This was hilarious. I’d be cool to have flopstarter come up with 20 projects every day. I’d go to the website every morning just for laughs. Well done.
IMHO only http://fairpixels.pro and http://airbnb.com are good. They both immediately tell me what they're selling and don't bombard me with visual information.
Stripe's page has so much detailed graphics and distractions on their site that it took me a moment to even realize I was on stripe's page. They even display a bunch of other product logos on their page more prominently (and in color!) than their own - as if intentionally trying to mislead me further [1].
Dropbox's page seems to have an identity crisis but they get away with it because people know what they really are. They're selling me some abstract "workspace" - I have no idea what that means and it's probably not what most people use dropbox for. They immediately want to sign me up for it though?
There was a time where I’d get super hyped when reading these kinds of promises. Transparent displays, foldable screens. Truth is, we’ve been seeing working prototypes at events like CES for more than 15 years. I’ve come to realize the mechanics of these companies are similar to the car industry. New technologies are presented for the same reason car companies present strange concept cars: PR
The weird thing is that we already have “foldable screens.” But all the phone makers have done with them is to give us slightly less bezel on our glass rectangles.
I’m wondering if this is a “flying car” thing—if actually handing consumers ultra-thin bendable (but not actually creasable) panels would be a dumb idea, because consumers would try to exceed their tolerances and break them too easily.
(This is also, I think, why we don’t see more optical cabling standards outside of the enterprise space. The average consumer can’t be trusted to install a glass-fibre cable run without breaking it; and when they break it, they’ll get angry, because glass-fibre cables still cost a lot of money. And plastic-fibre cabling, though more tolerant, is far less of an improvement over copper, especially in attenuation distance.)
>The weird thing is that we already have “foldable screens.” But all the phone makers have done with them is to give us slightly less bezel on our glass rectangles.
Also, aren't they used for curved TV screens and computer monitors?
Sure, these displays are bendable. But they have a zero Gaussian curvature everywhere. What would be really interesting is to build a flat panel display that has a non-zero Gaussian curvature at will, e.g. one that fits into the windshield of a car.
There is a catch that programming these displays require one to learn differential geometry as a prerequisite.
So are you saying that you want an actual foldable phone? Putting aside the technical challenges of getting the chassis and other components to also fold, I struggle to understand why this would be a desirable product.
I'm not convinced about rollable or foldable displays. My phones screen is reachable with one hand, any bigger and I have to use two hands. So I use my tablet. If I need to get work done I use a PC or laptop.
I don't see the point of a display that folds. The display would be worse than any I currently own. It would be more prone to breakage due to the nature of what you're asking it to do.
I think it's one of those technologies that sounds neat, but in reality is not that useful (like 3D tvs)
I don't even think it sounds that neat. Just silly.
3D TV's, on the other hand, I love and am very sad that they're now not being produced... Just when the size and resolution of TVs is getting good enough to make them worthwhile.
I must say using foldable displays to have 2 display sizes does seem very useful to me. If you can ignore the blatant cheesyness and sexism this video does illustrate it pretty well.
Maybe it was the content, but what I saw on 3D tv was just flat characters in a 3d environment. It felt very weird. The clunky glasses were a bit rubbish. All a bit weird and crap.
People will crease them anyway, accidental or otherwise.
Flexible displays are far too fragile to be practical except in applications where they're literally bent only once and then affixed to something for the rest of their life.
Foldable screens have been real and orderable for several years.
There problem is, screens need a protective layer on top, and bendable glass tech hasn't caught up. You need to be able to embed a touch layer, have good optical clarity, be scratch resistant, and impart resistant.
I've, gently, played with production ready bendable LCDs. Then realized that they weren't practical for any of the sci-fi scenarios I had imagined.
This is what I don't get. It's entirely possible that I'm particularly unimaginative, but I can't even think of any devices with screens I'd want to bend. All of my devices bend exactly as much as I want them to: none (or at least negligibly).
> How about a 75' TV you can carry around like a scroll.
It'd be a rather thick scroll. :)
The problem of break-ability again comes to mind.
The use case is niche. All the electronics for control still have to be there, so it isn't featherweight or anything, and it is not exactly pocket sized, and now the screen is really fragile.
What about just curved displays? Like in a car, it seems there could be some interesting applications (screen embedded in windshield, or wrapped around the dashboard or center console). Is curved glass tech also a barrier, because I feel I've seen very few applications of curved displays other than TV's.
These might be good for pro photographers, though right now I'd rather see affordable 300dpi A4-sized e-book reader with tablet pen and SD card slot to get rid of all my paperwork.
This looks quite promising. However, I'm burned a few too many times buying and trying to use tablets for drawing.
I had the iliad, a Dutch tablet in the very early days of e-paper. Slow, unworkable latency in drawing, buggy software, low support for digital book formats. I tried a few other e-paper devices since then, but they didn't improve on a lot.
The Microsoft Surface 2 seriously improved on this space. But it was still not feeling well - still too much lag. And then there is the huge problem that Windows is not suitable for tablets - it's a nightmare to work with compared to Android.
Surface 3 got it right enough, the feel is good enough to do some serious drawing on it. Microsoft OneNote is pretty much ideal for many usecases but has its cases where it becomes unbearingly slow. I have not yet tried the Surface 4 or the iPad Pro.
The ideal of an android device with a OneNote version which supports plugins and an app-store on a color latencyless e-paper display is still a decade away it seems.
I used to have 300dpi Kindle Voyage so I know where my threshold with e-ink lies. 220dpi is on my 4k monitor, which is fine from 3ft/1m but not closer.
Me too! I was so hyped up about it that I got myself a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with an OLED display. But wish I'd realized sooner that putting an amazing display in a shit laptop still leaves you with .... a shit laptop.
I don't understand in general why OLED is taking so long to be mass produced for TVs and monitors. It's like just now becoming mainstream, with what seems like two actually purchasable products.
I have an LG OLED TV, and I would recommend against purchasing an OLED for monitor use.
Burn-in is still a huge issue. I've used mine for about a year and the red channel is full of distracting burn-in patterns from still elements on my screen from things like wallpapers, tiled window borders, taskbar/docks, HUDs from games, etc.
Does anyone know if MicroLEDs could suffer from burn-in as well? I.e. do they also degrade over time based on usage?
I don't have any knowledge of LEDs, but I believe that the burn in problems in OLEDs are due to them wearing out due to them being organic, which presumably wouldn't affect artificial micro leds
Rather: Now would be a good time for Facebook users to resign. Zuck is doing exactly the same things when he started Facebook. It’s the users; The users that need to leave the platform. Does anyone really believe that a FB without Zuckerberg will all of a sudden be great for people? Reporters like these should inform users better about how their data is being used and how they can change things for themselves by simply leaving the platform. That’s 1. more practical and 2. the only actual solution to the problem.
I've been wanting to delete my FB account for years. Stupid me has it connected to a bunch of other services though by using single sign on feautures... Most used of those services is Spotify and they still don't offer a way to disconnect Facebook from the account.
Spotify used to be exclusively Facebook login, but introduced email login a long time ago. When that happened, I immediately disconnected my Facebook from Spotify.
Wow never knew, I had looked into it a year ago and they only said that you could cancel the current FB shared account and register a new one based on e-mail account.
However; that would make me lose all playlists, stored music and I'd have to move my subscription around. Too much hassle at the time.
I feel there's so much to gain in the advertising space. Companies want to advertise, publishers want to make money and consumers want to learn about stuff they love. I wonder if there are startups tackling this problem. If you can create something that all 3 stakeholders love, you can change the landscape.
Not to be self-promotional but the company I work at is tackling the problem in a way that at least helps 2 of those parties if not all 3 (unified.com). Albeit my commentary below is my own personal take.
Providing transparency to the marketers enables them to provide better targeting, more efficient spend, and in turn provide a better experience for their customers.
One other note pertaining to agencies. They'll continue to exist but the world where they can just blindly spend money is coming to an end. Previously they'd have a random ad buyer in the agency just go and spend the money. Those days are coming to an end and the free margin is going to instead go to reward those agencies that more effectively manage spend.
More transparency --> More insights --> More efficient spend --> Better overall experience.
This is usually the beginning of lots of bad things. When a company with such a monopoly starts banning competitors to promote their own products, it’s clear that their customers aren’t at the core of their engine. You should never ‘be evil’ to your own customers for short-term profit gain.
This is absolutely fascinating. It got me all excited about pen plotters and I’m thinking of ordering to hack around with it. Would love to try attaching water pencils to it for example. How about hacking 10 of these to move a long a real person’s hand so you can sign multiple pages. This one article is going to hijack so many of my upcoming weekends...
I'm not sure how current ones work exactly, but the 1940s through 1960s ones used a system of cams running against a template. It's more complex than just the 2D motion of a pen plotter, as I believe it can also alter the pen angle and pressure somewhat.
It descends from older devices which go all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who used various mechanical aids to make simultaneous multiple copies of handwritten documents.
If you order a kit, pay a bit more to get one with instructions! The quality of the kits seems pretty hit and miss. I would go with a branded AxiDraw instead of a clone if I had it to do again.
