I vouched for (undeaded) your comment, since I think the flagging/downvoting runs contrary to the principles of discourse we're (at least implicitly) celebrating here, smelling of tribalism/favoritism. Just because you view someone favorably, and someone else claims something negative about that person, doesn't mean you just get to flagbomb them into oblivion.
The right response here is simply to ask for further substantiation, as danso did. It's not clear to me that the mods are directly responsible for what you've experienced. If you haven't, I would contact them for clarification.
Downvoting something for complaining about votes is fairly normal. Downvote baiting on top is flagworthy. I imagine lots of people quite sensibly apply these as a matter of course.
With some exceptions I downvote any comment that complains about downvotes. I'm not 100% comfortable about it, and I might change my approach, but so far rigorously applying the rules seems to be working. I'm willing to bet I'm not the only one to do so.
Suppose he is being treated unfairly by the mods. Is that not worth complaining about?
I don't give a crap about some silly "downvote every comment complaining about downvotes" rule. Complaining about downvotes was frowned upon because people get inexplicably downvoted as a matter of course here, and the frequency of complaints was deemed sufficiently detracting to warrant being frowned upon. Being treated unfairly by the mods, however, is another matter entirely.
I haven't seen a preponderance of evidence suggesting the complaint was ill-founded, and the guy's tenure and comment history (what I looked through of it) do not suggest he's an ill-mannered troll, so I reserve judgement as to whether the complaint is in the wrong. Like any reasonable person would.
An earlier entry from the same blog on generated recipes. My wife and I were laughing so hard at these we got some weird looks from the waiter. The use of asterisks is priceless in that one.
This is almost certainly the result of how popular articles/books by Malcolm Gladwell, etc. have been, which goes back a long ways (The Tipping Point was published in 2000), rather than a prevalence of journalists who were creative writing majors.
The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.
> The tactic, though effective, has unfortunately become annoyingly common.
'Annoyingly common' is obvious. I would be interested in opinions from people in the industry if it is effective.
I know for a fact I can't bare to work my way through these style pieces; I'm also aware that there are publications that almost exclusively use it, so I'm guessing there is a large enough group of people who want to be told a story, rather than want to learn something. Is it a majority?
I notice a similar style issue in TV documentaries. Too often modern ones are about the presenter, with the majority of screen time showing the presenter, sometimes interacting with the actual subject but often enough just talking about themselves or unrelated subjects. Given that I think there is general consensus about what some of the great documentaries are, it seems that they are not even attempting to be good documentaries and are instead just attempting to make light entertainment.
I'd say there's been long-form journalism that people have appreciated for a long time that describes people, places, life history, and the journalist's impressions. For example, Berton Roueché and John McPhee have both written well-regarded long-form science journalism in The New Yorker that touches on some of these sorts of things, and not just "TLDR; it was lupus" or "apparently, making an atomic bomb no longer requires the resources that it once did". Both of them prominently featured the people who were responsible for discoveries or investigations and tried to give a sense of their stories and their character.
But maybe there's a trend toward too much purple prose in journalism over time, or maybe people specifically want a place to find out about important new discoveries in a less biographic or experiential way that still doesn't require much technical background.
I'm not sure why you'd expect a radical reimagining of UI for touch. Touch UIs look largely the same as WIMP UIs because there isn't a radically better way of presenting information and affordances on a screen.
Have you interacted with many professional UI designers? They almost universally have no time, they are forced to rush out mediocre work on a strict timetable.
I have a design background myself, and frankly, you're not going to do much better for flat screen-based UIs than buttons, scrubbers, tables, lists, scrollviews, etc. This has little to do with touch, and everything to do with 2D design for screens. Better/worse design will depend on how these idioms are used/organized, rather than a radical rethink of those idioms.
That's not to say there aren't good undiscovered idioms for 2D UIs, but there's no shortage of designers trying to find them, especially outside of their dayjob. Designers love trying to invent new and novel ways to interact.
It is, however, actually an advantage for touch UIs that they aren't radically different from WIMP, because users don't have to learn a completely different UI, at least in terms of visual organization/affordance.
You can also bet the Apple designers/engineers who were prototyping iOS UI idioms before the iPhone was released explored a range of different idioms, and they continue to do so.
Mobile OSes haven't been ready to accommodate desktop-level use cases. Apple is moving in that direction with iOS on iPad. Once they get there, convergence makes a lot more sense.
Agreed. I think it makes perfect sense to have a phone that can plug into a tablet or any other form factor. The thermals might not let you run an iPhone-in-tablet as fast as a dedicated iPad, but given how fast their chips are getting, it's probably just a matter of time.
But Microsoft have no phone offering. And if they release a new phone, as a an ex-hobbyist Windows Phone developer who experienced all the consumer and developer hostile moves (no upgrade from 7 to 8, numerous lies, etc.) I'll be very reluctant to target this platform again. Other devs with experience on the previous phone platforms will probably have a similar view on the matter.
