Hacker News: papertiger

New comment by papertiger in "Mozilla’s Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web"

papertiger — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 21:48:35 +0000

I have seen many apps (on all platforms -- iPhone, Android, OS X, Windows, etc.) that deviate from user expectations. Ultimately, meeting user expectations is the responsibility of the developer not the framework.

HTML has its own set of visual cues that you and millions of others easily interact with every single day. I would argue that the interaction model of HTML/JS apps may be as familiar or more familiar to users.

I don't disagree that HTML/JS apps can be difficult to develop, but I do not think they are going to "lose". (I don't think they are going to win either. It's not a win/lose situation.)

Since it seems that your background is in native applications, I just wanted to provide you with some references to frameworks that provide something a little more advanced than jQuery and interactive documents.

Obviously, each team needs to look at its project and goals and choose whether a native app, an HTML/JS app, or both is appropriate.

New comment by papertiger in "Mozilla’s Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web"

papertiger — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 16:31:05 +0000

HTML+JS libraries -- such as jquery -- are just fine for interactive document publishing, but are no replacement for Cocoa, Android, or Qt. The lack of common re-usable and extensible UI components is a travesty.

Cappuccino http://cappuccino.org/

SproutCore http://www.sproutcore.com/

Ext JS http://www.sencha.com/products/js/

New comment by papertiger in "Why is Groupon so important? "

papertiger — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:34:08 +0000

I wouldn't exactly call them un-targeted; the recipients have asked to receive them. Also, this is an audience that is open to using the offers as a way to get ideas for new experiences.

New comment by papertiger in "Leaving .Net"

papertiger — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 02:20:07 +0000

Sure, it is fair to call this out and I am glad people are doing so. What I find off-putting is the way in which the commenter did so. There is clearly no interest in a civil discussion when someone suggests that the opposing side needs to "Grow up" and that their opinions are the result of a mid-life crisis.

As for my comment being pointless, I agree. Shame on me. Won't happen again.

EDIT: Upvoting you for busting me on my hypocrisy.

New comment by papertiger in "Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash"

papertiger — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 01:49:16 +0000

No, it's not like saying that at all.

Playing or winning the lottery involves nothing but money. An acquisition involves major changes to an organization's structure, its products or services, and the lives of all its employees.

EDIT: Removed snarkiness.

New comment by papertiger in "Leaving .Net"

papertiger — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:05:05 +0000

I wish I could downvote you.

New comment by papertiger in "Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash"

papertiger — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:13:34 +0000

I've honestly never understood why startups want to be acquired (besides the monetary gain for individual employees). Doesn't acquisition often destroy or dilute the very successes they've worked so hard to build? (I worked for an acquisitive company that worsened nearly every product/company it acquired.) Why not just focus on making your business better?

Heroku will now be subject to all kinds of pressures and asinine ideas that may not relate to their core offering. As a Heroku user I am concerned and saddened.

Can anyone offer any perspective? I'm puzzled by the acquisition mindset.

New comment by papertiger in "Congressman wants WikiLeaks listed as terrorist group"

papertiger — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:28:14 +0000

This is a truly horrifying prospect.

New comment by papertiger in "Announcing Browserling: Interactive cross-browser testing in your browser"

papertiger — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:05:24 +0000

Something similar occurred once for me as well.

New comment by papertiger in "Announcing Browserling: Interactive cross-browser testing in your browser"

papertiger — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:02:18 +0000

This is much more than screenshots and jQuery does not eliminate the need for interactive cross-browser testing in any way.

New comment by papertiger in "The Facebook API: A Case Study in Not Caring About Developers"

papertiger — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 19:19:21 +0000

The company I work for has email and phone access to a Facebook developer for questions, but we are part of a beta program.

When I browsed the API on my own it was an utter disaster on par with the article's description.

New comment by papertiger in "Android wallpaper app that steals your data was downloaded by millions"

papertiger — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:35:45 +0000

Maybe treating any ad network component as a "sub-app" with separate permissions would make it more obvious when a request for network access is unwarranted. As to how something like that might be implemented... I have no idea.

I suspect people would ignore it anyway.

New comment by papertiger in "Android wallpaper app that steals your data was downloaded by millions"

papertiger — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 03:30:36 +0000

It would be nice if the article actually named the app rather than just the developer.

Does anyone know the app name?

New comment by papertiger in "The difference between iPhone + Android: Great since day one "

papertiger — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 00:27:26 +0000

To each their own. "Great" is subjective.

New comment by papertiger in "The New Ruby Ecosystem"

papertiger — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 02:50:02 +0000

I find the frequent major changes in the Ruby ecosystem to be quite frustrating. That's not to say that I wish this progress wouldn't occur... I just wish it would occur in a more controlled manner. Documentation seems to suffer the most and I have definitely come across a few libraries that don't "just work". I love Ruby and the Ruby community, but I long for the day when things move at a less frenzied pace... I know it would put my managers at ease, too.

New comment by papertiger in "Code theft: Asciimo: Where have I seen this before?"

papertiger — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:33:26 +0000

Thanks for posting this update.

New comment by papertiger in "Rethinking Rails 3 Controllers and Routes - PeepCode Blog"

papertiger — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:14:56 +0000

Well said. As soon as an application hits ~100 routes everyone would be writing their own routing layer just to be able to flexibly manage it all.

Convention born of common usage is a strength of Rails.

New comment by papertiger in "JavaScript rapid function definition"

papertiger — Mon, 24 May 2010 03:35:42 +0000

Agreed. As I see it, this actually limits the power of JavaScript rather than extending it.

Edit: I like to see people pushing and extending a language so I appreciate the author's effort... but I think it is misguided in this case.

New comment by papertiger in "Our solar system - A Webkit Animation using CSS3"

papertiger — Fri, 21 May 2010 14:10:04 +0000

Not so smooth on Chrome/Ubuntu (on Mac hardware) either.

Cool experiment.

New comment by papertiger in "Ask HN: How are you hosting email at your domain name?"

papertiger — Sat, 08 May 2010 20:09:39 +0000

I use rackspace hosted email as well. Very happy with it.