My favorite was this nice redesign I did where the form fields had no labels. Instead the designer cleverly used placeholders on input elements to identify them. Moreover they had a great deal of customization for each form to make them look nice and compact. At first glance this looked fantastic, until you try to add an error message to it.
I pointed this out to them, and their first inclination was to highlight the border of the errored out elements in red. Great, except for the large minority of users who are color blind. Also, this doesn't indicate what the error is, just that there is one. On top of that, form-wide (vs field-specific) errors still don't have a place.
This drives me crazy, because it's not like I can logically extend their design and say "let's put the errors here. What do you think?" Their design was so tight (in a good way I suppose) that it left no room for this kind of thing.
My suggestion is to make your version so ugly that it cannot be overlooked. Put the errors in size 72 font in neon green right over the fields. No way for it to go into production that way.
> In what freezing fucking hell is a dual-core, 1 GHz computer with gigabytes of RAM and tens of gigabytes of storage and 3D acceleration that can fit in my pocket memory-starved and CPU-starved?
Sounds to me like you've never developed seriously on an ARM chipset. These devices are worlds apart from your standard desktop, there is a reason that both Android and IOS dropped Adobe flash. It's partly the hardware and partly shitty ARM code, its not really much to do with the specs. I can do things much more easily on an underpowered x86 than an overpowered ARM.
> Sounds to me like you've never developed seriously on an ARM chipset.
You're selling cucumbers to the gardener, I was actually one career choice away from designing chips, and wrote ARM assembly before there was anything such as a tablet.
A mobile phone is slow in comparison to a desktop, but not slow enough to afford an excuse for lagging in most of today's mobile applications. If a Facebook client, a mail application, a simple 2D game or a music player lags on such a mobile phone, it does so because it's a piece of crap.
> If a Facebook client, a mail application, a simple 2D game or a music player lags on such a mobile phone, it does so because it's a piece of crap.
Fair point. It has more to do with the way these apps are cobbled together out of heterogeneous chunks of code, just to make them look "cool". The native frameworks are lacking in terms of their ability to easily customize the controls, so people start applying crazy hacks just to mimic some functionality seen in another app, without any regard for the performance. It just has to "work".
That's my understanding, too. Developers are using high-level frameworks that generate an absurd number of redraws. In many cases, the bottleneck isn't even the CPU or the memory, but simply pushing too many pixels to the screen. It doesn't help that we expect much snappier response from touch interfaces than from 10-year-old desktops. Two seconds to open a new screen was somewhat acceptable in a VB6 application. Try to do that in an Android app, and see the kind of rating you get.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. The challenge is that developing for mobile is nowhere near _as_ _easy_ as desktop. So we have a legion of desktop devs coming over to mobile and getting lost, their code doesn't "suck" its fine for desktop its just not good mobile code.
Also, power management.
> their code doesn't "suck" its fine for desktop its just not good mobile code
IMHO, code that is not adequate for a platform on which it is intentionally deployed, by definition, sucks. There's no such thing as good application that is fine for any computer except those it is ran on.
As a person who used an LG "smart"phone that couldn't handle the bare Android OS without lagging (and turning on Wi-Fi would freeze it to death), I agree wholeheartedly. Intentionally selling crap that doesn't work is evil in my book.
The original iPhone, back when these decisions were made to not support flash, used an arm 1176 processor underclocked at 412MHz. That was a single-issue, in-order core without SIMD. Consider the Cortex-A15 and the latest Qualcomm parts; they're at least three-wide fully out-of-order cores supporting 128b SIMD operation with fused multiply-add, clocked at 1.5-2GHz in two- and four-core configurations. They are far more similar to a low-voltage Core2 package than they are to the armv6 processors of the first iPhone and Android devices (and in some ways they’re actually nicer to program for), and would easily be capable of handling a flash runtime.
I just think adobe didn't really work to optimize flash for this processor in particular. Flash is a complex piece of software, and it's not properly made.
I think modern Android and iOS devices could do that just as well.
I believe not supporting Flash has more to do with Apple/Google strategies (i.e. not depending on propietary third party software) than actual hardware limitations.
Yep. Who wants to make bad ports easier? Their goal is to keep their users hooked, and people are cheap (or stupid if you prefer) and approach value from the wrong direction, money spent instead of value gained.
Even on the slow (by smartphone standards) Nexus One, Flash ran quite decently. The Nexus 5 is a good magnitude faster in every way (I can't find specific parity-version benchmarks, so perhaps I'll fire both of them up and give it a go), moreso in some ways like the GPU, and is as powerful as some desktops that people still use in business settings. It would of course have no problem with Flash.
Flash failed because a good percentage of existing content relied upon the accouterments of a desktop, namely the keyboard and the mouse. Minus these it just made for a frustrating experience for a lot of users. Add the fact that sites were loaded with obnoxious, taxing Flash ads, and it just gave users of Flash-enabled devices a very negative experience. It also reflected poorly on the product as a number of popular tech sites compared Android and iOS web page loading times, the former seriously hindered by the loading and overhead of Flash.
There were later changes to make it activate on click, but that just made it even more of a usability burden.
In a way, at the time this whole debate was raging, iOS users got to enjoy essentially a free "adblock" in the absence of Flash.
I have to entirely disagree with any notion that smartphones are underpowered: I am currently working on a very intense real-time image processing system and with each iteration I'm finding that I'm increasing the scope and featureset because the performance continually blows me away. Even when I work on "older" devices like the Galaxy S3, with good code and good parallelization (incl. the GPU), it is just a ridiculous platform.
:D. Why is anyone even considering FP vs OO programming a choice? I've used functional patterns within OO before and I'm sure the opposite is possible.
Both have merit depending on the skill-set and staff available to you, scale of project and existing infrastructure.
I was however very disappointed when the author bundled interfaces into the mix as if it was the same as the rest of it. The interface enables you to support many different types of behaviour and enables you to structure your libraries in different ways. It's a different aspect from just classes themselves.
Genuinely I don't think shit like this is healthy. Smacks of religion.
What the hell is up with that attitude? You're completely missing the point of a welcoming community by closing the door with an RTFM sign. He's writing his own shit but is wondering if there is a library out there already that is better/already does it.
The point of a community is to be helped and then help. You make it sound like you got to where you are by yourself and that's the only _correct_ way. To be frank this attitude has no place in a community.
"Does thing belong here?"
NO. "Are we helping each other?" That's should always be the purpose of any community site and the reciprocation of help is something that has driven every newsgroup, irc channel and community dev sites for DECADES.
Do it for me is not a question. It is a demand and a lazy one.
> You make it sound like you got to where you are by yourself
Hardly. I ask questions. RTFM doesn't answer everything, nor does it explain, but you actually ask intelligent questions and are in a position to understand answers if you did some work before hand. Of course the referenced post wasn't looking for an answer to understand, they wanted 'use libfoo.'
> "Are we helping each other?" That's should always be the purpose of any community site
I have to write a script to install this thing here at work, would you mind doing it for me? That would be a BIG HELP to me.
See the problem yet? Technically it is a question, it would be a help to me. I suppose a community site would be more than happy to go about that then.
Oh and the response on any newsgroup for decades would be "Do your own damn homework, come back when you have a question."
I know what you're talking about but I think you just failed to read the second paragraph of the post.
> I'm using OpenCV for detecting the faces and a rough Eigenfaces Algorithm for the recognition now. But I thought there should be something out there with a better performance then a self written Eigenfaces Algorithm.
Does this sound like a "plz send me teh codez" to you?
Yes, I did read the whole thing. He asked, tell me what library to use. That was the whole question. It was very much a 'do my research for me' question.
"I want to do this. Tell me what library to use."
"What is better ..." questions are closed on SO for the same reason.
My major disappointment with SO is how we lost the desire to be helpful and ended up with the desire to be "correct".
There are many questions that I would find helpful that get instantly closed because they are "not constructive". I'd like to hear my peers opinions on the respective merits of the latest javascript frameworks but that's "not constructive" so it gets shut down.
I like to help people so I occasionally decipher weird English and try to work out what they need.... too often my submission of my reply is then blocked because the question has been closed.
I dislike their rules about posting to jsfiddle (you must post enough code in SO for the question to stand alone).
I dislike the cliquey and "current" aspect of meta. if you're late to the party then you've missed the discussion and we've already decided.
> we lost the desire to be helpful and ended up with the desire to be "correct".
But that's the whole point of StackOverflow. Right on the about page is their mission statement:
Ask questions, get answers, no distractions
This site is all about getting answers.
It's not a discussion forum.
There's no chit-chat.
And while yes, it may be interesting for you to know what the "latest and greatest" of the Javascript frameworks is, that's really not the point of the site.
Why? Because the answer is inherently subjective. It's open to interpretation and flame wars. In a year, it will also be obsolete.
Compare that to a trivial question, like:
How do you create a while loop in C++03?
Which is incredibly basic, yet will always have 1 correct answer that will then be added to SO's vast knowledge base.
There's also the great side effect of StackOverflow then becoming a place for real-world problems for actual practicing programmers rather than a debate forum. The "best Javascript framework" might sound like a great topic for you, but it's also indicative that you haven't actually started any work on a project, compared to, say a person trying to figure out how to do two-way binding in Knockout.js. I'd much rather have a site full of real-world issues that are getting solved than a site dedicated to theory-based bickering.
So what about the questions pertaining to "obsolete" frameworks, should we scrap those too?
As exciting as this judgement of what is good information and bad information is its somewhat ironic that this categorisation is....... subjective. We have merely replaced flame wars with these debates. I don't think the time sink of productivity that you're evidently susceptible to (look at us both here!) is something that avoidable through censorship but a struggle that everyone must learn to deal with.
"How to create a while loop in C++03" is as you stated a terrible question become obviously this person hasn't even started on a project. Why don't they read a book? Is this their homework? ;)
Whereas when I found the closed question on javascript frameworks I was looking to make some major modifications to an existing web site. Problem is that its not as user-friendly as I'd like and the Javascript is becoming a mess so I think it would be a good call to go with backbone or knockout but I want a few sample opinions as part of my _research_.
But according to a response you gave me elsewhere, talking to peers that are probably more experienced in a given part of the field doesn't count as research. D:. According to the parent of this response my work related questions aren't even "real-world".
My issue with SO is they made a tool for developers who used it in many different ways. Then over the course of the next year and a half they started locking down on how _they_ wanted it used, (and by "they" I mean the most aggressive culture that prevailed amongst the owners/mods) I just find this a disappointment and a missed opportunity.
I had contributed over 10k's worth of rep there but after a while I just stopped going. It stopped being fun, it was no longer a community, we were no longer trying to help others as our primary goal. It made me sad.
SO has always had a very specific purpose in mind, and this has been advocated by Jeff Atwood, et al since the beginning. It was never meant to be a discussion based site. In fact, to quote the man himself,
"At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already." [0]
The entire point of StackOverflow is to answer questions as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible. You want more discussion? There's a chat room available. You want long, permanent discussion about (e.g.) the merits of various JavaScript frameworks? You're on the wrong site.
Plain and simple, SO is not (and never was) meant to be "a tool for developers who used it in many different ways". It was meant to be sued in one way: ask a concrete, specific, real-world question and get one specific answer that will always be correct.
Discussions about obsolete frameworks are fine. People still use them. If you are asking a question with a concrete answer that will not change, go for it. And by will not change, I mean that an answer about how to do something in Python 2.6 will never change, even though the version itself has been superseded by Python 2.7 and 3.x. That's still the right way to do the thing you want in Python 2.6.
Perhaps to most important point you are making is that "this judgement of what is good information and bad information is ... subjective. We have merely replaced flame wars with these debates." But the thing is, no one is really debating. This question was answered when the site began. Or certainly not long after. SO is a finely tuned machine, really, really good at one thing: answering practical questions in a practical way.
In fact, read up on the Coding Horror article referenced above[0]. Jeff Atwood talks about Discourse, a framework he and some other folks are trying to put together to address the need for a really good discussion-based environment. He makes the point that forums are the place where these discussions happen and are saved for posterity, and that's how it should be. When talking about the option of Stack Exchange as an online community for discussion, he refers to it as "quite frankly, terrible", because "We only do strict, focused Q&A there."
That really should put the issue to rest. SO is not a place to have open ended discussions. That's what forums are for.
I always thought the purpose was to kill off expert's sex change but I appreciate your post and the quotes. I don't really think how its ended up is right or wrong just not what I was hoping it would become.
It's a bit of a shame because the only thing going for expert's sex-change was the communal aspect of helping people (although obviously this process was used to extort $) but SO has lost that a bit.
The issue is that there are now three parties. On mailing lists and IRC channels its typically just two. One seeking help and one-to-many helping. But on SO there is a third one that is seeking to identify whether or not the two parties should be allowed to be exchanging information in the first place.
But that's Jeff's dream and he's achieved it. Maybe its just not for me. That's fine, I'm a bit of a weird one to be fair and don't really expect to be catered for. The only thing that bitterly disappoints me is that save the idealogy through moderation it works almost exactly how I'd want "my perfect Q&A site" to work (I think the format is actually better than a forum). The technology is there but they just chose correctness as their #1 priority.
I've been waiting over three months now for my designer to give me this. I mention it every time I see them and it never gets done.
Do they like my awful pink error boxes or just avoid errors when demoing???