risk to the seller, hence the price differential.

bryne··on Behind Mark Pincus's Bid to Save Zynga
Mr. Pincus also filled his calendar with product meetings, something he had previously scaled back on. And he switched his main phone from a BlackBerry to iPhone, the device preferred by Zynga's users.

I don't think anyone was under the impression that Pincus was personally invested in any of his company's products, but I think this is still a telling anecdote, similar to cultural problems most recently corrected by Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, for example.

bryne··on [dead]
Honestly, quite a few of these logos are objectively pretty bad. I don't get a very positive view of LoudNoises' business acumen after reading this article.
bryne··on Defense Department drops exclusive contract for BlackBerry
Struggling startups get a pass on HN. Struggling companies that were at the top of the food chain and tumbled to the bottom through hubris and a failure to innovate don't.
bryne··on Static Asset Compilation
If you're doing it manually, ImageOptim is probably the best GUI available.
bryne··on Things I, as a designer, wish more tech startups knew
In the vein of constructive criticism: there is a set of W3C-suggested accessibility guidelines that include tests for things like the contrast between text and its background (http://www.w3.org/TR/AERT#color-contrast).

This page fails that contrast guideline algorithm (258 out of a minimum suggested 500) and is a little annoying to read even for someone without a sight/color deficit.

bryne··on Oracle knew about critical Java flaws since April
Fragmentation.
bryne··on Why you should not be displaying relative dates.
I don't think they care about screenshots specifically, but they certainly do intend Twitter.com/.app to be the primary or only method that tweets are displayed, ever. To this end, relative dates are great.

You do have a good point that touches on the dilemma of the internet archivist, but this is certainly a problem easier to solve than the ones faced by people attempting to preserve software or video games, for example.

bryne··on Why you should not be displaying relative dates.
Sure, but that seems harder than attempting to shame developers into changing the way they display timestamps.
bryne··on Why you should not be displaying relative dates.
This is a ridiculous argument - relative dates are an enormous usability improvement for actual users, who don't care about machine-readable timestamps or the incredible mess that is timezones.

Twitter also doesn't give a fuck about archival via screenshots. I'm pretty hard-pressed to imagine who would, actually.

bryne··on I just left 200 fake parking tickets at YC Demo Day...
Grammar mistakes are a sign of laziness, not incompetence. Both should be warning signs.
bryne··on Who cares if Samsung copied Apple?
It's very easy (and cheap) to say that after the idea has been born.

The idea of someone profiting from the trademark or patent of an idea because they 'thought of it first' may be abhorrent to you, but it's the way this patent system works. I think it's also important to distinguish between companies that think of ideas, then implement them, thus innovating in product; and companies who simply patent the ideas and use them to sue. We call those "patent trolls".

bryne··on Who cares if Samsung copied Apple?
I don't think you understand what the word "copying" means.

It's certainly possible that similar end results can be achieved independently - that is what a court is determining, in this case.

bryne··on Social Game Monetization Startup Acquires SuperRewards from Adknowledge
Must have been a fairly painful writeoff for Adknowledge, who paid $50MM for the company a couple years ago just as social started to decline and were never really able to make any money with the product.

Seems like a great deal for Bailey, who was probably able to buy SR back with the interest on the money from the prior sale. Best of luck to Playerize with the platform.

bryne··on W3C Decisions on CSS Variables (Accepting Comments)
I'm glad $foo syntax was reserved for future flexibility in usage. When CSS level 4 is ratified in 2057, we'll all be thankful there was this kind of oversight and level-headedness now.
bryne··on Zynga earnings miss, FB also falling
FB is down 7% after hours, and the most likely culprit is this news, as the two companies' outlooks and stock performance have been tightly coupled after past quarterly reports.

The title looks factually accurate to me.

bryne··on Apple Reports Third Quarter Results
A better comparison would be to a quarter introducing a new phone model - Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones in Q1 2012, the fiscal quarter during which the iPhone 4S launched.
bryne··on Sprite Cow: Generate CSS for sprite sheets
Gzip will take care of the duplication bloat issue.

In general, this is a process best curated manually, with a maximum on converted file sizes and hand-picking images that are "must-haves" for the initial page load.

bryne··on Ouya Breaks Kickstarter Records
This is pretty telling. You're right on all points from a developer's perspective, and their line seems to be nothing more than "we're leveraging the big, wide, Android game ecosystem!"

I think anyone with hardware or Android game development experience should be healthily skeptical of the tall promises and minimal explanation coming out of this Kickstarter. I love a good chunk of optimism as much as the next guy who loves games, but the fervor seems to really be distorting reality and setting up an inappropriately adversarial tone to these HN discussions.

bryne··on Tweetbot for Mac - Public Alpha
Well, not bloating your system with a bunch of new and updated programs is certainly a great way to keep your system footprint light.
bryne··on The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In
It's not necessary for it to be a majority to be a market disruption.
bryne··on Microsoft analyzes over a million PC failures, results shatter enthusiast myths
What, because they're more prone to catastrophic, accidental physical failure, being less sedentary devices?

I don't think that has anything to do with the results in this paper.

bryne··on Here’s why the Facebook iOS app is so bad (UIWebViews and no Nitro)
Yes (the article is incorrect). Native apps (that aren't Safari) don't have JIT.
bryne··on Zynga's Going Down.
He's referring specifically to social games which, as a category, are generally much less transparent about their addictive gameplay mechanisms and extrinsic reward.
bryne··on What Adobe’s new pricing for Flash means for social game developers
Right now it applies to very specific apps and developers. Tomorrow, if this model shakes out favorably to Adobe, it may not. The frog boils slowly.
bryne··on Google told to halt auto-complete
I think the point is in the overwhelming majority of cases, other searches are the "right" searches.
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