jtaby

I'm saying disruption happens both ways: The innovators disrupt the laggards, but the innovators build up cruft and legacy over time and the laggards can side-step them and jump through revolutions.

We tend to get caught up in our own disruptions.

So the reason is because I have a black background color on body. When I said it's fixed, I just realized it's only fixed on Chrome Canary. It looks different on Chrome 18, and it looks different than that in Safari. Welcome to the Web. I'll try to fix it again after work.

Do you mean "awkward to scroll" from a performance perspective or from a not-being-able-to-see-the-scrollbar perspective?

My pleasure, glad you enjoyed it :)

I acknowledge WebKit's monopoly on the mobile landscape today, I make no claim whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, that argument would distract from the reality that if you want to make a mobile web app work well, you need to build it on webkit and debug it on webkit

Thanks for the comment. Was there anything specific you could point me to that you felt was above your head? I'd love to do a follow-up with more introductory material.

When you go to "About Google Chrome", do you see something close to "Version 20.0.1114.0 canary"?

Thanks for letting me know, I didn't realize I broke that. I just pushed up a fix

Chromium is the open source project that powers Chrome, the browser. Chrome Canary is upstream of Chromium, which is an upstream of Chrome.

You actually bring up a good point, the webkit inspector right now is tied to the webkit project, and the barrier to contribution is prohibitively high. I've suggested to Paul Irish separating the two projects and making them more independent, though I'm not sure what the feasibility of that is.

I can either try to submit a patch and likely fail, or blog about it. Last time I complained to Google about Chrome, they filed 33 bugs and fixed many of them. The point here is to be an agent of change, not an agent of patches :)

Ah damn! I had both those on my outline but forgot to write about them :( I'll update the post. Thanks :D

I love the internet.

Thanks a lot for your comment, disagreement males you question your assumptions and strengthens your understanding of the issue.

Is there a body of research that supports your counter-claims? I'd love to read anything you can point me to.

It's interesting, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi specifically calls out this idea of listening to your "natural emotional reactions to our circumstances" in his book Flow.

Your point about kids made me think of this story (Found out about it through The Talent Code) > http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html

Csikszentmihalyi is saying that Happiness is a self-made choice. The quote from the dying people supported and added context to the same idea.

The Steve Jobs quote is probably the most unrelated, you're right. I included it because I felt that it gave a good practical example of what it means to introspect, judge, and measure your own fulfillment. The overarching idea I'm trying to get across is to drop the social pressure to "keep your head down, don't make a lot of noise, and you'll get your paycheck every two weeks".

I'm starting to realize that those who do what they love find more success than those who do what they "need" to do in the long term. I'm fairly sure that the children would also rather have parents who are having fun and are happy than those that are sad and bored but bring in an extra $20,000 a year.

I don't have children though, so I can't really empathize on a deep level, I'm just going by intuition.

Thanks for the link, glad you enjoyed the blog post!

I recently started out my first blog which has ever found any audience at all. The response has been amazing and it's been a very rewarding experience both personally and professionally, and I hope to keep it up.

I agree with most of the article's points, except when it comes to commenting. My thinking is that commenting systems often degrade into back-and-forth, one-on-one bickering and end up distracting from the main points being raised in the blog post.

The exception of course, would be technical blog posts, where comment threads often include more in depth tips, corrections, and tidbits of related information.

FYI, I added a demo section to the blog post with links to an Instagram demo.

Not a talking point, we just have a lot of conversations about this at the office :)

I have a vested interest in seeing SproutCore succeed, but the point I'm making does not. Backbone.js and Cappuccino are other examples of javascript frameworks which fit the same criteria I talk about.

Backbone and Cappuccino have both proven that they will last and have dedicated communities building them. All these projects need people to contribute to them and make them amazing. A core team can build it, but the community makes it a real project.

Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to existing projects.

A bunch of mildly different Javascript frameworks creates a paradox of choice for the users. It means that when users start developing a new project, they have to weigh the benefits and costs of each of the framework. This not only increases the barrier to entry, but as Barry Schwartz outlines in his book "The Paradox of Choice", it also creates a paralysis and unhappy decisions.

That's only one of the problems. Another problem is that by having all these smart people dedicate their time to solving the same problem over and over, we get stuck at the same level of abstraction. If instead of solving the same problem in slightly different ways, we iterate and build abstractions, we can make apps previously impossible to build in reasonable budgets and time, possible.

It doesn't need to be Sproutcore that we coalesce around. It could be Backbone.

This has already happened with jQuery. The JavaScript community coalesced around the framework, contributed API changes, bug fixes, documentation, unit tests, and as a result, we can operate and build applications without having to re-implement the same cross-browser, low-level code.

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

The intro video could be improved, it dragged on for a little too long, but it seems cool!

But then you're increasing the barrier to entry to users. You're assuming the user cares enough about your app that they will sacrifice a spot on their home screen and will want to tap three buttons to get to it...

I agree with most of what you're saying. Add To Homescreen is a great feature for regular users of a mobile web app. Your application needs to support both modes however (browser-mode, and app-mode). The easy answer is to say: "Use back button in browser, and use navigation bar in app-mode" - Which is certainly possible from a technical perspective, but jarring from a UX perspective. You have to essentially re-learn how to use the application when you click that button. Not only that, but if you add a navigation bar in app-mode, then your navigation is on the top (where it would've been on the bottom in browser mode), and that has other fallout in relation to other elements that you may have placed on the top of the page in browser-mode.

I hope that made sense.

From my response to callahad above: "I didn't mean the search field covers search results, it covers the website's UI. Here's another example of it blocking the UI, this time in github: http://cl.ly/1t450T1S0s2J2V0I3O1W

I thought of writing about that but felt it was all subjective and that I couldn't make a UX argument for why it is objectively better.

I _have_ been unemployed for a week.

Thanks for the comment. I agree with almost everything you said, but I would add that Safari doesn't suffer from most of these issues, though it suffers from other problems.