I miss Windows Phone - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/7/17206174/microsoft-windows-phone-influence-editorial <comment><USER2> I purchased a $30 Windows Phone well after the platform was dead, I just wanted to experience it before it was gone.

For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth. The tile interface worked well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used (even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft, not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android.

As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0] which Google also shut down.

Makes you wonder what would happen if Google pulled all of their iOS apps tomorrow, and then blocked third parties/diminished the mobile browser experience on purpose.

[0] [https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft- kill-...](https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-your- youtube-app-immediately/)

<comment><USER3> From the article cited regarding the YouTube app developed by Microsoft:

> The problems with that, according to Google, are three: the app enables > users to download YouTube videos, prevents ads from being shown, and plays > videos whose owners have set to only play on certain platforms. Microsoft's > app, Google says, violates the YouTube terms of service, and uses the > YouTube logo in a way that contravenes the company's branding guidelines.

Is this just an excuse used by Google, or did they really have these features? Because I could understand why Google doesn't want a service to demonitize their service. Why wouldn't Microsoft just remove those features? It seems like a reasonable response.

<comment><USER4> Since it would be trivial for Goog to expose all of this functionality in their API, I consider all of this BS PR by google.

It would also be trivial for google to make a basic app for the 3rd biggest phone OS.

But since Google makes an OS and doesn't want other OSes, any actions they have other than support are suspect.

It's like when MS said that it was possible for PC sellers to not bundle IE. Sure it's possible, but it was just BS because it was completely MS' prerogative.

<comment><USER5> Can somebody breakdown which companies are on each side of this corporate war? Is it Microsoft + Facebook vs Google + Apple?

<comment><USER6> Why do you treat this as only having two sides?

In the "Platform" battlefields you have Microsoft, Apple and Google fighting for the end-users. On the infrastructure side Amazon is also making a play here with all of the AWS options and Google and Microsoft are also fighting there.

In the "Social" battlefield, you have Facebook, with Microsoft+LinkedIn+Xbox carving out some niches and Google flailing wildly at everything.

In the "Creepy Stalkering" battlefield (which overlaps some with Social) you have Facebook getting people to give up data and Google just silently watching .everything.you.do. _muahahahaha_. Facebook also watches as much as possible via website badges and sharing, but doesn't have near the reach of Google with searches + Analytics.

I'm sure there are other battlefields I'm not listing here including things like overlap into the offline world ("Political Influence" anyone?), but it's far from just a 2-sided battle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia 920 was by far the best phone I have ever used.

My friends look at me funny when I say that.

There were so many things they did right. Some random things off the top of my head:

\- Internet Explorer had the address bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't get how nobody else does this.

\- The tiles work really very well (big one). The usability of shortcuts + active information + dense layout on your homescreen.

\- The back-button behavior was perfect. It made sense.

\- Very snappy response throughout.

\- Lots of pros on the hardware of the Lumia 920 itself but that's a different story.

\- Best keyboard/swipe setup.

\- Lots of thoughtful design elements.

There's all kinds of stuff that was a joy.

I tried Windows Phone 10.1 Dev release and that was horrible.

I do wish Windows Phone continued to live though.

<comment><USER8> New mobile chrome has the controls on the bottom. It's dumb. I'm using Firefox now.

<comment><USER9> It was an option, and they already reverted it because of backlash.

<comment><USER7> I'm curious, why would there be backlash against something that's optional?

They could leave the default as the least offensive option.

<comment><USER9> Because if the benefit of the code being there isn't worth the maintenance effort required to secure, maintain, and develop it further, then it's removed in chrome.

<comment><USER7> In general, that's the sane argument against feature bloat.

In this instance, is the effort required to maintain a layout option really that much more? I don't know the answer, it's a genuine question.

Also, was there no benefit? I didn't even realize the feature existed because I searched for it before it was introduced and moved to Firefox.

I know nothing about the history of this feature in Chrome, but from 10000 feet, this looks like a heavy handed move to remove a feature instead of making it optional, especially in the times of large + tall touchscreens.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, there may be, and probably are some good reasons for these.

<comment><USER9> It's clearly a "controversial" decision by the Chrome team, but IIRC they have a fairly strict rule about "options", so they seem to like to err on the side of "less options" in most cases.

But in terms of the "cost" of something like this. When you run at Chrome's scale, it can be quite a bit. From documentation, help articles, UI team costs (okay now we need to make sure all UI changes look good and work well in both configurations), development costs (when 1% of your users represent over 10 million people, there is a WIDE configuration of devices it runs on), and testing cost (either automated or manual, it scales VERY poorly with the number of options as possible permutations required to fully test it goes up at an insane rate).

At a certain scale, the better option (at least in my opinion) is to "choose" for the user if you are fairly confident that the extreme majority will be happy with it, doubly so if the default option doesn't "break" anything for most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Many aspects of Windows Phone were thoughtfully designed, but they waded into a market where customers expected to install arbitrary apps.

There were some high-profile holdouts like Snapchat, whose lack hurt the phone (or hurt retention) among the valuable, younger demographics, while everyone else has been conditioned to be used to a zillion single-use apps, from their bank, their fast-casual restaurant, to throwaway games and random tools that try to imbue phones with some productivity utility.

A platform with a low market share and confusing (and ever-changing) developer story couldn't compete in this market, even if they kept putting out decent hardware for not a lot of money.

They could have reframed the expectations, and marketed it as a business OS, but with a rapidly declining BlackBerry, they didn't want to pursue what seemed like a failing niche. Or, they could have not screwed up Desktop Windows' app story so much, which exacerbated the issues with developing for Windows Phone.

Or they could have arrived at the market several years later, when Progressive Web Apps graduate from wishful thinking tech demos to a viable way of authoring software to be distributed over either URLs or app stores. This is the future that Google wants, their medusa-like competitor who tries to balance their desire to preserve and gatekeep the Open Web with their large install-base of Android phones running apps written in quasi-Java that they got sued over.

Windows Phone was a technically sound product positioned awkwardly, and they couldn't persuade enough third-parties to deliver on the expectations that customers expected. But they neither doubled down, nor did an immediate reversal (e.g. Surface RT), so in typical Microsoft fashion they let it flail around for years without any strong messaging to reassure users (remember this from Silverlight? Zune? XNA?).

<comment><USER11> _but they waded into a market where customers expected to install arbitrary apps._

Of course. The locked-down nature of the platform was a big turn-off for me too, since branding it Windows made everyone expect it would be more like desktop Windows with a different UI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I used Windows Phone for several years. It was a refreshing take on a mobile OS, and to this day I still think it had the best touch keyboard with the most satisfying tapping sound effects.

When I finally did put it out to pasture, it was a breath of fresh air though; I really had no idea how much I'd been missing out on in terms of apps and features on iOS/Android, and how many Windows Phone irritations/limitations I'd just been putting up with.

That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market.

<comment><USER13> > That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new > ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and > photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows > Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market.

I don't think so. While there's definitely some level of "App Fatigue", there's a lot of apps that users would _never_ give up. e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook (& Messenger), Snapchat, CityMapper, Google Maps, any banking apps, just to name a few big names that would be used day-to-day. And then there's a _lot_ of miscellaneous apps that I don't use regularly, but do use occasionally, like all the airline ones, or food delivery, or Trainline, or Taxi apps, etc.

The transport ones are notable because they make it really easy to add the ticket or boarding pass to the iOS Wallet, which means I have offline access to them (very important when travelling).

I think most users have found the subset of apps they _really_ want, and don't have a pressing need to look for more, yes. However, the apps they do have, they would definitely miss if they were gone.

Now, a lot of those apps might not be necessary if the mobile web site integrated with the OS well enough (mostly notifications, mic/webcam access, Apple/Google pay equivalent, responsiveness), though some probably wouldn't. WhatsApp is a good example here - all the content is stored _locally_ , on the phone. Making it a mobile website as the _default_ option would go against what they are trying to offer (Signal is the same, I believe?).

But since none of the existing platforms offer full integration like that (AFAIK), there would probably have to be some extra work building out those features on the mobile site. And I guess that brings us full circle back to the "no one builds anything for Platform X because it has no users" problem?

<comment><USER14> I think I only use a few apps, yet whenever I look at the open-app history on my Android, I am always surprised at the sheer number of apps I have used recently.

The long tail of uncommonly used apps do matter e.g. a bus tracking app I only use when visiting my brother (in another city).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Not widely known - MSFT was throwing around cash at developers and brands to make apps for windows phone. Even providing developer shops to code it.

MSFT handed us a check and a dev shop to pay with it. We designed the app in their ui paradigm and had fun doing it. Had enough money left over to take the team out for a fancy dinner when it was all done.

<comment><USER16> They did this later on.

In 2011, Android Market (Google play) cost $25 for a lifetime developer account. You could develop apps on Windows, Mac or Linux. It came with an emulator. So for the cost of $25, anyone on any major developer platform could write an app.

In 2011, you could only program Windows Phone app on Windows (I don't even have a Windows machine where I live). Windows Phone Marketplace charged $99 a year for a developer account. You can say Apple did this to, or that it should be nothing, but apparently it was not a winning strategy. I know a college student who shelled out the $25 back then and published an app on Google Play, now he works as an Android developer for a Fortune 500 company. Perhaps the idea paying four times that, and on a yearly basis no less, to Microsoft, was off-putting. People can straighten their tie and say any business going off on such a venture can afford $100 a year as a gatekeeper, but it didn't work out so well for Microsoft. Apple was already in the pole position so they could get away with it.

But you're right, after throwing up these barriers to developer entry at first, they started raining cash on developers to make apps, providing developer shops to code it and so on.

<comment><USER17> I doubt that many developers saw having a Windows machine as an impediment to building apps. Microsoft does still have 90% market share in PCs.

<comment><USER18> What's the marketshare on developer machines though? And build servers? What about Docker?

It's so nice to be able to have any CI build your Android apps and Travis CI supports building iOS apps, too.

<comment><USER19> Pretty much the same regarding developer machines.

Besides my stay at research institutes, I never worked on companies where IT allowed anything other than Windows as development machines.

Linux when required is only VM based or servers accessed via ssh.

Macs are only allowed on macOS/iOS related projects.

Docker remains a buzzword for the majority of customers, another box to tick besides big data and ML on slideware.

<comment><USER17> I wouldn't go that far. I often see cited that 60%+ Of commits on Github come from Macs.

<comment><USER19> Github is a very lousy metric to measure anything relevant to typical enterprise development.

<comment><USER17> Even modern "Enterprise Development" is mostly web based. Few companies these days are developing WinForm apps.

<comment><USER19> So what, we are doing it on Windows laptops and no one is ever allowed to touch Github beyond getting stuff out of there to spare money on licenses.

So no, Githib is not a metric for enterprise development.

And you are right Winforms is legacy, all modern Windows applications are written in WPF.

I have been doing it the last 4 years, and dispite the HN Web bubble, out there in the enterprise there are companies actually adopting UWP and migrating their laptop fleet to Windows 10.

<comment><USER17> It's not about the "HN Web Bubble". I'm on the opposite coast and keep my eye on the job market. There are relatively few jobs for WPF compared to web - even in the enterprise market. Most internal apps these days are web based because of ease of deployment, and TCO. No one wants to maintain a bunch of PCs with the only alternative being a bunch of Citrix Terminals when they can use a web browser.

The writing is on the wall - not even MS is falling over itself to support WPF in .Net Core.

<comment><USER19> So come to Europe. Plenty of WPF jobs here.

Not everyone is using Citrix, and there are many markets, like life sciences, ticketing systems, factory management and many other domains, using non networked devices with native UIs in WPF.

Of course MS is not supporting WPF on .NET Core, they already announced XAML Standard and Xamarin.Forms is going to support Linux and macOS as well.

Also they have big UI announcement planned for BUILD as discussed on .NET Rocks interview with Scott Hunter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Still using a Windows Phone (Nokia 1020) as my main phone.

It's mostly the Nokia parts that I really love, like the transit app, and the fact that it's user-serviceable with minimal tools.

The app ecosystem is actually less of a problem as time goes on; now that Apple and Google ship reasonable browsers in their phones most services I want to use have good mobile web experiences. The real essentials like Pandora / Kindle / WhatsApp are available and still work.

The big pain point for me is Slack's web client, which appears to be gratuitously broken on phones.

<comment><USER21> I use Slack's Windows Phone app on my HP Elite x3. It has some issues but it's functional enough for when I need to use Slack away from my PC.

<comment><USER20> I swear that wasn't in the store when I looked earlier. Updated this year and everything!

Cunningham's Law in action I suppose.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My Lumia 925 is still the best phone I've ever owned. But MS killed itnfor themselves.

Windows Phones were kinda big in Asia. Used to see lots of people in Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, with them all the time. But the high end phones never came to these markets. People I worked with wanted all the new phones but MS didn't release them in Singapore for over 12 months. People gave up and went android and iOS.

I went Android then iOS. There's a lot I miss about windows phone. And Poki is still hands down the best pocket reader app.

<comment><USER23> I thought here in Germany they also were making respectable inroads (although that might be distorted since the brightly-colored Lumnias were so noticable), but then they let it languish at a point where they would have needed to double down on having up-to-date and interesting devices around. Most people aren't buying new phones every year, so getting market share will mean sticking around for at least a few cycles. Apparently MS didn't think that'd work out in enough markets?

<comment><USER19> They were, at a given point it was quite common to see them while commuting.

A few of our customers also had them as official device for their regular employees.

<comment><USER24> UK: 'jack the lads' used to have lumina phones - the ones that you could get for £100 or that came with contracts. I used to see those a lot outside the local football ground. The central messaging queue seemed popular and video watching &c.

Then they disappeared to be replaced by huge Samsungs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I feel like Microsoft has a string of devices which could have been good to great, and they keep just missing the mark somehow - windows phone, ms band, surface hub, heck even zune was as good as an ipod at a lower price point.

Not sure why they keep dropping the ball, lack of focus? Not willing to stay the course? I get dropping zune as the market had moved on, but band was getting good reviews when they dropped it and wearables are still growing. And for the life of me I don't understand why they don't have a motto of a hub in every college class - that device is so perfect for facilitating remote class attendance.

<comment><USER26> Zune HD really was a good player. I switched to it after 3 Ipod Nanos in a row had trouble holding a charge about five minutes after the warranty period expired. Cheaper price, longer battery life, better (imo) interface, just poor marketing and hard to beat the Itunes Juggernaut. If you subscribed to the $9.99 a month music service then downloading new music and syncing it to the device was smooth and fast and easy in a way that Itunes _still_ hasn't managed. Like you said, no idea why Microsoft keep creating great products but then suck at selling and marketing them.

<comment><USER27> Well it's a good illustration for anyone here: ideas and good software are easy. Building a company that can successfully sell them is the hard part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My only experience with Windows Phone was when I had to port a Cordova app (made with AngularJS) to it. It was a really bad experience for me. The terrible hacks to get the Angular app to even run in the webview on Windows Phone 8.1 was shocking and the performance took a big hit. Bundling and distributing a test version was so complicated without a huge enterprise setup that it was simply not feasible. Windows Phone 10 improved all of that a lot but there were still security hacks necessary for the app to even run. I can only hope developers which created native apps had a better experience than I did.

<comment><USER29> It's not really Windows Phone's fault that Cordova and Angular are so terrible.

<comment><USER14> Of course it is Microsoft's fault. They could have chosen to put resources into making those projects work better on Windows Phone.

Microsoft made a bet on Xamarin instead.

Also you had to use their proprietary touch events in the webview browser, which (a) was buggy, (b) had little information about how to use it in practice, and (c) the webview was a branch of IE11 specific to Windows Phone. I think for Update 1 the webview supported the Apple touch event API but it was broken (disappeared in update 2).

The dumbest thing is that supporting Cordova properly would have immediately got them a whole heap of lesser known apps without having to give money directly to developers. Money multiplier investments are smart.

<comment><USER30> > Of course it is Microsoft's fault.

What? This makes no sense; why would Microsoft be at fault for supporting a platform that makes demonstrably poorer apps? Doing that would just be shooting themselves in the foot. Are Apple and Google at fault for not making Cordova work well on their mobile platforms?

<comment><USER14> > why would Microsoft be at fault for supporting a platform that makes > demonstrably poorer apps?

I have experience developing an app using a WebView, and I agree it is poor. However, it is a good compromise if:

\- a team of one that has experience with HTML5. It is possible to develop an app for Apple, Google, _and_ Windows Phone this way.

\- a web first, mobile second app

\- an app that is more about presenting information than entering data.

> Are Apple and Google at fault for not making Cordova work well on their > mobile platforms?

Irrelevant: they are the incumbents not the chasers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm still using Windows Phone - an HP Elite x3. I always preferred it to Android but I've refused to use Apple products for many years and when I decided I was done with Google products I went back to Windows Phone. I'm not big on apps anyway and I've mostly found it a positive not being able to succumb to the temptation to install time wasting or privacy hating apps. The biggest inconvenience is not being able to use the app for one of our local car sharing services but there is an app for car2go so I've just been using them instead. The official LastPass app is really bad too but I get by with it.

Not sure yet what I'm going to do for my next phone. I've backed the Purism Librem 5 so holding out hope that will actually ship and be a usable option. Biggest challenge for me there would likely be not having WhatsApp or Telegram (Windows Phone still has both).

<comment><USER31> In the same place. Love my Elite x3, will stay on it as long as security updates keep coming every month. May end up having to suffer iOS if nothing new comes out, but I'll never go back to Android. Definitely hope the Librem 5 works out, though have doubts that it will.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love my Windows Phones, even ended up buying WP 10, when the upgrade from 8.1 wasn't possible.

My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed up together.

The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more responsive that Android devices on the same price category.

And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android tools.

<comment><USER32> >My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed up together.

So they osbourned your previous phone and the current phone you have has an OS in maintenance mode and isn't receiving OEM firmware updates.

>The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more responsive that Android devices on the same price category

You realize that the high majority of Windows phone apps aren't written in C++ or .NET native, right?

>And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android tools.

This is hilarious considering the number of times Microsoft osbourned the Windows phone development environment.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust?

It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team.

To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill customer expectations, it is a chaos.

<comment><USER32> >Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust?

C#. Ever hear of it?

>It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team.

At least they're still employed. Windows support team - not so much.

>To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill customer expectations, it is a chaos.

Compared to the Windows store, which is a cesspool of garbage, for both Windows apps and Windows phone apps I would say quality was the furthest thing from their minds.

<comment><USER19> > C#. Ever hear of it?

Yes, apparently it is part of .NET, go figure.

> At least they're still employed. Windows support team - not so much.

Well last time I checked my Windows Phones were still getting more updates than my Android phones.

Quite ironic for a platform that is supposed to be dead with unemployed team

> Compared to the Windows store, which is a cesspool of garbage, for both > Windows apps and Windows phone apps I would say quality was the furthest > thing from their minds.

Not far off from the daily garbage I see on Play Store as well.

<comment><USER32> >Yes, apparently it is part of .NET, go figure.

It's also what most of the apps are written in, aren't they? Unlike C++ and .NET Native.

>Well last time I checked my Windows Phones were still getting more updates than my Android phones.

I'm pretty sure you're not getting firmware updates from the OEM since they abandoned the platform so you only seem to be getting OS updates from Microsoft - who announced they'll be ending updates.

>Quite ironic for a platform that is supposed to be dead with unemployed team

No firmware updates and your OS updates will be ending soon. That looks like an unemployed team to me.

>Not far off from the daily garbage I see on Play Store as well.

The difference is the Play store actually contains all of the apps and they're really nice to use. The Windows store, however, will always be a cesspool. I hear Microsoft is so desperate for apps that their scouring the Internet for PWA apps to put on their store.

<comment><USER19> Better take a compilers course to learn the differences between .NET and .NET Native.

Interesting that you mention PWA, which happen to be pushed by Google's Chrome team, which has some Google IO talks bashing native apps as if Android wasn't made by the same company.

At the same time they are pushing Flutter and Dart as replacement for those stacks.

What a cohesive company, go figure.

<comment><USER32> >Better take a compilers course to learn the differences between .NET and .NET Native.

It would seem you're the one in need of a course due to your inability to differentiate the difference between .NET and .NET Native.

>Interesting that you mention PWA, which happen to be pushed by Google's Chrome team, which has some Google IO talks bashing native apps as if Android wasn't made by the same company.

PWA is a platform for low end phones. It's funny that Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon so fast. When you're that desperate for apps on your cesspool of a store you'll take anything.

>At the same time they are pushing Flutter and Dart as replacement for those stacks.

Flutter and Dart are a cross platform development solution. They're also instrumental to Fuchsia - you know, the OS that'll make Windows suffer the same fate as Windows Phone.

>What a cohesive company, go figure.

Speaking of cohesive, how was your annual re-org?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Sorry to hijack, but the real hero in much of the progress described in the article and in mobile OS overall, is non other than Matias Duarte with webOS. Innovation includes features such as Synergy, Just Type, gesture bar and the card interface.

Highly suggest you watch the launch video from CES 2009:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw)

</comment><comment><USER34> I had a Nokia N9 that shipped with the ill fated Meego OS. Hands down the smoothest operating system I've ever used on a mobile.

<comment><USER35> I agree. The buttonless swipable interface was a joy to use (not least because it made it simple to distinguish between closing an app and putting it in the background) and the single notification/feed homepage was fantastic. Features like tap-to-wake and the glance screen felt so ahead of their time. I've not really found another phone that has been as awesome, and I am still profoundly depressed at how the phone was killed at birth.

<comment><USER36> I'm still using one now as my main phone. The only thing I don't like about it is how you have to hold the on-screen camera button down to auto-focus before taking a picture (making it difficult to do with one hand). Other than that, I've had no issues with it.

<comment><USER37> That's commitment. I loved my N9 about as much as anyone, but for me, the HW just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but perhaps then you wouldn't even need the interface.

Anyway, with faster internals, a sharper screen and an up-to-date browser, I would choose Meego any day of the week. Shame it wasn't the case.

<comment><USER36> > Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but perhaps then you wouldn't even > need the interface.

Well, it's still better than what Symbian provides (I also have an N8). As long as I can browse and post to HN and reddit, use it for off-line GPS, playing music, sms and phone calls, it works well enough for me. It even works for tethering with a USB cable.

I suppose once the battery goes bad, I'll have to move on to something else :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I had a Palm Pré and I miss webOS more than any mobile OS I have ever used.

<comment><USER39> Ah, Palm. I had a few of their Treo series and loved them. In 2002 I had the Internet on my phone! I had email! I had apps! The user experience was clunky compared to what came later, but it was amazing for its day.

WebOS was a good try, but too little and too late. They had a 6-year lead on Apple and they blew it. I happened to run across some former Palm people years later and I was told that PalmOS had stacked up so much technical debt that innovation was very slow.

It's funny how much people today believe that the iPhone was the first smartphone.

<comment><USER40> Same here. I wanted to add that even in 2000 with a Handspring Visor PDA running Palm OS you could sync with the Internet (news, maps, etc ) when it was in the cradle attached to your pc. There was an app where you could manually tell it your location (street intersection) and it would show you restaurants near you. A coworker had a "Ricochet" cellular modem for his Palm device and he would send emails from the Caltrain. This was in 1999-2000. For me, we had versatile computers with apps in our pocket 18 years ago, the difference now is high-bandwidth, cheap, ubiquitous wireless data everywhere you go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> dylan-m Microsoft and Nokia had a really good balance of software and hardware, and it's still a unique contrast to what Google and Apple are doing. I really liked their colourful cases (although the N9 did it best), and I'm still envious of the dedicated shutter button. Why hasn't anyone else done this? It makes way more sense than that goofy "press the volume button to take a picture" hack that Android and iOS have been doing. For one thing, the shutter button is actually on the right side of the phone. With the volume button, they don't even know if it's at the edge. (It probably isn't). And they keep coming up with these weird things like flicking your phone at the lock screen to open the camera app. No, Google, just add a button.

<comment><USER27> Heh wow I've had an Android phone for years and never knew the volume button would take a picture. Who would have thought? But thanks -- that's better than tapping the screen, which was the only way I knew until now.

<comment> dylan-m Glad to help! It's better than nothing, yeah :b And if you have a newer phone version of Android, you might be able to double press the Power button to open the camera. In stock Android, there's a thing in Settings / System / Gestures / Jump to camera.

(Now, imagine if you could open the camera and take a picture _with the same button._ Revolutionary! Someone should patent it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Windows Phone was fun to develop for (not). Especially their native C compilation setup was a nightmare, we had to rewrite most of our code that worked fine on Android and iOS to be ANSI C compatible so that the Visual C 6.0 compiler liked it enough.

<comment><USER42> I think you are confusing Windows Phone and ancient Windows Mobile.

<comment><USER41> No, unfortunately, Windows Phone 7.1 and 8.0 had very limited support for C/C++ libraries (native code). The support that it did have was based off old compilers (maybe it was the only thing they had at the time for ARM processors?). I believe 7.0 had no support for this.

<comment><USER43> 7.x (public) SDK had no support for C/C++ whatsoever, you needed special access and a private SDK to use it. Windows Phone 8.0 allowed C++ 11

<comment><USER44> VS2012 (I guess this was the compiler, maybe it has been upgraded after) had a quite limited support of C++ 11.

Only starting with VS2015 (and then maybe even update 2 IIRC) we had what we can call C++ 11 (for the purpose of not having to port code for it, or such port to be easy, so missing 1 or 2 language and library features can be OK, but missing half of them: less so).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Jumped on Windows phone back when Microsoft started throwing in the towel (some of those sales were just too hard to resist). I know at some point I'll need to leave (probably back to Android), but for now my Win 10m idol 4s is holding up.

<comment><USER46> I have a Nokia 730 Dual Sim. I have had it for close to 3 years. Great build quality. I have dropped it several times and the phone is still intact (touch wood). Battery lasts over two days. Here Maps work just fine. The only downside is there are no user apps. No Firefox, no AnkiDroid, my bank doesn't have a Windows Phone app. Despite lack of apps I am content with the phone. I am trying to spend less time looking at my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Speaking of challenging iOS and Android, not really heard too much from either Firefox OS [1] or Ubuntu Touch [2] - seems as if both have officially been dropped despite looking promising. I think the big two need some competition in the mobile OS space but there doesn't seem to be big support from the actual market itself.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch)

<comment><USER48> FirefoxOS is back for "smart featurephones" in the fork KaiOS: [https://www.kaiostech.com/](https://www.kaiostech.com/)

</comment></comment><comment> open-source-ux It's a shame that Windows Phone never took off. Microsoft are known for functional but clunky desktop software, but Windows Phone with the Metro UI is, in my view, one of their best UIs. It doesn't feel like a Microsoft product and it's quite refreshing that they took a different path from the UI approach of iOS and Android. The simplicity of the live tiles is a neat way of combining widget-like behaviour and launching an app. A single swipe from the home screen gave you a A-Z list of your installed apps (not a grid of icons like iOS and Android).

Contrast that with Android phone approach of separate app widgets, separate app icons and even separate home screens. If you love to tweak to the nth degree, you'll love such features. For the rest of us, it all feels stodgy and overcooked for a smartphone.

Interestingly, Windows Phone design guidelines contained ideas we'd also see later in Google's Material design guidelines e.g. such as the emphasis on animation as more than just mere decoration.

Here is a presentation from the Windows 7 design team that describes the new Windows Phone UI. It's from 2010:

[https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and- des...](https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and-design- language-3511859)

</comment><comment><USER49> What about the fact that even the cheapest windows phone ran almost as smooth/fast as a flagship Android phone?

<comment><USER30> Well, that's because Android was, until recently, a poor and laggy experience even on flagship hardware.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I stuck with WP as long as I could and I still miss it. The polycarbonate Nokia were tough as hell and felt solid in your hands.

IMO the OS was really solid. If they just stuck with it and kept building, albeit targeting the people that didn't use a lot of apps, I think they could've found a niche. They had close to 25% share already in countries like Italy and Brazil and were popular in India, Africa, etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> First of all, I owned four of the top line Windows Phones as the hardware progressed and have been an MS oriented dev/arch throughout my career.

I switched back to an iPhone when MS started playing with the email and calendar apps, making them horribly less useful. Around January of 2015. The 6 plus had just come out.

WP hardware was excellent until 2014 when it was clear MS had abandoned the platform. They fell behind quickly at that point.

I knew the Midwest MS evangelist and went to a couple of dev sessions on WP and the philosophy was to pump any garbage or duplicate app into the App Store. I argued they should spend money on the top 100 business apps and just make them better than iOS or Android. MS was never going to beat Apple at cheap games.

Buying Nokia looked good on the outside but it was clearly a disaster.

$6 billion could have enabled a ton of devs to build a ton of apps.

I was sad to see it go, but in the end, my iPhone never really gets in my way. I can email, message, call, and surf the web plus have a few other handy apps that just work.

</comment><comment><USER52> I feel the same way about my Blackberry Passport's BBOS 10. The UI is so nice, functional and polished. A real shame it was cut down in its prime.

<comment><USER53> I'm going to keep using mine until my place of work forces me off. It's such a nice device and there is no app I need that doesn't work on it.

<comment><USER52> My next phone was going to be a Gemini PDA but (while it's amazing they got it to market and it's an impressive bit of hardware) it doesn't compare to the sound quality of the Passport and the keyboard is actually quite hard to use.

And "apps" is another word for clandestine data collection. Sms, web and email is all I need and it does them excellently. I feel they avoided a lot of the bullshit I see on ios and android by positioning it as a business not consumer device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I still use it, and will continue to until I can't anymore. I'm on my third Windows Phone, which I bought just a few weeks ago. I've tried to switch to android, but after a few weeks I missed pinning tiles, and the simpler gallery and superior keyboard

</comment><comment><USER55> I used windows phone for more than 3 years. Lumia 630, 730 and 550. To be honest it is way better than android and iphone in terms of usability. I concur with OP that metro UI and all dark theme was the best and unique. I recently switched to android because of lack of updates in the basic apps that I was using. It is still my backup phone. Ohh forgot about the keyboard and unified messaging system. Loved cortana. One thing is I want to point out that all email clients and calendar app should learn to do things right way outlook apps in windows phone did. If you don't believe me use the native outlook and calendar apps you will start hating the google clients. Great jobs phone team at Microsoft!

</comment><comment><USER6> I had and used a Lumia 640 for quite a while and it was a really nice phone aside from the app situation. I still have it around and fire it up occasionally to see if there's another Insiders build update for it - if I lose or break my current one I could easily see using it for a few days.

I also can't feel that I overpaid for it, I got the phone while they were doing a promotion that also included a year of Office365 Personal - and I think I may have paid less for the phone than that subscription price would have been alone.

The app situation though, the app situation was grim even in browsers. I think Edge on it has improved significantly as it has elsewhere, but for a long time you had (pretty crappy) Edge and (pretty crappy) other browsers based on I'm not sure what. I knew Chrome wasn't ever going to be on there, and Mozilla's previous little adventure into other mobile devices had... not worked out for them, but I was hoping someone like Dolphin Browser would manage to port onto WP - it's webkit based, has or had its own implementation to work from (Dolphin Jetpack, so they could update when the phone's built-in webkit was slower), not tied to any Google Play services, etc. The death of Project Astoria (the Android-to-Windows Bridge) signaled the death knell for that and probably WP as well.

There were other security lockdowns that I found annoying (e.g. I upload my call logs and SMS to be able to view calls on a calendar and SMS in email), but the combination of "no apps" and "also no browser able to handle mobile website versions properly" was a real killer.

</comment><comment><USER56> I switched from Android 2.something to Windows Phone and the entire experience was a breath of fresh air. It performed as well and as smoothly as iOS, but had easily the best UI out there.

It's difficult to remember now just how awful the UI of Android 2 was, and Google let it stagnate entirely with an ill-advised focus on tablet. By the time I returned to Android it was on version 4 and light years ahead of where it was. The performance was (and still is) subpar, though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Regarding "Dark Mode" for Android on OLED devices as discussed in the article, while Google/AOSP may not ever plan to have that there are a lot of steps that you can take to get closer to it. Launcher changes (backgrounds, entirely new launchers, icon packs like TwoPixel[0]), browser changes (Firefox addons like Dark Background and Light Text [1][2]) possibly manufacturer-specific changes (doesn't Samsung tweak a lot of stuff for AMOLED display?) and even replacement firmware.

[0] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twop...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twopixel)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark- backgrou...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background- light-text/)

[2] [https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light- text-...](https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text- extension)

</comment><comment><USER57> The only things i liked about Windows Phone were the menu/launcher and the keyboard. Firstly the keyboard was the most accurate swiping input keyboard i have ever used, to this this day. The second is that the Windows tiles and list just make so much sense, surprisingly especially on a 7-8" tablet. Have even put the MS Launcher onto my Blackberry DTEK60 and thoroughly enjoyed that experience.

</comment><comment><USER58> To me, windows Phone was a nightmare. I previously had a symbian and every interaction with windows phone made me regret it. Windows Phone was so locked and worse than symbian!

You could not install another web browser (on symbian I was using opera or opera mini).

There did not exist file explorers (apps could not get permissions to explore local files).

Consequently, it was impossible to open html files (Edge, the only available browser did not understand the file: protocol). I kept some data in html files on my phone to always have them with me even when offline...

The dedicated search "button" was the worst idea ever: it had no use when offline and was barely interesting when connected.

It would automatically turn mute when connected to a bluetooth speaker but would forget to unmute when disconnected.

The volume control was even more confusing than android one (volume was represented as a number, sometimes, max was 12, sometimes it was 32...).

The only good thing (the reason I chose windows phone rather than android) was nokia's GPS app. But it was already ther on symbian!

Good riddance. I don't miss you windows phone!

<comment><USER59> Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage.

Never mind that debacle early on when people discovered that WinPhone7 would lock an inserted SD card to that specific device (a rarely used "feature" of the Secure Digital standard). With the added irony that Symbian could unlock said cards while Android could just reformat it.

Frankly i maintain that the introduction of the iPhone rolled back smartphone development by a decade or more, as look were put before functionality and what used to be a workhorse device became a glorified media player.

<comment><USER60> >Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage.

Backward compatibility with a platform which has almost zero market share is worthless.

<comment><USER59> PocketPC/Mobile, in particular in the corporate world, was massive. And in the "consumer" world, HTC made a name for itself by making PocketPC based devices with a range of designs.

Come the Windows Phone 7 announcement, they also renamed the PocketPC lineage to Phone 6.5, but it was clear that Microsoft was barely keeping it on life support.

Thing was that Phone 7 could not run PocketPC lineage software, full stop.

This meant that all those corporate and consumer programs (Opera Mobile came to be on PocketPC a decade before Americans were all hot and bothered about web on a mobile devices) had to be rewritten anyways, so why not look for alternatives (like Android).

<comment><USER60> Yes, WinMo was still being used in the enterprise, mainly in industrial PDAs, but definitely not in the consumer market.

I think that the main reason why Microsoft decided to drop compatibility with WinMo (apart from small marketshare) was the fact that it was using _extremely_ outdated UI conventions.

Almost all Windows Mobile apps were designed to be used with a stylus. Tiny widgets, small fonts etc. There was no place for that in the post-iPhone- launch world.

Benefits from creating new OS from scratch outweighted value added by compatibility with an outdated platform.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Dark mode may be the #1 feature I want from any app or device. I tend to shy away from anything I can't enable it on. I have an Android phone and each version gets brighter.

I am in the apparent minority that knows that a screen isn't a piece of paper and not in the majority of people who still believe myths about keeping the light on when you watch TV.

<comment><USER54> Even on Windows Phone though, Microsoft broke dark mode on their own apps. OneNote always has a blindingly white background.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A lot of the article just wasn't true.

System 7s redesigned happened because the old design was tied to fixed resolutions - the original iPhone's and the iPad's. Skeumorphism didn't scale with different screen sizes

Apple's extension system was already being used internally with Apple's hardcoded integrations with Facebook and Twitter used it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't miss Windows Phone or Windows Mobile, but I do miss the idea of a third mobile platform player.

</comment><comment><USER63> I wish Windows had allowed other web browsers early on. By the time Microsoft allowed native code, the few alpha projects of FireFox had been abandoned.

These phones do have UEFI+ARM. Has anyone unlocked the bootloader? I feel these would be an ideal open source OS mobile platform for something like Plasma.

</comment><comment><USER64> I also miss it and am disappointed Microsoft did not more aggressively pursue Windows Phone. It was fast, unique, and offered legitimately good competition to Apple and Google.

Continuum remains a fantastic idea, frankly I am surprised Apple hasn't adopted something similar with iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER65> Nokia Lumia 1520 and 930 are two of the best phones I've ever used. More than the tiled interface, I liked the consistancy and the coherence across the OS. The OS followed a certain set of design principles throughout and what few apps were available integrated well with it. Things like the various Hubs were very nice and useful. I've always liked the idea of scopes from Ubuntu Phone, and the Windows Phone Hubs were built along the same idea. I've always felt that there should be a central app for each category which all providers should integrate with, instead of having individual apps[1]. For example, I usually want to watch a video, not YouTube/Netflix/Amazon Prime/whatever. The Video Hub or Scope should aggregate videos from all the available sources. The same concept can be applied to a Music, Messages etc.

Coming back to the point, coherence is something Android sorely lacks. Unless you are using a phone with near stock Android[2], the apps are always out of sync with the rest of the OS in terms of the design language. And many apps don't even follow the Google design guidelines. While there were not many non- Nokia Windows phones, given their track record on Windows desktops, I don't think MS was going to allow that sort of interface customisation.

The lack of coherence enforces my view that Android is some sort of Frankenstein's Monster hastily cobbled together without putting much thought into the design - internal or external.

I wish Windows Phone had survived, if only to provide some competition to Android. Let's face it, iOS and Android don't really compete in any meaningful way. Google is happy to stick to the volumes while Apple keeps the premium segment.

And I wish I hadn't sold my Lumia when Nokia/MS didn't enable 4G/VoLTE for my carrier. At least I'd be able to use it as a secondary phone.

[1] The individual apps can be there for people who like them, but they must plug into the central hub. [2] With Pixel Launcher not being released for other devices, it is not clear what "Stock Android" meany anymore — Google is fragmenting Android themselves. Can you imagine the outrage if MS kept certain Windows features exclusive to Surface?

</comment><comment><USER66> I really liked the tile aspect of the Windows Phone home screen. Being able to resize the tiles and then get various levels of contextual information based on the size of the tile was pretty rad, and I haven't seen anything like it since.

</comment><comment><USER67> Like many others here, I still rate my Samsung Omnia, running Windows Phone 7 as the best phone I've owned.

The mistake MS made, for me, was abandoning the existing WP7 phones for new WP8 phones, no upgrade path, and taking so long to release WP8.

</comment><comment><USER68> I kept windows phone 10 up until this week.

I actually like that it pushes me to use mobile sites instead of apps.

Apps are closed ecosystems with app stores that charge a high markup. Sites are free and open.

I can use Uber Lyft, and Facebook without apps.

But with discipline you can do this on Android too.

Pros:

Beautiful Live Tiles Simple interface Unified look Dark Mode Less bloatware

Cons:

On Windows 10 mobile, the phone would freeze up or even restart as much as once per day

Drivers and software seem less optimized and performant even with powerful hardware

Never found a mobile site that allows depositing checks

No Firefox

So as of this weekend I'm now using a fast, stable, cluttered, and ugly Samsung phone loaded with bloatware.

I'm hoping LineageOS can make this more tolerable soon.

<comment><USER54> Interesting admit the freezes / reloads. I bought a 950XL that would restart constantly, at least once a day. A few weeks later i bought a 950 instead, for the smaller form factor. The 950 has zero issues. It has never once frozen or restarted. My point is, it's not Windows 10 mobile that caused that issue. You might have had a bad battery or device

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> Lol, funny timing to see this. I pulled out my HTC Touch Pro 2 phone today because it has a keyboard and wanted to do some quick ssh stuff from remotely. Maybe not technically windows phone, since it was called windows mobile then with different design goals.

Had to charge it for longer than recent phones needed, but it came up well (except bluetooth). Fortunately WiFi worked with my current phone's hotspot.

After that had to find a solution for ssh client. Wound up using a midlet runner found on xda-developers and an ssh jar file. The keyboard usage was interesting after foregoing it for about a decade.

</comment><comment><USER70> I work for a large wireless company and I am a volunteer for the new device employee testing program (you get new phones and try them out before they go to market and give feedback, fun... sometimes). I was very pleasantly surprised with the Windows phone and I had trialed a LOT of other phones over the years. I actually thought they were on to something with the tiles, very easy to read with a quick glance. It is too bad there is not a good 3rd options IMO, right now you have basically iPhone and Android. I think it would be good to have another player out there.

</comment><comment><USER71> All I say is competition is good.

I don't want to live in a world where Android is the only mobile OS out there. This is also true for the desktop space, Windows dominance is an issue, especially since the web didn't really fulfill its promise as an app platform, something Linux would have benefited from greatly.

WP browser was also sub-part when it comes to JS/HTML5 support compared to like Firefox on Android at that time. A good mobile browser is just the most important thing for a smartphone.

</comment><comment><USER72> I still use my Lumia 950 as my every day cellphone. When it dies, my plan is to just go back to whatever the most basic dumb phone will be at the time. I've experienced Android and iPhone and neither of them hold a candle to the experience I've had with Windows Phone / Win10 Mobile, so I'd rather just reset back to a point where there weren't things like apps or mobile internet if I can't keep mobile-friendly Windows on my phone.

</comment><comment><USER73> Honestly I miss WebOS on the old Palm phones the most. That phone had everything except hardware speed going for it. Everything including gestures (cards), notifications, wireless charging, and universal search were 10 years ahead of their time. The software was just too much for the hardware at that time.

Windows Phone was a close second to me. The worst thing about this all is that it seems impossible for a third vendor to be successful unless PWAs take off.

</comment><comment><USER74> A colleague of mine has a windows phone with the dock that lets him use the phone as a desktop computer.

It's super freaking cool.

It's sad that this direction is not being developed more.

<comment><USER75> Samsung has the Dex doc for both the S8 and S9. Dock your phone and get a desktop-like Android experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I was always surprised windows didn't do a real attempt on dockable phone -> PC interface. It has so many consumer and enterprise points of entry.

<comment><USER59> They basically priced it out of the range of those consumers that could benefit from it the most.

<comment><USER77> Yep, continuum seemed like a killer feature on release.

But I wasn't prepared to pay $AU1000 to try out a Lumia 950 at the time and the 650 was far too anemic to support it.

<comment><USER54> You can pick them up now for a quarter of that, second hand

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I had one, an HTC. In grand scheme of things, right after the iPhone 3 it was the best phone I ever owned. It was slick, fast and the UI made sense. But there were no apps... The last few years I am using Android, not so impressed. I made it a habit to switch between providers, so I dont develop a strong association with either...

</comment><comment><USER79> > Unified messaging – Microsoft's messages hub let Windows Phone users chat > via SMS or messaging apps like Skype in a single thread without needing to > juggle separate apps.

This. I never used Windows Phone but I.Am.So.Tired of having to check inboxes for WhatsApp, Email, Tinder, Bumble, Slack and every other app on my iPhone or Android device.

<comment><USER80> Everybody ignored it though. They should have made a store policy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I still use mine, I'm not a big user of apps generally so I can just about squeak by, the tiled UI is still far and away the best available for phones.

I hope the Windows everywhere initiative eventually works out, they got a lot of things right about the touch experience but they couldn't follow through on a lot of it.

</comment><comment> martin-adams I would love to see Microsoft release a Windows skinned Android phone which comes with all the Office apps, etc, but natively supports all the Android apps.

This would then help consumers transition to a Microsoft future. It would however be a blow to the Windows mobile operating system but that ship may have already sailed.

<comment><USER54> I wish they'd add live tiles to the launcher

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I wish they'd at least kept Edge up to date. That would make my Elite x3 live for another couple of years.

</comment><comment><USER82> I miss Windows Phone. Screen Glance, live tiles, bottom address bar, search button, menus at bottom (until they put in hamburgers in W10), Etc.

It was a great phone OS, let down by MS's own declining support of it and the App Gap (which didn't really affect me much, so the first point hurt most).

</comment><comment><USER83> Windows Phone may be dead, but Windows 10 is continuing the path to run on both Intel and ARM and on all form factors with the same codebase, so finally the next desktop PCs may be smarter than smartphones and equally mobile, at least their core.

</comment><comment><USER84> I bought a cheap windows phone for my mother four years back, even after 4 years, it works like the day I bought it (fast, no heating issues..), The big fonts and tile interface makes it easy for her to use it without her glasses.

</comment><comment><USER83> While the app Drude mimics the messaging hub by combining fetched notifications in on view, it's a question of when but whether the hub will finally be brought to Android and iOS as well.

</comment><comment><USER85> i never owned one but i really liked their idea of having apps display some data in the tile without having to open them up. Really sad that other phones haven't learned from this.

</comment><comment><USER86> We need a Linux Phone.

<comment> dylan-m Well, we had Meego, WebOS, and Firefox OS, and we failed them :( I wonder what it would take for one of those to actually _succeed_ at this point?

Personally I'm finding that I care much less about what apps there are than I did three years ago. It's easy to use progressive web apps whenever decent ones exist, and so much of the functionality that used to be "download an app" is just built in to Android and iOS now so I don't really think about it. That and I guess I've started to accept (and I think there's a growing awareness) that phones are being designed as soul-sucking addiction machines, so the idea of smartphone games is somewhat less appealing…

<comment><USER87> We never had Meego. We only had Maemo on Nokia N900, which did pretty well, and a Maemo/Meego hybrid on Nokia N9, which was very highly acclaimed, but already dead on arrival thanks to a backstab from Windows Phone (and some poor Nokia management earlier that has led to this situation, to be fair).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> The most annoying/stupid thing i found is one can not change sound volume using Settings. One can change sound volume using hardware buttons only.

</comment><comment><USER89> Microsoft squandered an opportunity to make an alternative mobile OS at a time when it was possible to do that. In 2010 when Windows Phone was released, the app store concept was only a few years old and many people did not have smartphones yet.

These days, I don't see how a new operating system could possibly succeed unless it had all of the popular social media apps on day one.

</comment><comment><USER90> i was pretty happy with windows phone but not being able to install many apps killed it for me.

<comment><USER91> I never owned one and regret it: the couple of times I played around with those Lumias etc I was pretty impressed, for reasons metnioned in the article, and the article mentions even more things I didn't know. The whole thing felt 'fresh'. Not unlike the competition, but doing certain things different and actually better. Also I don't care about many apps, so WP would probably have been perfect for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> I miss it too... live tiles, outlook integration, camera, fresh new UI

</comment><comment><USER93> I really like Windows Phone. Microsoft killed it themselves though, by killing the project (I forgot the name) that made it possible to run Android apps on Windows Phone.

All their other mistakes are dwarfed by this single screwup. It's like they wanted it to fail.

<comment><USER94> Wouldn't the existence of semi-functional Android app compatibility just mean that developers abandon native apps entirely? It reminds me of a similar dilemma with OS/2\. It could run Windows apps, so people stopped writing native ones.

<comment><USER93> Yes, totally. But given Windows's prevalence in businesses, there would've been many serious reasons for business users to use Windows Phone, even if few of the apps were native.

And on the consumer side, it was faster and leaner than Android at the time, especially on cheaper hardware. I bet Android apps would've slowed that down a bit but "I miss this one single app" wouldn't have been a reason to avoid the platform anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Windows Phone was a beautiful platform for consumers and developers. What Samsung did for Android, Nokia Lumia line undid it for MS. Fautly hardware, devices with one major OS version lifespan, shipped late to the market.

Nokia is the company that got stuck in 2005.

</comment><comment><USER96> They could open source it. It felt like a robust software product.

</comment><comment><USER97> I miss Nokia. Those were the days the biggest mobile manufacturer actually did things beneficial to users! Compare that to Apple today. No headphone jack which is probably more used every day even now than their proprietary shit port was ever used. Oh and the silly notch!

</comment><comment><USER98> WiFi password sharing was severely criticized when Microsoft introduced it. But then Apple put in in iOS and nobody batted an eye.

There are some ideas that just need time.

<comment><USER14> The implementations are completely different.

Microsoft shared the password implicitly to "friends" without making the security implications clear to the user.

It seems like Apple have made the security implications clear to the user: an explicit choice to share the password to one person, and the prompt mentions that a password is being shared.

The Microsoft implementation is rightly lambasted.</comment></comment>


FedEx Offers Coupon If Users Enable Flash on Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.fedex.com/us/office/no-flash.html <comment><USER2> FedEx is at the cutting edge of 1990s web technology.

Seriously, this does not surprise me at all. Their desktop products are also a travesty. When UPS had moved WorldShip to SQL Server, FedEx was still stuck in Visual Café.

</comment><comment><USER3> Do I get more coupons if i use IE7 while we're at it ?

</comment><comment><USER4> Cheaper to offer $5 off a purchase than to spend hundred of thousands of dollars rewriting their printing application.

</comment><comment><USER5> Now I'm curious. Why all this? The slow agony of Flash has already become something surreal.

FedEx, need developers?

</comment><comment><USER6> This is the funniest thing I've seen today.

Did they not get the memo that Flash is dead?

</comment><comment><USER7> They must have an exploit, and they're pivoting to ransomware. Dang.</comment>


The re-discovery of a long-lost Greek city - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200305-the-re-discovery-of-a-long-lost-greek-city <comment><USER2> I wanted to find out more as the story is too short and stumbled on the below. You can go there and spend a few weeks digging it up yourself (for two thousand euros). No experience required. [https://www.archaeological.org/fieldwork/excavating-in- ancie...](https://www.archaeological.org/fieldwork/excavating-in-ancient- thouria-in-messenia-peloponnese-greece/)</comment>


Taboo Your Words (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ <comment><USER2> Very similar to if-by-whiskey [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by- whiskey](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey)

 _If when you say whiskey you mean the devil 's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it._

 _But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman 's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it._

<comment><USER3> Honestly even if this manipulative speak I still love reading this every time.

Disclaimer: obviously manipulative speak is generally bad if not always

<comment><USER4> That wasn't a manipulative or fallacious speech at all. It was in fact deeply insightful, calling attention to the war of characterization being played out in the public sphere. Do people think the speaker honestly intended to pull the wool over people's eyes by agreeing with both sides of the issue?

The first if-by-whiskey is an over-the-top satire of whiskey-haters. The second was a rousing call for reason. It's brilliant wordplay whose intentions would have been clear to the audience.

<comment><USER4> kungfuton, you appear to be hell-banned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con One of my personal rules for communication is that high-level language is a killer. Whenever conflict or confusion arises, high-level words need to be abandoned in favor of precision if the communication is to go anywhere. This is very similar to the article's examples of replacing a word with it's definition.

I believe that high-level language is the root of many philosophical/political disagreements because people simply use different definitions. When disagreeing parties avoid high-level labels (like "justice", "bad", "fair", and a plethora of others) and instead say exactly what they mean they can much more quickly realize exactly what they disagree and agree on. Arguments over high-level concepts _rarely go anywhere useful_ because there's no substance to argue over.

> The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term > "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making > the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it.

This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same. They happen to use the same words, like "God", "heaven", etc, but the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.

High-level language is very useful for quick communication. But it's horribly misleading and is a complete road-block to communication when people have different definitions or ideas in mind. This seems really obvious, but it's sad how much religious, philosophical, and political discussions only center around high-level language.

<comment><USER5> > This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are > the same. They happen to use the same words, like "God", "heaven", etc, but > the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.

What's more, the definitions of the religions themselves are so slippery, we can barely begin to compare religions. For example, suppose we take the author's advice and try to dereference the term "afterlife" in a comparison of Christianity and Islam.

Our first step would thus be to ask: What happens to an individual's consciousness after death, according to each of the two religions? But here our inquiry goes right to pieces, because we won't be able to agree on how to define the set of beliefs constituting each religion.

Is Christianity defined as the set of beliefs expressed in the Bible? And likewise for Islam and the Koran? But if so, then what about adherents of those religions who are not fundamentalists? Are we to ignore people who call themselves Christians and Muslims, yet believe that only some, or perhaps none, of the scripture is literally true?

But if we define Christianity and Islam so as not to exclude those people-- which seems like the intellectually honest choice--how can we possibly agree on a set of beliefs that constitutes each religion?

Perhaps we could administer a scientific poll of self-identified Christians and Muslims, asking them to agree or disagree with various theological propositions. Those propositions which are supported by a majority of self- identified adherents become part of our definitions, and the rest do not.

That may allow us to continue with our project of comparing afterlife beliefs, but it still seems incorrect somehow. Now we've greatly oversimplified the actual beliefs of Christians and Muslims worldwide. By establishing an arbitrary threshold (>50% belief), we've painted over a lot of distinctions that matter to real-world adherents. Equally badly, the arbitrariness of the threshold makes our definitions suspect. Had we chosen a different threshold, we'd probably have arrived at radically different definitions, suggesting that our definition has little authority.

Thus the problem of comparing religions seems intractable.

<comment><USER6> It isn't intractable but it can be quite complicated. This is true of theology in specific and philosophy in general. It isn't ever going to be an easy top- down hierarchy.

As for "defining Christianity", this is a problem that is actually addressed in most churches, and their answer can range from as restricted to "just their church" to as open as "anything vaguely resembling trinitarianism".

As a specific example, I go to an ELCA Lutheran Church, and they are a lot more on the open side of things. [http://elca.org/en/Faith/Ecumenical-and- Inter-Religious-Rela...](http://elca.org/en/Faith/Ecumenical-and-Inter- Religious-Relations/Full-Communion)

<comment><USER7> > "anything vaguely resembling trinitarianism".

So they exclude Jehovah's Witnesses, then. Not really all-inclusive.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah%27s_Witnesses)

<comment><USER6> Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Oneness Pentacostals, various others. Being all- inclusive isn't the point, nor should it be.

If you want my personal definition of "Christian", it's this:

1\. There is a god.

2\. I'm not it, and neither are you.

3\. Jesus is.

4\. Therefore, Jesus is the boss.

After that, all the rest just sort of flows out of it. It is amazing how many doctrinal issues either instantly disappear or don't even matter anymore. You don't end up with all sorts or absurd "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin?" questions to argue about endlessly, with one camp saying 144,000 and another saying 144,000,000. Instead you get real questions, like "what does God want of me?"

It would be like having a major disagreement within a company over if the shoe size of the CEO is 12 or 13. The CEO doesn't care if you know his shoe size, he cares if you do your job or not.

<comment><USER7> > Therefore, Jesus is the boss.

Meh. My boss can't tell me how to live my life. My boss's authority ends precisely where I'm no longer doing what they're paying me to do.

My point is that, even in your simplified theology, there is still a lot of room for debates. And, in religion, debates turn into bloody warfare, because this is peace and love we're talking about, and peace and love really matter.

<comment><USER6> "And, in religion, debates turn into bloody warfare, ..."

Seriously?

You sure do know how to keep discussion polite.

<comment><USER7> The Albigensians would like a word with you.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The very rigid picture of language described here and used in this and many other lesswrong essays might be compared to early Wittgenstein ( _Tractatus_ ), to be contrasted with later Wittgenstein ( _Philosophical Investigations_ ), alongside Derrida and a litany of less famous philosophers.

Of course, the reason Wittgenstein ultimately rejected this picture, as in rejected describing the meaning of words by formal definition, is that it doesn't accurately describe the way language is used in practice, and leads us to misunderstand situations.

"Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound?"

Albert: "no" => "Berkeleyan idealism makes sense"

Barry: "yes => "I refute it thus!" _kicks rock_

Of course, the question of course, is do we really want to understand the situation, or beleaguer Albert and Barry until they stop bothering us? The _argumentum ad nauseum_ on lesswrong, by now an encyclopedia-sized blog, hints toward the latter. And there are plenty of bare, wrong assertions:

>Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by "free will", on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length.

"Most philosophers" probably wouldn't, unless you're at a conference of the Vienna circle. Philosophy admits a great many ways of approaching these questions.

If a tree is in a forest and nobody can ever hear or see it, is it really a "tree"? Is it in a "forest"? And can it really "fall"? After all, all of the trees and forests and falling we refer to in natural language (this is an empirical claim) are ultimately derived from (this is actually a propter hoc fallacy, but that's inevitable) our real experiences of trees and forests, in which falling makes a sound (this is not a definition, but a description). This is a sort of lame analysis, but at least I'm not trying to dodge the question.

<comment><USER9> > Of course, the reason Wittgenstein ultimately rejected this picture, as in > rejected describing the meaning of words by formal definition, is that it > doesn't accurately describe the way language is used in practice, and leads > us to misunderstand situations.

I don't think the author is really trying to give a "formal definition" of the meaning of words. The point he is trying to make is that while people may claim to disagree about a high level sentence like "when a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, does it still makes a sound?", they actually don't expect there to be any real difference in the physical state of the world after the tree falls.

If you taboo the word "sound", then the question becomes either "when a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, are there still vibrations in the air?" or "when a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it, is there still an auditory experience for anyone?" If two people were to disagree on either of THESE statements, then they actually have an important difference in their models of the world.

The idea is that words are just convenient ways of referring to a collection of objects that are similar in some ways. Words used in everyday conversation generally do not have strict definitions. They just refer to a cluster of things. This post helps explain that idea:

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspa...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace/)

<comment><USER10> How are arguments structured? Which words are meaningless? Who is in a position of authority to determine which words need tabooing?

The author's unfortunate choice of the word "Taboo" to describe this procedure of clarifying meaning reflects an implied ideological stance. He takes the role of a curator, the vanguard of the "rationalist virtue of empiricism". It's much like Richard Dawkins and others who adopt positions as the only sane ones in the room, the only ones who can isolate the _real_ parts of scientific rationality.

<comment><USER11> The author's choice of the word "Taboo" refers to the game called "Taboo" described in the first paragraph. It does not imply any special ideological stance.

<comment><USER10> It's clear that the author is not referring to the game Taboo:

> The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term > "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making > the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it.

He chooses to not represent certain things in language, but if we are operating in a situation where science has not or cannot make firm pronouncements, how do we act? The approach he is presenting is akin to just slicing off the fuzzy corners of a map, since by his estimation the clear parts are the only _real_ map. How we cut off those chunks of the map is arbitrary, and in that sense belies the ideological background of whoever employs this technique.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I find this interesting. I particularly enjoy the idea of proscribed words in Taboo leaking information that helps describe the taboo word. It reminds me of a pentester checking robots.txt to see what parts of a website the admin doesn't want crawlers to see.

However, I disagree with the "tree falls in the forest" example. The thought experiment was formed in a time when the only way to measure acoustic vibrations was with the human ear. I don't think it's any great leap to extend the conceit of the experiment to cover all forms of measuring acoustic vibrations.

Albert may claim:

        A tree falling in a deserted forest matches [membership test:
        this event generates pressure waves in a material medium].

And Barry could quite reasonably reply:

        How can we be sure those pressure waves are generated if we
        don't have any wave detectors in the forest?

In other words, I don't think this is a case where ambiguous language is the source of the apparent disagreement. No matter how far down the abstraction- chain you go, the detection of acoustic waves always requires an observer of some fashion, which brings us back to the sense of the original thought experiment.

<comment><USER13> I think it changes a lot of peoples thoughts about the question. It moves it from a "let's play with the concept of sound" to a basic question of induction and physics. At that point, why not ask how can we be sure the tree actually fell at all?

If you chase that rabbit hole, it probably devolves into arguing about what "know" and "is" and "sure" "actually mean".

<comment><USER12> I disagree. I don't think the original plays with the concept of sound, I think it plays with the concept of an objective reality. I don't think the thought experiment is substantially different in effect if it's changed to "does a tree fall in the forest if no-one is there to see it" or "does a tree have rough bark in the forest if no-one is there to feel it".

<comment><USER14> Or "do bears shit in the woods?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In the Theory Of Constraints "Thinking Tools" (a method to try and apply logic to group/systems dynamics/conflicts/constraints) they call this a "clarity reservation". I got caught up in a big discussion board argument about "gun control" before realizing everyone was arguing passionately about wildly different mental models that "gun control" represented. I could have said, "I have a clarity reservation on gun control" and spun the discussion out into several more simultaneous conversations.

It also got me thinking that most terms like this could be mapped on a 2x2 grid of "content" versus "signal". "Content" is the meaningfulness of the definition, and "signal" is the emotional impact of the word, or its ability to elicit certain emotional responses in the audience. "Gun control" could be seen as a high-signal low-content term, and that's the quadrant that you probably most want to avoid (or taboo).

This happens a lot in software engineering, too, probably more in the low- signal low-content quadrant (since most overloaded terms in software engineering are rather boring in the grand scheme). We regularly have confusion at work about words like "profile" (performance? user info? data type?) and "dev" (our test server? our git branch? our team?). This can also be hard when introducing layers of abstraction in a codebase - I feel like more than once I've struggled with running out of synonyms when trying to name certain classes.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand the distinction the author is making between defining the problematic word and the process of "tabooing" the word.

I do see the distinction in terms of the actual game: certainly 9 innings, 3 outs is not a definition for baseball. But the tabooing process described by the author seems no different to me than coming up with a definition.

<comment><USER17> People will argue about whose definition is correct. By simply mechanically substituting the definition in place, you don't need to worry as much about whether it's correct.

Albert and Barry may have strong feelings about what the word "sound" means. They'll never agree to use the other's definition. Search and replace and you can advance the conversation past that point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This article is RAGE-fuel for anyone with > 101 experience with analytic philosophy of language. It's the theory of reference equivalent of

"Your epistemology is bad because an evil demon might be fooling you." "Whoa."

<comment><USER19> I think it's supposed to be useful insight into how you can improve your approach to daily life, nothing more -- at least in the context of being posted to Hacker News, that's what it is. It's a dirty cognitive hack to help you look past high-level concepts rather than anything academic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't recommend this "LW" web site. This way only madness lies.

</comment><comment><USER21> Less wrong, more autistic.

<comment><USER22> Maybe not as autistic as one might assume, based on the facial recognition scores: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspe...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/28l/do_you_have_highfunctioning_aspergers_syndrome/)</comment></comment>


To the Moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.coinbase.com/lunar

<comment><USER2> Nice /lunar/feature rickroll!

</comment><comment><USER3> Is Coinbase about to support Dogecoin!?

<comment><USER4> I would be very surprised if they don't use this latest round of funding to expand their product offerings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Please use Chrome or Firefox

… Despite Safari being able to run this fine (by faking the reported user- agent header).</comment>


Ask HN: I've bootstrapped a tech ed startup. Now what? - <AUTHOR>

My startup does brick&mortar CS ed, but it also does some interactive java tutorials: https://www.ktbyte.com/intro . I feel like most of the companies in the space I'm in are venture backed. I'm not. Should I be? <comment><USER2> The question is: "Are you targeting Westerners with money?" American, and I extrapolate to other Western countries, don't care much for education after a certain income level. I don't mean they dislike education. They just don't see it as a priority in spending since they already have a public school system available.

If you are targeting this demographic, you'll need venture money. If you are targeting poor Asian countries, you need savvy. These countries are poor. They know the value of an education. As a result, parents will pay for their kids to get an education if they can.

If you can target poor nations, then you have to get your product known. The rest will follow. You should be able to do this on your own, assuming you've planned a runway.

<comment><USER3> Just a few thoughts. The parent poster is absolutely right that people will not pay for education, as all of the failed tutoring centers outside of cities will attest to. I almost started one myself but caught myself before I lost a lot of money.

While they may not spend money on education, one thing that people will spend a lot on money on is daycare and summer camps(for the daycare). The brick and mortar classes here have a real potential to expand into full blown licensed after school daycare.

To expand, this could possibly be a franchise model, or possibly just be a training class for people who want to start something on their own. And then they can sell them class materials as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Java is not "sexy" and too difficult to learn compared to the dynamic languages.

My advice would be to instead focus on the corporate market (depending on how good you are with Java yourself).

For example, I am developer X working at bank FF. We're old school, so we use tech that was big 10 years ago. Our systems are all Java. I got my CS degree and have tried to keep up with Java updates itself, but I've probably missed a couple of things over the years. My company approaches ktbyte.com to come do some instruction lessons for Java 7/8\. I'm getting the lessons for free and when I'm done learning, the knowledge I have will enable me to obtain a Java certificate from Oracle/Sun (you'll need to connect with them here).

Anyway, that is what I might consider, instead of the crowded "teach anyone to code" market. You could easily negotiate good terms with Oracle and because it'll only be you in the start, your main expense would be travel.

No need for venture money there.

<comment><AUTHOR> We started with Java because our middle/high school students do algorithmic competitions, and the choice is either Java or C++. At least Java is also used on the AP Computer Science exam.

What you say about training is interesting though. I suppose I would need to start contacting companies to reach out to whoever does training. Do you have any leads here?

<comment><USER4> Are you based in the US?

Unfortunately, I am not, so I cannot assist with leads.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Simple tool to manage time on projects for developers and freelancers - <AUTHOR> http://loggable.co.uk

<comment><USER2> UI could do with quite a bit of extra work, it's also not clear on the pricing table if you're talking about 1 time fees, monthly or yearly.

What happens if the Sumo package get's too small for me?

\-- EDIT -- Besides that good work, don't take my comment negatively :)

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you think of the pricing and plan options?

<comment><USER2> Pricing, based on the amount of users, is good. Also nice that you have a free plan for the solo user. But I'm not sure if the user/project ratio is good (the amount of projects per user could be higher).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, we are currently reviewing our plans, nothing is concrete at the moment and feedback is always appreciated. So potentially we could have a free plan that also includes more users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I find this a very interesting product category - and I'm part of a very (I feel) undeserved category of consultant/freelancers. The essence of what you seem to be doing "uber simple" (the the home page states), is what had me interested.

But, after seeing your video, and the number of times a user has to click on different elements - it's clear this is not a simple logging tool. I also think the video could be (a) called out above the fold and (b) include some sort of voice over.

I feel there is a market ready and waiting for those that work on more abstract sorts of things. Situations where work might form more organically from a blog post on <http://blogging.cwl.cc> (it's happened) or a small idea (more frequent), and eventually turns into billing or a larger scale project. With tools like these that are project-based - It feels like logging friction is much to high.

The problem is not being solved (in my opinion) because generally no one wants to log what they do, but for those that have decided to do so, there should be little to no clicking and a process to capture everything written in very low overhead manner (mobile support is essential).

So far, no tool seems to be as good as a simple OTA sync'ed calendar. So far.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We've had a few comments about the video and it's currently under review. I think a series of screencasts with voiceover would help.

It's interesting that you were attracted by its simplicity headline, but that you feel it's not that simple to enter time. We definitely need to address this if it could be streamlined further.

Agreed that mobile support is essential and we are working on resolving this. Low overhead is key.

We are learning a hell of a lot as a result of the feedback on Hacker News and you raise some key fundamentals areas to review.

Thanks, I really appreciate you taking the time to let us know your thoughts.

<comment><USER3> You're very welcome. I'm reading what I've written and it seems overly critical of your work. I don't want you to feel that's the case; it does look like a wonderful tool and, in the case of a developer or a web freelancer, may be very useful indeed.

I look forward to seeing how this project unfolds and I appreciate you taking the time to read my suggestions.

Kevin

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem. It's great to get your opinion from a brand new user's perspective. We don't want to build a product we think people will want. Instead we want to help businesses be more profitable and improve their processes. To do this we really need to userstand our markets and messages. Our plan is to review all the feedback, implement and then post on Hacker News when the next iteration that addresses some of the comments is available.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a pretty cool project. I would love to try it out once your servers cool down, particularly your API. I'm playing around with APIs for Harvest and Freshbooks now. Full disclosure: I created a minimalist time tracking tool for freelancers/agency folks that lowers the barrier to logging your work:

<https://timestreamapp.com/>

It's not for everyone, but it resonates with some folks (the minimalist UI + keyboard driven nature and available CLI).

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked out your app. Really cool app! I like the fact that you can enter statuses from a variety of routes and the video explains it well.

<comment><USER4> Right on. Thanks Paul. Are you guys planning to open up an API?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes we have an API on our roadmap but no exact date of release yet I'm afraid. Still fixing some fundamentals :-) I'm keen to keep abreast of your tool too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm a freelancer and I didn't get a good sense of why I would use your product. Why is analyzing how I spend my time and looking at graphs going to make me more effective? Isn't the goal to spend more time working on projects and less time managing my tools?

I think for many freelancers the question is going to be: why would I stop using Harvest to use your tool? For me, I didn't see the reason.

Not saying you don't have a good product here - just think the marketing message could be clearer.

<comment><USER6> I second that, except that I use Toggl, which has a great free layer.

<comment><AUTHOR> Toggl is a great tool

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Huge thanks so far to everyone who has commented. It's really early days and its clear we need to work on the mobile support, pricing plans and most importantly the marketing aspects of the product and website. Really appreciate the feedback.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a recent interview that attempts to explain where we are coming from: [http://doeswhat.com/2013/01/17/interview-with-paul-rhodes- lo...](http://doeswhat.com/2013/01/17/interview-with-paul-rhodes-loggable/)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This might help explain it a bit more to get people started, it's on the homepage but can't help to link it: <http://vimeo.com/ggapps/loggable- getstarted>

</comment><comment><USER7> Pricing page portion for the Free/Solo package is a bit confusing. "30 Day Free Trial" for a package that is free? Perhaps you could replace it with "Always Free", or "100% Free"

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, good point

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Something really basic, but it wouldn't hurt to say that the prices are (I assume) monthly.

Also, having to start writing a project's name to find it is not very efficient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting, do you think it would be better to replace autocomplete with a standard drop down for the project selector?

Agreed, a couple of people have commented about how to make the pricing plans more obvious and clearer

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Worth taking a quick look at the site on a mobile - the homepage is a little messed up... (Android/Chrome)

Good work though! :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we need to work on mobile support - thanks for the heads up

<comment><USER8> No worries - for the (really) quick (while you have traffic from HN) fix, stick:

@media only screen and (max-width: 800px) { .tuck-corners .headline, .tuck- corners h2 { display:none !important; } }

at the end of your style sheet. It (should!) hide the messy bit on the homepage from smaller screens and let people see/fill in the 30 trial day form.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, much appreciated. We'll get this done once the server cools down. A deployment would kill it :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Terrible presentation on that page imho, the video needs to be replaced by a quick blurb explaining the service.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, realised that after I posted, the quality full screen is poor. We do need to work on clearly explaining what it is.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Currently struggling to handle the traffic from Hacker News - please bear with us people

<comment><AUTHOR> ...and we're back :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh, look.

Lobster.</comment>


How We Migrated to Parse Server, Adventures with Heroku and Why We Broke Up - <AUTHOR> https://stanfy.com/blog/how-we-migrated-to-parse-server-adventures-with-heroku-and-why-we-broke-up/ <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing!</comment>


Click the Button - <AUTHOR> https://codepen.io/bnhovde/full/OJLYGKx <comment><USER2> With my web browser it is possible to get to the button, quite consistently, but it took me a little while to discover how. Unfortunately nothing exciting happens when you get there. There should have been some kind of reward.

And yes, I have had to use some real web sites that require a similar level of mousey cunning in order to operate them.</comment>


AMD Live Migration Support for VMs W Secure Encrypted Virtualization - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-SEV-Live-Migration <comment><USER2> s/W/with/</comment>