Apple Store Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://store.apple.com/us? <comment><USER3> I am not a designer by any means, but does anyone else think the images feel a little too big and overpowering to the point the name of the product and price gets lost? The colour of the price for me is hard to see unless you really look as well. It definitely marks an improvement over what their site looked like a few years ago, but I can't help but feel it is not very well thought out.

The limited colour palette of grey and white also means it is sometimes hard for my eyes to differ from the contrast which confuses me (the Beats by Dre section is a good example). Once again, I am not a designer, but I do not find this store redesign very appealing at all, it is confusing on the eye. I hate to be harsh, but feels like I am looking at a catalogue that came in the letterbox with large shouty product images on weird angles.

As for people making remarks about Apple selling third party products on their site, they have done this for as long as I can remember. Laptop cases, third party peripherals (external hard drives), headphones and more. You also have to remember that Apple bought Beats not long ago, so the Beats headphones are actually their own products even if Beats is being operated separately for the moment inside of Apple and probably will continue to do so.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is what the Apple Store page looked like in 2011 shortly before Steve Jobs died: [https://web.archive.org/web/20111001165346/http://store.appl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111001165346/http://store.apple.com/us)

I am very confused as to why people are saying he his rolling in his grave over third party accessories being sold through the Apple website - it has been this way for as long as I can remember.

<comment><USER5> Everything recently that Apple does that people don't agree with has Jobs 'rolling in his grave.'

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sort of a weird rebrand. I also, had jank scrolling. The massive screen real- estate donated to a double menu bar and this huge "busy" picture, just instantly puts me on edge. Also, when you go to a selection ('iphone', 'ipad') you get all products in the category not all products so you have to go back, you can't quickly browse around the site. I think it is super ugly, a total change in brand focused on parents and being trendy (small children, road-trip selfies pictures) and less on pure powerful technology that is exceedingly simple.

</comment><comment><USER7> Kinda funny how the top story was "Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason" earlier this morning, and then this comes up.

<comment><USER8> Perfect day for it really with them breaking a few of the rules laid out in another top story "7 rules for creating gorgeous ui" [1]. Having non white text over a high contrast photo with skinny text certainly is bold according to the pervious article.

[1] [https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating- gorgeo...](https://medium.com/@erikdkennedy/7-rules-for-creating-gorgeous-ui- part-2-430de537ba96)

<comment><USER9> 'text over a high contrast photo' \- rule applies when the text is over a high-contrast PART of the photo. The rule is there for legibility - black text over a flat, white (or just off white) part of a photo that also, in a separate part, has some high-contrast elements, is perfectly fine for legibility.

The only unreadable type on that page is actually the white type over the high contrast photo at the very top of the page. "From one gift come many" \- on my MBP, that looks really poor. My eyes are nearly in pain trying to read that.

All in all, I do think it's a bad job of a redesign. Very trendy, but quite obnoxious navigationally. Bad UX. I'm fine with big images and minimal text, but I think it needs to be shrunk quite a lot -- the entire Beats by Dre section should fit, top to bottom, on my 1440x900px screen. As it is, it's a full 2.5x screen heights (estimated).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> chestnut-tree A while back (Jan 2014), a designer called Sebastiano Guerriero created an unsolicited redesign of the Apple store. The square grid of large images in the new Apple store redesign reminded me of his concept. I wonder if Apple looked at the design (it went viral) and took some inspiration. Regardless, I thought the unsolicited design was rather nice.

[https://www.behance.net/gallery/Apple-Store- Redesign/1411391...](https://www.behance.net/gallery/Apple-Store- Redesign/14113919)

[http://ambercreative.co/experiments/apple- store/](http://ambercreative.co/experiments/apple-store/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only not feeling 100% comfortable with the new design?

It is more graphically appealing but the user experience is not what I'm expecting on an online store.

</comment><comment><USER11> In the past Apple's store website has never worked in Firefox; a typical problem is buttons that don't do anything when pressed (like "add to cart" or "checkout".) With this new site, it almost works with Firefox: I got stuck in an endless loop for engraving on an iPad, but after a chat an Apple tech put the iPad into my cart, and I was able to complete the purchase. Almost!

</comment><comment><USER12> This is clearly aimed at parents, who want to give gifts to their kids - <USER2> segment Apple are targetting anew in the run-up to Christmas. I guess what I'm seeing is a more "Home Shopping Network" thing going on, and it perturbs me .. but as a parent, I can see their positioning having effect.

I guess Apples' "thing" this Christmas is "Family-Friendly, Safe"..

</comment><comment><USER13> Is apple only now falling in with the useless-giant-image-and-lots-of- scrolling trend, or is this just 'refined'?

</comment><comment><USER14> At least they didn't slap a giant, full-screen video loop on the background. That fad can't die soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's interesting to see the new direction they seem to be taking.

All of those fullscreen pictures of people don't feel very "Apple-y", they look more like Tommy Hilfiger ads to me. And the contrast is especially noticeable when you scroll down to the all white, all products sections right beneath them.

<comment><USER13> This is apparently what the UX profession as a whole has decided is the best, most pretty-looking thing. Interestingly I've not seen studies that show people like it when they go to a web site with intent to find things, but that's secondary to looking pretty.

The pictures don't have to be meaningful or relevant - they just have to be big, and avoid distracting you with silly text that might convey relevant information. To get to anything like that, it's 'good design' to force the user to scroll first. hadn't you heard?

</rant> Sorry. This large picture + no meaningful up-front content + much scrolling trend is so irritating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the inclusion/highlighting of third party brands is Apple sticking it's toe into broad, Amazon-rivaling e-commerce.

Apple is looking to become a/the source for all things worthy of association. Side note - they're already great at brick and mortar shelf bullying (i.e. Fit Bit & Bose).

</comment><comment><USER17> There are a lot of non-Apple products. I recall seeing things like printers buried in the old design, but I assume drones are new? I am curious how people will feel about the perceived dilution of the brand vs. knowing their audience and curating interesting ancillary product offerings?

<comment><USER18> I, for one, am outraged. Outraged, I tell you! /sarcasm

Eh, it's the Xmas shopping season. It's to be expected and at least it's not the usual trainwreck of design that pops up on other sites. There's a room in Hell for designers that give people eye-plosions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The cheapest pair of Beats is $99. Are they moving upmarket or have they always been so expensive?

Compare with Skullcandy earbuds, which seem to be of similar quality, starting at about $20.

Interesting strategy if that's the case. Definitely fits with the Apple image.

<comment><USER20> Think of Beats headphones like a very expensive fashion accessory. Their performance as headphones pales in comparison to the price. Professional audio engineers use less expensive (and FAR superior) headphones.

Price doesn't always translate to quality. In many cases, it's pure status signalling. Many luxury fashion brands operate in this manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> 6th month old Macbook Pro, I'm getting jank on this page in both Chrome and Safari. This is legitimately disappointing.

<comment><USER22> What do you mean? The page doesn't work?

<comment><USER23> "jank" is a euphemism for "choppy scrolling".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Indescribable disgusting, like yet another n00b startup landing. I want to view key positions, click and buy.

</comment><comment><USER25> The difference between Apple now and Apple a couple years ago is that they would never dilute the main Apple product page with external brands. While I think it's great that you can buy Apple-compatible drones, I hardly think "people who impulse buy $500 drones or $300 headphones" is a large enough market to warrant ~30% of the page.

<comment><USER26> > The difference between Apple now and Apple a couple years ago is that they > would never dilute the main Apple product page with external brands.

Demonstrably false. About a third of [https://web.archive.org/web/20111001165346/http://store.appl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20111001165346/http://store.apple.com/us) (2011) and [https://web.archive.org/web/20090312055045/http://store.appl...](https://web.archive.org/web/20090312055045/http://store.apple.com/us) (2009) are taken up by third-party products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wish the menu icons at the top were a custom web-font or SVG. They look a bit blurry.

</comment><comment><USER28> Images seem to load slowly on my traffic-shaped connection.

</comment><comment><USER29> Apple's website is just getting worse and worse...

</comment><comment><USER30> Using user agent sniffing for responsiveness...

<comment><USER31> Noticed that too. What a poor decision -- UA sniffing is ultimately unmaintainable. And what's funny is how everyone is going full on responsive and moved away from UA sniffing because of the move to phones like Apple's. Yet here they're not. Strange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> All I see is the fancy-scrolling kind of website with pictures of products.

No photo of the redesign of the store?

It's not even clear if this is about a physical store or an app store...

<comment><USER22> That website is the store...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Browser based IDEs. Do they work? - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone here work predominantly with a browser based IDE? There seems to be a lot of them popping up lately so I was hoping you could share your experience with which IDE you use and what you use it for. <comment><USER2> I'd love to be able to use a browser based IDE for development on a Chromebook or other machines that I haven't fully set up, but I can't see it happening for a while for the following reasons:

\- Plugins - a major part of any IDE like Eclipse or Visual Studio, or text editors like Sublime Text \- Speed - Single threaded JavaScript isn't going to beat multithreaded Python, Java, C#, etc, and when dealing with large text documents, or trying to apply meaning to code structure intelligently like modern IDEs do, this is going to be even more of an issue. \- System Integration - I use keyboard shortcuts for a considerable amount of my work in IDEs, but the ability of a browser to use keyboard shortcuts is severely diminished. Something like Vim's command mode might work, but this is only one style of shortcuts that many people are unfamiliar with or actively dislike. \- System Programs - IDEs are supported by a large number of programs behind the scenes, this would mean any IDE would probably need to be backed by a VPS anyway, and then not only are you even more dependent on an active connection, but also you have a large cost overhead just to be able to work from another machine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I used ShiftEdit to develop a Python/Django webapp. I appreciated the cloudiness as I was quite mobile at the time and my laptop wasn't particularly portable. At the time it was the only free offering that didn't require a connection to GitHub, necessitating the code be open-sourced (quality was a bit low/hacky and the world didn't really need to see it!). Overall, I was pretty pleased with the experience.

Now I run Sublime Text on a laptop that goes everywhere with me and deploy using a proper VCS. I would certainly use ShiftEdit again in future if I was stuck without my laptop and needed to make a few quick changes to something, but I wouldn't use it as a replacement for a local editor.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use nitrous.io . It's fast, comes with all the python tools I could need, and the support is near instant. I have one free development box, and it syncs from my Chromebook to my desktop . All I could want really is a better editor (Ace please!)

<comment><USER5> +1 on nitrous.io

I have only played with it so far, but it is nicely done.

BTW, Google has a __very __nice web based IDE but it is for internal use only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you mean something like [http://ideone.com/](http://ideone.com/)? It's something I found the other day but haven't tried yet. I think it's probably more for testing some code snippet rather than working with a larger application, though. One I do use, however, is Adafruit's WebIDE for developing on the Raspberry Pi. [http://learn.adafruit.com/webide/](http://learn.adafruit.com/webide/) Perfect solution for coding on the Pi and it's linked to Github/BitBucket.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've just started playing around piecing together one. I'm using node.js as the server, redis as the database and virtual file system, ace for the text editor, jquery and some jquery ui plugins for the rest. My goal is to build something I can roll out and run with a raspberry pi and use as something like a pocket cloud ide.

Also for editing the actual html and other files, I wrote a small console app in c# that uses the FileSystemWatcher class to monitor a htdocs folder, which updates the redis key/values in realtime.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've had pretty good success with Cloud9's IDE.

I like that it's SSH based... I can secure it reasonably well and run any terminal command I need. It has decent code completion (at least for Node), a nice file tree view, can format code with indentations, etc... overall, a pretty nice experience.

The way I have it set up, is I work on a dev VPS (using their SSH). For any deploys, I check in my code, then can terminal into the production machine and git it. So, I can debug through the dev setup, then deploy to production when ready.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've just started trying to use [https://codio.com/](https://codio.com/) it's pretty nice, not sure if it can take over desktop-based ones though.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've had a terrible experience with them. Some of them try to do code sharing/OT but if I typed too fast they would crash my browser & I lost all my changes. I think my latency played a role but i'm not too sure.

That said I know of people using them with Chromebooks. Its nice because they can code the same file at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER11> I really wanna know how those IDEs offer debugging.</comment>


HTML is done - <AUTHOR> https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/06/05/End-of-HTML <comment><USER2> On the backend the developer chooses his universe. Whether it'd be ruby, python, mongo, postgresql, nodejs, haskell, go, whatever. If the universe sucks people can change everything. If you hate the mopho stack (mongo and php), that's ok, you got other options.

With the browser everyone is stuck with one universe. The only thing that changes are front end frameworks which offer some flexibility. Still, if html sucks we're stuck with it. If you hate html or javascript then you hate the entire front end. You exist outside of that universe because Nothing can change it. End of story.

I don't know how it could be done while keeping things secure, but it would be awesome if the browser universe was as flexible as the backend. If I could swap between html and any other kind of media based declarative language as easily as I can swap between python and ruby on the backend, it would change the face of frontend development and make it more accessible. In fact what if I wanted to develop my own language that interfaces with the rendering engine? The browser should permit that, because the Web is too broad to be dominated by a single language(HTML).

I think this should be the next step.

<comment><USER3> What would be really nice is something similar to .Net's virtual machine CLR. It would offer the flexibility to design in whatever language you want and possibly a performance boost as well.

<comment><USER4> The CLR isn't really very flexible. Most languages that run on it are pretty similar. If you try to implement a language like Haskell on top of it for example, it quickly becomes obvious that it isn't a good fit - because the CLR has no support for higher kinds, typeclasses, laziness, parametric polymorphism etc. Sure, you can implement a Haskell interpreter/compiler that converts to .NET, but there certainly won't be any performance boost by boxing everything into objects and having several layers of indirection to simply invoke a function (and not really any advantage over writing such interpreter in say, JS).

A more ideal VM would be one which doesn't force a particular paradigm on you, but just abstracts over the CPU, using capabilities to restrict which instructions can be invoked. The CLR lacks such capabilities. Perhaps something like SafeHaskell would be in the right direction, where side-effects are limited, and the user can optionally allow websites to invoke trusted modules.

<comment><USER5> A low-level safe VM? That exists with PNaCl (Portable Native Client), which of course everybody dislikes as a web technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Would be nice to see some examples of what people don't like about HTML+CSS+JS. I find it quite wonderful.

You can make all kinds of magic happen in a simple text file. In an intuitive way. Want to tell something? Just write it:

        This is some text. How easy was that?

Want to show an image? Just a few keystrokes:

        <img id=animal src="my_kitten.jpg">

Want to style it? Here we go:

        <style>.animal { border: 5px solid green }</style>

Want to change it programmatically? Easy:

        <script>document.getElementById("animal").src="my_dog.jpg"</script>

Deployment? Instantly. Developer tools needed? A text editor. Compatibility? Runs everywhere. Speed? Im often shocked, how fast stuff runs these days.

I think we created a paradise. And I enjoy "living" in it every day.

<comment><USER2> What if I want to use html+css+js to dynamically draw a 1024x1024 picture of a cat with pixel level detail? I'm sure it can be done. But wow. That code would be ugly.

Or how about dynamically drawing a diagonal line or swirl across the page?

I apologize for the lack of an example, but I'm sure you can imagine how much harder that would be in html and css then it is with a renderer that has bezier curves and lines as primitives.

<comment><USER6>
        What if I want to use html+css+js to
        dynamically draw a 1024x1024 picture of a cat

Here is your cat:

[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Ghostscri...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Ghostscript_Tiger.svg)

        a renderer that has bezier curves and lines

SVG is part of the HTML standard and has those. And much more:

[http://www.google.com/search?q=svg+examples](http://www.google.com/search?q=svg+examples)

<comment><USER2> I said pixel level. That's vector level. Also by html+css+javascript I thought you meant strictly primitives within that domain like spans and divs. While svg is part of html5 people typically don't think of svg when someone says to write something in html+css+javascript.

Either way, well played, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The point of the article seems to be that HTML is done because it's "basically OK", and everything around it is done because it's awful and can't be salvaged anyway. I _hope_ the next logical step implied here after this is NOT going back to native applications for everything.

      The browser-as-a-platform is based on a lousy programming
      language addressing a lousy object model and using a lousy
      stylesheet language for visuals.

I think JavaScript is a suboptimal programming language because it has too many features, and on top of that they tacked on yet more features recently. I wouldn't call CSS lousy either, and the API of the DOM even got better over the years.

We almost never phase anything out, and that's a problem, but I think the core issue causing suckage within the 3 pillars (4 if you count the DOM separately) is that they have been explicitly designed to not work together very well. While you can - and often are forced to - extend CSS and HTML with JavaScript, they didn't make the interplay between them especially synergistic.

As for

      HTML? Not perfect, but plenty good enough.

no, I don't think so, especially if we're discarding JS and CSS as garbage, HTML does not deserve to get a free pass.

      Even if we wanted to improve it, there are no obvious candidates to do the work.

I don't get why we're all of a sudden in an arbitrarily constructed situation where the whole web platform can never be iterated on again. Ever. But if the point is that whatever comes next probably won't come out of a committee that sounds about right.

I agree that _some_ of the frameworks mentioned exist to work around the issues we created in the browser platform. Especially the functionality of React should be considered for an adoption scenario, maybe not the exact React API, but something along those lines that makes working on (or at least applying) diffs easier. The same goes for handlebars-like templating. I would rather see some of these adopted than the effort that goes into giving classes to JavaScript.

<comment><USER8> > _I think JavaScript is a suboptimal programming language because it has too > many features, and on top of that they tacked on yet more features > recently._

No, that's not what makes a programming language "suboptimal".

(In fact following this logic to the inverse would make something like Brainfuck the optimal language).

It's not the number of features that makes a language problematic (of which Javascript, even ES7, doesn't have more than Python or Ruby do, and those are considered quite OK languages).

It's suitability to the task (e.g. you wouldn't want to use Fortran for text processing), how well the features play together (you don't want conflicting behaviors and edge cases a la C++), expressibility, aesthetics, coherence (and of course, tooling, speed, ubiquitness, etc).

> _I wouldn 't call CSS lousy either_

But CSS is lousy. It was overdesigned in parts nobody cares about, underdesigned where it would matter, an ad-hoc model for styling, and even mis-named, as it not only styles, it also layouts. And in that area it has been horrible, failing for decades to provide the most basic blocks to build layouts, and having people use hacks like "floats" to do so.

<comment><USER7> _> (In fact following this logic to the inverse would make something like Brainfuck the optimal language)._

You can reduce any argument to an absurd extreme. It's fair and fine to disagree with every single opinion I express, but I don't recognize your impression of that particular point as something I wrote.

My point was, and I'm sorry if I failed to get this across, that in my opinion there are bad parts in JS which could have been stripped away, making it better for an admittedly arbitrary as-defined-by-Udo's-mood-today value of "better".

Every single thing about this discussion, including the original article, is a matter of opinion. I agree with much of what you said about CSS and the need for a language to fit a purpose, and I don't want you to get the impression that I'm trying to say everything about HTML/CSS/JS is awesome.

<comment><USER8> > _You can reduce any argument to an absurd extreme. It 's fair and fine to > disagree with every single opinion I express, but I don't recognize your > impression of that particular point as something I wrote._

You're right on this.

On my end though, I accept the other extreme of what I said: a language can have the most features any other language has times two, and still be great.

That is, number of features is not really relevant as to whether a language is good or not.

People seem to think for example "oh, adding this and that would make Java too complicated and too hard to learn etc". At the same time nobody complaints against C# who has twice the number of features or even more. In fact most people find programming in C# is a joy compared to Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I lean toward languages with static typing for application development, but now that there is ES6 and typed arrays, JavaScript is a pretty nice language to program in. And there are a number of very powerful APIs available to browser JS that many people still aren't aware of/don't use to their full potential: WebRTC, Web Audio, WebGL, Transferable Objects in Web Workers, and so forth.

I've now stopped using jQuery for DOM manipulations, and use plain JavaScript in most cases involving simple manipulations (I do use React for complex applications).

CSS has some problems that grid and Flexbox should help alleviate.

But all in all, I'd say the Web is in a pretty good state.

<comment><USER10> I agree. As a C++ developer of ten years (before switching two years back), trust me when I say: JavaScript is not a bad language at all. Six years ago I used to laugh at the language. It has come a _long_ way since then (or I've learned more). So much so, it is now my favorite language.

As a side note: do try to _not_ convert JavaScript into a static language -- there are certain types of boilerplate/generated code that I could never eliminate with C++ due to static typing. With JS, it was a breeze.

<comment><USER11> Unsurprisingly, from the point of view of a C++ programmer, JS doesn't look bad at all.

<comment><USER12> That's not generally true. Another C++ dev here. I wish Dart had more success... If I were forced today (to do front-end) at least it should be TypeScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The basic problem can be described quite simply. HTML was designed for the World Wide Web - a matrix of hyperlinked documents. For that purpose it more or less has succeeded (some people were more ambitious about what authoring hypertext should have achieved but I'll ignore that wrinkle). However, these days people want to do things with the web other than write hypertext - they're wanting applications on the web in just the same way we want applications on our computers or apps on our phones. And for THAT purpose, HTML / CSS / DOM is utter gobshite. If I want to write an application, the bottom of layer of that shouldn't be "now convert that into something that perverts document layout of the browser to look like something that hasn't been laid out like an HTML document".

We need a technology that is suitable as a compilation target: a virtual machine. It can be optimised to hell (better than JS which necessarily is always compromised by having to be JavaScript and not byte code) and we need a suite of basic machine systems - sound, graphics, storage. We're not really all that far off from these things with what is supplied with HTML 5 it just sucks that the core of the affair - HTML/CSS/JS - is rotten through and through.

<comment><USER14> I think UI really shines using the Web stack because it was built using async tools from the very beginning. UI development should be async from the get go. In other non-webby systems you do UI using async but you're still using blocking tools (for example by using Java's mixture of async for UI but blocking for other stuff). JavaScript on the other hand, and all of its libraries, are entirely async which makes it a pleasure to work with - it's a much more natural environment to be doing UI in (single thread and everything is there to be used without multi-threading complicated stuff).

This is a big insight that JS and other webby-tools have given to the UI world, and I strongly believe something entirely async needs to exist for the desktop/mobile world as well - fortunately there is in the form of node.js/electron/nw.js.

Now in terms of how that's handled behind the scenes, I don't really care (use a nice VM, use a whatever mixture of whatever you want). Just give me a fully- async toolset to build my app in a single thread and I'm happy.

<comment><USER13> I can't agree that UI via JS async is a pleasure to work with. I can't think of a UI technology I've found less pleasurable to work with. No - there was an ancient C GUI that used all C Macros to compose - that was worse... but only just.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tim Bray or not, it's irresponsible to point out a pile of shit without pointing to a shovel. (And for the record I disagree that there is a pile of shit. I see a bazaar of indy components.)

The browser exists in open opposition to iOS and Android, technically, culturally, and stewardship-wise. No-one in their right mind is going to pick a web host that charges you 30% of revenue. And yet, that's what Apple has managed to get (and they just control the BLOB distribution channel, they don't even provide runtime servers!).

The whole shebang is sorting itself out and I for one think it's going to be very, very cool.

<comment><USER16> > No-one in their right mind is going to pick a web host that charges you 30% > of revenue.

Eh? What stops you from publishing a free app with ads?

<comment><USER17> Integrity? User experience?

<comment><USER16> Nobody seems to care about that on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What frustrates me about these kind of articles is that they ignore things other than technical perfection. Yes, the web platform isn't the ideal work environment, but at least its got mass adoption and has some kind of standard. Its much easier to program a web front end than it is to program and distribute a gui application using qt. Yes, the web development area needs improvement. JS, CSS, etc. aren't perfect, but improvements are being made, the technology is being pushed forward with every new version number.

<comment><USER19> I disagree when you say that its easier to program web front-end than Qt/GUI application. Although improvements are being made, they are mostly patches rather than rethinking the design given the current usage. I do agree with the author in that there are many broken tools and languages.

<comment><USER20> It may be easier to program a Qt application, but it's not easier to program and _distribute_ a Qt application.

<comment><USER21> Distribution seems like an easy problem to solve... App stores or software repositories. Am I missing something here? In 2015 all the major platforms have or the other other.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. For every web startup or established player, there's an equivalent native app running on a mobile phone, or also on the Desktop (from Facebook, and Twitter to Skype etc).

<comment><USER22> What is the native equivalent to Facebook?

<comment><USER8> The Facebook mobile app.

(Famously it was original done as a web-widget and Zuckenburg admitted this was a mistake and turned it to fully native UI).

<comment><USER20> "fully native" just means that it has multiple web views rather than one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I basically agree, except that I really like JavaScript (the language, not the APIs necessarily) and I think it gets a bad rap.

<comment><USER24> I have only programmed in Ruby and Java and Javascript (and the first two only a little). ES5 and before js does seem worse than the other languages I've experienced, but not by much. And ES6 is sort of a joy to write. Leaving callbacks behind for promises and writing in a largely functional style is very satisfying in js right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Popular javascript frameworks exist to "work around" problems with javascript and CSS frameworks exist to "work around" problems with CSS?

There's no magic with Angular or Bootstrap, they're codifying an approach using 100% native JS or CSS. Even SASS and LESS are just alternative ways to produce CSS. This is not novel in computing.

<comment><USER26> Totally true. That's like saying the Ruby on Rails exists because Ruby is somehow deficient.

<comment><USER27> But, your analogy is flawed; the situations are incomparable.

You're not forced to use Rails for your server application, many other software exists _as well_ as Rails: Django, PHP, etc. However you /are/ forced to use Javascript, CSS and the DOM; Unless you're a Big Browser Vendor and can try and coerce support (and even so, the amount of websites made in something like Dash is pitiful afaik). People made frameworks and libraries that make it bearable (SCSS, JQuery, etc), but that doesn't mean everything is solved...

<comment><USER25> That's a totally different analogy altogether. The argument expressed on that page isn't that there is a lack of choices, but that the choices are inherently flawed (and somehow "fixed" by frameworks that lie on top).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I happen to like JavaScript but I agree about HTML, CSS, and the DOM. Actually I would like them to die. It doesn't take a PHD to see that we've moved beyond what the original platform was designed to do. It was designed for documents and styling those documents, but very little of what we do today is making documents. Webapps are king now and designing them means having to work around this outdated platform built for documents. It's so bad that now we require books such as JavaScript the Good Parts to explicitly tell us how to avoid these warts.

Instead of iterating further on HTML I think a new open platform should be built that specifically targets interactivity and building applications. Keep HTML for documents, what it was meant for, and begin focusing on something that can address the current needs of developers.

<comment><USER28> _very little of what we do today is making documents_

Do you spend more of your time on the web using applications than you do reading documents?

I kind of doubt it. Maybe. But probably not.

It may be that you spend more time _making_ web applications than documents. That's understandable.

But is the web primarily for you as a developer, or as a user?

<comment><USER29> I would say a substantial amount of time is spent by most users using applications. For instance, Facebook might eat up more than 50% of some users time on the internet, which I think falls under the category of application. Or Youtube, Gmail, etc.

There may be a small minority or users who spend a lot of time reading documents (and I applaud them!), but most users are interacting with web applications.

<comment><USER30> Of the three examples you gave -- Facebook, YouTube, and Gmail -- you could make a good case that only Gmail is actually an _application:_ it's a mail client that runs in the browser. YouTube is arguably almost as document- centric than Hacker News is; it's simply that the documents in question are built around embedded videos and their comments. Facebook is somewhere in the middle. It's accreted application-like qualities over the years, but at its core it's assembling a list of text and image items -- i.e., documents -- into a master timeline.

I'd submit that an awful lot of web sites that people spend time on have been made _very_ JS-heavy and "application-y" despite being fundamentally document- driven. In part I'm sure this is due to the rise of native mobile applications -- have your server just use a JSON API and make your "web page" a JavaScript application that talks to it the same way your iOS and Android apps do. That development model has become the hammer web developers are using to hit an awful lot of things that maybe really aren't that nail-like.

<comment><USER31> But what are emails if not documents? Social media is just fancy document sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's the same problem XML has. It's bloated and unreadable for a human. YAML is much better in that regard, and I wonder if one could build a document language with a syntax that resemble json.

Have you ever opened the html content of any common webpage ? It's insane, in size and indenting, it's impossible to make sense of it, it would make much more sense to have an _open_ binary format and let developers deal with it. HTML has way too many attribute that stacked on each others. People will defend its openness, but I pity the guys who write html parser for internet browsers.

HTML thrived because its openness allowed to bypass microsoft and its closed solutions, but other than that...

</comment><comment><USER33> They are all "done" in that it is unlikely that anything will replace them any time soon. We don't event have, AFAICT, anything on the horizon. But there's a reason for that, and that is that the HTML/JS/CSS stack is the "virtual machine" or "assembly language" of UI development, and as such, we can't any more say they suck than does programming in assembly language. Assembly language is the "given" \- unless you build your own CPU. This stack is likewise the "given" at the moment, and developers build an amazing array of tool, services, and billion dollar companies on this VM. Nobody controls this VM, so nobody can engage in rent-seeking behaviour. This has the pleasant effect also that most libraries built on top of are also open-source, and we end up with a very Darwinian landscape. We are now in the Cambrian Explosion, and the body plans that evolve must, by that way of thinking, be the best adapted for their environment.

</comment><comment><USER34> HTML has many areas to improve still -- for example HTML-next can make it easier to do hypertext markup to a list of articles, including article title, author, date, contact links to social sites, and some summary text.

(Currently this is accomplished by munging the tags for cite, article, author, and jumping through some small hoops for microformats.)

</comment><comment><USER35> Different people have different problems. For a web dev HTTP is "basically OK" as author says, but for a network engineer it is very much not (to the point that 2.0 was created to be completely different). I personally don't see how some new html/js/css dialect could efficiently solve the problems for everyone out there. How do you make both CoffeeScript and Dart user happy with a single syntax? I prefer to have a bunch of specialized high-level tools to choose from depending on a situation, than forcing them all into some one-size-fits- all mishmash (which almost always fails)

</comment><comment><USER36> Joking about how html6 should be p,a,li,h,span only I googled it. And some people are pretty serious about a massive future version [http://www.html6.io/](http://www.html6.io/)

<comment><USER37> "This specification is about the 6th version of HТML (HyperTurtle Markup Language), not HTML"

<comment><USER38> "HТML uses a Cyrillic 'Т' to avoid any possible confusion with HTML." brb laughing until I cry

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> As long as there are very common things that you can only do with JavaScript, HTML is not done. With declarative syntax the browser can be so much faster.

</comment><comment><USER40> Headline means HTML is in an acceptable state, a little misleading

</comment><comment><USER41> As long as we distribute "HTML is done" messages in HTML, it is not done. Well played, though.

<comment><USER42> This is the problem with reading only the title of an article...

<comment><USER41> I did read the entirety of the article. Do you mind elaborating?

<comment><USER42> He's not saying "HTML is done" as in "over" or "not to be used". He seems to mean something along the lines of "feature complete" and suggests further efforts focus on parts of the web that are lacking (JavaScript, DOM, CSS).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There needs to come a point where we let html and javascript exist for static linked documents. And build something better for our applications. Java and Silverlight have failed spectacularly at this so that future does seem quite bleak. There is still some hope with chrome plugins I think.

</comment><comment><USER44> With CSS, the concept of differentiated HTML tags basically became obsolete. The purpose of HTML now is just to break apart and identify the content fields in an XML format. The only tags I really use in the HTML body are _div_ and _a_ \- and I only use _a_ because I can't add a _href_ attribute into a _div_. Some people have tried to argue against this way of doing things ("divitus") but as far as I can tell their criticisms are pedantic, not practical. If some one has a good practical argument for specialized HTML tag names, I'd love to hear it.

<comment><USER45> The argument against this approach is that it's not always humans accessing web pages. And even if it is humans, sometimes they need computer assistance to interpret the content. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_HTML)

<comment><USER44> As the article says, this is equivalently achieved by naming div classes and IDs (or some other attribute like _itemprop_ a la schema.org). Also I'd say a completely style-free HTML scheme with open-ended semantic tag names (XML) styled by CSS is equivalent. The point is HTML doesn't serve a useful styling purpose.

<comment><USER45> I don't have a strong opinion on whether browsers should provide default styling, as it's trivial to override (although many web pages do rely on it). I agree that HTML tag names don't serve a very useful styling purpose, but they provide a useful structural purpose that cannot be easily replaced by using open-ended tag names or classnames. Custom Elements ([http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/custom/](http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/custom/)) are in the process of being implemented, but I don't think that's an argument for throwing out the standard, structural elements that provide a common API for interpreting document structure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prospecting for High Profile Consultants or Agencies - <AUTHOR> This question is to the leads or owners of high volume consulting or digital agencies. My consulting business is about 1 year and a half old and I still feel like we haven't developed a working prospecting or sales generation method.
Considering the point of inflection for sales/revenue in your businesses, did you find a silver-bullet? If it wasn't just one thing, were there steps or progressions you took towards creating a successful sales pipeline?
If there was one thing you would have done differently or changed early on, what would that have been?
And, is there any other advice you might have for someone in my position? <comment><USER2> What does your consulting business specialise in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Custom software development. A lot of Web and Mobile applications, but we have dabbled in business analysis tools, scripts for data collection/digestion, and automated deployment pipelines.</comment></comment>


Slavery Ensnares Thousands in U.K. Here's One Teenage Girl's Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/world/europe/uk-modern-slavery.html <comment><USER2> This is an important topic, but some of the comments here are shameful. Stop spreading hate.

<comment><USER3> What's shameful is that you are willing to passively allow the raping of women and children in the name of some misplaced sense of progressive / liberal morality.

I am perfectly open to diversity, as long as the people brought in are civil and open to assimilate to our culture!</comment></comment>


Grommet – User Experience for the Enterprise - <AUTHOR> http://www.grommet.io/docs/ <comment><USER2> At first glance, this project looks like it's mostly a widget library built on top of ReactJS. Grommet may have grander ambitions than that (similar to how Qt has lots of non-GUI components such as file access, cryptographic hashes, etc.).

As for why they characterize it as "enterprise", you can look at their examples from [http://www.grommet.io/docs/design/showcase](http://www.grommet.io/docs/design/showcase)

Also look at the blog post: [http://blog.grommet.io/2015/11/23/what-is- grommet/](http://blog.grommet.io/2015/11/23/what-is-grommet/)

Looking over the widgets, this is not something to write apps like:

\- 2D games

\- raster graphics such as visualizing a stadium of available seats for customers to choose and buy tickets

... hence the "enterprisey" nature of the UX framework. It has dashboards, datagrids, calendar picker, etc to help you write typical line-of-business apps.

</comment><comment><USER3> Salesforce's one looks more developed than HP's. [https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/](https://www.lightningdesignsystem.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> The text font looks very bad at "normal" size on my very typical enterprise corporate Win7 1920x1080 monitor.

It appears to be the Source Sans Pro font, if I remove that everything looks OK.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's making this look more "enterprise" than any other CSS framework? Agreed that it looks nice, but I don't see how it's geared toward enterprise products.

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the support for IE? I can't find it. I figure that would be very important if it's going after enterprise companies.

</comment><comment><USER7> But where's the LCARS interface?

</comment><comment><USER8> Please don't take over users scrolling.</comment>


Show HN: Follow Hackers. Chrome extension to follow your favorite HN users - <AUTHOR>

Download: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hapackcnjagkljgfjlgonohbabnfgopc
Source: https://github.com/ImFatYoureFat/follow_hackers
I built this extension this past weekend.  It uses Javascript (obviously), python (Flask) and Redis.  I would love to hear any comments or suggestions.Thanks. <comment><USER2> Save yourself a copy'n'paste:

Download: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hapackcnjagkljgfjl...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hapackcnjagkljgfjlgonohbabnfgopc)

Source: <https://github.com/ImFatYoureFat/follow_hackers>

</comment><comment><USER3> Biggest problem with Chrome plugins for HN is they clash with existing ones (from my experience) eg <http://hckrnews.com/about.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice extension!

This is completely off topic, but Chrome store URLs are just horrible. hapackcnjagkljgfjlgonohbabnfgopc?

</comment><comment><USER3> Seen this? <http://hackerfollow.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> interesting implementation. I really liked the idea of just building a restful interface that people could plug into however they wanted to.

<comment><USER3> the best way to scrape HN would be for each user to submit an item's HTML or its cache of it when idle and when called upon. It could do a pre-check of the item, the time, size, # comments then do the whole page if called upon. You could keep a tally of who's submitting what. The system could go open-source as I'm sure other sites could use it. Perhaps the plugin just digs into a brower's cache at set periods of time. There might be copyright issues.</comment></comment></comment>


Los Angeles is suing a landlord for evicting tenants to rent units on Airbnb - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/712533/los-angeles-is-suing-an-apartment-owner-for-allegedly-evicting-tenants-to-rent-units-on-airbnb/ <comment><USER2> If L.A. is worried about housing affordability, the real solution is to build more housing: [http://la.curbed.com/2015/3/18/9979526/housing-crisis-los- an...](http://la.curbed.com/2015/3/18/9979526/housing-crisis-los-angeles- construction):

 _While Los Angeles County built the most out of any California county in the years between 1980 and 2010, it was waaaay less than it needed to keep housing prices from getting ridiculous. For comparison, in the same 30-year period, "the number of housing units in the typical U.S. metro grew by 54 percent, compared with 32 percent for the state's coastal metros. Home building was even slower in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the housing stock grew by only around 20 percent."_

We have the technologies to increase housing supply, but we've collectively made deploying them illegal.

<comment><USER3> What happens when you build more supply, but increasing amounts of people just buy up the units not to live or rent out, but in order to run virtual hotel businesses on Airbnb?

The better supply side solution to increase available housing stock is to build more purpose built rental. This would eliminate the possibility of new rental supply turning into short term rental.

<comment><USER4> If you keep adding supply, the bottom will fall out of that market as they compete with one another, and the market will balance out as they sell, or seek long term tenants.

<comment><USER5> The question is, is it feasible to build enough supply for this to happen?

I mean, if SF ever hit "affordable" on a median family income, the population would probably be tens of millions.

Keep in mind that tearing down old housing and building new is not very cost efficient: you are paying for land, and the old structure (which you are tearing down), and the demo of the old structure. I live in LA, and my structure, which was built in the 70s, is still valued at more than the land it's built on.

<comment><USER4> > The question is, is it feasible to build enough supply for this to happen?

Given current market prices? Absolutely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like there has been a growing body of "bad news" for Airbnb lately. Several major European cities (Paris, Berlin) are tightening regulations and limiting short-term rentals. NY, one of Airbnb's largest single markets, if not the largest, stands ready to essentially ban "whole apartment" rentals entirely as other cities seem to be gearing up to consider their own measures.

I'm not saying that any or all of this threatens what Airbnb is trying to do, and in fact I think such restrictions will make model better and more sustainable in the long run. Still, for a company that is, out of the necessity of their valuation, as bent on maintaining growth as Airbnb, the skies appear to be darkening.

</comment><comment><USER7> So a landlord pulled an illegal dick move and is being sued for it by the city in accordance with their laws. Why is this newsworthy?

Oh right, because putting "sued" and "airbnb" in the title equals clicks, despite Airbnb having jack shit to do with this case beyond being the unfortunate 3rd party.

<comment><USER8> It not illegal potentially. He left the rental market and entered the hotel one.

The courts have to decide if that is legal or not.

<comment><USER7> As I understood it, the violation was because they re-rented the property without notifying the former tenants and giving them whatever the legal term of art is for "dibs." I could be wrong, not a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Supply and Demand.

If demand rises -- and it does, the population of LA is increasing by roughly 20,000 annually (from [http://www.clrsearch.com/Los-Angeles- Demographics/CA/Populat...](http://www.clrsearch.com/Los-Angeles- Demographics/CA/Population-Growth-and-Population-Statistics))

\-- if 20,000 per year are added to LA's population, you need more rental units.

Here's a potential SAT question in the 'Logical Reasoning' part:

"A large city experiences 20,000 population growth per year. Because restaurants, doctors, barbers, dentists, and other service providers are not growing fast enough in the city to accommodate this large growth in citizens, should the city:

[A] Provide incentives for new restaurants, doctors, barbers, dentists, etc. to move into the city and start operating to meet the need?

[B] Or should the city impose caps/limits on the fees/charges of those restaurants, doctors, barbers, dentists, etc. who already operate in the city, which will create disincentives for new operators to move to the city to satisfy increasing demand?

Supply and Demand. The demand for EVERYTHING is affected by 20,000 new citizens in LA each year.

In 10 years there 100,000 to 200,000 more citizens in LA.

With the disincentives for new landlords to enter the LA market, there will be an even more severe shortage of units.

"Shortage of willing landlords."

The old adage is this:

"You cannot price-limit, and regulate, and tax your way to an over-supply of housing."

It's really, REALLY _awful_ that city leaders don't understand that.

Guess which cities have the greatest shortage of landlords?

Los Angeles San Francisco New York City San Jose

(those are the U.S. cities with the longest period of landlord-reducing Rent control laws, by the way)

Can we PLEASE INCREASE THE FREAKING _SUPPLY_ of willing landlords.

PLEASE.

$3500+ for a 1 bedroom apartment is just pyscho.

<comment><USER10> The number of people even on HN that don't seem to grasp supply and demand is shocking. If HN is a relatively intelligent group, imagine how much of the general population will think just price limiting housing will work?

<comment><USER11> We grasp it just fine. We also take a dim view of asshole landlords that decide to skirt the law.

<comment><USER12> If the law is stupid it is your patriotic duty to ignore it :)

<comment><USER11> No, it is your duty to work to get it changed. I imagine there are a number of industrial companies that feel workplace safety laws and laws banning the dumping of waste in waterways to be stupid, would you be ok if they ignored those?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> With so much regulations around what you can or cannot do with your own property, this sounds like a socialist state.

<comment><USER14> Urban areas always have laws about what you can do with your property.

<comment><USER13> That is surprising. I live in India, and there's no regulation around renting it out or asking tenants to vacate. As long as both landlord and tenant adhere to the agreement document, all is good. No government interference.

Government enforcing regulations asking a landlord that he can or cannot use his home for letting out to a person of his choice seems very regressive to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That title needs work, I had no idea what it meant until I clicked the article.

<comment><USER16> Yup -- it's missing the word "landlords" after the word suing

<comment><USER17> Ok, we'll add that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems as though he did leave the rental market and went into the hotel market.

so I think they have a good legal argument and IAML.

</comment><comment><USER18> > "[...] abuse platforms like ours in search of a quick buck," Airbnb says in > a statement.

Ah, the verb conjugation game, always fun:

\- I dare. (or disrupt, usage varies.)

\- You transgress.

\- He abuses.

<comment><USER19> You omitted the plural in your [...]

\- He abuses

\- They (real estate speculator _s_ ) abuse.

<comment><USER20> I don't think parent was pointing out a conjugation mistake. Rather, the point is how we will use different words to describe the same event depending on perspective - in order from least to most harsh, first-, second-, and third- person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What are they complaining about. Under the new 'sharing' economy, you don't need to rent one place anymore. You can simply hop week to week from one AirBnB rental to another without being tied down. And you can also hop between jobs as you like without being tied down. This is all in your benefit. Isn't the new 'sharing economy' great?

<comment><USER22> Why get a job? The world is moving to gigs man. Solve the oft-cited zoning crisis that is preventing tall building from low density places like Manhattan and build massive apartment blocks.

Then you'll just need a few fiverr gigs a week and boom, you can rent a different, exciting new apartment every day!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Good. The sooner Airbnb goes away forever, the better.

</comment><comment><USER24> The only noteworthy aspect of this story is that the city attorney is actually taking this particular rent-control law seriously enough to sue a landlord.

A lot of other laws are violated and the city attorney (and law enforcement agencies in general) just ignore the violations. So this tells us a bit about prosecutorial discretion in LA at the current time.</comment>