It's a lot more fluent with hardware acceleration! Thanks for that! Just when I go to 500 Firepaper over the Recent Apps it always goes to the initial screen instead of the History Browser where it was. That's a pity.
But all in all a great app!
It did return to the History Browser in my dev version but I disabled that for performance reasons, still looking for a work-around on that.
Love, love, love it. Thanks! IMO this is better than Muzei.
Thanks, it is really good to hear this once in a while.
Muzei gets recognition because of the developer but I'm a huge fan of this. OK I know chainfire is a great developer, but Roman gets more love for some reason.
Roman is Google'r with a lot of following, especially by other devs (who learn design tricks from his posts and videos), who spread the word to their own followers.
The thing is, most of the acclaim for Muzei is for it's very shiny configuration interface - people fawn over it. How often are you going to be in that configuration interface? If it's setup well - never. I'm also pretty sure Roman took a bunch of things from 500 Firepaper as base idea ...
I've spotted dozens of bugs in Muzei (it doesn't even work at all on some high-res large screens, good job), all in all it really doesn't work that well, IMHO. The API has a number of quirks which make it really hard for a source like 500px to behave well scheduling wise or costly bandwidth wise. Yes, there is a sample plugin for it (oh surprise!) and some have built out on it - one of the things with that is that neither respect 500px's terms and conditions (or didn't last I checked) ... and the images are lower resolution than the ones 500 Firepaper fetches as well.
All in all, I'm not a big fan of Roman. As a Google'r he's responsible for design - as with his clock widget, he's releasing an app for free that completely disrupts the indie market, and the only reason he can do that is precisely because he's a Google'r. He's personally killed this entire segment of the LWP market. He gets applauded for free and open source and shiny and whatever (which helps spread the word) - well if you work at Google and get paid up to $200k for it, then it's easy to do just that.
Heck, if 500px themselves didn't see something in 500 Firepaper, I would have dropped the project altogether, as there is pretty much no way - thanks to Roman - that I'll ever get back even minimum wage on the development of it otherwise. And no, it's not all about the money, but I do have bills to pay, and I have to choose what I spend my time on, and yes revenue is a factor in that.
Roman, just one more reason as a dev to not be fond of Google (as if we were lacking reasons). This is not the first time something like this has happened either.
Mind you, most of this *****ing is not because I dislike competition - I consider this to be
unfair competition. Had it been another indie dev with a rev stream somewhere (or 500px themselves), then it would have been
fair game. I'd still not be jumping for joy about it, but it makes the entire situation completely different.
Sure, some would come with the argument that you need to innovate and if you make your product *that* much better than something shiny and free and OSS, you can still sell it, etc. The target market unfortunately is not really large enough for that at this time. And it's really, really hard to compete with free apps that don't care about legality either.
