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Comment UX researcher, weighing in: show me the studies. (Score 2) 403

All this speculation about which environment is the most usable. Which one is best for new users because this and that.

The only way to determine which has an advantage is to conduct UX research from a completely unbiased standpoint.

/. *nix threads are not known for their unbiased takes on things.

Comment Re:The theater is dead. (Score 3, Insightful) 924

$8.00 for a movie ticket? My god.

Where I live (big bad city), it's $14.00 for a single adult ticket, plus a $1.00 fee to buy online.

Oh, you want to see "A Scientologist Actor Saves the World 3D?"

That'll be $19.00 for the "3D ZOMG1!1!!!" experience, plus a $1.00 fee to buy online.

I do the math and realize I have a pretty big HD tv and a penchant for Usenet and all of the sudden that cellphone-manners-fight-waiting-to-happen doesn't seem so appealing.

Comment It's because like, ur old and stuff or whatever... (Score 3, Informative) 140

(Disclosure: I'm am old bastard myself but I work in the mobile dev world so it's my job to know when things are making waves in the industry.)

The demographic that they appeal to is very, very young. As in teens and college-aged adults. The app itself is extremely popular in the iTunes store and on Android. So much so, in fact, that Facebook, after not being able to buy it quickly (after explosive... truly explosive growth) decided to rip it off and build a clone called, wait for it, Poke.

People declared the end of Snapchat as big bad Facebook was going to eat their lunch, digest their user base and excrete them out into a paper bag to be lit aflame and left on Snapchat's front step. Poke hit around #14 on iTunes, then slide down fairly rapidly and is now an afterthought.

This was a victory for small dev shops that demonstrated that big companies can clone a product but that user loyalty is a very, very real thing.

Comment I've seen them in the wild twice: Chilling Effect (Score 5, Interesting) 321

At two different events. The consensus is that they are creepy.

Last night a company I'm helping build had a booth at Uncubed NYC. A guy came over with the glasses at the end of the night. He had a drink in his hand and had obviously been taking advantage of the free booze. He was an MBA-type douche with obnoxious semi-slurred questions about our app (ex. "So, why can't Google just build this?).

As soon as he came over you could tell that everyone stiffened up and our attitudes changed. It changes how you respond to people's questions, how you act.

In a nutshell, Google Glass blows.

Comment The Solution: Burnnote.com (Score 5, Interesting) 93

This is an Android, iOS and web app that just came out a few weeks ago. I've been playing with it and it's perfect for sending messages you don't want to exist after the person reads them.

Basically, it's a free messaging services where the messages self-destruct. They never get written do disk, just to volatile memory. If there's an outage messages will be lost, which sucks, but it does mean that they kind of mean business about privacy. The messages have a maximum shelf life of 30 days.

Here's a writeup in Techcrunch.

I don't know if it's going to get that big but I realized the other day that even in my non-criminal, law-abiding life there are still a lot of things that I send to people via SMS that I probably should not have. Lots. Of. Things.

They have a tech FAQ which goes into detail about encryption, privacy, etc.

Comment By engaging your are promoting this ideology (Score 2) 1121

I love tearing down these people just as much as the next book-readin' heathen but please, my fellow freethinking friends, do not think that for a second this has anything to do with an actual debate on the subject.

It's meant to be a rallying cry for easily-led, mis/uneducated people and nothing more.

It's meant to show the Creation Museum as the stalwart fighter for the cause of Intelligent Design, which, I suppose it is.

By /. posting this it does nothing but drive pageviews and traffic and keep this and other kinds of similar stories in the spotlight.

We have more important things to be debating.

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