Jeremy Garcia, Bryan Lunduke, and Stuart Langridge present Bad Voltage, in which sales pitches are not our thing. Jono Bacon attempts to also attend and is let down by the unreliability of the perfectly reliable Transport Control Protocol. We also manage to discuss:
Jolla, the company behind Sailfish OS, crowdfund a new Sailfish tablet device and get triple their goal in the first week. This is great. Right? Are we getting one? (1.52)
Google Inbox: the new mail app for the modern age, or a revision that nobody needed and which you can't get an invite for? Stuart reviews Inbox (20.45)
Bryan is Wrong In 60 Seconds, about planes (37.48)
Adobe Flash: we all hate it. But should we? It works on the open source desktop, and we lose hundreds of thousands of games the day it gets turned off (39.56)
Discussion about Jolla and SailfishOS, woohooo
Surprise surprise, of course I ordered a Jolla tablet. And Iâm very excited about it.
I love my Jolla phone so I know I will love the tablet too. Iâm looking forward for the SDK update to adopt the BV app.
The reason why I like Jolla is because they are really different. they are going their way, no matter what others do. Nobody realizes it but exactly these guys brought many of the most innovative features to mobile devices. Back in 2009 the Nokia N900 with Maemo5 had true multitasking, widgets, multiple desktops and much more. Than the Nokia N9 brought swipe gestures and pull-down menu. Even today thereâs no other mobile OS that offers better multitasking than Sailfish.
EDIT: Jolla added three stretch goals to the campaign. I would like to have build in cellular data but It seems to be unlikely to reach $2.5M.
I use gmail almost exclusively via Thunderbird or my (Jolla) phone.
Today I had to open a mail in my gmail account on another computer than mine. So I opened gmail.com and expected the mail to be there in the in-box. But it wasnât. Google decided to put in another category. I immediately disabled that âfeatureâ. I think there is no way they can filter my mails a way that suits me. When I want them filtered, I define the rules myself. I donât know if itâs just me but when you do not get all in google, all their automated magic context stuff is just annoying. I would say Google Inbox isnât for me.
I think the reason we used to look forward to the death of Flash is because we always thought that a post-Flash world would be a plugin-free utopia where everything was based on standards that allow us to do everything Flash did and more, in a cross-browser and cross-platform way.
The reason that the death of Flash looks so scary now is that while we have HTML5 with new Javascript and CSS goodies, whatâs supplanting Flash is a mixture of Silverlight, Encrypted Media Extensions, Chrome-specific gubbins and other proprietary plugin-based technologies, most of which see cross-platform/browser support as an even less important than Adobe do. Rather than replacing a de facto standard with a de jure one, itâs being replaced with a bunfight of competing technologies.
I wholly agree with this. @bryanlunduke made the point that even if this is the case, it is still a good thing that Flash is going away, which I think is a reasonable point of view, but it is undeniably the case that from the point of view of the open source desktop, Flash going away will cost us something in terms of number of supported thingsâŚ
Itâs pronounced YOLLa btw. Stress on the first syllable and âjâ is pronounced like the âyâ in âyouâ and the âllâ is like a long lllll. Not too long of course.
Regarding the Jolla tablet: IMHO it is certainly a great device and it will work and it will be delivered. That is more than can be said about other contenders in the space of Open Source tablets. That said, it is just a shame, that there is so much duplicated efford behind the scenes between Jolla and Canonical. Both are Linux based tablets, both need something as a replacement for X11, both are based on Qt / QML. I guess we could have had a working tablet last year if both companies werenât so keen on doing it their way.
I hate to skew the due prominence of Jolla phones in this thread, given the relative ratio of them out there, but I do know someone who owns one. Not the other guy in this thread either He was enthusiastic enough to often wear his âI am the first oneâ T-shirt from the crowdfunded campaign for it many casual-Fridays in the office. I think heâs happy enough with it now but if I picked up correctly, and also totally my experience with crowdfunding, it did arrive late and there were still a few (fairly standard albeit less used basic phone) things he couldnât do for a while.
I had a N900, loved it and still want that keyboard experience back but decided a mostly freedom-hating Android experience was my most usable choice after that. Flash worked great on the N900 for a good while btw⌠And video Skype calls (before it did anywhere else) - those people at Nokia realised the importance of getting core apps on the phone, and I think the SailfishOS folk do too; but lack of Google Play services might cause a lot of friction for users and even more so as Google move that way to allow upgrades to roll out to older devices. They donât state that issue in the indiegogo campaign and it will really bite anyone who hasnât done any further reading and expects All their favourite apps to work. Like Google maps (iirc), freemium games etc.
Despite loving the idea of more open source/ish systems out there and wishing them best of luck I still would rather (based on device spec) take a regular tablet and install their/other Linux OS(eg. Ubuntu) on it.
Products taking longer and changing spec before release is all part of usual development process but most people arenât used to that in products they buy into as a consumer, and donât know how to evaluate the teamâs ability to deliver, especially hardware. The crowdfunding bubble will continue to expand but that realisation across the general public will take a while to settle in. Itâs a big gamble.
PS I wrote more cos I didnât have time to make it less, and I need more sleep. Tl;dr: crowdfunding sucks as a buyer experience but Jolla did an ok job before, considering other crowd funded projects. Still wouldnât âbuyâ their tablet.