Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:It's a self-correcting problem. (Score 4, Insightful) 153

The decline is solely from Chrome becoming mainstream and Google advertising it on their site, where lots of mom and pop Firefox users probably "accidentally" switch to Chrome because of some warning or advertisement from Google.

The reality is both Chrome and Firefox are great browsers, and only a tiny fraction of people are upset with the changes from version to version. Generally, most of us should just be happy that people are NOT using IE6 anymore.

Although personally, Chrome has not kept up with important CSS3 features nearly as well as Firefox, and now IE10 and IE11 have passed Chrome in my book. I mean, something as BASIC as linear gradients you'd expect to work in all modern browsers, but only Firefox and IE10+ can get it right. See bug 41756 - http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=41756#c71

Comment Re:Bad summary (Score 1) 218

The amount of things that completely suck in IE8 and IE9 mean that pretty much all new HTML5 sites I develop target IE10+. Not that anybody really uses IE of any version anyway, but if you do, it had better be IE10+ or you're SOL.

IE8 isn't even an HTML5 browser. It was the first version actually good for HTML4, back in the day, but that day is long past now. IE8 doesn't support opacity, rgba, box-shadow, calc, or transform, just to name a few really useful CSS3 features.
IE9 at least will work with HTML5 sites, and just look a little ugly. You really need IE10+ for text-shadow, gradients, and transitions, and then you're getting on par with Firefox and Chrome.

Comment Re:Bad summary (Score 2) 218

The tools aren't as great, but they're there at least. I prefer to debug in Firefox most of the time still.

I think it's nice that Chrome and Firefox update so fast, quickly adding HTML5/CSS3 features so after a short while the majority of people have browsers that can use those features. Even with the difference in release models, IE10 manages to get quite a lot of things right that Chrome still hasn't fixed, like CSS3 linear gradients over large areas without horrible dithering for example, and CSS3 font-stretch support.

Comment Re:Err, wha? (Score 1) 291

I guess, since it seems like every time I see somebody with a 2560 or 2880 width monitor, it's effectively pretending to be 1280 and 1440 anyway...
"Why does this website go off the edge on my monitor?"
"I don't know, it looks good for me, I'm using 1920 width, what's your computer set to?"
"Says 2880"
"Send me a screenshot"
Screenshot is basically 1440 pixels blown up to 200%....

Comment Re:Still sucks (Score 1) 127

That's great and all, and actually it's typically called I, P, and B frames, with B in this case being a frame that requires both the previous and the future I-frame information to base changes off of. Even with-out B-frames (which I'm not sure are actually used in real-world MPEG-2 or H.264, etc much anyway), the issue is MPC-HC has no trouble frame stepping forward, and VLC does, on the same videos.

Comment Re:Bistromathics (Score 2) 196

What about restaurants like Denny's (and there are many others around me) that just list every food item under a specific seat number on the paper receipt they bring you for your bill. You can then cash-out by paying either the entire bill or a specific seat number, or even group of seat numbers. It's all pretty straightforward and easy to understand.

Comment Re:Still sucks (Score 1) 127

Really? I have no problem with MPC-HC just using the keyboard arrows to do that in just about any video. Some videos don't like going backward one frame though.

Comment Re:Still sucks (Score 1) 127

I have the same issues he sees, and pretty much gave up on VLC. Why does MPC-HC work so much better, and feel so significantly less bloated? Isn't that all open source too?

Comment Re:I disagree (Score 1) 289

Maybe that was the problem - I didn't want to keep buying newer and newer versions of OS X just to run Xcode, and the last version of Xcode refuses to do anything useful now as far as iOS is concerned. It is a 2007 edition with OS X 10.4 on it still. This is still quite the problem, as my Windows Vista computers from the same exact year (2007) and my copy of Visual Studio 2008 (from 2007) still function just fine for all programming needs. Even my older Windows XP computers and copies of Visual Studio 2003 are still usable. Eclipse runs on all these computers too, without paying for OS upgrades.

Basically, with anything Apple, you get into this perpetual rat-race of upgrades, and have to constantly spend money (on hardware or software) just to keep things usable from a basic functionality standpoint. You simply don't have to do that with Windows, Linux, or Android development. The things you buy still work just fine a couple of years later, and you're never forced to spend money on upgrades just to keep developing.

Comment Re:Consumers may not notice ... (Score 1) 289

What feature in API8+ can you justifiably say your app can't work without? You can still have the latest look and style by declaring android:targetSdkVersion="17" in your manifest. The end user still gets all the OS changes and upgrades. Almost any app works just fine with android:minSdkVersion="4" if you program with that in mind.

It's the exact same with Windows. Almost every normal program can easily be written to still work on Windows 95. There is almost no reason you have to exclude yourself to XP+ or only work on Windows 7, etc. There are new APIs, and your program exe will fail to launch if it tries to link to a function that doesn't exist, but you simply don't need those features in the majority of normal programs.

Comment Re:I disagree (Score 1) 289

Xcode is a pile of crap. I can't develop for iOS from Windows or Linux computers. I have to constantly buy new Macs just to keep up (My couple year old Mac Mini already can't be upgraded to a new enough Mac OS X to run the latest Xcode, so I basically dropped caring about iOS and stopped using the thing now), meanwhile any old XP, Win7, Linux, etc can run Eclipse just fine.
That's not even getting into how much Objective C sucks as a language.

I've never had to drop features to make my Android app target 1.6 either. The widgets that exist only on new versions are things you can quickly design yourself, or just ignore. I typically just ignore them because the regular widgets all still work just fine for 100% of anything I need to program.

Comment Re:Consumers may not notice ... (Score 3, Insightful) 289

As if those older 2.x devices would ever get a 5.x upgrade anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Just target 1.6 or 2.1 and don't worry about it. If you're running into weird issues on certain phones, you're probably programming something too specific, and not doing things right because your code is sloppy or trying to be cute. Program in a more general manner and your app works just fine on all devices.

Comment Re:I disagree (Score 3, Interesting) 289

As a developer, I can say hands down that iOS is WAY more difficult to work with than Android, for completely unrelated reasons. The whole fragmentation thing is more or less something I ignore. You have basically two choices: Program to a older API, and ignore all new features, or, Program to a newer API, and ignore all older phones. I've chosen to always target Android 1.6 and my apps always have no trouble running on new phones. I've seen a feature that only exists in newer APIs that I really can't live without, so I always code around anything that requires 2.2 or 4.0, etc. It's not a big deal at all, and all the documentation is very good about stating which API a function requires, plus the Eclipse IDE will automatically show warnings for anything you try to use if you declared a target API older than something requires.

Slashdot Top Deals

To write good code is a worthy challenge, and a source of civilized delight. -- stolen and paraphrased from William Safire

Working...