Mobile Development Challenges Presentation



  • A slide presentation that's not only excellent, it relates to discussions here about Javascript debugging on mobile devices: Debugging Mobile. I think that Blakeyrat will highly approve



  • Protip:  Don't steal your presentation from 4Chan.

     



  •  It has too much dropshadow for 4chan.

     

    I love it!



  • Oh, it's one of those unusable Web 3.5 SP2 HTML5 abominations. Yay, I think?



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    Oh, it's one of those unusable Web 3.5 SP2 HTML5 abominations. Yay, I think?

    Worked fine for me. I did think the content was a bit retarded, though..



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @pkmnfrk said:

    Oh, it's one of those unusable Web 3.5 SP2 HTML5 abominations. Yay, I think?

    Worked fine for me. I did think the content was a bit retarded, though..

    So, scrolling up and down caused content to come from the bottom and top of the screen, respectively, for you, and it wasn't choppy as fuck? Lucky.



  • @pkmnfrk said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @pkmnfrk said:

    Oh, it's one of those unusable Web 3.5 SP2 HTML5 abominations. Yay, I think?

    Worked fine for me. I did think the content was a bit retarded, though..

    So, scrolling up and down caused content to come from the bottom and top of the screen, respectively, for you, and it wasn't choppy as fuck? Lucky.

    I don't have scrollbars but if I PgUp or PgDn it will transition between slides, smoothly. Not lucky, just running Chrome.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Not lucky, just running Chrome.

    Ah, so unlucky.


  • @Sutherlands said:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Not lucky, just running Chrome.

    Ah, so unlucky.

    Don't be sad, Firefox can render it too, kind of. It doesn't load background images and it does the "cube-spin" transitions between slides (which are jerky and look like shit) whereas Chrome does a smooth slide transition. Firefox does seem to have slightly better anti-aliasing, though.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @pkmnfrk said:
    Oh, it's one of those unusable Web 3.5 SP2 HTML5 abominations. Yay, I think?

    Worked fine for me. I did think the content was a bit retarded, though..

    The content is your typical Powerpoint presentation.  Completely meaningless and useless without a real person to narrate and fill in additional information.  But it's so much hipper and cooler thatn Powerpoint because it's all HTML 5 and it has all those troll face, rage face, etc. that are so popular with the kids these days. 

    As for how it works, everything was fairly smooth (Firefox) and I had no problems.  Background images were displayed just fine except for the mysterious slide 3 (see below) which has a flashing background in Chrome but no background in Firefox.  However, somebody was slacking off a bit with the user controls:

    You can navigate forward or backward using PgUp and PgDn, the arrow keys on your keyboard, or you can use the arrows in the lower right corner of the screen.   OK, seems good so far.

    • Starting from the beginning, if you use PgDn, this is the 3rd slide , however, if you use your arrow keys or the on-screen arrows, you never see that slide and this is slide 3.
    • If you use PgDn to get to the slide 3 mentioned above, then press the left arrow key to go back, you go back to slide 1 (the title slide), skipping slide number 2.
    • PgUp goes back one slide, unless you are on slide 2, then it doesn't work.  You have to use the left arrow.

     I didn't bother checking past the first few slides.

     Edit:  Tried it in Chrome.  Works fine, does the "cube spin" effect noticably faster.  But that doesn't make up for the lame content.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    The content is your typical Powerpoint presentation.  Completely meaningless and useless without a real person to narrate and fill in additional information.

    I often find detailed, professional PP presentations useful and informative.

    @El_Heffe said:

    and it has all those troll face, rage face, etc. that are so popular with the kids these days.

    That's why I said it was retarded. Rather than make a useful, intelligent presentation it's just full of lame-ass 4Chan memes. I guess we're supposed to think the creator is young, hip and "with it" because, even though he's a tech guy, he also uses swears and knows about some image macros? The sad thing is, I see this shit all the time when Web 2.0 people try to make presentations, like the "Wat" Javascript one. shudder

    @El_Heffe said:

    You can navigate forward or backward using PgUp and PgDn, the arrow keys on your keyboard, or you can use the arrows in the lower right corner of the screen.   OK, seems good so far.

    • Starting from the beginning, if you use PgDn, this is the 3rd slide , however, if you use your arrow keys or the on-screen arrows, you never see that slide and this is slide 3.
    • If you use PgDn to get to the slide 3 mentioned above, then press the left arrow key to go back, you go back to slide 1 (the title slide), skipping slide number 2.
    • PgUp goes back one slide, unless you are on slide 2, then it doesn't work.  You have to use the left arrow.

    I noticed it seemed to have two-dimensional navigation or some shit. I guess it's the same theory Hollywood uses: if it sucks with its current number of dimensions, add another.

    @El_Heffe said:

    Edit:  Tried it in Chrome.  Works fine, does the "cube spin" effect noticably faster.

    Interesting, with Chrome 18 I get slide transitions, which I prefer. Is this cube spin shit really the future of HTML? I'm so sick and tired of everyone following Apple off the Cliff of Eyecandy UIs That Suck To Use. This is the shit they were adding to Firefox instead of fixing its goddamn stability and memory problems (or doing process-per-tab or sandboxing the render threads so that some JS bug can't fuck up my system)?



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I often find detailed, professional PP presentations useful and informative.
    I agree, but, as someone who has had to create a lot of PP presentations over the years, there are some major limitations.  The amount of information you can fit on one slide is severely limited with any normal easily readable font.  Sure, you can make all the text a lot smaller, but nobody is going to read 3 paragraphs of dense text and listen to you at the same time.  PP was really only intended to be an outline, with the presenter filling in the details.  The trick is finding the right balance of just enough detail.  There are a lot of PP haters, but its only because they are doing it wrong.



  • Bizarre. On IE I got a black page with the arrow diagram in the bottom right. Pressing the arrows did nothing, nor did PgUp/PgDown or anything else I tried.

    On Firefox I didn't even get that. Just a blank white page. No evidence that anything at all had actually loaded in any way, though I tried several times.

    On Chrome I actually got to see the presentation.



  • @Scarlet Manuka said:

    Bizarre. On IE I got a black page with the arrow diagram in the bottom right. Pressing the arrows did nothing, nor did PgUp/PgDown or anything else I tried.

    On Firefox I didn't even get that. Just a blank white page. No evidence that anything at all had actually loaded in any way, though I tried several times.

    On Chrome I actually got to see the presentation.

    Older version of IE and Firefox? Noscript?



  • @El_Heffe said:

    Powerpoint presentation.  Completely meaningless and useless without a real person to narrate and fill in additional information.
     

    Yep. The source idiocy is not in sparse powerpoints per se, but in the idea that the file with the slides is redistributable on its own. It's not. And that idea only happened because people were doing the dense text-slide thing, which is wrong.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I often find detailed, professional PP presentations useful and informative.
     

    No! Stop it! You want a reader. Not a collection of text-slides.


  • @dhromed said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    Powerpoint presentation.  Completely meaningless and useless without a real person to narrate and fill in additional information.
     

    Yep. The source idiocy is not in sparse powerpoints per se, but in the idea that the file with the slides is redistributable on its own. It's not. And that idea only happened because people were doing the dense text-slide thing, which is wrong.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I often find detailed, professional PP presentations useful and informative.
     

    No! Stop it! You want a reader. Not a collection of text-slides.

    A reader? Not sure what you mean by that. However, I do like textual PP presentations (not full of prose, but still with info). I don't pay attention to people when they're talking, anyway, so presentations are lost on me.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    A reader? Not sure what you mean by that.
     

    The documentation of the topic that was presented to you.

    I say unless you're going to record the presentation in some way, you might as well delete the slides afterwards. It's like one half of a phone conversation.



  • @dhromed said:

    The documentation of the topic that was presented to you.

    A lot of times there isn't a lot of written documentation for these things. There might be articles written by other people, but they invariably reference the presentation.

    @dhromed said:

    I say unless you're going to record the presentation in some way, you might as well delete the slides afterwards. It's like one half of a phone conversation.

    I always record my half of all phone conversations because I like the sound of my own voice.

    But as for presentations, for the stuff I'm thinking of (mostly white hat security stuff, explanations of exploits, ideas for how to fix/replace the CA system..) the presentations are just fine.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @Scarlet Manuka said:
    Bizarre. On IE I got a black page with the arrow diagram in the bottom right. Pressing the arrows did nothing, nor did PgUp/PgDown or anything else I tried.

    On Firefox I didn't even get that. Just a blank white page. No evidence that anything at all had actually loaded in any way, though I tried several times.

    On Chrome I actually got to see the presentation.

    Older version of IE and Firefox? Noscript?

    Nope. Current versions of all three browsers and I don't block script (or ads). Beats me, but I don't care enough to investigate.

    On the usefulness of PP presentations: some of them can be useful with just the slides, when all the information you need is on the slide; this is rare but sometimes happens (e.g. when the slide is a diagram). Otherwise, apart from a few exceptions, the only really useful ones I've seen are where people have actually taken the time to use the slide notes feature and put down all the explanatory and linking stuff that goes into the presentation. Vastly outnumbered by the "here are the slides, now take a guess as to what any of it actually means" style.



  • It's strange how respect for the concept of parts-of-speech exhibits such a strong inverse correlation with willingness to adopt new technology, e.g. how using the word "mobile" as a noun seems to be in vogue right now among armchair programmers. I even read something today that mentioned Microsoft's "Director of Mobile." I'm still waiting for a noun at the end of that title... the correct answer is probably "Crap" but we can only infer that.



    In any case, I'm afraid I just don't respect any developer that hasn't complete the following steps:


    1. Learn the English language
    2. Learn an assembly language
    3. Learn a systems programming language
    4. Learn RDBMS / SQL




      Only after these four steps have been completed beyond a shadow of a doubt do I recommend moving on to these steps:


    5. Learn to program the sort of application that interests you
    6. Pontificate about the sort of application development that interests you



      Developers under a certain age seem determined to omit steps #1 through 4. The ones who have an "online presence" often seem to have skipped #5 as well. The top 50% will at least take a stab at items #3 and #5. Some will attempt #4, because even programmers have enough sense to follow the money.



      Items #1 and 2 are sadly ignored by younger developers. Those that go to college (which, of course, is held to be a complete waste of time) will be forced to work on #1, although even for college kids #2, #3, and #4 seem to be falling by the wayside.



      I guess this is just a symptom of our hype-crazed society. As much as I like Java as a language, I must admit that much of the rot originated from the Java movement. The worst part of all of it is that these people spin their own little orthodoxy in which RDBMS is unnecessary, gibberish is an acceptable presentation medium, and "assembly" is a .NET euphemism for an EXE or DLL file. They are not content to just suck quietly, they have to turn their mediocrity into a movement that's politically incorrect to even question.



      I take comfort in the fact that I will probably be writing simple SQL queries for about $20,000 per month before too long. It's not going away, and the kids aren't learning it ----> meal ticket.


  • @El_Heffe said:

    PP was really only intended to be an outline, with the presenter filling in the details.  The trick is finding the right balance of just enough detail.  There are a lot of PP haters, but its only because they are doing it wrong
     

    That.

    A good presentation is a good presentation, whether or not PP is involved. Unfortunately I've come across a number of presentations where the presenter has relied too much on technology and would have served more purpose saying nothing but just clicking to read the next slide, in particular sales people that believe PP is a substitution for poor presentational skills. It ain't, and frankly it's quite embarrassing.

    I treat PP slides as an "agenda" where I flesh out the details but the slide content simply introduces the concept (and in some ways provides supporting  content - such as examples, statistics, quotes, images etc).



  • @bridget99 said:

    In any case, I'm afraid I just don't respect any developer that hasn't complete the following steps:

    1) Learn the English language
    2) Learn an assembly language
    3) Learn a systems programming language
    4) Learn RDBMS / SQL
     

    5) Learn to proof-read.

    Not too sure why (1) is a priority...  unless English is their first language, in which case it comes under "communication skills".



  • @Cassidy said:

    @bridget99 said:

    In any case, I'm afraid I just don't respect any developer that hasn't complete the following steps:


    1. Learn the English language
    2. Learn an assembly language
    3. Learn a systems programming language
    4. Learn RDBMS / SQL
     

    5) Learn to proof-read.

    Not too sure why (1) is a priority...  unless English is their first language, in which case it comes under "communication skills".

    I regret missing a single "d" but it hardly rises to the level of atrocity that others perpetrate on the English language. And you can call this "communications skills" if you'd like, but the fact remains that English is the language of software development. Quick question: what's the best book about Java written in Russian? (And I didn't even choose a very implausible combination there; I could have asked "what's the best book about VB.NET written in Igbo?" and in your universe, where programmers just work in the local language, this would still be an entirely valid question. There are tens of millions of Igbo speakers out there, and a similar number of VB.NET developers.)



    Hell, there are popular development tools, runtimes, etc. out there that basically ignore any other language, e.g. PHP. You can run down PHP if you'd like, but I'd venture to say that its creators' decision not to set foot in the quicksand that is Unicode was a big part of their success.



    I've worked with developers with a poor command of English before. In cases where they had a good command of SQL and a good supervisor, these people were still productive. But people making long, elaborate HTML5-based presentations that purport to tell me how to do my job damn well better use proper English. The fact that people at Microsoft won't use proper English even in their executive job titles does a lot to explain why I dislike them so much.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    Hell, there are popular development tools, runtimes, etc. out there that basically ignore any other language [than English], e.g. PHP.
    Bad example.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    I guess it's the same theory Hollywood uses: if it sucks with its current number of dimensions, add another.
     

    I wish I'd seen this comment before renting Battlefield Earth 7D.



  • @bridget99 said:

    I regret missing a single "d" but it hardly rises to the level of atrocity that others perpetrate on the English language. And you can call this "communications skills" if you'd like
     

    No.

    I called (1) communication skills - perhaps language skills would have been more accurate - but the point I was making of (5) is static analysis.

    But I get your point about atrocities visited on the English language.

    @bridget99 said:

    but the fact remains that English is the language of software development

    @bridget99 said:
    I've worked with developers with a poor command of English before. In cases where they had a good command of SQL and a good supervisor, these people were still productive.

    I think you just made my point there.



  • @Cassidy said:

    @bridget99 said:

    I've worked with developers with a poor command of English before. In cases where they had a good command of SQL and a good supervisor, these people were still productive.

    I think you just made my point there.

    To some extent, you are correct, but there's no upward mobility for these people, since they end up needing too much translation / supervision. A good developer should really aspire to be more than a drone who has to take orders in SQL.



    I saw something today that reminded me of this thread. Microsoft is running banner ads that say something like "Kill the Code; Unlock the Achievement," as if "killing" code were somehow good. I guess this comes from the same school of thought that labels any exciting new technology "sick."



    When I see crap like that, I just figure that Microsoft is trying to attract a certain sort of person who doesn't really believe in absolutes (like sick/dead = bad). They are also trying to appear youthful in spirit. Their plan: get the young and soft-headed developers into the Microsoft camp and control them like a zombie army.



    C.S. Lewis wrote a science fiction book, "That Hideous Strength," in which a young academic is prepared for assimilation by malevolent aliens using a sort of truth-denial process. He is made to sit for hours in subtly asymmetrical rooms, to insult traditional symbols of wholesomeness, and so on. It's all directed at making the subject more mentally labile. A very strong appeal to his desire to be what we would call "cool" is also made. Lewis uses words like "inner circle" and "forward-thinking" a lot in this book



    It's pretty amazing to me that Microsoft's behavior reminds me, more than anything else, of the assimilation process in a science fiction novel.



    Visual Studio Titanium Maxx: It's gonna be straight up twisted, y'all.



  • @bridget99 said:

    To some extent, you are correct, but there's no upward mobility for these people, since they end up needing too much translation / supervision. A good developer should really aspire to be more than a drone who has to take orders in SQL.
     

    Then - pedantically speaking - you're after coders that require minimal  translation / supervision, not after coders for whom English is their first language. Best not conflate effect with cause, after all, given that there are many native EFLs that still require supervisory overheads.

    I've no idea what the rest of your post was about...



  • @Cassidy said:

    @bridget99 said:

    To some extent, you are correct, but there's no upward mobility for these people, since they end up needing too much translation / supervision. A good developer should really aspire to be more than a drone who has to take orders in SQL.
     

    Then - pedantically speaking - you're after coders that require minimal  translation / supervision, not after coders for whom English is their first language. Best not conflate effect with cause, after all, given that there are many native EFLs that still require supervisory overheads.

    I've no idea what the rest of your post was about...

    The rest was about what would prompt a company selling an IDE to buy banner ads saying "kill the code."

    You wouldn't go to a hardware store that encouraged you to "kill your plumbing" or tried to sell you a "sick" hose or bolt... would you?



  • My plumber is one fat sicknasty boss!



  • @dhromed said:

    My plumber is one fat sicknasty boss!

    You better hope he's not "twisted"... "twisted" is apparently good for software, but probably isn't a good quality for someone who'll be lurking in your house with a steel wrench in hand.



  •  .. but I have have heard of people killing processes.

    That, and a killswitch as a safety mechanism.

    Wrong terminology, I understand, but misinterpretation of the language isn't confined to IT.



  • @Cassidy said:

     .. but I have have heard of people killing processes.

    That, and a killswitch as a safety mechanism.

    Wrong terminology, I understand, but misinterpretation of the language isn't confined to IT.

    OK... "killing" a process is a bit morbid. But it makes sense.

    To use "twisted," "sick," "demented," etc. as terms of adulation is a different, more erroneous way of communicating. It's not just morbid or bizarre... the actual meaning and the intended meaning are almost complete opposites.

    My other pet peeve, the use of a word as if it were a different part of speech, is a third sort of linguistic quirk.

    I don't know if these two trends are completely isolated to IT types, but they seem to me to be particularly prevalent among IT wingnuts ( i.e. overenthusiastic early adopter types).



  • @bridget99 said:

    OK... "killing" a process is a bit morbid. But it makes sense
     

    No... it doesn't.

    The explanation: the "kill" command in *nix means "sent this process a signal". The signal can be "please stop" or "could you pause?" and even "I've changed something in your congif file - please re-read it and adjust to the new settings without restarting". It can also be used to shotgun the process through the head and stop it outright, but in general "pass him this message" and "kill him" are fundamentally different actions.

    The point: just extending your observation that specific meanings of words are understood differently by different cultures, and I have encountered it also, hence my evidence. I wasn't disagreeing.



  • @dhromed said:

    My plumber is one fat sicknasty boss!

    Too obvious

     



  • @PJH said:

    @bridget99 said:
    Hell, there are popular development tools, runtimes, etc. out there that basically ignore any other language [than English], e.g. PHP.
    Bad example.

    The fact that PHP emits error messages in latinized Hebrew doesn't imply that it supports Unicode. In fact, it's languages without Unicode support that resort to ugly latinizations like PAAMAYIM_
    NEKUDOTAYIM.

    It is possible to force Unicode in PHP but you can't use regular quoted strings. You have to treat each character as a 16-bit numeric literal. At least, that is my recollection.



  • Thanks, Dr. Science.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Thanks, Dr. Science.

    You are very welcome, Commodore Improbable.


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