HTML5 App For Panasonic TVs Rejected - JQuery Is a "Hack" 573
An anonymous reader writes "I have been working on an HTML5 app for Panasonic VIERA TVs, specifically a client for the Plex Media Server. After paying $129 for the developer program, version 1.0 was submitted for inclusion in their VIERA Connect marketplace several weeks ago. After a few requested tweaks, they inquired about how the client communicated with the Plex Server. As many/most web developers do, I used jQuery and its $.ajax call (which is just a wrapper for XMLHttpRequest()). They insisted this was not standard Javascript, and after several communications with them, they replied back with "A workaround like this is considered a hack.". I'm stunned that anyone familiar with HTML would consider jQuery a hack. I've been patient in attempting to explain how jQuery works, but I am getting nowhere. Any thoughts on how I can better explain jQuery to an app reviewer? Yes, I know I can write my app without any Javascript library, but I am really hoping avoid that."
Beta is terrible! (Score:2, Insightful)
My Eyeses Precious!! they burnses!!
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:4, Insightful)
Kill the Beta!!!!! Free Mod Points!!!!
sure jQuery is a hack, so is most tech (Score:2, Insightful)
Most tech out there is a hack on top of a hack, that's what people do, they hack shit together.
Where to go after Slashdot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Move on (Score:1, Insightful)
Panasonic has no clue about technology? Hahahahahahahahaha. That's a good one. No they simply don't want retarded web monkeys writing bloated apps for their TVs.
Re:Psh, jQuery. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh man so many of those examples are ridiculous.
Look you don't need jQuery! You just type 20 lines of code and it does the same thing as jQuery's 1 line of code.
See? jQuery isn't needed at all.
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been a Slashdot user since 2007. My username is JoshuaZ ID# 1134087. I strongly dislike the beta version. The large default font makes less on a page at any given time. The comment handling is inferior and is harder to follow. It makes it much harder to just see upvoted comments instead subjecting us to the entire thread. I don't want a choice between "all" and insightful, informative or funny. I want an option to just see the more upvoted comments with the other comments still there with their subject lines so I can then decide based on that if they are worth looking into.
The userpage interfact and display is also lacking. The new version of the achievement display is strictly inferior since it doesn't show when things happened or give any information about the achievements instead giving cutesy graphics that tell nothing about what an achievement is for. Even knowing what achievements are common, I had to use the inspect element feature on my browser to figure out which is which. Comments in the user page also don't show how much they have been upvoted or downvoted nor do they give their description of how they've been modded. There's also no way to just go directly from a comment on the userpage to the comment on the article page, but instead the link takes one directly to the top of the article. This means that if one wants to find the context of a comment one needs to go to the main article and then search for the comment itself. This is inconvenient.
Overall, beta has many minor inconveniences. Any of these by itself would be minor but the totality is highly unpleasant. All of these should be fixed.
Now that I've had even more experience with beta I'd have other fun things to add to that email. I'm not optimistic that any of this feedback is going to be listened to.
Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score:3, Insightful)
Hell no, we knew that for several months. What we learned today is that they're planning to promote the beta despite several months of people telling them it sucks. This is what annoys me even more than the bad design - they actually solicited our feedback, and we took the time to give it, then they completely ignored it.
Re:Um, WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score:3, Insightful)
We didn't learn that today. We've known that since October 1, 2013 [slashdot.org].
1191 posts, (no, Beta, I won't click "more posts" a million times to read the entire thread, I'll just leave), nearly universal negative feedback, a bounce rate that must be in the 90%+ range (the other 10% being people who don't know how to turn it off), and despite having helped document the UX failures of Unity and Windows 8, Dice continues to double down on its own UX fail.
Quite possibly indeed! But still... FUCK BETA! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's what Slashdot is for now.
Comments about how beta sucks, repeating "FUCK BETA" and... Fuck Beta.
I see no point discussing about anything else until they kill that abomination or just let us to continue using the classic interface.
Also, fuck beta.
Re:Apple may be even worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple, as obnoxious as their control freakery has always been, undeniably have a walled garden that people would fight like dogs to get their applications into. Their position, in terms of platform ownership, is unbelievably enviable. They can be dicks all they like; because what are you going to do about it?
Panasonic? One of the largely-interchangeable makers of perfectly adequate but not thrilling TVs, pretty much every last one of which has a shitty 'smart TV' platform, all braindead in somewhat different and incompatible ways? What kind of leverage do they think they have?
TIL: the beta sucked since October 1st. (Score:3, Insightful)
And the suckage got much louder today.
Re:Fuck Beta: I've been here for 13 years (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree 100% The new design offers NOTHING. It is utterly soulless and spaces everything out requiring more and more fucking scrolling. Which is what seems to be the damn trend.
FUCK BETA
A workaround for what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading the actual email they sent, it sounds to me like they provide a (javascript) API for doing what "VieraApp" is instead doing with a direct ajax call (and jQuery vs XMLHttpRequest is not the issue; it's not using their wrapper that is the issue).
Re:Move on (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Sod that. Just point them at their own web site [panasonic.com], where jQuery is included in every page, and tell them they've been hacked.
Re:Boycott (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Inline it (jQuery).
When they ask how it communicates, tell them how, not what functions/callbacks you use in your code.
Ex. The server communicates using the standard Plex web API (or whatever it's called), documented _here_. The RCP calls are made using the standard XMLHttpRequest, with wrappers to ensure compatibility with the evolving web browser landscape. yada yada yada.
I'm sure it's a PITA, but I get the feeling the submitter said too much - explaining how jQuery internals work is going to seem like an over complicated nightmare. If they specifically ask about that weird looking "$.ajax" stuff, just tell them it is a simple wrapper that compensates for the subtle differences in XMLHttpRequest implementations. If the code finally gets to someone that can read it, they'll probably be quite familiar with jQuery and quite happy you are using it than some custom cobbled together hack :-)
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:5, Insightful)
If a large population likes it the way it is, that is valid feedback. It means don't change. Keeping things the way they are is a perfectly good, and frequently the best design decision.
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate the Beta! Been lucky the last couple weeks and haven't seen it!
Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Back then we THOUGHT we knew.
Now we KNOW we know.
It's a Zen thing. Like FUCK BETA.
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not a designer and they aren't paying me to try to do design. The only issue I brought up which was primarily a pictorial issue was the achievements display which has two such obvious solutions that they shouldn't need to be stated: 1) having the achievement information appear when you mouse over it 2) just use freaking text. Incidentally, the use of extra graphics over text is a really strange thing given that we live in an era of mobile devices.
It doesn't require detailed feedback to say that one should use a smaller default font. And asking that you have an option when you click on a comment from a userpage to actually go to the comment is so basic that I shouldn't need any special issue. Thank you for pointing out the typo in "interfact." if they aren't listening to people because of typos in feedback they aren't going to be listening to much at all.
Do you write these letters to all the sites you visit?
No. But I do write a letter when it is a website that I like and to which I actively contribute and where they've *asked for my feedback*.
Re:Quite possibly indeed! But still... FUCK BETA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Heh, as someone who just tried beta, kinda find this thread funny. I lasted about 15 seconds on beta before going back to classic.
On topic though, just strip out the parts of jQuery you need, rename them, and use them as-is. Think about it like static-linking a library.
Re:Where to go after Slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
I read MacRumors, but strictly for the news. The commenting is horrible. And Ars' reporting is decent, but its commenting system isn't great either.
I read Slashdot for the comments. Slashdot has managed to hang onto a diverse group of intelligent people, and it's really the only place on the 'net where I can vehemently disagree with someone, go through a little back and forth with them, and have a reasonable expectation that at the end of our discussion, one of us (me as often as not) will come around to agree with the other person's viewpoint. It's rare that people on the Internet are actually willing to admit when they are wrong or when someone presents a compelling argument that contradicts their own, yet time and again, I've seen Slashdot users do just that, and it's what I love about the place. That, and experts in their respective fields are actually present and willing to weigh in with details and layman's explanations for those of us who may only have a passing knowledge of their field.
Re:Um, WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Beta is terrible! (Score:5, Insightful)
Reddit, much like digg, sucked from the get-go, and has never stopped sucking. I'd sooner get my news from 4chan.
Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score:5, Insightful)
The beta doesn't add any useful new features. All it does is remove them and severely fucks up the best part of this site: the commenting and moderation system. If the commenting system goes out the window, why would I come here? The stories are always several days or a week old, the editors are terrible at their job, and all of the actual articles are on other sites I could browse instead.
What the hell, Dice?
Re:i don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ah, yes... but... FUCK BETA! (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what annoys me even more than the bad design - they actually solicited our feedback, and we took the time to give it, then they completely ignored it.
Hopefully they will listen to the crickets after classic is no longer an option...
Re:Quite possibly indeed! But still... FUCK BETA! (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, fuck beta.
Interestingly enough, they've also removed all/most of the fuckbeta [slashdot.org] tags that had been put on 20+ stories earlier. It looks like most other variations such as "betasucks" have also been removed.
Remember when tags used to be an open and fun way for the community to micro-comment on a story? 90% of readers here realized that Slashdot's tags were completely and utterly useless (they still haven't dumped the pointless story [slashdot.org] tag**), so using them as a platform for humor or community feedback was both clever and fun. Oh, yeah, all that was before abortion that is Dicedot.
Fuck beta.
** Wow, that page is screwed up. Not only did it take almost a minute to load for me (what the hell are you guys running these newage bullshit pages on, Ruby?), but after all that it only displayed about 50 links, and most of them are duplicates (dupes, on MY Slashdot!? Inconceivable!!).
Re:Vanilla.js FTW (Score:2, Insightful)
I get the joke.
But seriously: they actually prove the point why things like jQuery exists in the first place; the JS examples are obfuscated and incompatible.
Re:Vanilla.js FTW (Score:3, Insightful)
Lolwut? You do understand that jquery is just a set of helper libraries written in...Javascript...right? It's not a 'core' language because it's not a language _or_ an 'extension' - it's a library of code.
There's no issue of browsers 'supporting' it, it's more an issue of it supporting any given browser and its eccentricities, which _you_ as a Javascript developer would need to do anyway.
Would you be happier if these non-"script kiddie" (lol) developers just pasted the jQuery code in their own files, does that make it better?
Re:Psh, jQuery. (Score:4, Insightful)
I think we're about on the same page. I use libraries as needed. If I can use one library to do 4 functions well, I won't use 4 different libraries to half-ass it because I found code in a forum post somewhere, and didn't want to think beyond "hey, lets copy & paste this in!" I won't include a library to save myself 3 (or 10) lines of code that I could put into my own function. On occasion, where I only needed a few lines of a huge library, I copy it (license permitting, of course), and note where and why I got it.
He didn't give us a lot to go on for this argument. He was doing something. He wanted to use jQuery. Panasonic said "no". He's complaining that they refused it. It wasn't even clear if he included jQuery with his code, or if he was calling it from Google or elsewhere. (i.e., <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js">) Including it with the code guarantees it won't get updated, ever. Calling it from elsewhere means that the TV must have Internet access to operate that function, which can't be guaranteed. You could quite literally have a bunch of apps, all using different versions of jQuery, wasting memory or storage space, when the functions could have been done in a few lines each, or it may have been unnecessary and leftover from during the dev cycle and never cleaned up.
From here: https://developers.google.com/... [google.com]
They provide ajax.googleapis.com access to versions: 2.0.3, 2.0.2, 2.0.1, 2.0.0, 1.10.2, 1.10.1, 1.10.0, 1.9.1, 1.9.0, 1.8.3, 1.8.2, 1.8.1, 1.8.0, 1.7.2, 1.7.1, 1.7.0, 1.6.4, 1.6.3, 1.6.2, 1.6.1, 1.6.0, 1.5.2, 1.5.1, 1.5.0, 1.4.4, 1.4.3, 1.4.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.6, 1.2.3
What happens if next year Google decides not to host jQuery, or say all the pre 2.x versions. It could go the way of all those lovely Google Maps API sites that were v1 and many v2 sites. It's less than idea to force users to update. Users are dumb. That makes a support nightmare for them, for reasons the users simply won't understand.
If his code was very needy of the jQuery library, I could see it as being reasonable, but we can only guess. I know there's lots of cool stuff that can be done with it. I've only done some. :)
Re:Quite possibly indeed! But still... FUCK BETA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I'll post something on-topic: Fuck beta, and also Panasonic.