In most places, restrictions on bars and nightclubs are a moral/religious issues driven by the elected representatives (and hence the electing public's) perception of what is "right". Therefore logical arguments don't really work until majority of the populace is doesn't hold as strong emotional points of view. Amsterdam has of course for long been down that road and so these things are easier there.
Probably commenting too late but I find it a lot simpler to just compile from source. After you're initially setup (you need a go1.4 installation in your homedir), you just pull the latest repo updates, checkout the release tag and run all.bash or all.bat each time. This also gives you cross-compilation and ability to contribute bug fixes.
Agree with much of the article. I personally find Apple iOS devices completely unusable because I have to constantly try to guess what kind of action or gesture will achieve what I want to do rather than being obvious. The same for several apps which appear to have become successful first on iOS before being ported to Android. I find remembering these gestures and actions an unnecessary cognitive load.
I'm right with you, the grandparent is insane. Flat out.
I love reading quotes like that that are backed with, you guessed it, absolutely nothing.
Pinch to zoom is a great example. It may not be your first guess but it's the type of thing that you do a couple times then look back thinking, Wow! that's a great way of representing zoom on a device capable of listening to multiple inputs at a time. And subsequently will never forget how to do it, and it becomes your first tool when you want to zoom.
HN is so anti-Apple it's not funny. I've noticed if an argument makes Apple better, no matter how reasonable you are, you tend to get downvotes.
Anyway, I agree with you. (There are two of us!) Apple's stuff is built to be easy enough for a know-nothing user to get the basics done, and depending on your skill, you gain access to more and more over time.
Incorrect. I have a 5-year old here, and they do have trouble figuring things out. What they learn are simple patterns the bring success. There are some things that are simple. Press the home button to go back to the screen with the boxes. Press a box to open the thing that plays kids singing! Yay.
But then none of what they are dealing with, for the most part, is made by Apple. They are using apps built by others, and some apps are just incredibly confusing.
Apple is rife with UX problems. Just look at the newest device they came out with, the Watch. Two buttons that are positioned in a way that constantly have them activating when I lift my hand up. Why do I have screenshots of my watch every day littering my computer? I mean, I cannot fathom someone used this and didn't have this issue.
The Watch is a beta device, and everyone I've met with one has agreed with that sentiment (both techies and non-techies alike).
This doesn't even begin to touch their software, or the OSs themselves. Here is a company that still can't get windowing right.
The only reason I still use their products is because OS X is built on UNIX and is supported by major companies, but even that is going away, so there is less incentive.
Can you elaborate on the windowing issue? I don't have a mac anymore, and always disliked the menu at the top of the screen UX (which is the same as my Ubuntu). I'm not sure what the windowing issue you're referring to is.
Also, how is OS X moving away from UNIX? Or is it that major companies are moving away from UNIX? I'm not sure I've seen evidence of either of these.
First, apologies on the confusion on Unix. That was my fault.
> is supported by major companies, but even that is going away, so there is less incentive.
I meant that companies supporting OS X, not Unix. The two reasons were:
1) Unix
2) OS X support
The second point is what I meant was going away. I see companies that matter to me supporting OS X less and less. The latest company to do so is Blizzard. Again, apologies for the confusion.
As for the windowing issue, I have to download a third party app to handle most of the stuff I get for free on every other major and many non-major windowing systems from a decade ago. This includes snapping and auto sizing and moving windows among monitors.
Couple this with OS X's horrible support for external monitors on it's laptops. Several times a week I have issues when I disconnect my mac. Either my sees a phantom monitor that is not there and so windows still exist there that I can't reach or bring over. I have to close the lid and open it up again.
The full screen support is still an absolute insult. And the when they changed what the stop light did and made it maximize is annoying.
The only reason people started using their computers again was because of Unix.
This is a common refrain, but is it possible that adults have learned valid paradigms that make using the iPhone as it is today, more difficult? If you want to design for 5-year-olds and have them retain that forever, I guess it can work, but maybe it's a design failure if the people who actually buy your product have a harder time using it.
To use another analogy, it's somewhat like saying "Well, people literate in a left-to-right language have no problem using it." Great, but presumably Apple was aiming for a global audience, so pointing out success stories in some subsections of that audience does not mean they succeeded overall.
I've certainly noticed that my decades of touch-typing experience make it much more difficult for me to enter text on a buttonless touch keyboard. I'm constantly growling and swearing at the machine and deleting words and typing them over, because I can't shake the habit of watching the text as I type instead of the buttons I'm trying to push. Someone who had never learned to type properly would be unlikely to have this problem.
Maybe embracing the system and its physical constraints instead of fighting it would help, in that case using something like swype that is both fast and completely different from typing (makes it easier to transition).
At least that worked for me and I am typing without looking at the keys too.
I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable." Also my 93 year old grandmother took to her iPhone almost instantaneously. As did my technically challenged parents, all of their friends and pretty much any of the hundreds of people who I have ever seen pick up an iPhone. I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post. And on a tech forum no less - what are you even doing here?
Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?
> I think a 5 year old with no preconceived notions of a user interface is probably the best validation of whether a device is "usable."
But Western 5-year-olds have already had 5 years to watch their parents use contemporary technology. I'm not sure there's such thing as a "blank slate" here. And I doubt the average 5-year-old from a rural town in a third-world country is going to pick up an iPhone as easily as an American one. You're picking like 1% of the world population and making them the benchmark for universal design. I suppose the ultimate end to this line of reasoning is that there is no such thing as perfectly universal design, and I'm OK with that.
> I have actually never even heard of a single person picking up and iPhone and saying "I can't figure this out - it's unusable!" until your post.
When did I say that? You might have me confused with the GP poster.
> Perhaps you feel Apple should have designed a beautiful rotary phone?
Why not? Many 5-year-olds probably could use rotary phones just fine back in the day. Maybe Apple doesn't actually have a monopoly on making it possible for 5-year-olds to use technology.
I have to wonder which iPhone era you're thinking of. Back in the early days, maybe. Nowadays? The iPhone is a puzzle box. I imagine a 5 year old would have a great time playing with it and seeing all the surprising things that happen in response to various actions, but if you want to actually use it for anything it's not nearly as pleasant an experience.
Sure... but Tarsnap is basically Colin, serving a very niche clientele and unlikely to be worth a few billions. Almost every tool discussed in the article is targeting mass market where such considerations become important at some point.
The reason you see a lot of opinion pieces against ad blocking in mainstream press and blogs is because their main income stream comes digital advertising and either changing business model to paid content or negating ad blocking will take a lot of effort and expense.
There's literally hundreds of thousands of people in the journalism and ad industry who's ability to put bread on the table is put at risk and Apple's support for ad blocking threatens to tips the scale of blocking use. Naturally there is every incentive to expend journalistic and PR efforts to protect their income stream. Much like the music industry did in Napster days before iTunes.
It has very little to do with rights and morals and the like. I'd be surprised if most of the tech savvy writers writing these pieces don't use ad blocking themselves personally.
Well you have to remember that the Swiss have both better income sources (assisting the world's wealthy & many corporations evade/optimize taxes for instance) and don't have military expenses and such due to neutrality.
While many problems of the US are of its own creation due to either ideology or wealth dominating politics (healthcare & education spring to mind), it is quite unfair to compare what the Swiss government provides with the US.
It's a common meme. The entire financial industry is only about 11% of the GDP (or around 7% if you use a different statistical method). That includes insurance, pensions, etc.
The idea that Switzerland is propped up by tax evasion simply isn't true. The UK thought it was true and actually wrote proceeds from better Swiss cooperation over banking records into their budget .... then discovered there was a huge shortfall, because there was much less evasion done that way than they had imagined.
OK, but if a larger percentage of Swiss residents emigrated there for the favorable tax laws than emigrated to the US for the same reason, that could inflate Swiss GDP, i.e., make the Swiss per-capita GDP an overly optimistic measure of what life is like for Swiss residents who haven't acquired wealth outside Switzerland.
OK, but if someone who made a fortune in Germany moves to Switzerland and buys a Mercedes, does that not add about $50 K to Swiss GDP? The reasons I suspect it might are (1) GDP is essentially a measure of economic activity, i.e., transactions, and (2) how all of the small tax shelters, Monaco, Lichtenstein, etc, have very high per-capita GDP.
Regarding (1), it is possible that living in a tax shelter gives residents without a fortune more opportunities to make money than living in a country like Germany or the US does, but I lean towards the possibility that per-capita GDP is simply inaccurate or flawed as measure of the economic prospects of the residents who don't have fortunes.
Also, Singapore's per-capita GDP is very high compared to the personal income of its human residents (I have read) and I figure that was because a large fraction of Singapore's businesses are owned by non-Singaporeans (which has been the case, BTW, since Singapore's founding by British trading interests).
The roots of their respective prosperity and poverty come from the long-term effects of their respective ideologies. The US choses to let corporations evade taxes, and the US choses to project military might to pursue private corporate aims.
Just because a behaviour and culture is endemic and has occurred for generations now, that doesn't make it written in stone.
Actually, neutrality requires more military spending. As a NATO country, Switzerland could specialize more and better coordinate on technology and purchases. But on its own, it needs to maintain a full defense machinery without outside help.
They were lucky to not get invaded by the Germans but they totally expected to be invaded and built a defense strategy based on this belief that lasted until the 1990s.
Twice the Germans started the process of putting together a Swiss invasion and gave up early because they realized they would have lost.
The Swiss attitude is that many countries, including the u.s., are corrupt with corrupt governments and it is your responsibility to put your money someplace safe and out of hands of that corruption.
They provided a place for the jews in nazi germany to move their money outside of germany. But if I was Jewish and in Nazi Germany I would have done the same, as my Catholic great-grandparents did by moving their money from Germany to Switzerland when the Nazis came to power.
It's unfortunate that most of their Jewish customers were killed by the Nazis. They also accepted deposits from the Nazis, but I can understand their attitude of not taking sides. In the end you want a neutral party like that, no matter what side you're on.
A tip for learning UML. If you don't understand what is it talking about, just ignore it. There are some concept which is just too complicated and not quite useful. Only pick the concept you like/understand, that is what you will use.
UML is a design language, but not a computer language. You don't need to follow everything in the standard.
That will learn UML in an easier way.
Personally I think UML is worth to learn. Since it could design an architecture with using some common building block that many people know. And those UML tool can draw and manage diagram to save your time.
Thanks! it does looks interesting as I've tried using Prezi for this sort of stuff before but tripped on its "presentation focused" features whereas this seems more flexible
