It's not true in this case, though. People who have the power to choose, are voting with their feet.
Still, many people have short term thinking or knowledge (better to get higher pay now than realize it will hold back by career trajectory), or they aren't too worried about success of their company or their productivity level.
I'm pretty sure what the companies selling reviews are doing is unlawful in the EU under the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive - the reviews would need to state they were done for a consideration and by a business in order to meet with legal requirements from what I understand.
>'A practice is unfair if it fails to meet the standard of "professional diligence" (the standard of skill and care that would reasonably be expected of a trader in its field of activity) and it materially impairs an average consumer's ability to make an informed decision, causing him to make a decision he would not otherwise have made.' (Out-Law.com, ibid) //
In some cases it may be illegal in the U.S. also. The clearest case would be if a direct competitor hires someone to post fake negative reviews intending to damage a competing business (and fails to hide the trail). In that case the "target" would have a good case that their competitor is engaged in some kind of tortious interference with their business.
I'd claim it is illegal, and fraud. If a seller buys positive reviews, then anyone buying the item has been led to believe that the reviews are independent and honest reviews. The seller didn't inform the buyer of information that the seller knew, and the seller materially benefited from not informing the seller, ergo fraud. It's a crime as old as the hills.
This is a broad generalization that it's used for illegal purposes.
My (very legal) business accepts Bitcoin. I don't have many customers using that form of payment, but chances are I may not have them if I didn't accept it.
I don't really care what form of payment you want to use.
Ok, so Coda 2.5, BBEdit, TextExpander and other developer-type apps can't be in the App Store because they can't be sandboxed. Fine, if it's a developer-type tool that has to do things most everyday users aren't going to need, do it outside the Mac App Store. For everything else, the Mac App Store is great.
In fact, I'm such a fan of the Mac App Store that I wish every app could conform to it's rules so I wouldn't have to dig out a lame license key, or heaven help me, email the vendor for some time sensitive generated key thing.
Also, any service where it isn't viable to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, Spotify for example (who have to give 70% of their revenue to record companies).
Not that Apple would want Spotify in the store anyway, with it being an iTunes competitor.
Because they have to allow it for iOS, otherwise iOS becomes "the platform without Spotify". Imagine if iOS wouldn't allow a native Facebook app - what would happen then?
With OSX it's a little different, as there are alternative channels for installing Spotify, which prevents OSX from becoming "a platform without Spotify", and also allows Apple to ignore them entirely, and push their own product in the store.
No, Spotify is not an exception to App Store rules.
There are hundreds of apps that allow you to use subscriptions made outside of the App Store. The rules for digital goods and digital subscriptions are:
* If you want the actual payment/checkout to happen ON the phone THROUGH the app, it MUST be an In-App Purchase (subject to 30% cut).
* Appendix: redirecting to a website for the payment is forbidden, because it would be a too easy workaround to the previous rule.
* If you want the app to just connect and use an existing subscription made elsewhere, go ahead, nothing is owed to Apple.
Dropbox for instance happily works with the subscription made on the website. A couple of years ago, they ALSO added a way to subscribe to their paid plan through the app, in which case the 30% cut is paid to Apple. I can see they doing it because probably they don't want to lose customers that feel like upgrading with a single tap is much easier than going to the website and inserting credit card details. As everybody in marketing knows, when you're potentially one tap away from buying something, the sole idea of having to go to the computer and taking the wallet is enough for a turndown for most people; impulsive buying is a strong force.
Rdio just charges more on iOS. "Rdio costs the price you see if you subscribe via Apple’s in-app subscription service. This price difference is due to Apple’s policy of taking a 30% cut of subscriptions that occur through their service."
I didn't think Apple allowed this, but they are doing it.
Basic roombas handle stairs and overhangs, you just need a very basic IR rangefinder on the circumference, if a finder or two "loses ground" there's probably a hole, treat as a wall.
Amazon.com Inc. has agreed to acquire Twitch, a live-streaming service for videogame players, for more than $1 billion, according to a person who has been briefed on the matter.
The deal could be announced as soon as Monday, the person said.
Google Inc. had earlier been in talks to acquire Twitch, but those talks cooled in recent weeks, according to people familiar with the matter.
Twitch, launched in June 2011, is the most popular Internet destination for watching and broadcasting videogame play. The startup raised $20 million from investors, including Thrive Capital and videogame-maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. in September.
News of the acquisition was earlier reported by tech website The Information.
This story is literally the first time I've heard of this site. Is it really popular enough to demand payment for reading the articles?
Looks like it was started on Dec. 04, 2013 [1] and has been subscription-based from the beginning. $40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
$40/mo or $400/year seems like a lot of money... any indication that they break news before any other site?
The value prop isn't just breaking stories quicker than the next outlet, but we do happen to break a fair amount of news. For instance, we broke a story [1] last week that moved eBay's share price up by 4-6%. [2]
There's nothing wrong with it, and I'm not holding anything against them. Just wondering if anyone here is a subscriber, what their target audience is, and if it's worth a subscription at the price they're asking.
It's not designed for casual readers, it's designed for professional readers who read it for professional reasons. $40/month is nothing in that scenario.
That's funny, the paywall-preview ends with the line:
The acquisition would help Amazon bolster its position in the fast-growing business of online gaming and... which doesn't show up in your quote.
I believe the parent poster was posting an earlier version of the article. With breaking stories, news sites will sometimes post a small amount of initial information so they get the story out fast. Then, after more details are available, the article is edited to include more information.
I certainly hope their new syncing is better than their Transmit Dropbox implementation. I had to stop using sync it was so bad.
I prefer MAS apps because of how easy it is to purchase, install and update. I'm particularly annoyed when an app is available in the App Store and is then pulled out later. By then, I've already purchased and have to transition, awkwardly, to a non App Store version.
This isn't the first developer tool that's done this for me.
It is both a real thing and laziness. With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it, the support library will fallback gracefully down to all the OS versions you do care about.
Most of the time when I hear designers complaining about Android fragmentation they are really just using "fragmentation" as a scapegoat to bemoan they fact that they can't just create a very small set (1-3) of universal "pixel perfect" mockups and ship those off as a PSD to a developer as the end-all, be-all "visual spec". They have to worry about things like how different parts of the app should scale as more real estate is made available, really understand DPI (I've met more than a few designers who shockingly don't really grasp DPI scaling), etc. Some designers are awesome at this and welcome the challenges (and benefits!) that "responsive layout" brings with it, but a lot of them (most of them, in my personal experience) just want to punt on all that shit.
> With decent technical design and Google's Android support library you can pretty much code as if 98% of people run KitKat and not worry about it
People say this. It's not really actually true.
A nice little example encountered recently. Say you have a HTTP server which uses gzip or deflate when the client asks it to. Pretty standard, right? And say you want to return a HTTP 204, or other contentless success. Seems reasonable? And if you do this on Android 4.4 using the standard HTTP client, it will work. If you do it on Android 4.1 (the most commonly-deployed version of Android), it will throw a null pointer exception deep in the library code.
This is just one of many issues. Compatibility support libraries are all very well, but they don't really help with the standard libraries being buggy, and those bugs will _never be fixed_ for the vast majority of users.
It IS much easier. Given that you only have to worry about 2 devices, with 2 resolutions (2x scaling is handled pretty well), it's perfectly possible to make a pixelperfect layout off a PSD (of course, things get a bit complex with font sizes, etc, but autolayout helps out).
It's "easier" in the same sense that it's easier to hack up a quick website in PHP than it is to write kernel driver.. (though the magnitude of the difference is not as great as that example picked for illustration).
"Mika says it spent 20% of its total development time last year on the process of porting two of its games to Android and then tweaking those titles for individual devices. It could never even get Battleheart to work on Galaxy S phones, because they can't download .apk's larger than 30MB with stock software. For all the months of "thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through," Mika claims it never made a profit off either of its Android games."
Geez, I wouldn't go into Android game development after reading this. And we haven't even breached the piracy issues.
You apparently missed that the article itself is from March 2012, talking about a game (Battleheart) released in June 2011.
The Galaxy S was released in June 2010 (so it's not even 4 years old, let alone 5…), it was barely a year old at game release and was not only one of the popular smartphones of the times, as the Nexus S it was also the reference device until November 2011.
Does that really matter though? Apps which require 4.0+ still frequently have terrible design which is just an iOS clone, complete with fuzzy assets and a frustratingly iOS-centric UI.
At the same time, developers like ShiftyJelly (www.shiftyjelly.com) show that fantastic crossplatform apps can be developed which have a great Android UI and are still very similar to their iOS counterparts.
I genuinely think it is just laziness, but while users continue to put up with it (especially since Android users appear to be happy to stick with a shitty UI on a free app compared to dropping a couple of dollars on a great one), it is unlikely to change.
