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Every company makes mistakes. The great ones learn from it and try to do a better job next time. Everyone I know loves their service and their prices. They do not sell out their users. They also brought us DVD by mail without late fees and then pioneered streaming and are now doing high quality original programming. That should count for something, no?

about 4 hours ago on 'Monsters University' review: Pixar makes prequels look easy

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It’s actually a better implementation now. Spotlight is on every homescreen tucked away on the top. No need to switch to the first homescreen and then left of that.

about 4 hours ago on IOS 7 removes the search screen left of the home screen without replacing it. Why?! 3 recommends

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Lol. Sure he didn’t create the movies but he was the primary reason the company is where it is today. In fact, he believed in the products and people so much that he almost ran out of all his personal money until Toy Story was released and turned the ship around. He was their CEO, got involved in all the minor details including critiquing their movies, the open design of their building (now named The Steve Jobs Building) which allowed spontaneous interactions, etc.

about 23 hours ago on 'Monsters University' review: Pixar makes prequels look easy 2 replies 20 recommends

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There were two big ones which had Google paying millions of dollars of fines and agreeing to 20 years of audits. I’m sure you must’ve heard of it? Streetview data collection and ignoring Safari privacy settings.

StreetView was probably a more serious violation though they pretty much got away with it in the US. Their backend engineers had access to everything sent over unsecured WiFi connections of millions of families and who knows that they could’ve done with that data with simple greps.

The bypassing of Safari settings actually effected me for months, if not years. One thing I remember distinctly is seeing “Abortion Experts” ads following me for days on unrelated websites after I did some research on Google when my wife suffered a miscarriage. I’ve always made sure to turn off 3rd party cookies but that didn’t seem to have any effect and it was a pretty frustrating thing for me because I didn’t understand (even as a seasoned engineer) how they were able to figure out my wife’s medical condition.

After it came out in the news that Google and other advertising companies were exploiting a trick and understood how exactly they were doing it, they completely lost my trust. Google paid $20+ million in fines and if you ask me, got away with a slap on the wrist.

Safari, by default, doesn’t allow third party cookies to be set. However, it does allow setting third party cookies if a user explicitly clicks on the third party’s link and this is the correct thing to do.

So if you go to google.com and then go to say theverge.com, Google, doubleclick and other Google properties cannot read or set Google cookies when you’re on the Verge website, even if they advertise there. So they won’t be able to connect the dots. However if you click on a +1 button or a Google served ad, Safari will allow Google to set a cookie and read any previous cookies from their domain (google.com search or Google Plus identity cookies), because you, as a user explicitly interacted with Google on a non-Google website.

What these companies were doing was using Javascript tricks to fake-click that link on load, to fool Safari into thinking that you interacted with them (basically hidden form submission inside an invisible iframe). That’s purely unethical and only designed to track you even when you didn’t want to be.

You can read more here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-google-circumvents-privacy-settings-safari-users

about 23 hours ago on Paper maker FiftyThree raises $15 million to build the Office suite of the future 1 reply 1 recommend

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Just to be clear, Safari auto hides the top navigation bar too right after the page loads. Try, say, newyorker.com. It comes back when you scroll back up. I also use the full screen mode in Landscape which has 0 chrome unless you scroll to top or bottom. Not as many features as iOS 7, but still pretty cool.

about 24 hours ago on UX Niceties: iOS 7's Safari auto-hide address bars

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Safari never was the best browser on iOS.

Safari was always the best browser on iOS. It always blew away the competition both on iOS and especially on Android. This is from a list I posted earlier:

• Safari is smoother
• renders webpages better with better font support
• has built-in Reader mode
• you can tap on any word and get its definition (OS wide feature)
• you can tap on any word and make it speak the pronunciation (OS wide feature)
• it zooms to columns more consistently when you double tap and then locks in when you scroll vertically
• has full screen mode
• let’s you turn off third party cookies
• allows you to set pages to read later with offline support
• let’s you scroll to top by tapping the top of the screen (OS wide feature)
• let’s you bookmark webpages with Favicon on your homescreen that look and work like first class apps
• let you shake to undo editing when filing up web forms (OS wide feature)
• Bounce back gives you feedback that you have reached the end of a page (OS wide feature) but on Chrome on Nexus 4 it just stops abruptly and there is no visual feedback if it’s just laggy/unresponsive or it hit the end.
• On mobile Safari, it automatically converts plain text that look like phone numbers or street addresses or email addresses, into actionable links (called data detectors).

Mobile Safari was and is still the gold standard in mobile browsers.

about 24 hours ago on UX Niceties: iOS 7's Safari auto-hide address bars 2 replies 5 recommends

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Phew. I was hoping it didn’t turn out to be like Cars 2. As an aside, Pixar, Apple, Tesla and Netflix are the tech companies I respect the most and they continue to maintain their high standards.

about 24 hours ago on 'Monsters University' review: Pixar makes prequels look easy 4 replies 24 recommends

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I can understand why they would buy it. For design, developers, apps, competitive edge, etc. And I really don’t care if they make or don’t make Android versions. That doesn’t effect me. But anytime a company is taken over by Google, as a rule of thumb, I stop using their product after the next revision. My primary concern is that I don’t trust them with my data, based on their past infractions. It’s just a matter of principle for me personally. I hope you can appreciate that. Just like I can totally understand why someone wouldn’t buy Apple products if they feel the company is too restrictive.

That’s why it’s my hope they don’t swoop in and buy FiftyThree.

about 24 hours ago on Paper maker FiftyThree raises $15 million to build the Office suite of the future 1 reply 1 recommend

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Apple also gobbles up successful startups though not at the pace of Google. My issue is with Google purely because I use Apple products and am concerned about Google’s privacy issues. Someone else in the forums probably has the same issues with Apple and it would be fair for them to be pissed about Apple taking away their favorite developers.

1 day ago on Paper maker FiftyThree raises $15 million to build the Office suite of the future 1 reply 1 recommend