The horse this author decided to whip in support of his cause célèbre is 3D Touch. Perhaps you could argue mobile usability is getting worse but 3D Touch is hardly a good example to pick.
Comparing 3D Touch to adding a 'right-mouse button' is at best a faulty comparison. 3D Touch does not replace already-learned interactions; it does not require the user to learn something new. It simply adds new ways of interacting for people that know its there or those that discover it by accident.
How can that be making usability worse?
The beauty of mobile devices is there are so many ways to interact with a touchscreen in an intuitive way, the complexities are easier to hide. Apple have added yet another way, but it is entirely optional.
Perhaps the author would care to explain how if usability on mobile is so bad, how does my 2 1/2 year-old intuitively and effortlessly navigate children's programs on an iPad without any instruction at all? She'd need to be at least double her age in order to do the same thing with a mouse and keyboard.
For those using iOS in the enterprise and worried about data leakage, this sort of thing should give you pause.
This sort of thing is difficult to detect in the AppStore Review process so apps that may appear benign could quite easily use this method to try to steal sensitive information with little risk of detection.
We've been lobbying Apple for a while now to improve the controls around clipboard data; specifically to allow us a policy that prevents prevents personal / unmanaged apps from seeing data that was copied from enterprise / managed apps. It might not solve the personal privacy issues but would significantly reduce this as a risk for corporate data.
Why do you assume the product is no good simply because they sold out?
I prefer to look at as they simply didn't have deep enough pockets to go up against the likes of Sony and no doubt Microsoft and Valve in the near future. Being acquired by a giant like Facebook - as distasteful as it may seem at the outset - gives them the capital they need to execute on their vision and not have to worry so much about being buried by the gaming titans.
This was a strategic play to keep Oculus alive, not to kill it dead.
Assuming someone did steal your phone and look for prints, they would need to know which print to lift and that it's enrolled with Touch ID. After they, they only get 5 goes to be successful before the phone insists on your passcode.
CCC made it look easy but I bet it didn't work for them first try or even 5th try...
Just installed Win 8 in Parallels on an rMBP and I have to be honest, I don't hate it as much as when I tried the preview release in a window on an iMac.
Some of the tips in this article are great and the more you dig, the more you find they actually HAVE improved a lot of things in the 'old' OS as well (this seems to get ignored/glossed over in alot of reviews, especially the negative ones).
So far, Metro/Win8 is just a toy without touch. I honestly can't see myself getting much work done here but it seems to keep out of the way enough.
Ultimately (for me), would I use Windows at all unless I had to for work? And would I replace OS X 10.8 with Win8 as my primary OS? Quite simply: hell no. You'll have to pry this rMBP out of my cold dead hands (not just because Retina is such a game changer visually - I still MUCH prefer the speed, power, efficiency, apps and overall experience of OS X. It's no competition IMO).
Whether Win8 is a winner on touch devices like Surface, time will tell. Metro/Win8 is nice enough but there are next to zero apps for it. I'm also still not convinced having the 'old desktop' on a tablet really is what people are going to want. Obviously it's a stopgap until Win8 takes off but is it really much of a selling point? Anyone who has done RDP or Citrix from an iPad can get an idea of what it's like (I've used it enough times to know): It's OK in a pinch, but shoot me if I had to use it to actually get serious work done.
Microsoft have definitely thrown a Hail Mary here, not long to find out if it will work...
> I'm also still not convinced having the 'old desktop' on a tablet really is what people are going to want
Just a note that ARM tablets running WinRT will not have the desktop, except for few Microsoft programs, specifically office. So, we really don't need to worry too much about the old desktop on a tablet problem. For tablets like the surface pro, running Win8 x86, I don't see why using a mouse would be a big deal if you are power user-y enough to specifically get the not ARM version of the tablet.
When the code was adjusted to fit on the website they lost a lot of the formatting, and severely hurt the readability of the code. It appears that the lines of code were rather long, but were word-wrapped to fit within the size of that image, creating linebreaks at unexpected places. The first and last lines of the block open and close curly braces, but the rest of the code is not indented.
Readability is something you need to be aware of, but don't worry about learning bad practice. You'll become opinionated pretty quickly on your own.
I'm not the most savvy javascript developer, but I'll take a stab at it.
Variable declarations and assignments happen on multiple lines in the 2nd snippet instead of all being defined at once.
var currentLanguage = "en";
var spanish = "es";
var german = "de";
var english = "en";
vs
var currentLanguage = "en", spanish = "es", german = "de", english = "en";
Additionally, "en" is assigned twice. If you're going to take the time to assign the "en" abbreviation into the "english" variable, then you should use it when assigning to "currentLanguage", in my opinion, if only to avoid typos and redundancy.
var spanish = "es", german = "de", english = "en", currentLanguage = english;
The "disclaimer" element is accessed using the documentGetElementById DOM call twice. javascript is getting faster, but forcing multiple DOM calls when it's not necessary is bad practice. Ideally, you'd access it once and save it into a reference.
document.getElementById("disclaimer").firstChild.nodeValue = response;
var text = encodeURIComponent(document.getElementById("disclaimer").firstChild.nodeValue);
vs
var disclaimer = document.getElementById("disclaimer"), text = disclaimer.firstChild.nodeValue;
disclaimer.firstChild.nodeValue = response;
The code formatting is poor and inconsistent, notice an incorrect space after "encodeURIComponent (", but no spaces after "getElementById(" and "getElementsByTagName(". Also notice no indentation anywhere, or line-breaks after the function signatures and opening brackets "{";
The code is polluting the global namespace by not being enclosed in its own namespace or perhaps an immediately executed anonymous function.
I'm sure more seasoned JS devs can list some more things wrong with the code, but those are the ones that stood out to me.
A lot of developers don't like declaring more than one variable on one line, that's a style choice.
There's nothing wrong with it, especially in JS where accidentally deleting a variable declaration can suddenly turn your variable global.
The problem with the code is more that the code stinks, even after you remove the formatting problems, it looks more like .Net code and it doesn't make any sense.
I don't see a bunch of variable definitions on one line as an improvement, just reads less easily and only feels justified in the case of some low numbers like
var x = 0, y = 1, z = 0;
// Some looping or similar here
I do agree with your using of `english` variable to assign `currentLanguage`.
Personally, I like doing all the declarations on their own line as well. But anytime I've used JSLint in the past, I seem to recall it complaining about that. Perhaps I'm mistaken?
That feels like a situation that could easily end up (copy pasting something, someone adding another var, ...) in an unexpected global variable declaration.
var foo = 4,
bar = 5,
baz = 6,
sprinkles = 'wee';
qux = 'quux';
The formatting is non-existant. That makes me angry. Because I have OCD. Most programmers do.
There's a lot of direct use of DOM traversing, which makes the code rather brittle. (Use a css selector for binding to the DOM - jQuery is the de-facto standard tool here).
Variables are not encoded in the URL. And when it is, it happens on a separate line from where it's used. That's just bad style.
Oh, and what's the point of those declared-but-unused variables (`spanish, german, english`).
The horse this author decided to whip in support of his cause célèbre is 3D Touch. Perhaps you could argue mobile usability is getting worse but 3D Touch is hardly a good example to pick.
Comparing 3D Touch to adding a 'right-mouse button' is at best a faulty comparison. 3D Touch does not replace already-learned interactions; it does not require the user to learn something new. It simply adds new ways of interacting for people that know its there or those that discover it by accident.
How can that be making usability worse?
The beauty of mobile devices is there are so many ways to interact with a touchscreen in an intuitive way, the complexities are easier to hide. Apple have added yet another way, but it is entirely optional.
Perhaps the author would care to explain how if usability on mobile is so bad, how does my 2 1/2 year-old intuitively and effortlessly navigate children's programs on an iPad without any instruction at all? She'd need to be at least double her age in order to do the same thing with a mouse and keyboard.