clapinton

I bought my Nexus 5 in 2013. It's still running pretty smoothly. Every time I see an app render using the N5 frame, I chuckle. It just reiterates my thought that I made a good choice when I bought my phone, and I like that feeling.

"The second would be to bite the bullet and tell the world what your plans are, even though it’s your decades-long tradition — a fundamental part of the company’s culture — to let actual shipping products, not promises of future products, tell your story."

Interestingly enough, they also broke secrecy in 2013 when they gave a sneak peek of the new MacPro at WWDC, which would only ship later that year. They probably only announce products when they're ready to ship to not hurt sales of the existing models, but I'm guessing that won't make much of a difference with the current MacPro.

I got through 5 years of Engineering without buying a book. Between a bunch of copies of newer versions, some of older ones, some in English (this was in a Portuguese-speaking country) and some that couldn't be checked out from the library, there was always a copy available.

That was one of the high points of the college I went to, and I sure as hell did not take it for granted.

4) Forbes "Quote of the day". Seriously Forbes, that is irritating as hell.

Still, my number 1 is loading the extra content and making elements jump around. A lot of times I: 1) see a link that interests me; 2) hover my finger over a link, ready to tap; 3) wait 1-2 secs, to be sure it's done loading; 4) Ok, it's ready; 5) tap the liContent jumps and I click somewhere else.

Both Facebook's and Twitter's search act like this. It displays recent search for enough time for you to move your finger/mouse to click it, then loads general results, like trending and suggestions. Waiting for the AJAX response to come back before displaying anything should be the norm.

If they approve it to be on the AppStore...

I remember Starbucks was doing it for their mobile app about two years ago, sacrificing security for a "better"/faster UX. It's one of those things that you think "No one would be dumb enough to do this", only to be surprised by the fact that a big player has been doing it for a while.

Thought so too, but the timelines don't match, since she mentions stuff about Xmas. Still, my jaw dropped a few more cm after reading those sentences, and believe me, it was already on the floor after reading the medium piece.

Totally agree on the UX. Example: 99.8% of the openings I've seen on their job board in the past 4 months all redirect to an outside board, usually Indeed. Actually, I only remember finishing an application inside LI once, which begs the question: why aren't companies posting their jobs inside LI? It almost looks like they scrape posts from Indeed. Besides, one of the Premium features is "Featured Applicant: Move to the top of recruiters' applicant lists", which is basically worthless if no one actually applies through LI.

There are many holes in LI's UX which I'm hoping will get fixed after the purchase is complete. I just hope it doesn't break as Skype did (you're not the only one to feel that). Even though it's Microsoft, it's not Ballmer's MSFT anymore, so I'm hopeful. And if it does, there'll be a big gap for some other company to fill.

This just made my day.

I guess I'm also lucky to have the latest 6.0.1 on my Nexus 5 running smoothly. Yes, it did get a bit slower after some updates, enough for me to notice it, but considering it shipped with 4.4, I'm still pretty happy with it.

But you're right: it's definitely not exclusive to iPhones. Planned obsolescence, some would argue.

Fair enough. "break into your computer" does sound like getting hacked by them, which wasn't technically true, at least from what I know. Thanks for pointing that out.

I worked with a Google engineer once and he offered me advice as I was considering buying a new phone, namely the HTC One: "Phone manufacturers know how to make hardware. Google knows how to make software. When you marry the two with both knowing their place in the world, things work out. When one tries to make what the other does, you get crappy stuff on top of your system. Stick to vanilla Android, man."

Having said that, I see Apple more as a hardware manufacturer than as a software one. You don't hear Jony Ive and his seductive British accent passionately talking about iOS or OSX as many times as he does about new hardware. It doesn't see software in the same way it sees hardware.

Still, I can't complain about Apple offering free OSX upgrades, including major ones, for quite some time now and also managing to maintain backward compatibility for a rather large span of devices (my early 2011 MBP still flows nicely with OSX El Cap).

Remember the U2 fiasco, when Apple decided to break into your computer and push their new album through iTunes? It seems like whenever Apple decides to take control of your files, shit happens.

Back in the day, I tried to use iTunes for a while when I bought my iPod. One of the first things that it asked me was to take control of my music, as it would reorganize it by itself. I agreed, but tested it first with a small sample. When I saw the mess it had done to the way I organized my music, specially with the files' names, I backed out of the auto-organize option and preached heavily against it to everyone I knew.

I learned my lesson: never let whatever service control your files. And always, ALWAYS have backup. Remember: The answer to life, the universe and how many backups you should keep of your stuff is 42.

My Maslow's middle layer immediately filled up when I read this. Thanks for making my Monday better.

Write a script to rhythmically open and close the curtains, as well as turn the lights on and off for the whole floor. Then call OK Go and tell them to bring a drone because you got their next clip idea.

This was a bit of an "existential" question for me over the past years. I've been wondering if it was just me doing something I shouldn't be doing or if Skype was really going that bad, specially on Android. "It's not possible, they have a successful product. They wouldn't fuck it up. Has to be me...". I kind of kept creating excuses for it when it wasn't working: "Skype looks pretty heavy, I don't know if I should expect it to run smoothly on my phone..." or even blame the phones themselves (which have always been on the flagship side for the time).

But in this day and age, bad performance of apps are kind of "unacceptable". If it doesn't work right, something else will, and I'll have no problems abandoning the bad product. And guess what: Skype is shitty. I often get message notifications on my phone hours after they arrived on my desktop (that is, if I get a notification at all). It's slow and clunky and a pain to even start a call. I dread the thought of having to use it on my phone. I've asked to delay meetings so I could take them from my computer. Or even spend money on Google Voice and make that international call through the regular phone app. So, I abandoned it. I don't suggest Skype anymore to my contacts when I have a call. You know, "Ok, so I'll call you at 9am. Skype's good?". Not anymore. It's usually Hangouts.

This is not how these things are supposed to be.

This is a great example of how to get elements from mobile design (hamburger button, left sliding menu) and adapt it to desktop, which Apple has been slowly doing in the past versions.

My 2¢: - 6 fingers on the trackpad means two hands on the trackpad, which means moving one of them out of its working position. Just like you are avoiding moving the mouse around with the look-and-tap thing, you want to avoid users getting their hands off the keyboard, onto the trackpad, and back to the keyboard; - the context menu is really nice.

It is a very impressive piece of work for someone who is looking to show off his skills while still in college. I made projects myself before graduating, but they were always amateur-y and only for myself. I never made it to actually share it with the world. He actually did something and put it out there for others to see and judge.

Kudos to the guy, specially if the whole design process which he claims to have gone through (research, target groups, user flows) is as thorough as it sounds.

That's very true. Sometimes I wonder what the team behind WhatsApp does all day. They released Web and voice calling, but nothing since, and there's nothing to keep us expecting new things. No new features are added. Yes, they have to squash bugs and that is endless. Maybe work on a better infrastructure and make it more stable, but we'll never know about. Other than that, it's solid already and doesn't need anything else.

But then again, there's a paradox: if they do nothing and someone shows up that, for some reason, steals their customers, they can get in trouble, like Orkut fell and was "replaced" by Facebook. If they do something that breaks the experience, they can loose users to another player (recently in Brazil, WhatsApp was banned for 48 hours and lots of users signed up for Telegram. It wasn't WhatsApp's fault, yes, but it's just one more showing of how easily users migrate when they're not pleased).

So what do you do? You have to be careful with where you take your service. But standing still is just waiting for someone to come and stab you.

Marissa Mayer debunked this in 2013: http://www.businessinsider.com/mayer-google-20-time-does-not...

"It’s funny," she said. "People have been asking me since I got here, 'When is Yahoo going to have 20% time?'"? "I’ve got to tell you the dirty little secret of Google’s 20% time. It’s really 120% time."