grantheaslip

My point of contention isn't which style of rendering you or I prefer, it's whether or not you're justified in ignoring (if not intentionally sabotaging) the UX of the vast majority of users because of said preference.

I never claimed there was any objective standard -- you did.

I think properly-hinted fonts look better (or at least more readable) than OS X, and I did even when I used a MacBook as my primary machine from 2007-2010. It's not Stockholm syndrome, it's a different preference.

But to your "poetic justice" point, is this about revenge for perceived injustices, or about providing the best experience for users? Because the fact is that most sites are overwhelmingly viewed by Windows users. When it comes to professional work, you can't be making decisions with huge UX implications out of spite. Most people haven't even heard of ClearType, and shouldn't be caught in the crossfire of your bizarre crusade against it.

If you're unknowingly using fonts that look like shit in Windows because you're not testing, you're (at best) lazy and unprofessional. If you're knowingly using fonts that look like shit in Windows because you harbor a decade-old grudge, you're an childish asshole who should be out of work.

I think the others who replied to this are missing the point -- he's complaining about the number of sites with fonts that look blurry, jagged, or just plain hideous on many text rendering engines (especially, but by no means limited to, Windows).

One could argue this is Microsoft's fault, and there's probably some credence to that, but it's kind of beside the point. Far too many sites seem to have been designed on OS X and not tested anywhere else, and it's an obnoxious, lazy, and frankly elitist practice that needs to end.

Another related syndrome are sites designed on professional-grade monitors, with no thought given to how they're going to look on the other 95% of screens. This kind of shit is like engineering a car in California and just assuming it will work well in February in Montreal.

That kind of mindset is a lot easier to espouse when you (and a lot of the visitors to this site) are in one of the few industries that wasn't particularly affected by the recession, and for that matter is arguably in the midst of a bubble.

We're all lucky -- if your chosen profession (and, say, one that you invested 8+ years of expensive American college to get into) was an industry that had the air sucked out of it in 2008, you might not be so condescending.

I do get what you're saying, and I think there definitely is a type of person you're describing, but you're oversimplifying a measurably more complicated problem.

Gruber does seem to know a lot, thought I'm not sure that talking about type on your podcast or working for a company that develops a text editor exactly proves that. That said, he's clearly got a snarky agenda about Android, which makes me take anything he writes about it with a grain of salt.

What annoys me is not so much Gruber or other bloggers having an opinion, it's the followers who take what they write as fact. Roboto probably isn't a font for the ages, but it seems to do what it set out to do very well. The people who worked on it aren't idiots.

Android has its issues, but I'm sick of the little cabal of Apple writers who portray it and everything surrounding it as a trainwreck.

I have no idea how much you know about type design, but I get the sense that the vast majority of people disparaging Roboto don't actually know shit about typography, and are just parroting what's been said by a handful of bloggers (many of whom also aren't particularly well versed). If a lot of these guys were asked to rate a bunch of unnamed fonts without the benefit of the internet to tell them what they think about them, they would probably make some terrible font snob faux pas.

I'm not an expert of typography, but to my eyes, it's a nice, clean, readable screen font. So is the Droid font family. It's not my absolute favourite, but there are more pressing issues in the world.

It’s funny you say that, because what ultimately soured me on buying Apple products was my iPhone 3G being effectively bricked by the 4.0 update, two years after I bought it (and, theoretically, days after some other people bought it from AT&T).

Microsoft may rebrand stuff in weird ways sometimes, but they don’t often kill stuff off prematurely. I’d actually argue the opposite: that they often hang onto stuff for too long.

As to your examples, PlaysForSure was only really killed from the perspective of manufacturers, or if you heavily bought into the MSN Music Store. The Kin was an extenuating circumstance, but no doubt a huge fuckup. Zune may be getting a rebrand, but I’ve heard no reason to believe a Zune player won’t continue to work with Windows 8.

All you’ve really done is name three failures of a company that has hundreds of projects. One could do the same thing for Apple, Google, or almost any other tech company.

People have already given some good reasons why this article is nonsense (or at least unnecessarily reductionist), but what pissed me off about it the most is the underlying assumption you see in so many anti-Microsoft articles: that the only reason anyone uses Microsoft products is because they don’t know any better.

This is such a juvenile, condescending, and back-patting way to look at Microsoft, and I’m fucking sick of it. I prefer Windows, I prefer Office, and I prefer C#, Visual Studio, and ASP.NET MVC. I used a Mac as my primary computer from 2007-2010, and I used Linux from 2010-2011, and I ended up back on Windows by choice. I used an iPhone, I used Android, and I ended up Windows Phone by choice. I’ve programmed in Ruby (Rails and Sinatra), Python, JavaScript, Node.js, and am currently writing an app in ASP.NET MVC by choice. I’ve used OpenOffice, I’ve used Google Docs, I’ve used Evernote, and currently use OneNote, Word, and Excel (backed by SkyDrive) by choice.

Implying people using Microsoft stuff are just sheeple who haven’t seen the light yet is as fucking stupid as claiming that people only use Apple products because of marketing and design. I have no problem with people using Apple products, Linux, or anything, I just hate the anti-Microsoft circle jerk that certain subsets of those communities sustain themselves on.

I may be taking this too far, but I think there’s more to it than IE. Many in the “hacker” community seem to wrap themselves in the flag of “open”, but only when it’s in their favour.

It’s the people who argue for a decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook, but embrace Google+. It’s the people who explain how terrible it is to tie your business to a single vendor, but decide to build businesses on iOS. It’s the people who tell you they would never put any personal documents on the cloud, but embrace Dropbox. It’s the people who claim to support open, DRM-free data formats and think the Khan Academy is the future of education, but think iBooks textbooks are great.

Like I said, I don’t have a particularly strong attachment to open source and open data formats — I just hate the way people use openness and standards as a prop. Saying standards aren’t necessary when WebKit has neat new features is (loosely) analogous to only supporting democracy when the party you vote for wins.

As others have said, what Microsoft did was arguably worse, but I generally agree: Apple and Google are industry darlings, and because of this are getting away with things people would be crying bloody murder over if Microsoft did them.

I get the distinct sense that a lot of people don’t really care about web standards so much as they care about their favourite company controlling standards. If it were Microsoft who was forging ahead with new features, would the MacBook-wielding, Gmail-using technorati be so enthusiastic?

I’m not even entirely against the new -webkit- stuff, I just hate the hypocrisy from people who claim to be all for web standards, except for when there’s a shiny new feature that only works in Safari, Chrome, and iOS. Microsoft has arguably been doing the best job of respecting web standards since IE9, and they get very little credit for it.

I’m not in the position of supporting a family, but is that really enough to support a mortgage, car(s), daycare (if we’re assuming both parents are working), putting kids though university, buying supplementary insurance, etc?

I get the sense that “average” is no longer middle class unless you really loosen the definition of middle class.

Sure, ununionized labour would be more employable, but these would be lower-class jobs, not the middle-class jobs that the west of today was built on. Nobody’s going to be able to support a family at middle-class standards on $10-15 an hour.

For some reason, the broader socioeconomic discussion the western world should be having has been condensed to creating jobs. But jobs aren’t a binary thing; and they’re means to an end, not the end goal (an equitable society in which the average person can be a member of the middle class).

If there was legitimately no demand for these products, then sure, they should move on and make something else instead. But there is a demand for them — it’s just that many of the people consuming it are stealing it. This is what laws are there for.

Again, I know this analogy isn’t perfect, but what you’ve said is not all that different from telling a shop owner who was robbed that maybe he should do something else instead.

Fair point — I was being a bit facetious — but the fact remains that if a critical enough mass of people steal/copy Windows, it’s no longer economically viable. Every user who hasn’t paid for it is being subsidized by those who have.

Windows may not be the best example since it’s so massively profitable, and sells a lot to enterprise customers and OEMs who won’t pirate it. That said, I suspect the business case for producing high-budget, non-mass-market consumer content (say, HBO shows) is starting to tip. How many people pirate Game of Thrones for every one that pays for it?

In the end, we live in a capitalist society — the people making software, movies, music, books, etc. have to get paid for the stuff be made.

So you’re saying that because people are stealing their software, Microsoft should throw away their business model?

If people were stealing iPads from Apple stores, would you suggest Apple should “figure [that] out for themselves”?

Imagine if the company behind this was, say, Microsoft — I’m guessing there would be a lot less defense of propriety, DRM-laden educational material. Really, imagine an HN thread discussing a proprietary Microsoft-backed textbook platform. Besides the level of polish, what’s the fundamental philosophical difference?

Don’t get me wrong, this looks really neat, and I think this is a glimpse into the future of education. I’m just a bit sick of Apple getting a free pass on things that people would be up in arms about if they came from almost any other tech company.

I personally find the way 37signals promote themselves to be often distasteful, but I still pay for Backpack because it does what I need it to do, and almost nothing more.

Sure, some of the interface and features feel a bit dated, but no other similar service I've tried is as simple, elegant, and devoid of unnecessary, distracting, fiddly bullshit as Backpack. Honestly, is the fact that it's not a trend surfing web developer's wet dream preventing it from being a useful tool?

I can see a lot of the same people in my social circle as well, but I'm not sure they're representative of the norm. I think as geeks who know what HTML and CSS are, own approximately a dozen devices that can access the web in some capacity, and don't think that Greasemonkey is a brand of motor oil or something, we have a tendency to form an everyone-must-be-just-like-me myopia. And even worse, we tend to (even subconsciously) assume that people who, say, don't know what the difference between a browser and Google must to be too stupid to read long-form content online. They're the ones reading MSN.

I'm not accusing you of doing this personally, it's just a recurring deficiency I see in tech communities (and I'm certainly not immune to it).

I'm almost certain this is the majority of the people who read the New Yorker online. Among the HN crowd, you might be right (though I doubt it), but regular people just aren't aware of almost anything you listed.

It might be hard to believe, but there are millions of intelligent people out there who read long-form writing online but have almost no idea that websites are mutable. There's nothing wrong with that--they just have different priorities.

I think what it comes down to is that as a developer, you've lost your way if you're creating a product you personally wouldn't want to use. Even if it were the case that the average user might not be that turned off by AIR (and I'm not convinced that's the case), if you've decided to base your product on a platform that's basically a deal-breaker if you're shopping around for apps (as AIR is for me), then I think you've set a really bad tone for your future enthusiasm for what you're making.

A frequent drum-beat on HN is having passion for what you create. Even if it saved me time in the short run and got me some degree of free platform support, I think having to work on an AIR app that I would probably never use in real life would probably doom the project in the long run.

When I think about the independent software projects that I love, it's obvious that the developers behind them love them as well. I (and I don't want to speak for everyone) can't see myself loving an AIR app.

I think the point he's making is that a lot of the UI elements don't quite look or feel right, kind of like how a lot of Adobe CS apps have "native" dialogues full of weird mistakes.

Sometimes little look and feel things have a huge impact on how people react to apps: I remember (and I could be wrong, it's been a while) pretty much instantly not liking Opera on OS X when I first tried it since it had smooth scrolling turned on by default, something almost no Cocoa apps do.

Maybe I'm just a slower writer, but 15 articles an hour seems impossibly fast, especially considering that the articles require some degree of research. Do you honestly believe someone could write 100 of those articles every day? Even if it were possible (and I'm not really sold on that), that sounds absolutely soul-crushing.

And yes, you (and other commenters) do bring up a good point in that $1 has a lot more value in many parts of the world. And while it still strikes me as a bit exploitative, I fully understand how untenable my complaining about this is considering basically every piece of electronic equipment on my desk was probably made by someone earning the around the same, if not less. The same is probably true of the clothes I'm wearing.

> Moreover I have hired a talented writer via Freelancer.com to keep my niche blog updated to gain more search engine traffic (he takes $1 per article!).

$1 per acticle? I know the articles on the site (http://www.minimotherboard.com/, via a comment) are short and not really original content, but assuming he's spending even 10 minutes per post, he could be earning more working the drive-thru at McDonald's. I suppose he's agreed to it, and it's not your fault he's undervaluing his work, but that strikes me as insultingly low. I really feel for the guy if he's been forced into writing for what is essentially table scraps.

That has nothing to do with the assertion that governments are encouraging private companies to restrict internet freedom. No number of examples of police forces overstepping their bounds is proof of an authoritarian conspiracy to censor the internet in the federal government.

I've got nothing against people having an ideology opposite to mine, though we're not talking about polar opposites here -- we probably both agree about the importance of net neutrality.

What I do have a problem with is people holding beliefs based on little to no actual evidence. I understand the appeal of trying to slot this into your worldview, but it's totally unsubstantiated. All evidence suggests that neutrality is threatened by major corporations lobbying the government to allow them to make more money, not the government lobbying major corporations to turn the internet into a walled garden.

Oh come on, do you really think that governments are so shook up over WikiLeaks that they might encourage ISPs to turn the internet into a series of walled gardens? For that matter, do you really think that they're that evil? Obviously they're not happy about WikiLeaks, and I'm not saying that governments or ISPs are perfect, but some perspective is badly needed here.

What you've written screams hyperbole and is veering dangerously into conspiracy theory territory. Net neutrality is a real issue, but it's got nothing to do with WikiLeaks. Governments aren't as dastardly or hell-bent on destroying your freedoms as you (and many others on HN) seem to think. It's actually quite disconcerting that so many on HN think this way -- hackers (in the good sense) could have a lot of influence on the future of democratic nations, but this kind of anti-government slant has the ability to really hurt our credibility and keep us on the sidelines.

Total red herring. Sure, I've read some of his articles in the past, and I even skimmed this one to make sure I wasn't wrong, but that doesn't change a thing about the substance of them.

Quick rule of thumb: if it's on AppleInsider, it's probably speculative bullshit. Doubly so if it's written by Daniel Eran Dilger, whose articles usually are in the following form:

Recent news item + A bunch of tangentially related, usually revisionist details about Apple's history + Some tangentially related, laughably biased, usually revisionist shots at Microsoft/Google + (Sometimes) An insane, impossible-to-read graph/chart = Unsubstantiated conclusion that reads like a wish list for what Daniel wants Apple to do, not what the evidence shows.

He recently wrote an article explaining that he thinks Apple is going to port Cocoa to Windows and release a Windows app store: http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2010/11/12/when-will-apple-rel...

> First, nobody is told they're not allowed to attend church. In fact, people who are excommunicated from the Mormon church are in fact _encouraged_ to keep attending so that they can come back into what's called "full fellowship" of the church by changing their lives to meet the standards of the church.

You're probably right here. I've heard contrary, but I haven't done my research on that, and I know there's a tonne of misinformation on both sides.

> Secondly, there is a distinction between being gay and having sex. Mormons, gay or straight, can't have sex outside of marriage. If a gay person has outside of marriage they are subject to the same discipline that a straight person who has sex outside of marriage would have. Some of my gay, believing Mormon friends are simply chaste. Some of my gay, believing Mormon friends are in heterosexual marriages. They do this with the full knowledge of their spouses, and with no hope of becoming straight, just because they feel like it's the right thing for them.

By "just because they feel like it's the right thing for them", I'm assuming what you mean here is "because they have no other option". I can't imagine an openly gay person choosing to be in a heterosexual marriage because it "feels right". What you just said might sound perfectly natural in Salt Lake City, but it would be an utterly ridiculous, and possibly offensive idea in, say, Toronto.

> Nobody is telling anybody they can't go to heaven or be a real Mormon unless they stop being gay. They're saying, "be chaste." I know that's a distinction that will probably be lost, but it's a real distinction, and a real requirement that all Mormons try to live up to when they're not married.

But if you say "you can't get married to someone who's the opposite sex" and "you can't have sex unless you're married", what you're really saying is that gay people are never allowed to have sex with the gender they were born attracted to. I consider that cruel and inhumane. And I'm not buying the "gay people can go to heaven thing". The church's stated policy is that "Homosexual behaviour violates the commandments of God". That's a pretty clear indictment.

> All that notwithstanding, I assure you I'm not lying about my gay Mormon friends, if you're ever in the Salt Lake area look me up, I'm sure they'd love to meet you :) One of them is always looking for good hackers for various projects.

If I'm ever in SLS, I might, I really do want to understand the thought processes here, but I can't say that it's at the top of my list of travel destinations, with all due respect :).

To be fair, they just recently slightly improved their stance on homosexuality, but saying "the LDS church doesn't think anybody is damaged goods" is whitewashing at best. Here's the new, improved policy:

http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/joannabrooks/37...

In short, gay people are sinners, are "subject to church discipline", but can be forgiven if they repent for their sins (i.e. stop being gay -- i.e. stop being themselves). Church leaders should tell them to "control unrighteous thoughts". And they aren't allowed to attend Church. The only substantive positive change is that church leaders are no longer told to send gay members to counselling, which they were up until a month ago. How is telling someone "you can't be a real Mormon or go to heaven unless you stop being gay" not telling them they're damaged goods?

I don't want to say you're lying about your gay Mormon friends, but presumably they can't actually go to church, and through some kind of Stockholm syndrome consider themselves a member of an organisation that thinks that "Homosexual behaviour can be forgiven through sincere repentance".

Sure, you can talk about how you think everyone is good and precious and deserves love, but beyond platitudes, the Church's policies on homosexuality are pretty clear.