For anyone, like me, that has not heard of Tapatalk here is a description that I found:
Tapatalk is a forum app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia. The app provides super fast forum access to any vBulletin, phpBB forums that have activated Tapatalk (Simple Machine Forum and IP.Board are in development). Forum owner can download the free plug-in to activate Tapatalk in your forum.
The application for Android, while cheap, is not free. I am not sure if it is open source or not, the forum software here must support it and of course, its intended for smart phones. A search of the openSUSE repositories finds no match for it either. And in general, the openSUSE forums are mostly being used by desktop and Laptop computers. Anything is possible in the future, but I don’t think support for Tapatalk will be something that will happen in the short run, but we do accept all suggestions.
I really understand you difficulty to add and maintain new features to our forums.
Tapatalk Client is not free. but vBulletin plugin is free.
actually vBulletin itself is not a free software, so I think free or open source should not be the standard of choosing supports.
Yes, most of the traffic must come from desktop users.
that’s the common sense shared among any forum. but it does not mean we should not improve mobile user experience with a single plugin.
It’s not mobile only, it has chrome and ipad version.
Ipad nowadays claims to “kill desktop” even if it’s mobile only, think about Japanese and Chinese, they has more mobile phones than population. no offense, not everyone here are Deutsch, in some sub-forums here it’s a long live habit to login and chat using mobile when taking subway or long distance bus.
So anyway, it’s not the problem of open source or close, but of convenience and easy to maintain. I hope in the long run, I can see this feature here.
If opensource should not be the standard of choosing support, what should be the standard? If we choose user distribution we should stop to develop VOIP software and Asterisc and use Skype, Facebook on a Windows Client only. As there are more cell phone users then Smartphone users, we should not support access of apps at all. We should actually focus on GSM access. So distribution cannot be a support standard. Cost could be one. Underlying logic (if not ideologic) may be one. So could you be so kind to elaborate what is your view on what standards should be, as a negative definition does not seem informative enough to promote the feature.
Yes, most of the traffic must come from desktop users.
that’s the common sense shared among any forum. but it does not mean we should not improve mobile user experience with a single plugin.
Yes this is an argument. So we should foster on what? On i-Phone non standards? Or on Android non-standards. Or Baidu, or WebOs? The problem I see is, if you choose a proprietary software supporting this feature, it will determine who is supported or not. Therefore you are giving support to a limited group but you are excluding others…not on your decision but on the basis of the vendor of the software. As this site should be as free in access as possible, I have my doubts about the implementation not about your statement. The statement actually may well oppose the use of the aforementioned software. You could talk to apple and to Google to implement an open standard, open source, royalty free to allow to do this. Open source plug-ins would appear at once, be assured.
It’s not mobile only, it has chrome and ipad version.
But Chrome is not currently part of the regular openSUSE distribution. And i-Pad is part of an industry of which the former owner intended to spend billions to destroy open source software.
I
pad nowadays claims to “kill desktop” even if it’s mobile only
They claim to kill android. A certain Steven B. claims that too. And a lot of other industries get and got (the never ending story, SCO, you recall?) from very dark channels with the aim of destroying open source software, that is also this distribution. That said, if you go into advanced tab and you choose the forth button you see: paste from word (a MS closed source application, not contained in openSUSE and not open source). So it may well be that your argument is defensible through precedents.
, think about Japanese and Chinese, they has more mobile phones than population. no offense, not everyone here are Deutsch, in some sub-forums here it’s a long live habit to login and chat using mobile when taking subway or long distance bus.
No, not everybody is German. Denver AFAIK is not and is living in Denmark if he did not change residence. The fact is that in Germany there are far more cell phone than Laptops. It is estimated that every cell phone user has up to 4 unused old cell phones at home. Be aware of statistics. The problem is not the technological hardware base, but the tariff structure of the phone bills. It is also true that this forum is about open source linux software, currently running on Servers (always less), Workstation, PCs (main par of users AFAIK) and Laptops (growing). As long as no open hardware is on the market that does allow the development of a “cell phone linux” (and you have seen what resources are spent to avoid this recently), pure user experience is not a good argument maybe. Especially if you consider that a lot of users use nntp to access these pages.
You face therefore potential fragmenation of user interfaces. All this requires manpower = financial resources. And licences in your case.
A friendly suggestion: please avoid mentioning of nationalities to catalog individuals as part of a behavior or national reality. This is counterproductive and IMO not covered by the TORs of this forum. It is tricky, see dangerous, and can deviate attention from your post into unrelated flamewars. I do not feel that was in your intentions. But don’t worry, I think everybody did understand this in this context. Still I do not feel comfortable reading it.
So anyway, it’s not the problem of open source or close, but of convenience and easy to maintain. I hope in the long run, I can see this feature here.
Both convenience and ease of maintenance have been challenged by this post.
Happy New Year, SuSE!
Same for you (although the Chinese New Year should be well ahead in time, right? When is the date and what do we have this year as star sign? I love that “year of the” habit. I am a fire horse BTW.
It’s not necessarily a drawback that some tapatalk clients are not free. The Chrome addon appears to be free. There are lots of people who are reading the forums from non-free software and platforms, e.g. Windows, Apple, IE. However my real concern is that tapatalk might be a proprietary protocol. This would be a lock-in and something I would not want to encourage in a forum that discusses FOSS.
As for the future of web access, I think the mobiles already outnumber the desktops and that’s the inevitable trend. For a forum like openSUSE, there may not be the urgency since presumably the target audience has a desktop. But I am not saying that forum access should be limited to desktops. I sometimes read mail on the move, so why not a forum? I however find the vBulletin layout unfriendly to space limited screens (e.g. last post link just next to the author link) so I’ve given up trying to read this forum on my smartphone.
Couldn’t you use an nntp client to read the articles? Just intended as a general question as I tried to set it up and (a part of some design drawbacks) on the laptop, it seamed just a thing to easily integrate into a mail client or news reader. So, this questions is just by curiosity to see if it is technically easy and possible in Android and i-Phone. Anybody tried?
There are several drawbacks with using NNTP on smartphones. Sometimes I want to follow interesting links. I don’t know if NNTP clients support forwarding links to the browser. And why should I when the forum is already available in HTML form? Similarly I might want to forward a forum article to someone. I don’t know if the NNTP text has a link to the web version. Also what if the article has some screenshots? Does NNTP support inline graphics?
I respect the NNTP users’ right to use their chosen interface but I regard it as a backward step on a smartphone. All that is needed is a page layout that is optimised for space limited devices. Many websites have filled this need by providing an alternative site for mobiles and redirecting you there when they detect that you have such a device.
Opera Mobile in a certain sense provides this feature of resizing. But of course with limitations on privacy.
I am not using nntp on a day by day basis, so I do share your view about the issues you listed. That said, the design for limited space is a problem even with laptops (I have a 12" one and with KDE 4 these screens may be troublesome and with KDE3.5 they are too, sometimes.
What you say would be a WAP interface, but WAP was quite a flop AFAIK.
Should the SmartPhone producers provide solutions to make web pages accessible or should websites be forced to adapt to limitations of static smartphone OSs? Nice dilemma.
I think the market has already spoken. If you don’t cater for smartphones, you lose customers. Really, many websites are overdesigned and overdecorated. The limitation of space has forced website designers to think again about what visitors really want to do on the site. And you’ll find that it’s often just 5% of the functionality offered. I sometimes even read a mobile site on a desktop because it minimal, no annoying ads, sidebars, and similar frills.
In a sense the smartphone apps are a move in the other direction from a do-everything web browser. An app is specialised to do only a small set of tasks, e.g. buying a pizza, checking the weather forecast. So instead of collecting bookmarks, people collect apps. And why not?
I agree about the “flash” illness, blinking adds, stupid and redundant design. Whether this bring the designers to design better or to create a bloated and disfunctional environment to smartphone…time will tell.
In a sense the smartphone apps are a move in the other direction from a do-everything web browser. An app is specialised to do only a small set of tasks, e.g. buying a pizza, checking the weather forecast. So instead of collecting bookmarks, people collect apps. And why not?
Why not? Because every app has to be payed (there is no free lunch) and the fragmentation does not allow to combine functions, which reduces usefulness to a greater extend.
But I feel we are hijacking the thread of the O.P. as much as I do enjoy this exchange.
No, the pizza store doesn’t charge me for the app. The bank doesn’t charge me for the app. I have not paid for a single app yet (though I have to say I’m not an avid collector). The sales model is not what you imagine. The app is only the means to sell goods or services. If I can order pizza quickly from shop A because they have an app, then shop B loses out.
Also most apps are light, typically tens of kB. They reuse a lot of commonality in the platform. You could download a dozen apps for one download of Firefox.
Hahaha, fat lot of money the pizza shop will make selling my pizza preferences (I usually buy the same, when they have a discount :)). As for the bank, the app does no more or no less than my normal web browser transactions. And what can they sell me with the weather forecast app given that I don’t have to login to get the info? Present me with an ad for umbrellas, maybe? None of this is any different from what happens with web browsers. Sorry, this has nothing to do with apps anymore, only your well-known prejudices about the online world.
Telling well known you should elaborate “well known by whom”. If you refer to the fact that I do think about the consequences of the current business models for individuals, this is well known by whoever reads what I write.
Prejudice is a statement that says: what I am saying is right by default, what you (referred to me as a person) is saying is not only wrong but not based on facts or on intellect. Just a prejudice. It is a wording that I would use with caution. How did say a mod short time ago: the use of a smily does not necessarily lower the impact of your words.
And on YOUR argument: your pizza-shop does not care about your data. But the 500 other pizzashops competitors of a metropolis do, they do pay for user data, maybe also for profiling. And they do pay IMO quite a lot of money.
Well known to the readers of this forum. Did you not post recently about the cloud or has someone been posting on your behalf?
Prejudice carries no judgement with it and I’m sorry if you think it does. You have your own ideas of how you want to conduct your affairs online or not, and I have mine. Ergo, you have your prejudices and I have mine. So I declare that I have prejudices too, so feel free to call mine by that name.
As for the pizza shop, I don’t think shop A is going to let shop B have the data. Maybe the soft drink manufacturers. But as I said, this is no different from a web browser session. So maybe you don’t want to order pizzas online, and I do. In that case you should avoid both web browser sessions and app sessions with the pizza shop, and go to the shop in person, where they will transcribe your orders manually and ask you about your name and postcode, and you can then decline to give them those, and wait for your pizza.
You see, it is all about definition. I did never hear a definition of prejudices the way you do, but then O.K.
In the context it raised a ambiguous impact.
Then lastly, I am health economist (or was, who knows). In health-insurance it is uttermost important to ship around to what is “moral hazard”. That is, there is an information mismatch, an insurer tries not to do too fair conditions (for mechanisms that I do not explain now) for not falling into the trap to attract the worst subjects (so called adverse selection). In order to do so the insurances today tend to do more and more datamining. By itself it is not useful for them to know that peperoni pizza are more desired then the extra mozzarella di buffala. But if they are able to get hands on a file where the usage data of all the apps generated on your smartphone (IMEI and other identifiers help) then they are able to do profiling. Now what happens (or could happen) is: Kenyap want to insure himself for health-care and does find only horrendous prices or…no insurance at all (as he is excluded - this is called cream skimming). This because they link your profiling data to a profile that has a “dangerous lifestile”. Now the funny thing that comes is: what is dangerous is just their prejudice about your lifestile (if I use your definition) though they will not tell you of course. The will just deny your contract, or give you a very high risk…without you being able to “defend” yourself. This scenario is no science fiction. I would love it would be. Currently it is done only on a much lower level. But it is applied. And it is applied not only by health care providers but also by financing analysts when the have to agree on loans. How do find out about risks? Well by profiling of course. The better profile you may build the tougher you may discriminate (in the economical sense but not only) your customers. You will maximize you profit and that requires to minimize risk and losses. (Minimax principle in decision theory if you like it). And for achieving this, the industry will continue to program all the apps you want.
**Note to who did read up to here: **
This thread is the thread of MargueriteSu and we where so “vile” to hijack it (it was not really intentional). I apologize sincerely to her. Her original question was to add the **TAPATALK plugin **into the services of this forum. Thank you to jdmcdaniel3 to have made the link here accessible.
There where three answer post at the beginning of the thread that where of IMO interest to her question, my exchange with ken_yap is surely very interesting (I hope the interface of economics and IT interests) but in the end deviated from the original thread.
So please feel obliged to discuss the original thread from now on.
@ken_yap: this is very intriguing to me as I love economics. Feel free to open a thread on this (maybe in general chit chat) and I will love to exchange with you on this issue. I really was a bit driven by passion and would like to go on, but this is not the right place. Hope you can accept this. As for arguments, i just wanted to answer you on the “prejudices” (filter may be better) thing of my thought. And where it comes from. Again apologies to the thread owner. (passion ruled :shame: )
Let me just say that it is best to keep your reply’s relevant to the original posters intent. Anyone can start a new thread on any valid subject and even voice one’s ideas in the Soapbox forum, but in the end, we are here to talk about all subjects as they relate to openSUSE and in general not insurance or other such subjects. And in particular we are not here to post anything here that is against another user as this is simply not the place for that. I do understand that heated arguments on various subjects can ensue and the original subject become diluted, but think about the original user and their questions or requests. If you have a valid argument that relates to openSUSE, create your own post and find the proper forum for it to exist. Be polite at all times and carefully consider the words that you write. Failure to follow the forum guidelines can cause the entire offending messages to be removed and further action should it be warrantied.
And in particular we are not here to post anything here that is against another user as this is simply not the place for that
Nobody did. It was just OT for a while.
even if it’s mobile only, think about Japanese and Chinese, they has more mobile phones than population. no offense, not everyone here are Deutsch, in some sub-forums here it’s a long live habit to login and chat using mobile when taking subway or long distance bus.
even if it’s mobile only