About the Apple vs. Samsung jury verdict: “I hate it,” Wozniak told Bloomberg, “I don’t think the decision of California will hold. And I don’t agree with it – very small things I don’t really call that innovative. I wish everybody would just agree to exchange all the patents and everybody can build the best forms they want to use everybody’s technologies.” From the mouth of a real inventor and engineer.
The link seems misformated…
It’s not. It’s the mobile version and on a desktop it looks quite bad
Correct link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-13/apple-s-wozniak-hopes-ipho…
Why sites have a mobile version of their site is always a big mistery to me anyway.
Don’t these people know what Responsive Design is ?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_Web_Design
Lennie,
“Why sites have a mobile version of their site is always a big mistery to me anyway.
Don’t these people know what Responsive Design is ?:”
osnews has a mobile site too
http://mobile.osnews.com/
Within a moderate range, many CSS layouts will work ok. But sometimes mobile devices just don’t have the space to display all the information we’d like to have displayed on the full version – and we don’t want to compromise the full version to accommodate mobile users.
CSS media tags can help in theory. But even with CSS tags it can be extremely difficult to bridge the gab between what designers are asking for and what CSS renders.
Trust me on this, I’ve “fought” with clients on numerous occasions – at one time even on a detail as minute as where the word-wraps occurred. I’d iterate the futility in trying to adjust layouts for their particular screens since it might even be counter-productive for users in different resolutions/browsers/window sizes/etc. One client must have spent days aligning menus & sidebar elements to individual paragraphs on the home page (and then maintaining those alignments). He couldn’t comprehend the difficulty of making this work everywhere and didn’t care about the idiosyncrasies that HTML presents us with. Don’t tell anyone…but some requests were so frustrating to comply with that I did the unthinkable; I took the text into Gimp and used the resulting PNG on the website. It made my brain haemorrhage, but alas he was happy.
Anyone else have html horror stories?
Edited 2012-09-13 20:28 UTC
Well, maybe you can tell me this:
It’s getting better, right ?
We have customers asking to improve their sites to work on mobile. They don’t seem to be interrested in a mobile site either.
Do you know why ? I think it is because they are smartphone users themselves. So they are starting to get it.
Which I can NEVER get working on my cell phone (Opera Mobile on stock Android 2.2.2; LG Optimus V). I have to go into Opera’s settings and tell it to masquerade as a “desktop” browser just to be able to view OSNews, and then go back into the settings to turn it back to “mobile” so every other web site loads the correct (mobile) versions of their pages. And sometimes even that won’t work. It’s annoying because OSNews is one of the few sites I would would want to check throughout the day, but I often just say “screw it” and don’t even bother until I get home on my desktop machine. No hassle on a regular desktop web browser.
Edited 2012-09-13 21:32 UTC
It’s funny, but some sites such as ExtremeTech have horrendous mobile versions – in fact, ET often insists on centering the gutter, leaving half a column of text on each side, on my iPad. I have to partially slide the column over and hold it with my finger to read. Insane.
They have a “Use Desktop Version” link that switches to the desktop URL – which detects my iPad, and switches back to the mobile version.
Happily, my N900 is NOT detected, and so displays the site perfectly. So I end up switching to my tiny, ancient phablet to manually enter and read links found on my 10″, latest OS rev iPad.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and one heck of a lot more annoying!
The whole News column is always poorly formatted!
This is what the Department of Redundancy Department contributed to the linked article:
Something that’s been in Android for some time now. It’s the same as turn-by-turn navigation, or even the ‘share’ menu, for instance.
Apple has to compete with specialized hardware makers (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc…) and a company like Google (both a software maker and a big-scale information cruncher) at the same time.
They need to stop copying Android and come back with some big bet (like what they did with the original iPhone or the iPad), because the physical design or their users’ elitist mindset won’t save their ass much longer.
EDIT: Fixed a redundancy 🙂
Edited 2012-09-13 19:45 UTC
Funny thing is, the Turn by turn navigation and Panorama has been available on my Nokia N900 since late 2009, though the voice navigation wasn’t originally there (the community got that working).
But this was a hardly supported phone. The Symbian phones at the time had panorama software and turn by turn navigation.
I find it hilarious that Apple’s ‘innovations’ are all copied from everyone else.
He always seemed pragmatic to me.
…should be world leader
I wouldn’t go that far. There’s something about Segway Polo that just …. weird.
Good point…
fact is everything good came from copying. it follows that copyrights stifle innovation, which is bad. but copyrights also promote some sort of justice, which is theoretically good.
if everyone can agree on that, then we can argue about copyrights/patents/whatever rationally: what level of innovation stifling is worth what level of justice?
from there I bet everyone would agree that there is little to no justice (de?)served by someone claiming ownership of stupid obvious things like rounded corners and pinching to zoom.
Silly Putty should sue over pinch to zoom. And I couldn’t be the first to mention this, I just don’t read enough, I guess.