

RockMelt For iPad - ssclafani
http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/10/rockmelt-for-ipad-a-browser-built-for-touch-that-turns-the-web-into-a-feed-so-content-comes-to-you/

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bruceboughton
How is this different to to Flipboard? This seems like their main competitor
and I haven't seen anything yet that looks like an improvement over it.

>> “Go back 25 years to the flashing DOS prompt. That wasn’t accessible to
someone like me. What Windows and Mac did was make it computing accessible to
wanna-be nerds like me. But today, h t t p colon slash slash is not natural.
It seems like something ripe for disruption.”

What a pointless soundbite. No one _real_ has typed h t t p colon slash slash
in about 10 years. Google and others before it solved that problem long ago.

~~~
josteink
_What a pointless soundbite. No one real has typed h t t p colon slash slash
in about 10 years._

After Google decided to covertly introduce their own proprietary SPDY-protocol
and to undermine standard HTTP, W3C and IETF "in the name of user-
friendlessness" and Chrome started assuming that any non-canonical server-name
(ie in a URL like "test-server/testapp/page") is a Google-search, I find
myself manually prepending URLs like that with <http://> _all the time_.

Granted. I'm not a normal user. It's not a normal internet use-case.

But browser-design as of late has made it increasingly needed to be specified.
Someone, somewhere sat down and decided that this was a direction they wanted
to go.

The URL-bar has always been a referentially transparent addressing-function.
IMO making it not so is a very bad move, and it's sole purpose was to secretly
promote yet another invasive Google-product into becoming a web-standard
without involving anyone else for input.

~~~
bruceboughton
Perhaps, but what RockMelt is proposing is even less referentially
transparent. My point is that the "problem" the quote proposes is not ripe for
disruption as it has already been disrupted by search long ago.

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antihero
I think the issue that will always plague this is that firstly, when stuff is
filtered through an app (ie not from the "source") there's a paranoia that
something is being somehow missed.

Secondly, I _like_ sifting through different sites (if they're built nicely),
it adds variety - browsing is part of the experience of consuming content.

Also, there's an organisational overhead for setting up feeds. If you can just
click on sites and explore, it's a different experience to adding feeds and
refreshing. Consider it the comparison to doing your food shopping with a
vague idea of what you want, and meticulously planning your groceries on-line
and having it delivered. The latter is far more efficient, but the former is
kinda fun in its own way and more entropic (which people enjoy in their
lives).

I might be completely wrong, of course.

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duiker101
Is it just me or is techcrunch's video player the worst thing ever? It starts
automatically and when I play pause to stop it , a spinning wheel appears like
it's buffering but the video keeps playing...wtf...

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shimsham
great. more cat fotos.

