iOS 7: Catch me if you can - <AUTHOR> http://www.allenpike.com/2013/ios7-catch-me-if-you-can/

<comment><USER4> This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007.

The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy. The original iPhone was much more than an eye candy improvement.

<comment><USER5> It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. It was the first time anyone put an OS on a phone that had a _blazing fast_ graphics layer.

Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model.

Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they invented the platform that made it implementable. The deep integration of UIKit with hardware acceleration, as well as animation as a first-class consideration in the API, were (and still are) some of Apple's greatest advantages.

<comment><USER6> >>It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution.

I disagree. Only a very small minority cares about operating systems and revolutionizing them.

What the iPhone revolutionized was _user experience._ For the first time, someone invented a device that was easy to understand, fun to use, and seemingly limitless in capability. When Steve went on stage and showed it off, the minds of everyone in the audience went into overdrive to start imagining all the possible things they could do with it. Both the hardware and the OS were designed to maximize those aspects of the device.

This is what sets the iPhone apart from its competitors, who to this day focus on hardware features and software gimmicks. In my opinion neither Android nor Windows Phone have managed to capture and learn to communicate in the higher level thinking that constitutes UX. They are still great operating systems. They just work in a very different context.

<comment><USER5> I don't think we're actually disagreeing. I'm not saying that the average iPhone user has remarked "Core Graphics is great! It makes my phone so responsive and fast!". I'd be very surprised if _any_ lay iOS user has ever said that ;)

But the idea is the level of interactivity and the UX around iPhone would have been impossible without the platform Apple first built for OSX.

Many other manufacturers at the time had UX ambitions like Apple, but were held back by their own platforms. This infamous video comparing the concept renders of the Nokia N97 vs. what shipped really demonstrates this:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU)

It's not that Apple didn't innovate on the UX, they sure as hell did, but rather that they bought themselves a huge lead on the competition by having, for all practical purposes, the only platform around that could even _do_ something like that.

<comment><USER7> Wow, I never saw that video, but your analysis is spot-on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
        iOS 7 was clearly designed to show off what's possible in 2013.

I absolutely agree with this point.

And, while I disagree with the post's main thesis — I believe the changes were in no way directed towards the web — it's a pretty entertaining take on the updates, OP.

<comment><USER9> I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me.

there's nothing revolutionary in ios7 shown so far. that said, I can't wait for Apple to sue Android over the things they just stole from them.

<comment><USER10> I haven't used Android since it first came out, but does it have the dynamic physics, layering, dynamic image compositing (blur, etc), parallax, etc, that all are in iOS 7? iOS 7 seems to me to be very much about how it feels and behaves in motion. The current beta still isn't performance tuned, so my guess is the final build is going to be a pretty futuristic experience on the iPhone 5S.

I think a lot of people are getting hung up on lack of textures/lighting as "copying Android" but I would love to hear how Metro and Android are comparable on the things that are going to define iOS 7's experience: motion, dynamics, translucency, layering, and depth.

<comment><USER11> I agree, but it's funny. iOS 7 is all about dynamic, physical interfaces - <USER2> much so that they built a physics engine into UIKit. At the same time, they're ripping apart the user experience so that nothing onscreen _looks_ like a physical object.

Before, interfaces looked like a bunch of real-world objects. Now, they look like a bunch of thin-ass lines and boxes, but behave like real-world objects.

I agree that iOS is all about motion, dynamics, translucency, layering and depth. But the verdict is still out on whether those things make for better interfaces.

<comment><USER12> Motion, dynamics, and depth are a hallmark of the Windows Phone Metro experience.

<comment><USER13> Windows phone metro doesn't include a physics engine. The motions are all tweened.

Windows phone metro includes no depth at all, it truly is flat and 2D spatial.

Dynamics?

<comment><USER12> I don't know (or frankly care) how it is implemented. While the UI is flat, the apps use transitions and a parallax effect to build the illusion of the depth (similar to how Apple does it using their gyroscopic parallax effect on the home screen).

<comment><USER13> There is no depth or layering in metro, not even small drop shadows and definitely not layered application screens. The panaroma metaphor is panning left or right with some disjoint movement of the background (not really parallax, very fake) and the cutting off lots of text...

Lets wait until we can judge them side by side. I have a windows phone device, but no apps (my market doesn't really have anything decent), so I'm not really sure if the metaphors have evolved much from the panaromas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Gauging iOS's progress on aesthetics alone is like a Formula 1 driver on the highway saying "I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm making great time!".

They only recently implemented a sane notifications system and quick-access settings, and they STILL don't have anything comparable to Intents on Android, which I believe is a revolutionary feature that should be core to any mobile OS.

</comment><comment><USER15> >If we felt really crazy, we'd make simple things like home screens and modal dialogs subtly shift in 3D, real-time, in response to gyroscope input. (To a mobile web developer that sounds like a troll feature request.)

Uh, except that's all completely possible on the modern web, thanks to tools like CSS3 and deviceorientation APIs. In fact, when iOS7 was revealed a few weeks ago, developers raced to duplicate the parallax background feature, and did exactly that in very short order: [http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style- parallax-background-bas...](http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style-parallax- background-based-on-device-orientation/)

</comment><comment><USER16> If this article is accurate - and that iOS 7 has so much eyecandy that it will only work on the latest high end hardware - does this mean that a low end budget iPhone is off the table? Or is this Apple's way of segmenting a high end version of the OS and then a version with all the eyecandy disabled for the cheap iPhone?

It's interesting that Apple and Google seem to be going in polar opposite directions right now - with Apple going for high end effects, and KLP reportedly focusing on reducing the minimum requirements and letting it run on lower end hardware.

<comment><USER17> Ios 7 runs fine on most hardware right now even with beta 2, blur effects aren't exactly that big of a power draw.

Don't believe everything you read in articles before its released. Best not to form opinions on things that aren't in general availability. Apple isn't going for "high end effects" at all with ios7, more fluid effects that overall provide a consistent experience. Can't get too into details due to nda but it isn't nearly as crazy as this article makes it out to be.

It is impressive what they've changed since Ive took over though, very impressive how much of a change they've made actually. It definitely feels designed all the way through.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't care about 3d or blur or other eye candy. I'd happily trade all that crap off for the battery life of my old Nokia 1100.

<comment><USER5> The 3D and blur aren't what's draining your battery. The big ass LTE radio sucking down videos, music, and photos is what's doing it. That and the huge, brilliant LCD screen staring at you.

Optimizing battery life by getting rid of animations and graphical effects would be _extremely_ penny-wise, pound-foolish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > The 3D, the blur, the compositing – all of them are disabled or degraded on > the [iPhone 4's] A4.

I hadn't heard that before, and it's quite interesting. Does anyone know if previous iOS versions have similar feature segmentation, other than the obvious (and perhaps artificial) ones like Siri and 3d maps?

<comment><USER5> Besides what others have already mentioned, third party devs (including myself) find ourselves disabling features on the iPhone 4 also.

The important thing to recall is that the iPhone 4 quadrupled the number of pixels you had to render while doing almost nothing for CPU performance. Graphics performance-wise the iPhone 4 was a _huge_ downgrade from the 3GS.

If you're doing any sort of graphics work that's CPU-bound, your iPhone 4 performance is going to be dismal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps:

\- Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development.

\- More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls.

\- More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language!

\- More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort.

The common theme of these points being that Apple wants control over everything, and _has_ control over everything. But that's a point for a separate rant. My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open.

Apple could still take control and sell web apps, but they seem to be very purposely not doing that, and pushing native as hard as they can while occasionally implementing a buggy web app feature here or there. It just makes me sad. We don't need parallax when we move our phones around. We don't need blur effects everywhere. We need an easy, clear, open, and accessible way to develop apps for mobile devices.

<comment><USER21> > _\- Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to- > learn, niche language used only for mac development._

It's not hard for someone that already knows C, or really any other language. The learning curve is in platform knowledge, and every platform -- including the web -- is different.

> _\- More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even > be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls._

The IDE is a major win, not a downside. It automates the mundane, and applies equally well to web development -- I use IntelliJ for web work.

> _\- More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on > android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language!_

That's unfortunate, but it provides the best user experience.

> _\- More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, > in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort._

On the other hand, Apple has a mountain of customer's credit cards on file. The 30% buys you a lot.

> _My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a > uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely > used, and the environment is open._

The web has a massive pile of its own drawbacks -- it's a language monoculture, low performance, no platform to speak of, much less platform consistency. Development is a hodgepodge of different interdependent tools, server-side and client-side. None of your users actually own anything, and webapps can just disappear at any time.

Neither proprietary native platforms NOR the web are perfect, and both are imperfect in very different ways.

<comment><USER22> I have never used objective C, although I use C quite a bit. Javascript is much higher level than C, thus you can code more faster with less bugs in javascript. Of course it all depends on if you need low-level performance.

<comment><USER23> Objective-C is about on the same level as Java.

<comment><USER5> Well... No. And I say this as someone who write Obj-C all day and actually likes Obj-C.

Obj-C is a _relatively thin_ layer around C, it's nowhere near Java's level of abstraction.

For one thing, at least on iOS, there is no actual garbage collector. ARC is a static analyzer that injects manual memory management code into your app - <USER3> does not collect garbage at runtime.

Even with ARC you are still managing your own memory - it is not possible to write a complex iOS app without understanding manual memory management and what the different reference types do in this regard. This is in contrast with Java where you really don't have to understand memory at all to write non- leaky code.

You're also allowed to (though not encouraged to) do low-level hackery like pointer arithmetic. There is _nothing_ stopping you from reaching down and fiddling with raw memory addresses and values. This is in sharp contrast with Java and other high-level languages where you're very explicitly forbidden from doing anything that might blow your foot off.

The runtime itself is also really thin compared to the JVM. Hell, frequently the first you know something is wrong is when your program segfaults. Try that with Java.

Not Obj-C, but OSX/iOS, is also that as soon as you get into any of the deeper libraries you're in C-land. Core Graphics is exclusively a C API, as are many of the other APIs like calendaring and address book. You really can't go deep into the platform without touching raw C.

Anyways, Obj-C isn't on the same abstraction plane as Java, not even close.

<comment><USER23> It was a generalized statement for people who want to begin to learn it, I personally find that Obj-C offers very similar level of abstraction for beginners as Java does (especially with ARC, and not everyone has to deal with CoreAudio, AddressBook and other C libraries or integrate C and C++ code into their app).

I'm a professional iOS dev as well and everything you said were correct, so no arguing there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Good point. Hadn't really though of it this way before. I guess as a mobile web dev I'm going to be always behind the curve here. Something interesting to think about.

</comment><comment><USER25> Will it be true that Apple still has enough weight to cause ripple effects in design paradigms completely unrelated to a mobile device? I am guessing so, but mostly because a lot of designers are coupled strongly to Apple ideology and it affects their designs directly.

This is of course painful as someone outside of this bubble - watching designs that conform to a device and a way of thinking instead of living and breathing in their own right.

<comment><USER16> Well, at least this design is a lot closer to current Android and WP8. When developers designed specifically for iOS and then ported to Android as an afterthought, the results often looked completely out of place.

I'm hopeful that it will be easier for clever designers to make apps that look very similar on all three platforms, and also look at home on all three platforms.

<comment><USER25> Good point. That may not actually be too bad. I would hate to see blur and super-thin lines propagating all designs but those would hopefully be minor details if the apps themselves are more similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> From my brief, albeit limited time, running iOS 7 beta 2 on my 3rd gen iPad I have to say that I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. Bugginess aside, it just feels like a significant step backwards in terms of intuitiveness and usability.

It's as if Apple (obviously) had to do something and prioritized jumping on the flat UI bandwagon over a well thought-out / polished experience.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is assuming that everyone is chasing the same level of perfection as apple. If the web can provide a "good enough" interface will the bulk of developers go to the extra effort of native apps?

Currently things like games are (largely) not good enough on mobile web and so the issue is forced, but building a native app for a nicer blur effect? Probably not.

<comment><USER28> I'd argue that bulk of developers are already doing native. The thing is, extra effort is required to replicate with web technologies even simple things that native SDKs offer. If everything you know is HTML, JS, CSS then yes, learning iOS or Android SDK will require some effort but it is worth it. Even the best webapps still feel subpar on iOS6, on iOS 7 they will feel very clumsy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice to see a non-negative analysis of iOS7. Not having tested it myself, I hadn't realized that iOS7 was actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible with modern hardware. My previous impression was that, if anything, it was a simplification of sorts and that seemed a dubious direction. Thanks for pointing this out!

</comment><comment><USER30> Apple haven't done anything with iOS 7 that I can't do with MOAI. ([http://getmoai.com/](http://getmoai.com/)) By taking this direction, they've given me even more reason to ignore their Native GUI frameworks and continue to focus on implementing a clean, usable GUI using non-native (read: 100% cross platform) technologies.

I think this is a good thing, personally. I don't see any reason to write code specifically for iOS any more, when I can, just as easily, declare a similar GUI function in a language that will work on all platforms.

</comment><comment><USER31> iOS 7 implementing "troll feature requests" for web developers had me chuckling. For the most part, I'm finding iOS 7 to be great.

</comment><comment><USER32> Apple doesn't need to introduce delicious eye-candy to its interfaces that nobody needs to hamper web developers...they can just keep neutering the shit out of WebView by keeping it several generations behind the Safari javascript engine.

<comment><USER33> Bing! Give the man a prize! I totally agree.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Another cynicism that comes to mind - this won't only help staying ahead of competitors, but also perhaps persuading owners of older iphones to get a newer device, even though they were fully satisfied up to this point.

</comment><comment><USER35> Why is blur supposed to be computationally intensive? It's very simple mathematically...

<comment><USER36> It's not the computation itself, it's the GPU memory bandwidth it takes up. (Assuming you're doing it in real-time of course.)

<comment><USER30> Shaders.

<comment><USER5> Most certainly you want to use a shader, but that doesn't fix all your problems. You have to push a (very large) texture across the bus. The GPU will chew on it and spit out the result, which you then have to pull back across the bus into main memory so that it plays nicely with other UI elements that are CPU-bound and not cached in VRAM.

So you've removed the processing bottleneck in exchange for a bus bandwidth bottleneck :(

<comment><USER35> are you sure it has to be pulled back to main memory?

<comment><USER30> Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either. Especially since the entire point of the recent changes to iOS is precisely to get everything on-screen handled by the GPU, in the first place ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> What's funny here is the idea that somehow commodity SoCs will not soon be catching up and providing the same hardware benefit to all the competitors.

Hiding behind a hardware wall is not a safe place to be these days.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Try copying this assholes"

Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand.

Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick impressive demo...)

<comment><USER28>
      > I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still
      > with their heads so far in the sand.

Those iOS fanboys are just knowledgeable enough. Why don't you spend some time and educate yourself on a couple of things. First, where the first usage of the cornerstones of modern web tech appeared in the wild: I mean <canvas>, CSS transitions and animations. You may be surprised. Second, learn a bit what native SDKs offer. Once you know the state of "modern web" and the state of modern mobile OSes SDKs you may be less tempted to try to compare them. Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable and the person making such claim probably has his head in the darker place than sand.

<comment><USER38> Ah, yes. Assume I'm ignorant about the technology you claim is superior (the exact same thing happened the last time I tried to point out that the web has advanced a bit in the last 10 years). I didn't even try to make any claim about the web being better than native, but for your own knowledge, I have experience with native SDKs from win32, to cocoa, to android and iOS.

>Trying to portray web stack as superior is laughable

In what regard? Surely not in ease of development? Ease of learning? Ease/portability/availability of tools? Portability of the end app itself? Available developer pool? Open source code to look at and use? I can't imagine a way that any native platform beats the web in any of those categories.

Or just in terms of making a fancy animation and having reusable UI elements? You're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly advancing on that front as well.

<comment><USER21> > _Surely not in ease of development?_

Nope. Building a complex _application_ in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking.

> _Ease of learning?_

Also nope. Complex applications are still complex.

> _Ease /portability/availability of tools?_

Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited.

> _Portability of the end app itself?_

Portability is a cost-cutting measure, but never a user-appreciated feature. The web would need to stand alone as a first-tier platform for this to be a net gain; as it is, web-only experience is subpar.

> _Available developer pool?_

Quality engineers capable of producing first-class _applications_ for your users still cost a lot and are rare on the ground.

> _Open source code to look at and use?_

This is not even remotely unique to the web.

> _You 're probably right, but oh wait, if only you'd investigated Shadow DOM > and Polymers like I recommended you'd see that web technologies are rapidly > advancing on that front as well._

Catching up to 1990s application architecture is not really a cause to celebrate. The technology stack that drives desktop and mobile devices is _massive_. We don't build custom interfaces directly on top of OpenGL and call it a day.

<comment><USER22> Hmm, I suspect that the comparison is relative, whereas many of your comments are absolute. E.g. Quality engineers are certainly hard to find, but are good javascript developers _harder_ or _easier_ to find than iOS developers? I don't really know, but I suspect that good javascript developers are easier to find. Also, I think web-development tools are pretty on par to xcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> You may be surprised, but iPhone 5, or even more, Galaxy S4 are capable of much more than that crap. Like the full 3D with bump mapping, environment mapping and dynamic lighting.

The main problem is iOS 7 does not invoke a desire to copy it.

Whereas various items of the old iPhone's UI can be found all over the web. That UI style is so routinely copied nobody even notices. Some things from the iPhone have even become some sort of a standard.</comment>


Lyons Electronic Office: The First Business Intelligence Project - <AUTHOR> http://timoelliott.com/blog/2014/05/in-the-beginning-was-analytics.html

<comment><USER2> > The LEO team had designed the system that they would have like to have had > if they had been running the teashops, not one that the managers themselves > had asked for.

This has been the story of my life as a programmer, 61 years later and we are still doing that.

I'm not saying that we should always build exactly what the client asks for (they are often not aware of what is possible which is after all partly your job to explain) but in many cases I've seen projects fail because the person designing the over all system didn't go spend a few days with the people who would be using it (and I don't mean meetings with them, I mean go and sit in their office and watch them actually work).

I've found meetings are a horrible place to gather requirements from users (especially if the user has a manager present) as you never get the full unedited story and this leads to false assumptions.

Also something I find works well, get copies of all their _actual filled in_ paperwork (anonymised if required) as you'll often find the process the manager describes and the process actually used diverge somewhat ("oh yeah, we don't bother with that, we just write the drivers name on the manifest").

<comment><AUTHOR> fully agree! seen and still see it every day!</comment></comment>


L.A. County homelessness jumps a staggering 23% as need far outpaces housing - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-homeless-count-20170530-story.html <comment><AUTHOR> Title edited for space.</comment>


Ask HN: Me Want Some Lobsters? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone, anyone has a Lobste.rs invite ? I've tried emaling few people from invite tree @ https://lobste.rs/u/ but no luck =( If anyone can help please send me one to > tux[-@-]vmail[.]me Thank you so much! <comment><USER2> Sent

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, nice! Thank you buddy :-) Registered!</comment></comment>


Why Is Apple Suddenly Hiring So Many More Designers? - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/01/25/apple-hiring-designers/ <comment><USER2> My prediction, they haven't innovated in years, time to slap on a fresh coat of paint so it looks like they're doing something useful. Flat design will be replaced with something "revolutionary" and everyone is going to follow. Physical buttons and wires will make a come back. Laptop screens will get bigger and phone screens smaller.

</comment><comment><USER3> They're revamping their Education department

</comment><comment><USER4> This is easily answerable by anyone who has spent five minutes using an Apple product.</comment>


HitWarrior.com: A new approach to click fraud detection.  - <AUTHOR> http://hitwarrior.com/ <comment><USER2> From my own experience, clickfraud is not a significant issue. I was running a campaign for one of the windows software centered startups and we were spending over $15,000 a month on AdWords. Amount of fraud was insignificant. It was so small that it didn't make any sense to waste our time on trying to do something about it. Google then instituted a policy by which they pay you back for the fraud they detect.We had less than 30 fraudulent clicks per month.

If you're a startup fighting click fraud, make sure you have a solid value proposition. People will not pay for your service if it doesn't save them at the very least 10-20% of the amount spent on AdWords.

</comment><comment><USER3> I remember talking to you about this during Startup School weekend. Best of luck with this. Some information on the website about what differentiates you would be good. You shouldn't rely on people signing up just to find out what you're all about.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Self-promoting my startup. Check it out and sign up for the testing phase.

Let's see.. we were #11 (1st alternate) in TechStars and one of the many rejected teams from YC. But we kept going. And here it is so far.

<comment><USER4> YEAH! You kick their butts!</comment></comment>


A JavaScript clone of Nu Pogodi, a Soviet hand-held game - <AUTHOR> http://nerdlab.pl/uploads/projects/nu-pogodi/index.html

<comment><USER2> Ah, Nu Pogodi. The handheld everyone played in rural Poland around 1990. This one mimics the look-and-feel of the original rather well, but, sadly, I have yet to see a clone that faithfully implements the gameplay of the original.

From memory (remember that I was only 6 back then, so I might have screwed up some things):

* There were two levels of difficulty, denoted "игра А" and "игра B" ("game A" and "game B"). The A version was easier: in it, the bottom-left roost was disabled and eggs would never fall off of it. In game B, all four roosts were in use.

* There were multiple stages of the game: \- Score 0 to 5: only one egg falling at any given time, the next egg appears only when you catch the previous one \- Score 6 to 20 (?): two eggs active at any given time \- Score 21 to 50 (?): three eggs active at any given time

And so on, up to a limit of, I think, six or so at a time, at certain thresholds. Also, at certain score thresholds the game speed would accelerate. I think this didn't start to be noticeable until the score of 200 or so; by the time you got to score 500 falling eggs would become moderately fast, by score 700 quite fast, and getting past 800 or even 900 would require your fingers to be extremely snappy.

* If I remember correctly, getting past 999 would cause the score to wrap back to 0 and the speed to wrap back to as slow as at the start, but you wouldn't get three lives back and you would still have six eggs to catch at a time. I managed to do this only a few times ever; I think my high score ever was approximately 1050-1100, and average score might have been around 700-750. This was in game A, which I mostly played.

* Also if I remember correctly, the order of falling eggs, at least in the beginning phase of the game, was deterministic (top-left roost, then top-right roost, then bottom-left roost (skipped in version A), then bottom-right roost, and so on). The order of subsequent eggs was probably deterministic as well, but this wasn't noticeable anymore. The initial roost might have been chosen randomly.

<comment><USER3> Yep we had the same thing here in Romania (ex communist) in the 90's. From what i can remember it was a clone of this but the implementation was the same as you said.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had the real Nu Pogodi as a kid, and once invited half of my class and served them lemonade while they were taking turns to play it. It was a big thing to have in Bulgaria, and the rest of the eastern block in the 80's.

</comment><comment><USER5> It looks like a clone of one of Nintendo's earliest video games: [http://www.mariowiki.com/Egg_%28Game_%26_Watch%29](http://www.mariowiki.com/Egg_%28Game_%26_Watch%29)

<comment><USER6> Argh. But I am not surprised. I was kind of hoping it would be an old Soviet original. But yes, it looks pretty much like a clone of that game.

I guess since the 60s or so, Soviets just started to copy all the CPU designs and electronics from the West. Apparently it included children's games.

<comment><USER7> Don't forget about Tetris, the Soviet original released in 1984.

<comment><USER8> Nintendo went to great lengths to acquire publishing rights for this game. Tetris basically established the whole handheld gaming market, it was the Game Boy's killer app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That was way too much fun. At the beginning I thought to myself "gee, this is a simple and boring game." And then I played it to a score of 208, haha.

One thing I found interesting while playing was that the game never deals you a losing hand. It got faster, sure, but only one egg is added per step so you always have time to move.

<comment><USER10> Yeah. There's never a kill screen, just increasing speed until there are multiple eggs per second.

First attempt: 484. In a way, it almost gets easier at higher speeds. And it's always obvious which egg is next, or you can just watch what order they appear in and collect them in that order.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It was originally a cartoon. I remember watching it growing up. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nu,_pogodi)!

<comment><USER12> Interestingly, Wikipedia translates "Nu, pogodi" as "Well, you just wait". Actually, this phrase is a threat and should be translated something like "I will get you".

<comment><USER13> Idiomatically, "just you wait!" is a threat. [http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/just- you-...](http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/just-you-wait)

<comment><USER12> Thank you, I did not know that. It is sometimes very surprising to see such identical idioms, while English and Russian languages are so different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Holy smokes, another Электроника game I played 20 years ago. [http://www.pica- pic.com/#/space_bridge/](http://www.pica-pic.com/#/space_bridge/) I'll definitely ask my parents to look for this game, maybe it's still somewhere there.

<comment><USER14> Ah, Electronika. They made an interesting PDP-11 clone desktop computer: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKNC)

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

<comment><USER15> It's actually a brand name. A while lot of different consumer- and professional-grade products were sold under that brand (follow the link to Russian Wikipedia to see the full list)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Holy crap, this brings back some memories. Very cool! I also remember playing "Весёлые Футболисты" (Fun Futballers).

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool game. If anyone else is as confused as I was, you have to use up/down as well as left/right. I only figured this out after trying to use the console buttons.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is awesome. I created an account just to make this comment. I did not even realize I played this as a kid until I started to play it here.

</comment><comment><USER19> This brings back so many memories of sitting on the steps playing those old hand-held LCD Tiger games. I was absolutely addicted to the batman one: [http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/Batman.htm](http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Tiger/Batman.htm)

</comment><comment><USER20> Others already mentioned, this game bears a lot of sweet memories, since it was one of few hanheld games foreign USSR made (OK, a few years ago I found them being much more than a few) and other countries cloned. Having one ot those was friend-magnet, mastering and exploiting bugs in them was regarded as being geekish in best of ways.

Also, it came as no shock that each and every Elektronika brand game was a copy of sorts from similar or identical Nintendo products.

As this is very approximate clone of original handheld, sound was closest to version everybody remembers. It triggered nostalgic feeling all around the room.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Found the source here: [https://github.com/pawel-winiecki/nu-pogodi- html5-game](https://github.com/pawel-winiecki/nu-pogodi-html5-game)

</comment><comment><USER21> For more nostalgia, check out [http://www.emulator3000.org/hq.htm](http://www.emulator3000.org/hq.htm). Many many Elektronika simulations in one package (Win/Linux).

</comment><comment><USER22> Very nicely done! Scored 165 from the first try. I used to play this game on my friend's console, long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER23> Nice but I cannot play on iphone4 Ios7 safari - bottom buttons are hidden under the toolbar.

</comment><comment><USER24> I remember playing this when I was a kid. Nice job!

</comment><comment><USER25> IIRC, originally it was silver, with red buttons

</comment><comment><USER26> A similar game but with better graphics: [http://netforza.com/verydoge/](http://netforza.com/verydoge/)</comment>


So, That's It For Thunderbird - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/so-thats-it-for-thunderbird/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure why this is a problem, really. E-mail is e-mail, and the great thing about it is that it's been e-mail for years and it will still be e-mail in many years' time.

Thunderbird is a decent native e-mail client. It does its job well enough already. IME, it's been stable and robust for a while now. Lightning is fine for basic calendar needs these days, too. Mozilla have hardly done anything significant to this whole area for a long time anyway, and short of some new protocol being developed or something like signed/encrypted mail becoming the norm, I don't see that the tools require a lot of ongoing development either.

I'd be far more interested in improvements to Firefox or, if we're talking about messaging, in having some kind of lightweight Exchange replacement with the same kind of ease-of-use so I don't have to configure a million text files on a Linux box to get a basic mail/calendar/contacts store set up. Personally, I trust the likes of Google (or any other data-driven/ad-funded freebie service) about as far as I can throw them, and they'll host my e-mail when they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. :-)

<comment><USER3> Lightning is not really "fine" - it never properly worked for me properly. Integrating it with Exchange is a nightmare. It is sad that it was never brought to a level where you could confidently recommend it as Outlook replacement, and now it never will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just noticed today that Thunderbird was using 300 MB of my RAM, and was surprised at how bloated it had gotten. I was going to blog about how my 2012 computer feels as snappy as my 2002 computer because of these sorts of things, but I didn't get around to it.

There _must_ be a good case to be made about light, responsive software. From the other posters here, I take it there's no light alternative to Thunderbird, and I'll keep using it, but 300 MB of RAM for an email client is a bit ridiculous.

<comment><USER5> Is a native, snappy email client something you'd pay for?

$20? $50?

What operating systems? Is there anything specific features/aspects/licensing that would push you to $50?

If neither, (I assume free or close to it) why? How much time do you spend in an email interface? How much is your time worth?

Cheers!

<comment><USER4> I would pay if it were something _amazing_ (i.e. not just a bit faster than Thunderbird), probably around $20. I don't spend that much time on email, but I hate the small annoyances of Thunderbird (when I delete messages a new, empty one appears that can't be removed, it has no tray icon, it starts up maximized and I have to close it every time, it has no decent "send later" functionality, etc).

These are all things that Thunderbird doesn't get right. Also, search is _completely_ broken.

<comment><USER6> It sounds like your "what to do when I mark a mesdsage for deletion" setting is wrong.

What is a tray icon? Is that a windows thing?

<comment><USER4> It _is_ a Windows thing. I'm on Ubuntu, though, with Gnome 2, and it has one too. They all have one, really.

<comment><USER6> The little icon biff-like that shows if you have new mail? I always thought it was fairly useless. One or two active mailing list subscriptions and the icon was always lit up.

PS: What is the signifigance of the italicized _is_?

<comment><USER4> It's more like "the little icon biff-like that prevents Thunderbird from taking up space on your alt+tab bar when running".

The "is" was just emphasis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Long live mutt :)

In the "who's the user, whose the product" dynamic, I'm a bit confused over what's what in the Mozilla empire. And while no, I wasn't a user, Thunderbird's among the better and more complete email clients out there, I don't see this as a good thing.

<comment><USER7> Erm, "who's the product". Apostrophe miscue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ihmo there isn't so much left to innovate in an email client and Thunderbird is already a solid client so personally this message won't deter me from using it

<comment><USER9> I disagree -- nobody has of yet come close to matching Apple's Mail app. It does a simple job exceedingly well, with a minimally impeding user interface.

The alternatives -- including Thunderbird -- are bulky and poorly designed. I believe the wide migration to gmail is in no small part due to the extremely poor showing of e-mail clients on Linux and Windows.

<comment><USER10> I'd kill for a desktop client that was as good as Gmail. I'm surprised nobody has done a straight copy of the UI in a desktop deployment. Heck, you could do it in Javascript+HTML in an embedded gecko/webkit.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunately copy of the skin of Gmail would not get you the gigantic honking datacenters that make Gmail so much faster than Mail.app. Would you pay for a client that looked like Gmail and performed like Mail.app?

<comment><USER10> The only thing I can think of where honking datacenters could conceivably help is searching for things. All other things should be mostly unaffected. And I'm not sure you need an entire datacenter to search through one person's email or address book.

Spam protection is a more serious issue, I think. Both mail servers and desktop clients do it. Mail servers, especially if they get feedback from clients, have a huge advantage though in that they can learn from all their users. The desktop client has to work with a single user's input; unless you implemented some kind of p2p collaborative approach (which would be really cool).

<comment><USER11> The day-to-day performance of Mail.app is orders of magnitude slower than Gmail. Loading a thread with 100 replies in Mail will take several seconds. The same thread in Gmail will load in milliseconds.

<comment><USER10> Yes, but that's just evidence that Mail.app is badly optimized, for that use case anyway. You don't need a server farm to get a couple of hundred replies to display quickly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's fine, Thunderbird is complete. Great features like labels, filters, and tabs.

As an added bonus of FOSS, the code base can be forked into a new project and continued by those who are interested.

<comment><USER13> TB Search does suck, though.

<comment><USER12> No, it works fine. Why specificly do you think it sucks?

<comment><USER14> Really doesn't. My pet peeve is that there are 2 search bars. Search and Quick Search. The main search doesn't really work well when you want to say, search for emails sent by co-worker X.

You type in their name/email and you get this separate tab (so many tabs). There are things like To Me, From Me, Attachment, People, Starred and a bunch of statistics at the top. You can see a screen shot here: [http://www.dagorret.net/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/thunderbi...](http://www.dagorret.net/wp- content/uploads/2010/01/thunderbird_result_search.jpg)

The regular search could be good for advanced searches. There are probably a bunch of options for it somewhere. But for most searches you really want the Quick Search which is some menu bar option.

Not sure what kind of design decision this is either. In Mail.app except for saved searches, I usually try a simp search, if that fails, then there is an option to try and refine it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Our article about exporting e-mails from Thunderbird to Outlook has been one of the most successful blog posts since 2009: [http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages- and-f...](http://blog.nektra.com/main/2009/04/14/export-messages-and-folders- from-thunderbird-to-outlook-outlook-express/)

What triggered the article was the unresponsiveness from the Thunderbird team about ugly bugs we reported and they removed!

</comment><comment><USER16> Too bad really, but probably coming for a while now. I use Tbird on Windows (and Mail.app on OS X) with my email hosted at pobox.com. I have a gmail account but I've never been a fan of webmail at all.

I miss Eudora :( Now that was a simple, fast, clean email client.

<comment><USER17> Me too! Lightning fast. I actually run it still in XP Mode in Windows 7 (couldn't get it working natively) for my personal email (Thunderbird for work, like to have a clean separation), even with that layer of emulation it's the fastest thing ever. I also love the ability to alt-click on any field and have the messages grouped by that. Closest I've found in Thunderbird (penelope extension is awful) is the Nostalgy extension, set up so that ` toggles between grouping messages by sender or subject based on the email you have selected. Not as awesome and not as fast, but still super handy.

<comment><USER16> I would use it but I worry about using programs that are not being actively maintained because of the risk of security vulnerabilities. Especially in email where you can have a lot of risky inputs (spam, phishing attempts etc) - even though I have great spam protection (thanks pobox) there is still a risk. I'm not sure what I'm going to do on Windows yet... I'm trying Postbox and it's nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> someone please explain to the author what Open Source means and why Mozilla pulling their own people off an Open source project doesn't prevent that project from continuing

<comment><USER19> Someone please explain to ABS that open source isn't magic and in many cases the community does not have enough resources or will to continue development of a product (see Camino).

<comment><USER18> You are missing the point. It's quite possible no one will pick it up but that's completely different from saying, sarcastically, "But it's not stopping? Right".

What the above is is ignorance of what it means to develop open source code.

EDIT: an please let's try and stop this trend here on HN of replying to comments ignoring half of them. I wrote "doesn't prevent that project from continuing" not "it will definitely find other people to carry on"

<comment><USER20> It's TechCrunch, don't expect them to _know_ about software (not that any other major tech publication, except maybe Ars, is any better than TC. Almost none of their writers have the slightest clue about the software).

<comment><USER21> there is lwn and (to a much lesser degree) heise.

<comment><USER20> Thanks. I didn't know about them and must check them out.

But now that I think about it again, I think I was a little harsh. There are plenty of good news sites about Open Source software and community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Funny, after a couple years of webmail I have just installed Thunderbird again today since I wanted to have more powerful features. I was positively surprised that it had improved quite bit.

<comment><USER23> I also found that out the same way, and it was owerwhelmingly great!

Only that it was soulcrushingly slow. Firefox is quite snappy theese days (especially with pentadactyl, mmhm sweet jezuz) but TB was always a hog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is rather interesting, given that Mozilla had recently adopted the lead developer from the Mozilla-based IM client Instantbird to incorporate chat into TB15. Knowing the software is deadpooled, I wonder in hindsight if that was a last-ditch effort to stay relevant or if that effort helped highlight the inevitable decline/futility of desktop-based email.

</comment><comment><USER25> I've been a HEAVY user of Thunderbird for 8 years now and I am very saddened by this decision but I do support it. :(

One part of me saw this while reading the letter: "Google Chrome is whooping our FireFox browser's ass and we need all men at their battle stations, including people from the Thunderbird team. We've been neglecting Thunderbird for so long that it's not like anyone's going to notice. After all, it took us 10 years to get Sunbird (Mozilla's Standalone Calendar Client) to version 1.0."

And the other part of me saw this while reading the letter: "The era of desktop software is coming to an end. Most people have smart phones, multiple computers, and use web-mail to keep it all in sync and accessible across all of their devices. Desktop email client users make up a small percentage of users and there's no reason for us to keep spending money and resources on something that will one day be emulated by a web interface."

=== Things Wrong With Thunderbird That Will Probably Never Get Fixed (too expensive / not worth it) ===

\- The biggest problem with Thunderbird is that it tries to be a bare-bones email client with poorly integrated functionality in the form of third party add-ons. What really makes email clients shine is when a lot of usable features are tightly integrated with a very intuitive and snappy interface. Thunderbird out of the box comes with so few features that it can't compete well with web mail and when you do add on much needed features, they just get generically "bolted on" to the interface. Sometimes in ways that just seem unintuitive and backwards. And every time you update Thunderbird, ALL of your add-ons are rendered useless and you have to wait days/weeks/indefinitely for the addon to be updated. This is the biggest downfall of Thunderbird in my eyes. You'd have to redesign Thunderbird and that isn't happening, it isn't worth it.

\- By default Thunderbird tries to send all my outgoing mail through 1 smtp account. This alone causes so many problems. Each email account should send emails from its own stmp. Not doing so can mark your "from" field incorrectly (has happened to me many times), trigger red flags (happened to me before) and make other email clients mark your email as "Gmail thinks this message is a scam".

\- The SPAM filter in Thunderbird is A.W.F.U.L. Let me repeat that A-W-F-U-L. Despite training it for years it routinely misses the same spam, with the same title, and the same content, while sometimes marking very important emails as junk.

\- The time and date selector for Lightning is just atrocious to the point where I hate having to use it. It FORCES me to set everything in military time and makes date selection more cumbersome than it needs to be.

\- The tasks todo list for Lightning has never worked for me. Never.

\- Thunderbird is stuck to one device (desktop). Technically you can have Thunderbird across a lot of computers by using IMAP instead of POP3 but that slows down and cancels out a lot of your speed benefits.

=== Why Mozilla Should Fix Them ===

\- Originally I had typed up a HUGE list of things that desktop email clients can do that web mail clients cannot. Upon further inspection I found that a LOT of those features, everything from multiple accounts being displayed in one stream and searching across multiple accounts is now available in gmail.

\- Email Clients allow me to have full control over my email inboxes and contacts without having to feed them into gmail.

\- Email Clients give me a lot of options in how I can display, index, read, and write email.

\- Email Clients allow me to search emails and contacts from across ALL my email accounts (gmail currently has a limit of 5 accounts).

\- Email Clients allow you instant one click access to all your email accounts with powerful and expandable features, an intuitive and lightning fast interface, and god-like control over massive amounts of email accounts. For business people, entrepreneurs, assistants, community organizers, and domain owners email clients are a necessity.

\- The same way power-users like using Seesmic for twitter and facebook, and people like downloading and using native apps over web based ones, the speed and control of software is what's keeping me with Email Clients at the moment.

\- As soon as you have more than 5 email accounts to manage on a daily basis, the speed of an Email Client wins out. Gmail only allows 5 multiple accounts to be imported into your stream.

=== Why Mozilla Will NOT Fix Them And Instead Leave Thunderbird ===

\- Everything I mentioned above is slowly getting emulated by web mail. At the moment gmail is the winner when it comes to email client emulation but in a few years I can see an elegant php+mysql web based email client that not only does exactly what Thunderbird does, but does it across all your devices. And without breaking all your addons after every update.

TLDR: The end is near for Outlook + Thunderbird + Mail + Evolution + The Others...

<comment><USER26>
      Thunderbird is stuck to one device (desktop). Technically you can have Thunderbird across a lot of computers by using IMAP instead of POP3 but that slows down and cancels out a lot of your speed benefits.

You're still using POP3? You're about the second person that I know does that.

Your complaints about Lightning are misplaced. It's an extension, not part of Thunderbird itself.

<comment><USER25> In my situation POP3 works best. I only check email on 1 device, my desktop. Not my phone, not on other computers. I have 4 gmail accounts and 4 email inboxes from my .com domains. I NEVER use my web host's webmail interface. NOR do I want old email backed up into it. So I use POP3 to pull ALL of my emails out of those accounts. I don't like leaving my email with gmail either. I pull it out and it becomes mine. I own my email. I have my entire Thunderbird portable folder with ALL of my emails backed up constantly.

=== Security Wise ===

If anyone somehow breaks into ANY of my email accounts I still have access to all of my emails, they can't delete any emails, and they can't read any of my emails. With IMAP they can just look through old confirmation emails and see your username, go to that site, try to log in as you, click "I forgot my password", and have it sent through email, log in with the new reset password and change all your credentials to a new username, new password, & new email so you can never log back in. Effectively creating a massive mess for you to clean up. Email is the greatest failure point of your digital existence.

I've reached a point in my digital life when I realize how insecure I feel to have so much information all over the place with ANYONE in the world able to access it all just by knowing a password. With everyone claiming a stake to own my digital property I feel the best way to truly be in control of my own words is to pull my emails out completely and keep them locally. I want to own my words, I want to completely control where they are and on what hard drive they exist. It makes me happy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Bah. What's a good alternative native email reader?

<comment><USER7> My own preference is mutt, and I'm deadly serious about that.

KMail / Kontact is actually a very nice client / integrated suite (and it will happily play either way). I consider it the best general PIM I've encountered on _any_ platform.

Balsa and Thunderbird (GNOME).

<comment><USER28> I prefer Sup to mutt. Labels instead of folders, indexing for super fast searching, it's awesome.

<comment><USER7> I've been meaning to try that. Ah ... it's in Debian repos now: sup-mail.

From what I recall and read: sup is the ruby-based implementation of mutt. I believe there are also forks of the mainstream mutt which incorporate indexing, tags, and notmuch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> So what do you guys use for managing multiple email accounts well? I love gmail.com but it still doesn't have an easy way to add multiple accounts to the same interface so I'm stuck with the problem of constantly switching between 3 google accounts just to read my email.

I used thunderbird for a while but it doesn't show or work with conversation threads as well as gmail and it's search functionality is terrible (I always had to open up gmail to find old email)

<comment><USER30> I use thunderbird but you can do what you asked in gmail.

The steps I believe are:

1\. Forward All Email to 1 email address (you can use a filter to even forward the spam if you don't want false positives getting stuck in an email account you don't log in with often.

2\. Set up the ability to send mail as all the email accounts on your main account (this is done in settings, i think it was under identities or something)

3\. Select the option to (on reply) send email from the address it was sent to

With this you will also be able to send from any email account from your main one.

<comment><USER29> Thanks for the information, unfortunately one is a Gmail account (personal) and the other 2 are Google apps accounts (startup and side project) and I don't think you can send mail looking like a user at a Google Apps address.

Also I don't really want all my email from these 3 services mashed together into the one inbox as it'd be almost impossible to undo and it'll get messy really quick.

All I really want is a side pane in Gmail similar to Thunderbird / outlook which shows the 3 accounts and their folders with how much mail is in each folder, then I can easily click on any folder to navigate to it straight away.

<comment><USER31> Google has the capacity to make this really easy; the fact that they haven't makes me wonder how difficult it is to aggregate search and other data into one user profile, as that seems like the primary argument against easy Gmail (and thus Google) account mashups.

By far my biggest frustration as a 5-account, 3-OS (plus mobile) GMail and Apps user is the client. Two personal accounts, an academic and side project, and a professional one. Oy. Thunderbird provided some cross-platform consistency, but was far too clunky to last in my workflow - not surprised it died.

What I've done for the last six months (before recently experimenting again) was keeping the six accounts completely separate and using Sparrow on OSX/iOS as the primary means of access. It kept headers from getting all effed up with Gmail aliasing, but was a real pain when I would occasionally have to log in via web (signing in/out multiple times to check inboxes, etc.).

I've now decided to keep all non mission-critical forwarded to the same account (for me 5 Gmail/Apps accounts, for you would be your personal and side project accounts) and the professional account (Apps) separate. With Google allowing a max of Gmail and one Apps account at the same time, this works fine, so long as I'm willing to have my headers display stupid "sent by [me] on behalf of [my other email]" text. Which I am at this point for a little simplicity.

Agreed that an aggregator/navigator plugin would be killer (even if it just forwarded you to an incognito tab with your mailbox, to keep you from having to sign out of your main Google account) but the implementation details are onerous/likely impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is there a good web-based email client? Like a html/javascript email client that can talk POP3 & SMTP or IMAP. It's like a Thunderbird on the web.

Note I don't mean Gmail/YahooMail/Hotmail. Just a web-based email client that can talk to multiple accounts using standard protocols. Some light server storage support for buffering the POP3 mails would be great.

<comment><USER33> There's RoundCube. I don't think it does multiple accounts though.

<comment><USER32> Excellent. Looks very nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Too bad, all the Thunderbird features they've been implementing have been really positive. I can't say the same for Firefox...

Last time I tried the nightlies Thunderbird was coming together as a great "Messaging" client - with IM, IRC, Facebook, GTalk support, filelink for sending big files with dropbox.

It's just too bad, I don't find any of the new features in Firefox nearly as exciting as those. Without addons it is still set up and functions pretty much like phoenix does the way I have it configured. I never liked insert tab after current - which is copied from chrome, never liked tab previews which slow down ctrl+tabbing, despise the autoupdate service firefox installs now - they're pretty much jamming firefox with all these useless and copied features and stopping true innovation with Thunderbird.

</comment><comment><USER35> Well that sucks :(

I've used Thunderbird exclusively for all of my IMAP accounts (8 of them) for years. I cache all my mail locally so I can get to it with or without an internet connection and if I'm on the road and haven't got my laptop with me, I can still get to all my mail via a web interface. It's the perfect setup.

I will be a very unhappy bunny if Thunderbird dies on the vine and all I'm left with is Outlook or Windows Mail (neither of which have decent IMAP support).

Damn you Mozilla!

</comment><comment><USER36> Highly recommend this and one reason I'd be super upset if Thunderbird ever vanishes:

<http://extensions.hesslow.se/extension/4/Quicktext/>

Allows you to do all sorts of templating within emails. A huge time saver. Great for customer service any any type of standard replies.

(Anyone know of any other way to do this should TB ever vanish? Can you write extensions for other email clients?)

</comment><comment><USER37> * CampaignMonitor[1] reports just 1.21% usage

* litmus[2] reports 2.4%

Not the huge market share that you'd expect.

[1] [http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it- work/email-...](http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/will-it-work/email- clients/)

[2]<http://litmus.com/resources/email-client-stats>

</comment><comment><USER38> The thing that has kept me with thunderbird are the AdBlockPlus and VirtualIdentity plugin. Does mail.app / opera mail / any other Linux client have something comparable?

(Virtual Identity is a godsend when you have a domain; it lets you set up identities on the fly while writing an email, and manages them beautifully and helpfully for you)

</comment><comment><USER39> It's my favourite newsgroup reader. What are the other alternatives (I'm using it on OSX, Windows and Linux)

<comment><USER40> On OS X, your best bet for a _newsgroup_ reader is Unison (<http://panic.com/unison/>), which quite honestly beat the snot out of Thunderbird for that purpose a _long_ time ago.

I don't have good recommendations for the other two systems, though, sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As an average user, there's just too much overhead in maintaining the desktop client for personal email.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a good free/paid webmail service that can be used with a custom domain and has good security? As far as I know, GMail can only be used with a custom domain if you convert your account to Google Apps, which prevents you from using some Google services.

<comment><USER43> I use Fastmail.fm for my email hosting (using my own domain), and recommend them. They don't have two-factor authentication, but do have others, such as one-time passwords. They have a lot of features over and above GMail too (such as aliases and personalities), and much prefer them to GMail.

<comment><USER28> Google Apps has aliases and catch-all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Hopefully this will open up some breathing space for serious open-source mail client alternatives. I'm hoping for a revival of Letters.app (<https://github.com/ccgus/letters>)

</comment><comment><USER44> I guess I will have to shift to Postbox .. which is a private variation on Thunderbird.

</comment><comment><USER45> Damn. I just finished importing 18,922 messages from my old email app (the dire windows mail). I've been running Thunderbird (Portable Apps edition) for the past week... it's been excellent so far.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'm pretty sure Postbox (<http://www.postbox-inc.com/>) is based on Thunderbird's source, no? I wonder that this means for them?

<comment><USER19> I guess now they'll have to do _all_ their development. But if they want to hire programmers with Thunderbird experience I know where they can find some...

<comment><USER47> It would be ironic if they scrapped TB to have more people working on FireFox, and then lost all their ex-TB employees to other companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> We use it at work.

For sure, there are bugs never fixed and some features that would need polish. I hope support will continue for some time.

</comment><comment><USER49> Thunderbird is(was?) pretty good for what it did and was a good competitor for Outlook about 5 or 6 years ago, but the POP and IMAP protocols and the servers that implemented them were no good and never came up to the level of Exchange.

Thunderbird simply didn't have the other half of the equation, Exchange clones failed to live up to their promise and Thunderbird floundered with the introduction of Gmail.

With a powerful Exchange replacement on the server side, it could've flourished as the client of choice.

Not to mention that Thunderbird did not have a source of revenue like Firefox did.

<comment><USER12> I have been using IMAP on Thunderbird for _at least_ the past 5 years and it has worked well. I even used to use Netscape's email client back int the day and it worked well, too. Open source _email_ software is vastly superior to MS offerings. Outlook is good group ware, who needs it on today's social web?

Exchange + Outlook are horrible and mostly used due to the power of Microsoft's monopoly.

PS - I am an MCP and have administered Exchange in the past.

<comment><USER49> >Outlook is good group ware, who needs it on today's social web?

Almost all companies do? Or do you propose they use the public social web instead of groupware like Exchange or Google Apps?

>Exchange + Outlook are horrible and mostly used due to the power of Microsoft's monopoly.

What's horrible about them? Also, you don't need Outlook to communicate with someone using Outlook, so I don't see much of a monopoly effect unlike with Word or Excel.

If there's an alternative server and client software that costs much less than Exchange and is easier to administer but has similar or more features, why won't people switch? The lack of such server software is what killed Thunderbird. After all, some are moving to Google Apps.

<comment><USER12> I will light a candle rather than curse your darkness! (I am not trolling and welcome this discussion !)

>>Almost all companies do? Or do you propose they use the public social web instead of groupware like Exchange or Google Apps?

Odd you equate google apps w/ exchange.

Most companies have an intranet that includes a wiki, evernote, or forum. Also, many source code control systems include a knowedge base, wiki, and comment system. Google docs + hosted domain gmail is easy to use, more secure, more robust, and lower cost than Exchange + Outlook. The reason large companies don't do this is they have sunk costs in Exchange and an admin who likes it -- why change? But for start-ups and new companies it is a no brainer. Licensing alone of Exchange (plus windows server with active directory) is prohibitive. Most users have IM accounts on AIM, Skype, or Gmail to use for chatting.

>>What's horrible about them?

UI, stability, security, documentation, user license agreement, required system resources, remote exploits that grant admin rights. I'll run out of space to list them all!

>>I don't see much of a monopoly effect unlike with Word

Good point, for example MS is appealing the verdict that it in fact abused its monopoly position with Word vs. Wordperfect. It is more subtle when it comes to Outlook. For example, the only workstations Dell sells come with a MS operating system, that includes IE and Outlook (but you must pay for Outlook/office after 2 months or something). Or staples. Or Office Depot.

>>why won't people switch

The power of mono-culture aka monopoly. It is well documented in the public record that microsoft repeated abused their monopoly position.

This is beyond the scope of email clients, but look into:

Novel Networking (IPX), 3COM lanman licensing, Sysbase & MS SQL server, Apple's UI lawsuit vs win95 that MS settled, IE & Netscape, Real media vs windows media player, The Samba group trying to get docs , Word & Wordperfect,

>> The lack of such server software is what killed Thunderbird

Wow, ummm, no.

<comment><USER49> >The reason large companies don't do this is they have sunk costs in Exchange and an admin who likes it -- why change?

The bigger reason that with locally hosted mail, you have accountability and control over your own data.

>UI, stability, security, documentation, user license agreement, required system resources, remote exploits that grant admin rights

I am sure Google Apps has none of those issues, except things like this <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4198080>

>It is more subtle when it comes to Outlook. For example, the only workstations Dell sells come with a MS operating system, that includes IE and Outlook (but you must pay for Outlook/office after 2 months or something). Or staples. Or Office Depot.

That sounds extremely roundabout. A 2 month trial of Outlook is not going to convince anyone to keep using it.

>Wow, ummm, no.

You have not provided one shred of reason to counter my point that, if there was a Exchange alternative that integrated well with Thunderbird, it might have been a success.

<comment><USER12> Linux & Thunderbird are much better for local email than MS Exchange. Exchange sells MS server 200x licenses.

Web stuff is for groupware, but not MILSPEC.

Yesterday's Thunderbird is superior to today's Outlook as an email client.

I got tired at the end of my last reply.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Free DNS service? - <AUTHOR>

Ever since EveryDNS was acquired by DynDNS I feel it left a void for a free DNS service. Does anyone else since this void? I may create a free DNS service to fill it. Thoughts, suggestions and feature requests would be greatly appreciated! <comment><USER2> <http://dnsimple.com>

It's not free, but it's only like $3/mo. You get 1 month free, and with every referral you get a free month. It's by far the best and easiest dns service out there. It was a side project of an HN'er as well. He did a fantastic job with the service.

Makes DNS easy. When I wanted to set up google account stuff (mail, notes, docs, etc). I just clicked on the domain edit, clicked edit (or something along that verbiage) and chose it from the list. Also used that to set up my A record pointing my personal domain to my username.github.com site.

</comment><comment><USER3> We are extremely happy with Zerigo. Great UX, with things like import/export of records, and ready-to-go snippets for email hosted at Godaddy etc and Heroku-hosted domains. They have a free plan (3 domains, 50k queries/mo). IMO their $19/year (20 domains, 1M queries/mo) and $39/year plan (45 domains, 2M queries/mo) are "pretty close" to free.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use <http://freedns.afraid.org>. It's a great service.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have no firsthand experience but 1984.is run a free DNS that I have heard mentioned a few times.

<http://1984hosting.com> will take you to their English site (although the What is FreeDNS? page is in Icelandic).

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.namecheap.com/products/freedns.aspx>

Not ideal, but not terrible either.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hurricane Electric offers free DNS, <http://dns.he.net>

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm a huge fan of <http://pointhq.com/></comment>


Google Meet premium video conferencing is now free for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://www.blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/ <comment><USER2> My account still says "Your account only lets you join meetings".

This change was the obvious thing to do, but they should have done it years ago when they announced that hangouts was dead. It was very strange, no one used hangouts because it was abandoned even when it was still better than the competition.

I know google is super unreliable and they kill what you love (reader, wave, etc...)

<comment><USER3> Am I the only one who still uses hangouts? For some reason its the app my wife and I use, i dont use it with anyone else. It's handy that it pops up in chrome, and my Google Fi messages pop up in it too.

<comment><USER4> I still use it. Partly it's habitual since "GChat" was a big reason I got my first Gmail account many years ago. At the time, most IM platforms required you to install a separate application, but since it ran in the browser, I could keep a Gmail tab open at work or at on university PCs and keep in touch with Gmail contacts (as well as AIM contacts which was still a decent number of people back then).

I still use it because it's available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well as both Android and iOS devices. My friends and family are on a variety of platforms but we can all use Hangouts. I still dislike some of the changes they've made as it moved from the old Google Talk to Hangouts but being able to follow conversations on mobile and in my browser is great.

I have a few friends who use iPhones and occasionally complain because they want to use iMessage, but a good 30-40% of us can't run it since we don't own iPhones or Apple computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait, they had something simple to understand (Duo for consumers, Meet for professionals), and now everyone has access to two different products doing about the same thing?!

Google and messaging products... [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chat)

<comment><USER6> Except they didn't interoperate, Duo didn't work on laptops, Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it used software video decoding...

<comment><USER7> > _Meet had terrible sound quality unless you had a $1000+ laptop because it > used software video decoding_

How did video decoding in software affect sound quality? Is this just a typo/brainfart?

<comment><USER8> The video encoding/decoding could have leveraged hardware accelerated codecs and freed up resources for audio encoding/decoding

<comment><USER7> Audio encoding is not of particularly high complexity. Even the highest complexity modes of the best codec right now (Opus) are like 60-100x real time on commodity hardware, and not too far off on phones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I just want to +1 Google Meet, its one of the rare video chat products that works without any flaws with 150+ people in a room.

<comment><USER10> During the CV lockdown, there's been a creeping adoption of paid Zoom accounts in the large company I work for, despite ubiquitous free Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite).

This seems to be mainly based on the perception (which I share) that Zoom copes better with large meetings and/or bandwidth challenges, and possibly offering the 'tile view' that Meet previously lacked. (It may also be because of novelty, or novelties such as being able to replace the background, which people love.)

<comment><USER11> >Meet (which is also easier to schedule and use, given we use GSuite)

This is one of the main reasons I mostly use Meet. It's basically a couple clicks in Google Calendar to add the video meeting link.

<comment><USER12> A couple? One for adding (or automatically always), Two when joining, One when you have hardware in physical meeting rooms. It is perfect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If I read it right, they still require everybody joining to have a Google account. Which means the others that don't require this will keep growing. I mean, we're a Google shop ok, but requiring our customers to use google accounts is just something that we can not do.

<comment><USER14> We don't see that and use Meet (via GSuite) to have external calls with people and have never heard that that require a Google account.

<comment><USER12> Because the paid G Suite behaves different than the free Meet they announce now. Makes sense, because external dial (via phone) costs them money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Suddenly every big tech company wants a piece of the zoom pie.

I quite like Google hangouts (now meet?), it's simple to use and comes packaged free with g-suite.

I run a small business so for just myself it's less than $100.

Amazing value.

<comment><USER16> The crazy thing is google had like 10 years where the zoom pie could have been theirs for the taking. But they always just let hangouts sit there without trying much of anything in the way of improving it. I swear for a good 3-5 years in the early to mid 2010's, almost every time I'd try to join a hangout meeting in chrome the audio wouldn't work and I'd have to restart the browser and try again.

And now they're actually trying? We're they genuinely surprised to learn there's a market for corporate video chat?

<comment><USER15> They have so much cash they could use to build stuff and push in enterprise but don't. I feel as though they're a little directionless with their strategies.

Best product they've created after Gmail has definitely been G suite though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great, we've been using Meet a lot since WFH started and it's been pretty solid and decent enough quality.

My only gripe and unless I'm missing it, it's not possible to log into Meet on Android without also logging into the Google account on the device too. This is frustrating because sometimes I want to jump on a work call but all I've got is my personal device handy. I really wish they'd separate out Meet App users from Device users like the iOS version of the app :(

<comment><USER18> This doesn't address your comment about device users per se, but you can have multiple accounts on your device and meet will let you choose which one to use when joining calls.

<comment><USER17> I'd have probably have had to do this but luckily I have an old phone that I can use for my work account. I just really don't like linking work and personal accounts at a device level given the multiple ways that might cause problems.

Thinking on it a little more, I guess that since this product has been generally aimed at businesses, maybe this isn't normally a problem for people with company devices.

<comment><USER19> Android has this concept of Work Profiles, where your work account apps are isolated from your personal apps. It works well with Meet and you have a single button to immediately disable all the Work apps (including their notifications).

It gives you way better separation than anything on iOS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> HN headline inserts "is now" incorrectly, the source headline does not say that and the text indicates a phased rollout starting next week.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is of course a good development for those cases where Jitsi is unstable. Although:

>Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won't enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30.

So actually it won't be different from Zoom because there's going to be an - albeit longer - time limit. Not enforcing this during the upcoming months of quarantine is a nice move.

</comment><comment><USER22> We are being spammed by Google Account Managers to join in on the Google Meet, even though it's not available for our basic tier. After we have specifically declined the invitation multiple times, we are now being spammed to join in for free until September 30th. I do not want to break the Account Manger's heart, but we simply cannot rely on any product Google makes[0]. We still use docs/sheets and email, but that's about it - hopefully they won't manage to kill/mess that up as well.

[0] - [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/)

<comment><USER23> You don't have to rely on Meet being around forever though. Video chats are ephemeral and if Meet goes away for some reason, you can switch to something else without too much pain.

<comment><USER8> It's not so painful these days but when we actually use conference rooms it's a bit more painful to make all the microphones and cameras and displays and controllers talk to a new platform

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> And Zoom stock is down 7% right now. [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+ZM](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=fin&q=NASDAQ:+ZM)

</comment><comment><USER25> They've also added Meet to G Suite mail menus. Is there a way to get rid of those links?

<comment><USER26> Block the element using uBlock Origin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I hope Google eats Zoom alive by just throwing resources and whatever cloud service power at this. Video chat should only always have been browser based website/web app and never involved installers and stuff.

</comment><comment><USER28> It can't do PC audio when presenting so a video or other content won't make it through without cleverly routing your PC audio through your mic. I have a GSuite account for my domain as it has a lot of useful tools for cheap (1 user). I was using it for hang out type sessions with friends and family but we moved to other tools to play party games or similar with others.

I guess where I'm going is if they allowed audio when presenting I'd use it for everything again.

</comment><comment><USER29> \- Google Hangouts

\- Google Hangouts Meet

\- Google Hangouts Chat

\- Hangouts Chat

\- Google Chat

\- Google Talk

\- Google Allo

\- Google Due

\- Google Voice

\- Google Meet

\- Android Messages

\- Youtube Messages

Product management at its best. Half of the time I don't know which app I am using.

<comment><USER30> I love that in Google Hangouts chat, default chat app on Android phone, there is no search capability.

I keep using it because I'm assuming they will add it eventually. I still find the Gmail+chat+hangout combo to be extremely robust and easy -- I just don't know why it isn't supported.

<comment><USER31> You didn't miss that it's about to get killed right? I've been an avid user of Google Hangouts. I wonder what will I use instead.

<comment><USER30> Wait, the chats are getting killed? Or the video? Or is it getting renamed?

Super confused.

<comment><USER31> I found out about it on [https://killedbygoogle.com/](https://killedbygoogle.com/) just now. However, after double-checking, apparently it's some G Suite Hangouts variant that's getting killed: [https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to- hang...](https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/08/updates-to-hangouts- chat-migration.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Did anyone notice the picture of the doctors office (in the press release) has a picture on the wall that is blurred out?

<comment><USER32> No, but I did notice that the doctor has a stethoscope around her neck, which seems strange for an online meeting.

<comment><USER33> "Okay, now hold your laptop's microphone to your chest. I'm going to use this stethoscope on my speaker; it'll be just like you're here."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Why aren't we all using free video chat clients that run over webrtc?

<comment><USER35> If you want a serious answer is because peer to peer webRTC doesn't scale beyond two people.

If you have 4 people every client would need to maintain 3 streams, a total of 6 streams between all participants.

To have any kind of scalability you need a proxy in the middle that can act as a single stream to each participant.

This middlebox can also handle normalisation, interpolation and other useful features you might want to smooth things out when clients have connection difficulties.

Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation? Because these days just publishing a protocol isn't enough for adoption; not to mention that proxying large amounts of data will incur a significant cost.

And that hasn't covered the need for authentication, which is yet another required service.

And if the proxy box is interpolating and gracefully handling frame drops, does that mean it will be handling _gasp_ decrypted video traffic? Yes, it will, unless you want to move all that to the client and then have a key exchange happen not just at the start but a renegotiation every time someone connects or disconnects.

So you see it's not as simple as, "everyone just opens this URL, webRTC is a thing duh".

<comment><USER36> > Why don't we have a Free Open Source webRTC proxy server implementation?

Isn't that what Jitsi is doing? [https://github.com/jitsi](https://github.com/jitsi), meet.jit.si

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Must use chrome extension. [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google- meet-grid-v...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-meet-grid- view/bjkegbgpfgpikgkfidhcihhiflbjgfic)

<comment><USER38> Grid view is the default view now in meet. It rolled out (for my org at least) yesterday.

<comment><USER33> Oh, that's good to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> and just like that, zoom now faces its doom....

</comment><comment><USER40> Zoom grew a lot with the long tail. Facebook got in the game. Now Google.

Large corporations running the infrastructure to connect us and mediate our interactions. This is how it's been from the beginning. It's the first stage. Like we had with America Online / MSN / Compuserve.

But eventually organizations want to host their own software and own their own brand, database, relationships and so on. Maybe customize the experience and integrate it into their website.

In fact the Web itself came and replaced AOL and others with an open protocol (HTTP) where anyone can permissionlessly set up their own domain and host their own website.

The Feudalism of rentseeking corporations has been replaced with a free market of hosting companies, and trillions of dollars in wealth were unleashed.

Today, Wordpress plays that role for Web 1.0 (publishing) powering 34% of all websites. But what is out there that will power even Web 2.0 ... namely all the social networking and interactions we have come to expect from Facebook, Google, Telegram etc.?

Web browsers alrrady have all the front end capabilities including Web Push notifications and WebRTC videoconferencing and even PaymentRequest for payments etc.

There just needs to be a platform that lets people take ready-made components, like wordpress plugins, but Web 2.0 (chatrooms, events, etc.) that are all based around the same standardized unified core (user accounts, permissions, etc.) and are user friendly enough.

That's basically an operating system. For example before MacOS/Windows developers all built their own buttons/menus/windows etc. Before UNIX people built their own file management etc.

These OSes standardized the layer 1 so developers can just use standard buttons and reason on higher layers. Developers of Photoshop for Windows did not have to implement custom menus and buttons. And because of the standardized components, the users across apps were used to a common language, they knew what buttons and menus did, and even if the app used a custom version it had to be close enough to be recognizable.

So in this same way we need a social operating system for the web. Like Wordpress for Web 2.0 — open source and let anyone build their own Facebook or Google Meet out of reusable components. Ideally the core should be all designed together, like BSD, so the underlying OS is a good extensive foundation and not a hodgepodge of components.

Ok. Hopefully you take the below as a "Show HN"

We built it over the last 10 years and we're giving it away:

[https://github.com/Qbix/Platform](https://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

We are still working on updating the documentation tob be as cool as for Angular and React. But it's more than those frameworks. It includes a PHP backend with MySQL (pluggable) database support, with Node.js optional for websockets realtime updates and offline notifications to apple/google/chrome/firefox/etc. On the front end it has integrations with Cordova for releasing native apps in the store, such as [https://yang2020.app](https://yang2020.app)

Just as an example if you wanted to build videoconferencing into your website, you would just do:

      Q.Streams.WebRTC.start(options)

It's as simple as that. And if you want to have a secure user signup, forgot password, account management you just do:

      Q.Users.login(options)

If you wanted to have events and schedule videoconferencing for various apps you build (eg group dating or collaboration) you would use

      Q.Calendars.addToCalendar()

Reusable tools are placed like this:

      Q.activate(
        Q.Tool.setUpElement(
          element,
          "Streams/chat",
          options
        );
      );

or with jQuery:

      $(element).tool(name)
      .activate(options)

You can have tools and subtools and pass options similar to React etc. _Our goal is to build a growing ecosystem of well tesed reusable components that anyone can use, even if they are not very technical_.

Check out the GitHub link. And especially the videos there. It's totally free and open source. You can build something like Yang2020 in a day. We are using it for our clients, who want custom work done.

If you run into a snag or want to ask anything, just hit me up at _greg_ at the domain _qbix.com_

Finally... if you are a PHP or JS developer, and want to contribute to the project, please first try to install it yourself and play with with it. (We have tutorials but we are making more.) And email me. We have lots of clients who want these custom online communities right now, and we are looking to equip developers in diff countries to build them using this platform.

Oh and last thing... it's interoperable with everything else so you're not locked in. You can take a wordpress site that uses React and drop a chatroom or videoconferencd in there and gradually start to build community features, an app in the store and reward people for inviting others etc.

</comment><comment><USER41> Oh look! They made another communication tool!

</comment><comment><USER42> So we have now:

\- Google Hangouts

\- Google Meet

\- Google Duo

Am I missing any other? Is there any difference between them?

<comment><USER43> Hangouts has video and chat and is being discontinued.

\- Google Meet: Zoom

\- Google Duo: Facetime

\- Google Chat: Slack

<comment><USER44> want to use google chat to replace the hangouts that I have with a certain group [because the hangouts interface and mobile notifications aren't great].. it's available for my G Suite accounts, but not my generic @gmail account. which is kind of maddening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Google have got to learn that they have not rolled out a successful consumer product in quite some time whereas Apple do, and a big part of it is this stupid, stupid "rolling out in the next few weeks" attitude they love so much.

Product launches need a big red go button in 2020 or they don't work, especially when you're already three months behind the curve.</comment>