If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.John 15, 7
Thoughts
Awesome, awesome, awesome application that works like magic. Smooth experience, beautiful interface, ability to save an article to the read-it-later application of your choice (Instapaper, Pocket or Readability), fantastic and optimized use of the screen real estate that makes the big display even more gorgeous. The app overshadows all the other news readers in the Android ecosystem out there, starting from Google Currents which is so sluggish on my Samsung Galaxy S (i9000). It’s possible to import other news sources, like Facebook or Google Reader in my case.
Why have iOS users been the only allowed to enjoy all the fun for so long?
[via The Verge]
Kudos to them. I’ve always been on that side when it comes to develop a website or a webapp. Supporting IE always means spending some extra hour to make everything work on that shitty browser, and there are always problems with the newest CSS features that are not entirely supported, so custom rules must be added to the stylesheets and that will probably not be enough, given that every major version has some different kind of flaw. It’s not only IE6, that Microsoft itself has sentenced to death and that unfortunately still has a remarkable percentage of usage, it’s also every other version up to IE9. Only the latest version 10 can be somehow compared to Google Chrome, Safari and Firefox. I’m talking here about the rendering engine from a developer point of view: Internet Explorer has always been a nightmare, and the fact that it has taken almost 20 years to the folks at Redmond to churn out a decent browser is not acceptable, not at all. It’s the users that must adapt to the websites they visit, not the opposite.
Simply put, IE hinders innovation and therefore must be ignored.
The 2-3 readers of this blog might have noticed a slightly change in the layout of my site. In fact I finally found a bit of time to build up a fresher, responsive theme that adapts to every screen size, just try it out by resizing the browser window. Aside from the visual aspect, I also moved the blog to the root from its previous /blog subdirectory and added a couple plugins to give it some of the most prominent features of the so hyped Tumblr, so that could be an advantage for me in order to write more frequent, shorter posts.
A war is clearly brewing between Google and Facebook for the social network domination and is mainly fought with features and redesigns that are constantly added to their products. A few weeks ago Facebook sported a new layout to visualize photos, very similar to the photo viewer in Google Plus. Only four days ago Google+ had a major design overhaul especially for profiles, where a new cover photo was added behind a bigger profile picture, a layout too much similar to Facebook’s and, even if I’ve always been a big Google fan, the first thing I thought was something like “Seriously, Google? That’s really worth a lawsuit.”
Now it seems that after this Google+’s layout change that increased the size of the profile pictures, Facebook did basically the very same thing. Actually, it’s not a really noticeable change for many out there and I’m pretty sure very few people noticed it. I realized it because my Facebook cover was and still is tailored to the profile picture where I played around a bit to get a seamless, creative image. Now with this change it’s no longer as before and it might seem kind of broken, as you can see here below where I prepared a comparison, because of the bigger size of the profile picture.
So, dear Google and dear Facebook, why do you keep copying each other’s features? Aren’t you able to come up with original ideas? Timeline and hangouts were good ones to me, so please stop copying, you can do better than this. And hire good UI/UX designers/engineers, you can do that as well.