Please make your products work with URLs
I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that.<p>Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend installing a virus scanner? Yeah, that’s great. It’s got a web browser at least, though that’s the only positive thing I can really say about the web browsing experience.<p>Can it run software? If you can find it! There’s no app ecosystem here, just the big apps it absolutely had to have to be worthy of shipping. If you want to watch Twitch.TV streams for example you are SoL. There was an unofficial Twitch app, but it was removed from the store.<p>I tried to set up development for Tizen. Yeah not gonna try that again. I always thought getting started with development on Android or iOS was a little cumbersome but it really doesn’t compare. Even getting into developer mode was challenging since I had trouble finding the instructions that were pertinent to my model of TV, and that was the last thing I accomplished successfully.<p>So I’ve got a desktop computer hooked up to my smart TV and now I am contemplating paying more for a TV so I can get one that doesn’t have any of this dumb crap on it. The only downside? You can’t really run many 10 ft versions of things, and there’s not many good casting solutions. Lame, but every time I run into a new pathological case with the TV OS and its set of subpar apps I reconsider how much it’s even worth to have fancy 10ft interfaces and smart phone integration.<p>(If you are looking for a casting solution for an HTPC running Windows, I tried Reflector 3 briefly and it looks pretty good. But I personally do not run Windows on my <i>own</i> HTPC, so I’m stuck in the dark.)