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Perhaps the service could build in some kind of opt-out option? It could either be at the point of making the appointment, or after receiving the first reminder.

This is nothing new, but they appear to have packaged the offering to an audience not served by their competitors, though the quote about it being appealling to car geeks is suspect to me. Assuming they are having successful sales, this could be a good example of taking a well-defined product, targetting a completely different audience, and cutting out/focusing on features that will resonate with this audience.

For reference, take a look at the leading OBD-II iPhone app Rev (http://www.devtoaster.com/products/rev/). I've actually owned and enjoyed this app for the past 2 years. It pretty much does everything. Anything you can do through the OBD-II port, you can do, and customize completely to how you need it. It also does the CEL lights, which is pretty standard. But selling to auto enthusiasts, this app focuses on the performance features.

No car geek would ever recommend GoPoint over Rev, but for someone that's interested in environmental impact and fuel economy, GoPoint's simplicity and price clearly wins.

He mentions the importance of the post-live experience, as well as, of course, the actual live broadcast, but he fails to mention whatsoever the importance of the pre-live experience. The build-up, the marketing, the getting-the-message-out that a live show or event will be happening.

It's silly to think one can just flip on their camera and expect users to suddenly start appearing. It would be plain common sense to let people know beforehand that your show or event will be happening. Duh?

One other thing that makes a live cast successful is a regularly broadcast format such as Mixergy, where users know when to expect the next live broadcast, whether it is daily, weekly, or monthly, or where one can check a schedule of upcoming events and add it to their calendar.

As I mentioned in my other comment, I give a thumbs up to Movable Type, particularly in regards to security. The only database access is done on the admin side. When you publish anything, it generates pure html pages. So only you access the database. Users only access html. There are no complexities between these two arrangements.

Movable Type takes just a little longer to set up than WordPress, but hey, many of us here are hackers right? Plus you can tweak the code to your heart's content.

I've been using Movable Type for years, the differentiating factor being that it generates html pages. No worries about database load. No worries about database hacking, the only access to the data or files being through the admin login. The additional ability to customize the code at any depth is a plus too.

Summmary:

- a million irrelevant paragraphs to make this guy seem like someone you can relate to

- guy driving on wet road

- picks up phone

- looks up and sees he's about to crash into another car

- swerves across median into oncoming traffic

- head-on collision with a Chevy Silverado

- more irrelevant stuff about what goes on in those microseconds of the crash to try to scare you

- explanations of what you should do in inevitable crash events

Editor anyone? Interesting read anyway, but I probably read every 3rd or 4th sentence.

Agreed. A kid can play with a roly-poly he found on the ground and that's a game.

Anyway, not sure why this discussion needs to be whether we consider this a "serious" game or not. I think it's a fantastic idea, and its execution will determine how fun it is to play.

Agreed. It took me no more than a minute after installing to realize there was no use for this.

I'm not buying into 3D interfaces represented on a 2D screen. I don't believe 3D interfaces will succeed until they can be holographically projected around me a la District 9.

Do you want to go through life scared of everything, hiding in a hole, or do you want to be out there, prone to danger, but in the mix of daily life?

This is just a classic balance between security and openness.

The more secure you try to make things, the less usable things become, and the more you worry about things you don't need to worry about. The more open you make things, the easier and more efficient things become, and life is more enjoyable. You might get bruised and cut every once in a while, but it's the price you pay for a more open, fun, and social life.

I'm in agreement with Zuckerberg on this. Openness is the future, whether we like it or not, and you can either fight it and become a hippie 2.0, or just go with the flow and enjoy the advantages that come with.

True. Good point. I suppose my main disappointment is in the fact that he has generally had a good track record of distilling complicated things down to common sense "no-duhs". But he's failed at this in this case, to me at least.

This actually saddens me on Jon Stewart's part. I'm a huge fan of his with his ability to report the more truthful side of politics. This lessens his credibility to me since his facts are misrepresented or missing. He completely ignores the "finder's" role in this and his not-so-secret desire to make money on his discovery, and fails to address the moral obligation on Jason Chen's part as a professional journalist, all for the purposes of making Apple look like the only bad guy here. Ergo, all for the purposes of making a "funnier" bit for the purposes of entertainment.

Additionally, his jab at Gray Powell joking that he was using the iphone to pick up chicks takes the cake. Completely false and misleading! I think Jon Stewart needs to take a look in the mirror on this one.

Yes, in Chrome, just hit Command-Shift-F for full-screen. It's awesome!

Btw, this PlainView app appears to be 2 years old. How is this getting upvoted?

Hooray for competition! This can only spur Google a bit to improve Google Doc's feature set. Why does the author think one service must live and one service must die? There's always room for choice when services offer advantages over each other.

Taking this one step further, the iPad could recognize how you are holding it, whether it's one hand, two hands, on the side or from the bottom, and the keyboard would auto-adjust on the fly to accommodate. The animation/motion would be the same way it rotates from landscape to portrait on the fly, just in this case, the keyboard would morph.

Perhaps it is each airlines particular systems or operations that requires the torn tickets. Virgin America's tickets don't come with any part to tear. At boarding, they scan it in and hand it back to you. That would work for a wallet size as well. For people printing a pass, well, they're using a full sheet of paper anyways, so there could be a different design for printed tickets, the same way printed concert ticket designs are different than official tickets that are mailed to you.

Also want to note that I missed the part about the thermal printing, which would nullify the ink cost issue.

One advantage the original design has is its low cost of ink. Just look at SquareSpace's redesigns and those huge blocks of black, red, and blue. Just trying to eye it, I would estimate anywhere from an 800% to 1000% increase in ink. Multiply that with the enormous amount of tickets printed, and that's a lot of ink....and a lot of money.

Yes, they are prettier, easier to use, but I'd be interested to see a design effort with this additional parameter of saving cost on ink or paper.

Notice how, while Virgin America does seem to be printing a lot of colors on the backside of their tickets, their ticket size is about half the size of standard tickets, thus, saving money on paper stock.

Edit: looks like some of the updates from other designers have addressed a more minimal use of ink. I think the Wallet Size one in particular wins for me. There's just no convenient place to carry standard-size tickets.

This seems like it would be a dangerous move on Yahoo's part, aside from the acquisition of talent. This is only my gut feeling, but I don't see users being so vested in the FourSquare service, that if they're unhappy with the direction it is taking, just jumping ship to Gowalla. A lot of people already check in through multiple services, and it wouldn't be too hard a decision to stop checking in with one if it's flavor turns sour.

Point is that users will more often ignore opt-outs than not, regardless whether it is beneficial to them or not. As a UI practice, it's up to the form's creator how to manipulate this behavior.

How do we know that these shoppers did not, in fact, knowingly submit their souls to this company? Like, hey, why not? No biggie.

In all honesty, this just illustrates a very common UI practice that opt-outs are more effective than opt-ins.

I will though acknolwedge sympathy to the engineers for having such a seemingly impossible task laid upon them.

Guys please explain to me why so many of you are coming to the defense of the engineering effort? Perhaps it's different in this case, but most companies, particularly ones funded with 33 million dollars, make decisions based on business and what will eventually lead towards making actual moola. Theirs is not a charity case. Engineerig efforts there are not acts of chivalry. What is their big master plan on coming out the end of this tunnel, or are they simply taking random shots in the dark hoping to hit somethig unexpected?

Just from my rudimentary math skills, I'm not sure the pay-per-achievement assignment would work. As an example, let's say I have 10,000 active users per month, and from their activity, they achieve 10 things per month. At one penny per, I would be shelling out $1000 per month for your service, $12,000 per year. Simply put, hell no. Perhaps, a better pricing plan would be in tiers with fixed costs, and notifications if one were nearing the limit of their chosen tier?

Also, for that $1000 alone, I could probably hire a developer to build an achievement system on my own server for my own sites. Just curious, what would the incentive be for me as a site owner to pay for your service as opposed to building my own?

This is a major problem. Without even being able to read the article titles, there is literally nothing you can scan to decide where you want to look, what you want to click, or even just what you want to zoom in on. I can make out the Sheraton logo though? Maybe Opera takes a cut of banner ad clicks and wants those to be the only things we can read without zooming in?

Maybe I'm overly accustomed to the "feel" of Apple's native apps, since there's just something about the app that just doesn't "feel" good to use.

The zooming-in and out is a big downside, as I often tweak in or out from what Safari gives me as a default when I double-tap.

The scrolling deceleration brakes to a halt sooner than native apps. Again, maybe I'm just being fickle, but if the physics don't match the native feel, then it just doesn't feel right.

Don't understand why they created their own form of copy/paste.

The zoomed-out small fonts are completely illegible. I can't even make out header or subheader text, or titles of articles.

Startup time, at least for me, was about 3 seconds, compared to immediately for Safari. I just have the 3G, and I'm sure it would be much faster on the 3Gs.

When going from vertical to horizontal view, the page does not resize. I have to reload the page for it to fit to the full width.

Despite the innovations that I was very excited for, it's the little things, the details, that will keep me from using this app. To me, good execution is in the details. Some of the things above, for me, are simply musts. An example would be a car that must feel good to sit in, have sharp steering control, easy-to-reach controls and a solid-feeling gearbox. Extra-cool features without this are non-starters. These are the things Safari gives me which Opera lacks.

Is this supposed to be a shocker? My submitted prediction is still 66 days out, even though I think an answer of never is still very likely. Though I'm just betting on Opera cutting features to get an approved app.

Apologies if this is off topic, but I found this particular quote worrying, with regards to whether the Content Aware Filter would be included:

...you can find out on Monday whether these have made the cut for Photoshop CS5.

As the most popular new addition and selling point of CS5, I feel a bit mislead that there's a possibility it won't even make the cut. It's essentially the only thing I would upgrade for.

I think this person will regret writing this post tomorrow, if not sooner. This is akin to having an emotional reaction to someone's email and returning an immediate flame email, later feeling like a complete jerk. But this is on a much grander scale, writing a blog post as an official representative of an entire company. Very poor taste.

Though I'm enjoying the show quite a lot!!!

Thickness, weight, price, boot time, battery life.

Aside from the UI alone, this would have to answer each of these in order for it to compete with the iPad.

This isn't just a symptom of the iPad. I've always been confused when news sites build an iPhone app for people to read the same news they can read in the browser or a news aggregator. It seems the time, cost, and energy could be spent improving the site experience, making accommodations for the differences in finger and mouse inputs.

Is it just for the ability to boast that they have an iPhone or iPad app? Perhaps it's just another avenue to increase readership?

Regardless, it's their choice to build the apps and users choice to pay for and use them, so c'est la vie.

Actually, I had not considered this. Thanks. QOS could easily be controlled on the client side, the same way Firefox or Safari apply less memory and bandwidth to webpages in unfocused tabs, while giving the page in the current tab the most love.