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Novell Bringing .Net Developers To Apple iPad
GMGruman writes "Paul Krill reports that Apple's new iPad could be easier to write apps for, thanks to Novell's MonoTouch development platform, which helps .Net developers create code for the iPad and fully comply with Apple's licensing requirements — without having to use Apple's preferred Objective-C. This news falls on the footsteps of news that Citrix will release an iPad app that lets users run Windows sessions on the iPad. These two developments bolster an argument that the iPad could eventually displace the netbook."
this would mean we could get xna games for the iPad
I'm not a programmer myself so can someone tell me if C# really easier to use than C or Objective C as stated in TFA? Or is it just a matter of there being more people who are familiar with it?
This ain't rocket surgery.
Ok, yeah, I know a lot of /.-ers won't be happy about Mono. But Mono is free, and you get to target the iPhone/iPad without owning a Mac. Macs are unaffordable for a lot of folk, and this should give open-source projects a way into the App Store*. (The other non-Apple alternative is Adobe's Creative Suite and that costs big $$$.)
*Yeah, they still have to pony up $99 to Apple to join the dev programme. But at least that's a one-time cost and could be sponsored by any OSS-supporting person/organization.
Go somewhere random
The iPad is one product...Netbooks are a genre of device. Add to that the aversion of folks like me to using anything put out by Apple, and I don't see much chance of the iPad replacing a whole genre of DIY-friendly hardware.
Jesus christ stop with the Apple spam.
There are already RDP clients for the iPhone and Mono Touch isn't freaking new.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It's getting like Steve jobs twitter page around here.
I'll wait six hours until the next ipad story.
What's going on? This is Steve's baby. He's been working on a "new Newton" since, what, 2000? Well, his perfectionism payed off and now the ones who aren't laughing are the ones who don't give a shit. Hey guys! Let's make an iPhone, but bigger, and a gajillion times more expensive! They'll love it, especially in this economy! More from that last one:
Here's an idea - What Steve should have done was release a tablet version of the MacBook Air (with the exact same software compatibility, OS, etc.) and call it the MacBook Slate or MacBook Touch. I would have bought one of those, and I'm often the first to question the sexual orientation of male Mac users.
As someone who's programmed both in .net and for the iPhone, I can't imagine that being able to program in .net would be an advantage. Both are adequate for making windowing systems, but the paradigm is different.
Seriously, Objective-C isn't that hard; if you can't learn it in a day or two (or at most a week) then you are probably not a professional programmer.
Qxe4
... the next 60 days, amirite?
The iPad has been officially announced for all of two days, a vanishingly small portion of people have actually spent any time playing with one, and the world is already full of vociferous opinions about its prospects for (pick one) dismal failure/niche success/displacing netbooks/world domination. Like this one:
Because of its price and lack of perennial netbook features, such as a physical keyboard.
Looks to me like it doesn't lack for a physical keyboard, even if it's not permanently attached. Will that be a problem for literal laptop users? Maybe. If I were betting, though, I'd guess that it'll be good enough that Apple's sales will compare with the top 3 netbook manufacturers.
I'm not betting, however, because like most of the planet, I haven't had a chance to really play with one, and therefore don't have a very solid idea what I'm talking about.
Tweet, tweet.
Umm no.
1 - its far more expensive
2 - it has no keyboard
3 - did i mention it was expensive?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Umm, Metaphorically or Inquisitively? and Umm, How often?
I'm not seeing the iPad displacing the netbook even with .net. The problem isn't that developers can't develop well, the problem is that Apple doesn't let developers do much with iPhone OS. The nice thing about a netbook or a cheap laptop is I can run multiple things. I can keep my Facebook open, my IM open, play music on YouTube and type on a document all at the same time. These are basic things that people do daily, the lack of a major component of today's web (Flash) and the lack of an ability to multi-task is going to kill any chance the iPad had to survive much faster than anything else other than the steep price.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
huge novell fan about five years ago. eDirectory, GroupWise, etc. I know what direction they went in. ... and I can't believe they are still in business.
I'd be very interested in this but the last time I check it doesn't support .NET's remoting API's such as webservices.
I'd want to be able to make rich thin clients that talk to application layer servers but Apple always make sure the garden is well walled.
I'm getting a good laugh out of all the folks damning the iPhone for it's lack of explicit multi-tasking.
Sigh. If one wants to oversimplify there have been two great visions presented in computing. One was eberharts classic video showing off mouse and button based editing, along with cellular communications. If you've never watched it, you have no idea what you have missed. Prepare to crap your pants.
The other is Raskin's dream of the info appliance. A device that has no specific function but morphs itself into the perfect dedicated human interaction device for whatever task is needed. It does not multi task. It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
The ipad is the closest (practical sized) realization of that to date. it's 1.5 times the width of your fingers so it balances perfectly in one hand. when you have a task it dedicated it's surface to becoming the perfect human perceptual interface you need just for that task.
The key here is that Even a 1 year old understands the iphone interface. It's task specificity is intuitive.
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to. Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device. The iphone os does most of the connections you want. The addressbook is ubiquitous, apps can send e-mail and get web pages. etc... In the future this conduit management will be handled more and more by the computer as it should be. Context switching will be transparent because the computer will anticipate your next move and have pre-warmed it. etc...
Multi-tasking is just the current way we approximate implement this metafore for the device that simply changes into what we need at that moment by itself. You don't really want multi-tasking you want that effect.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself, and because I multi-task a lot I do find the transistions annoying. But I have to admit it really does de clutter and improve how you interface with an app. I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode and anyone who has used one can see how well it works in the small format device.
It's raskin's dream incarnate. This is why other devices that don't get what's being created here are going to fail.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
say goodbye to pinvokes
I grew up in really old Fortran codes where we obsessed with the number of square roots it takes to do this or how to reduce the number of trig function calls by two (not a factor of two, just two sin() calls are avoided in a tight loop). Eventually came to C++ and saw everyone using new and delete left right and center and I naturally assumed it would have trivial cost. Imagine my surprise when I actually ran the comparison benchmarks. With modern math coprocessors, a sqrt() is just three times mults, sin() is about 14, hyperbolic sine, logarithms are all about the same, inverse trig functions were around 25-30 times the cost of a mult. You know what? A simple push_back() or push_front() to an std::list is around 180 to 200 times as expensive as a mult. Throw in automatic garbage collection on top of this, you are looking at some serious performance degradation.
If you cant program without memory leaks in plain C, C++, I just won't hire you.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Merriam-Webster has 13 definitions for pad. None of them refer to feminine hygiene. While it's true that you have to know your customer, it's hopeless when your customer is so self-centered and fragile that such a common word is somehow offensive. As for the fight with Fujitsu, Apple has never been one to shy away from using whatever words it wants to use. Personally, I think the iPad is a good idea. However, I also think that while the app store is a useful evil on the iPhone, it's going to be death for the iPad. The device should at a minimum be allowed to run in general-purpose computing mode and walled-garden mode. Otherwise, general-purpose programmable competitors are eventually going to overtake it--especially if they don't require the investment of buying a Mac and a $100/yr license just to run dev. tools.
Shouldn't we be waiting until, oh I don't know, the device actually is released and we can see how this whole thing plays out?
It's almost like Slashdot is perpetually trying to make up for that whole "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." thing.
#DeleteChrome
the most insightful post in a week.
Objective-C rocks, really. But! If you don't know it, and you have an existing code base in C#, maybe this would be useful. I guess. I think this is not aimed at making iPhone/iPad app development easier in general, but rather, specifically for people who are already using C#. In which case, it's not totally stupid. Just mostly stupid.
FWIW, I'm currently at the "okay, that's the basic functionality, now what do I do next?" phase of developing an iPhone app. From "never even looked at the docs" to "working multitouch and graphics" took me, oh, a good solid two evenings.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Both Merriam and Webster are dead. Try http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pad
Perhaps, but as a woman I can definitely tell you that all my women friends have agreed it's an unfortunate name because the first thing it makes us think of is feminine hygiene products.
What on earth are you going on about? It's not offensive, just awkward. It lacks cachet, which is a bit surprising. Even iSlate would've been so much better -- though really, haven't we all had enough of the "i" thing? It's so '90s...
Caveat Utilitor
iPad and Mono have to be two of the five worst product names in the industry. (I can only think of Wang as being worse.)
The other two must be GIMP (Free paint program) and Ayds (appetite suppressant candy).
So a Linux company is bringing Microsoft development to an Apple device? And it's STILL useless?
"I usually don't listen to my records once they are finished and released, but in 1968, during the second European tour, We're Only In It for the Money won the Dutch equivalent of a Grammy. There was an award ceremony, during which I was handed a little statue -- with the album playing in the background. I noticed that whole chunks of songs were missing. Someone at MGM had been offended by the lyrics and had arbitrarily chopped portions of them out -- in one instance, about eight bars of music -- just enough to fuck up the song on the way to the bridge.
The Big Offender was a line from the song "Let's Make the Water Turn Black":
I couldn't understand why anyone would chop that out. Years later I learned that an MGM executive was convinced that the word "pad" referred to a sanitary napkin. He became obsessed with the idea that a waitress somewhere was feeding sanitary napkins to people in a restaurant, and demanded (in violation of our contract) that it be removed. That guy needs to see a doctor."
- Frank Zappa
...ambiguous vulgarity...
Then we have the Nintendo Wii (piss, pee, urinate, tinkle). No one made a big fuss when that was announced.
1 - its far more expensive
$500 is not "far more" than many netbooks, and will probably last much longer than the cheapest.
2 - it has no keyboard
You went the wrong way. It actually has an infinite number of keyboards, with a number of physical options since it supports Bluetooth. What it has the Netbook lacks is the ability to go without a physical keyboard - web pages are easier to read on a sideways screen, but you are not going to be turning a Netbook sideways.
3 - did i mention it was expensive?
Repeatedly, which brings one to question your judgement.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The problem isn't that developers can't develop well, the problem is that Apple doesn't let developers do much with iPhone OS.
I guess all 140K applications do the same exact thing? Since Apple "doesn't et you do much".
The reality is that Apple has a few areas they don't let you go, but everything else is wide open.
The nice thing about a netbook or a cheap laptop is I can run multiple things. I can keep my Facebook open, my IM open, play music on YouTube and type on a document all at the same time.
And on an iPad (or iPhone) you can play music while you type a document, and get a stream of notifications when there's some new twitter or facebook post you really care about. Or you can write and jump quickly into a twitter/facebook app to see what is going on and jump back - because the device has been optimized for that use, unlike a traditional PC where application startup is more expensive and lengthy.
These are basic things that people do daily, the lack of a major component of today's web (Flash)
What? Where is is major use? It's widespread to be sure, but I question that it is such an important aspect of using the web today. I installed ClickToFlash on Safari about a year ago, and the ONLY flash I have had occasion to click on to see have been videos - all on sites that simply feed the h.264 the flash video player is already using under the covers, directly to the device. In the meantime I have also been spared a horde of annoying, battery sucking ads - and I never did believe in adblock because I like supporting sites. It's just that the number of Flash elements per page was getting to be absurd, with a ton of Flash overhead consuming the CPU.
Other than video use, the other major use of Flash is web based gaming - are you really arguing the iPhone/iPad platform is hurting for free casual games? There are so many games out now you could probably play free trial or ad supported versions of games for a year straight before you ran out of things to try. There is no Flash based game so compelling it would make people choose a platform, EXCEPT possibly for Farmville due to the large number of players who would like constant access to it. But there I imagine we'll see an iPhone app at some point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not a programmer myself so can someone tell me if C# really easier to use than C or Objective C as stated in TFA?
It is on Windows. But I don't think it is on the iPhone.
Even though MonoTouch has done an excellent job bridging over into the Apple frameworks, you can never get that kind of stuff a 100% match. The thing is that these days any modern language is actually a lot less important than the frameworks behind it - would Ruby have gained so much traction without Rails for instance? Similarly the iPhone/OS X platform has a TON of libraries, as it has been around forever - really deep low level stuff like networking, and very high level stuff like CoreAnimation or CoreData. To my mind it simply makes more sense to work in the language these frameworks were developed in, because you learn to anticipate names or the way the framework will behave.
I've programmed other platforms too, and pretty much always it just makes more sense in the end to program in the language the system is based around. There are a lot of people with a burning desire to make it happen and as I said they are doing an impressive job. But they will never be able to overcome the impedance mismatch that naturally results when you try to bridge different mindsets.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.
I don't care if you have an existing codebase in C#. You are going to have to expose your code as generic webservices anyway since Mono for the iPhone does not support .NET remoting anyway. Once your "cloud" services are available as standard web services, they can be accessed by any language and it makes sense to learn the main native language of the iPhone OS platform.
Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You do realize that even the iPod Touch has a keyboard right? Do you also realize that 99% of the folks who use them don't need to write code on it, or take notes at a meeting?
If someone should get the urge to do those things, I'm sure they could, but that's not it's primary purpose. If they tried it anyway (being the rebels they are), I'm sure they would figure out the Note app and the keyboard without much difficulty. As to the rest of your opinion, what fool would need a portable device, with a multi-touch screen, 3G internet access, and a 150,000 apps + music + movies + books when a pencil and paper would serve just as well?
"You do realize that even the iPod Touch has a keyboard right? Do you also realize that 99% of the folks who use them don't need to write code on it, or take notes at a meeting?"
Of course they don't its an mp3 player not a tablet.
"what fool would needs a portable device, with a multi-touch screen, 3G internet access, and a 150,000 apps + music + movies + books when a pencil and paper would serve just as well?"
What are you babbling about, So in your opinion, No one buys a netbook or a laptop, cus thats what they are generally used for. The idea of a tablet is to combine the functionality of a laptop with the ease of a (paper) notebook. Not be a trendy web surfing waste of money.
"If someone should get the urge to do those things, I'm sure they could, but that's not it's primary purpose"
Just my point, Its not a phone, it would suck as an mp3 player and it has none of the redeeming qualitys of a netbook or laptop. What is its purpose, surfing the web. LAME and useless considering my phone, laptop, mp3 player a work computer, home computer, TV and nearly everything else I own can already do that. And most of them do it better.
Hey guys! Let's make an iPhone, but bigger, and a gajillion times more expensive!
Say what? The iPad is about the same price as an iPhone, the difference is that you don't pay for it on a contract.
... and then they built the supercollider.
No one made a big fuss when that was announced.
They did, actually. Slashdot was full of comments about how "Revolution" was a much better name.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Oh come on, the name jokes are a manufactured "controversy". Just like the name iPod, iPad will stop sounding like something else, and become a word of its own. But even without this, there are so many other "pads" out there, that this is silly. For example, where was this controversy over the Fujitsu iPAD? Or the various other pads. ThinkPad? Newton MessagePad? MS Notepad? Or simply a pad of paper?
I'm not complaining about the jokes per se. They're kinda funny for a second, but they do wear thin. But what I'm responding to is that this is treated as some sort of serious issue. "OMG, people are making jokes!" How many iPood, iPaid, etc. jokes were there?
In the long run, the name is going to be just fine.
Here's an idea - What Steve should have done was release a tablet version of the MacBook Air (with the exact same software compatibility, OS, etc.) and call it the MacBook Slate or MacBook Touch. I would have bought one of those, and I'm often the first to question the sexual orientation of male Mac users.
And it would have sold worse than the MacBook Air. People have shown they don't want tablets that are just their desktop OS in tablet form. To be sure, there are people who buy them, but they are almost exclusively sold to geeks, artists, and some vertical markets. But as a mass media product, it takes something that's already cumbersome for most people, and making it even more so.
The brilliance of the iPhone OS is that it's designed specifically for multitouch. You're not just using your finger (or stylus) as a mouse, with handwriting recognition thrown in for good measure. Mac OS X no only already supports this, but you can already have your Mac modded into a Mac tablet (or buy one pre-modded). And they're not selling well enough to warrant a separate Apple SKU.
How does being able use C# or run windows sessions on the iPad enable it to displace a netbook? About the only place they overlap in functionality that they are both really good for is that they are both good for browsing the web and interacting with web apps that don't require lots of text input.
Beyond that their functionality diverges. The iPad is a slightly better ebook reader, is better for certain types of applications (particularly, though not exclusively, those involving fairly passive media consumption.) A netbook is better for anything that requires lots of text input -- I wouldn't want to take notes in a meeting or class on an iPad, or write a substantial document on one, both things that netbooks are good for. Netboooks are also substantially cheaper -- the least expensive iPad model is at the high end of netbook prices, the 11.6" Atom Z520 powered netbook I got a couple days ago that I'm typing this on was half the price of an iPad. (And it has a SIM card slot and 3G capablity, which I'd have to pay another half the price of the netbook on top of the minimum price of an iPad to get on iPad.) Its also got much more storage than the high-end iPad. And you don't need another whole computer with iTunes just to be able to use it. Its perfectly possible for someone who doesn't have heavy computing needs to have a netbook as their only computer -- an iPad can't fill that role as long as it is dependent on a "real" computer with iTunes.
Personally, I think the iPad is a good idea. However, I also think that while the app store is a useful evil on the iPhone, it's going to be death for the iPad.
Why? What apps are there really that are being blocked? Google Voice, SlingBox over 3G and...? Yawn. I know there's a list of interesting rejected apps, the losses are minimal, and while lamentable, a drop in the bucket compared with what software *is* available.
On the contrary, the App Store is one of the single most important factors in the success of the iPhone and now the iPad. Yes, the geek-types will lament the control imposed by the app store, and for myself, I'd prefer an official opt-in jailbreak mode, but in terms of mass appeal, the hinderance caused by the control is absolutely dwarfed by the benefit brought about by the single marketplace for discovering and downloading new apps and games.
Lets see here, no multi-tasking, no "competing" with Apple's own offerings, creative freedoms are stiffed with censorship, little developer-Apple communications, etc. Even when you make an application who knows when it will be on the market or if it will ever be.
I already showed you how it can multitask. And developers can use multiple threads. The phrase "no multitasking" is simply wrong, since it supports it at all. What you are looking for is "limited multitasking".
As for censorship, basically - no porn (in an app).
I have not found developer communications to be that bad. If I had a question they answered.
As for "who knows when it will be on the market" - try seven to fourteen days. You don't get 140k apps IN the market without a ton being accepted, most rather quickly.
Which is a terribly poor imitation of true multitasking. Imagine this, all of your tabs refresh automatically yet in order to switch to them you have to close out your current window and reopen it rather than just changing tabs or minimising a window.
Since I do this all the time it's not hard to imagine, and it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
Um... On a traditional PC I can guarantee you that switching from one tab to another is a heck of a lot faster than going from the facebook app and back.
But not on a netbook compared to the iPad. It's really not that much slower.
The problems with "free" iPod games
The problems you list are all true of flash games too. The next time you play one you might want to look around, as there are plenty of ads to be had.
Video, gaming, navigation, etc. While its use has diminished some, its still a vital part of most systems.
"Vital Part" is bullshit. I've been browsing for a year with click to flash enabled, and as I said I've only needed to enable flash for videos. I've almost never seen it used for nav, since dhtml is so much more flexible...
Now we get to the good part, where you just start making stuff up:
iPad: iPhone OS, access to about 150K apps, wi-fi, 16 GB flash memory, must be tethered to a computer to do advanced functions,
What "Advanced Functions" are you talking about here? You can buy anything right on the device. You can use applications to send files to and from other systems. You could easily never attach it to a computer.
no multiple app support,
There you go again, many native apps can and do run in the background.
partial media support, closed development $599
$500. Not $599. I know you can't understand or believe it but it is true the base price is $500.
Netbook: Windows XP/7/Linux, access to millions of programs
Most of which will run like hell (not to mention "millions" is an utter exaggeration, look up sometime how many applications are actively for sale on Amazon or elsewhere).
wi-fi, 160 GB HDD, can stand on its own, keyboard included, no touchscreen, can run many apps at the same time, full media support, open development $350
And dead in a year.
Other than the form factor and the touchscreen, the iPad simply loses in comparison to a cheaper netbook.
The iPad wins on:
Browsing.
Software.
Ease of use.
Portability.
Ability to rotate to view content.
Targeted Applications (meaning applications meant to run well on the device)
If I'm spending as much as I would on a normal laptop with all the features I need, it should have basic features found in a computer $200 cheaper.
If I want a laptop I'll buy a real laptop, and not a crippled shriveled delicate husk of a laptop. But I'm not going to pretend the twisted half-computer that is the netbook is in any way more useful than a device built from the ground up for compact computing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Perhaps, but as a woman I can definitely tell you that all my women friends have agreed it's an unfortunate name because the first thing it makes us think of is feminine hygiene products.
Sure, today. Give it some time and iPad will just be another word, like Wii. People made the same arguments against the Wii. This too shall pass.
I think you are very much wrong about multi-tasking and I think you can ask any iphone user and verify this. First of all the typical
joe user could give a shit less. I am a developer and I am perfectly happy that the iphone and even the ipad has no multi-tasking. Sure
it would be nice to have. However I realize that not having it keeps my device from turning to shit because I loaded someone's craplication that thinks
it is cool to burn my battery life by running a worthless notifier, spam downloader etc.
Got Code?
Not to say anything negative about Apple here, but to those of us not in the gamer community, Wii still sounds asinine.
Not to say anything negative about Apple here, but to those of us not in the gamer community, Wii still sounds asinine.
You couldn't have that any more backwards. The Wii is the one console that appeals to non-gamers.
People may still snicker at the name, I'm not saying that's going away. People still make "iPood" jokes. But the name "Wii" is no longer seen as a liability.
That the iPad is going to get a disproportionate amount of support compared to devices that are FAR superior, such as the Adam tablet from Notion Ink. (More expandability, hdmi, 1080p, color lcd can change to a mode that is similar to e-paper)
Here is a demo of it: http://gizmodo.com/5444232/notion-ink-adam-pixel-qi-tabletereader-hands-on-your-screen-is-obsolete
And here is a mockup of the final unit, which is supposed to come out in june:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/28/notion-inks-adam-gets-a-name-june-2010-release/
So in the same vain: The iPad is the one tablet that appeals to non-computer users?
The Apple iPad - it's a Touch for people with huge hands and/or something new to dump your muck over for fanbois who have too much money.
Now GET OVER IT & MOVE ON!
Also, no USB ports and oh yea, you can only run one app at a time. Can't have itunes up and surf the web at the same time.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
I wrote this about the Mac, but it applies to the iPhone and iPad as well:
1) Mac users are highly sensitive to the quality of your products' user experience. What this means is, go native or don't bother. Even though Google Earth and Photoshop are rife with UI atrocities, don't imagine that you can get away with ignoring the rules like they can. They're 500-pound Gorillas, and you're not. If you are Google or Adobe, get with the program and write a Cocoa UI, already. It's about time.
2) The native language for the Mac and the iPhone is Objective-C. Get used to it; it's not hard to learn. Any developer familiar with C should be able to learn Objective-C in a day, and be an Objective-C language lawyer within a week if he cares to. Yes, there are Ruby, Python, and other bridges you can use, and they work just fine, but limit this to integrating existing libraries with your apps. DO NOT try to use the bridges as a way to avoid learning the environment you're working with.
3) A cross-platform GUI is neither feasible nor desirable. You can't #ifdef the difference between Cocoa, xlib, and Win32. Don't believe me? Look at OpenOffice. (If OpenOffice looks OK to you, then please, forget about offering your products on the Mac. You'll only cause us pain.)
4) Don't bother with third-party cross-platform GUI libraries like Qt. Yeah, you can make it sort of work, but you'll get a lot of complaints from your Mac customers, and it will be more expensive than properly factoring your code and writing a native GUI for each platform. For every Mac customer who complains about a bad UI, there are many more who took one look at it and decided never to do business with the vendor in question.
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That pretty much describes the target audience: People that don't want to use complicated computers and/or don't care about using them.
you're missing the computer-as-appliance thing. this is not a general purpose computer, this is for consuming digital entertainment and information content. and it'll sell well because that's all a very great number of people want a computer for (ie, not futzing about). think of a car as a personal transportation appliance. then imagine if people pretty much had to maintain their own cars.
Interstitial spaces are filled with cream.
So w/o RTFA the key thing here is that if CITRIX are making it viable for windows sessions to be run on the iPad then this means that the iPad now appeals to a huge number of corporate clients, especially those on retail! Therefore making the iPad way more likely to appear in stores which will then encourage more POS development and more eyes.
I still will not buy one!
What's going on? This is Steve's baby. He's been working on a "new Newton" since, what, 2000? Well, his perfectionism payed off and now the ones who aren't laughing are the ones who don't give a shit. Hey guys! Let's make an iPhone, but bigger, and a gajillion times more expensive! They'll love it, especially in this economy!
The top of the line iPad is not even twice the price of an unsubsidised iPhone. It's pretty cheap for what you get.
Here's an idea - What Steve should have done was release a tablet version of the MacBook Air (with the exact same software compatibility, OS, etc.) and call it the MacBook Slate or MacBook Touch. I would have bought one of those, and I'm often the first to question the sexual orientation of male Mac users.
Perhaps you might have bought such a hack, since techies have a much greater tolerance for clunky computers than most people. To do that properly, OS X and most of the applications on it would need to be redesigned.
It does not improve a perfectly weighted japanese sushi knife to attach car steering wheel and fire extinguisher to it just in case you need to multi-task. Each item itself has all the controls and human interface it needs for it's task and only that.
That is a broken analogy. Each one of those devices has hard-set physical characteristics that inherently conflict with each other. The iPad can do multiple things, but not concurrently. Their UI is in no way hard set to preclude any of the functions people are asking about. A knife can never be a reasonable steering wheel ever, it isn't just that it can't cut and be a wheel at the same time.
In raskin's vision, the appliance would never need instructions. it would be as obvious how to use it as a hammer is.
And yet I see in hands on demos people trying various random gestures, and requiring the Apple rep to demonstrate what gesture was needed to perform a task. Notably, pinch to 'go back', how the hell is that intuitive?
Moreover you don't really want multi-taksing. You think you do but what you really mean is you want to beable to context swtich easily and for cases where apps need to interact that they do so in the way you want them to.
People don't complain about WebOS's realization of small form-factor multitasking, where each app is a full-screened app at pretty much all times. You seem to be attacking the multi-window model, which is a fair thing to question particularly in small form factors, but forbidding a program from executing in the background (doing non-interactive things like receiving instant messages or manipulating audio, etc) is asinine. I wonder what your post will be when Apple does finally cave to allowing third-party apps to background execute, it will happen I can guarantee.
For example, people insisted background processing was needed to handle incoming e-mail or other daemon tasks for apps. But the vast majority of those needs (though definitiely not all) are now served much better by the push notification deamon that apple implemented. See background processing was just one way to solve that problem that you were used. You did not need it and you are now better off without it.
Umm, you do realize that the daemon they implemented is explicitly a form of background processing? Apple *needs* it to deliver the things they need, and they allow themselves the privilege of background execution, they just deny it to third parties.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And since you're a woman, you're supposed to be the voice of reason around here or something? Some women have just as many juvenile hang-ups and some men do. Most people won't care about the name. Not all of us giggle or blush when we hear the word "tampon", you know.
Maybe it's just a cultural thing. The US does seem to have more sexual hang-ups compared to other English-speaking countries. Where I live, we have Dick Smiths Electronics, and people seem comfortable with that.
In the US, we have BJs and Dick's Sporting Goods and people are usually fine with those as well.
...and some vertical markets.
Not only that, but speaking from actual knowledge, people in at least one of those vertical markets (drs, medicine) do not like the available tablets.
Microsoft must be loving this.
Merriam webster's definitions don't follow products, and were never intended to. You don't hear a merriam webster definition for apple include the company, do ya? Or definition for windows include MS windows, do ya?
Well, feminine hygiene pads are not elusive products. You get yourself in hot water trying to deny them and/or get even remotely involved with the concept.
It's ot "true multi-tasking" - it's more like the old DOS TSRs that gave you limited "multi-tasking". Aside from the baked-into-the-OS multi-tasking apps, it doesn't multitask - which is one reason it won't support flash - too many threads of execution on a device that is resource-poor (comparatively slow cpu, limited ram).
What the fuck were those guys thinking? We know about the fight with Fujitsu over the iPad name, but in today's New York Times there was an article about the ambiguous vulgarity of the name itself. From that one:
So indistinguishable from iPod is the word iPad that Steve Jobs himself mistakenly called the iPad an iPod during the press release. I thought that was funny. But seriously, people should stop beefing about the name, sure some women will be reminded of a tampon, but on occasion people refer to their homes as their pad. Theirs padding in the sofa. Hell, people sometimes pad their computer memory, or their ego.
Funny thing, iPod doesn't appear as a spelling error in safari but iPad does, better get that patch out quickly apple.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
Also, no USB ports and oh yea, you can only run one app at a time. Can't have itunes up and surf the web at the same time.
Are you serious. Unless Apple decides to jump the shark they're not going to remove the ability of the OS to run iTunes at the same time as any other app that doesn't have sound. Trying going to an Apple store and playing around with an iPod touch or an iPhone and you'll see that the music keeps playing while you surf the web, check your e-mail, play card games, etc.
The iPad is not meant to be a full fledged computer (lamentably), it is more of an ultra portable media device. If it truly has a 10 hour battery life with video playback that makes it an incredible video player for traveling. If viewed in that light the iPad should be a success. I do wish they had decided to simply make a multi touch computer instead, it would have been much more exciting.
"Educate the mind but never at the expense of the soul."~Blessed Basil Moreau
... built with Unity (www.unity3d.com).
She didn't say anything remotely like that.
She said it was "awkward", nothing about giggle and blush.
Dick is a common name in the US as well. Are you quite sure English is your native language? You really don't seem to have understood the GPP at all.
Since when the ability to run windows qualifies a machine as notebook.
C# only strength is good infusion into fresh graduates. Otherwise Apple's XCode is an excellent choice for development platform.
Language differences, I don't buy that. You learn the language in 3 days. It's the OS and SDK that takes the bulk of learning.
Apparently you don't understand the term non-gamers .
But even without this, there are so many other "pads" out there, that this is silly. For example, where was this controversy over the Fujitsu iPAD? Or the various other pads. ThinkPad? Newton MessagePad? MS Notepad?
Think, Message and Note are more significant than simply "i". Furthermore, messagepad and notepad are pre-existing words.
Fujitsu Ipad is stupid too. If we got daily stories all over the media about that, we'd be ridiculing that too. But since it's only Apple that gets an absurdly disproportionate coverage even when it's vaporware (remember, it's not even released yet), that's the one people are mocking.
The brilliance of the iPhone OS is that it's designed specifically for multitouch. You're not just using your finger (or stylus) as a mouse,
What happened to "One mouse button is better"? Adding complex gestures doesn't necessarily make things easier - plus you have the downside of a less accurate touchscreen (capacitive versus resistive).
with handwriting recognition thrown in for good measure.
Welcome to 2002. What portable touch device doesn't have that these days? And I'd rather do that with a stylus, not my finger.
The top of the line iPad is not even twice the price of an unsubsidised iPhone. It's pretty cheap for what you get.
Right, so it's more expensive than the unsubsidised Iphone, which is already pretty expensive. What does it add to justify that price? What does it do better than netbooks at a fraction of the price? Or the other tablets out there?
You know, that's an excellent point. Remember all the uproar, including from Apple fans, when Windows proposed its three app limit?
Yet when it's Apple, "multitasking" is simply something that isn't needed, or even, that it's better to only run one app at once, because that will apparently make it easier which is apparently what people want.
Microsoft should release a special "Apple user" edition with a one app limit (as well as lots of other features removed, and of course you can only run an app with Microsoft's permission), let's see how well that sells.
If the developer can't code in Objective C, using native frameworks, there should be a logo or something to make people understand it is based on Mono/MS .NET. I wouldn't trust to such developer or their coding competence. What next? Use MS Visual C?
I don't even mention stupidity of using an Apple/OS X/UNIX device and use clone of the clone framework to code for it, it is a bit political. I would really want to know if an application is based on .NET, there should be a way to figure it out without hacking anything.
Some people with hopes for working at MS in future use that instead of native frameworks since they think, MS is picking up developers that way. The framework itself is coded by a MS reject himself.
I don't think it is easier since we got a perfect example in hand, companies/people didn't release a single thing for J2ME (on billion devices) or Symbian released their application on iPhone/iPod. XCode with Objective C is said to be the best/easiest thing mobile developer World ever seen, it is coming from all camps, even Symbian camp.
Really? Are you being sarcastic, or just a giant douche? When I hear such stupid fucking drivel, I often wonder whether or not the person posting has parents who are brother and sister.
You fucking hick pussy.
I guess it just rocks too much to provide support for even basic internet technologies.
So much more fun to re-invent the wheel, and lock your codebase to a single mobile platform.
Any less asinine than "Gamer" "l33t" "teh" etc?
I think iPad is an obvious and smart choice for the name of this device.
The difference is that this is a fucking media consuming device
It's not just for porn.
not a desktop computer.
Windows 7 Starter is designed for ultra-low-cost PCs such as netbooks, and prerelease versions were limited to three applications until Microsoft backed down. Is a netbook closer to a "desktop computer" or a "media consuming device"?
Why in hell is it awkward? Are we all fucking FIVE?
Awesome!!! Great words from my favorite composer. He was on to something too. I have zero experience with other countries, but in the USA, we have a fucking juvenile understanding of sexual relations and bodily functions.
The fact that someone is reminded of Ladies' Sanitary Napkins, and it makes them uncomfortable, when hearing about the iPad says more about the general level of maturity in the person than it does about the naming of the product.
Just like the kerfuffle over the cover of Metallica's Death Magnetic.
If this is what we are about, and who we are as people, then America is FUCKED!
interestingly it's claimed that OSX was originally going to behave that way at Job's request. there's a hidden mode switch (in the defaults.write ) that will change the interface so only one app is visible at a time. the others snap to the dock at each context switch. I activated that for my mother and here ability to use the computer skyrocketed. I've tried it myself
What's the switch? I just tried looking through defaults read, but that's an awful lot of text to sift through without knowing what I'm looking for...
Tweet, tweet.
My iPhone was about the same price as my Treo 600 was. Or was that overpriced, too? What are you comparing it to?
The iPad will browse the web better than any netbook or previous tablet. Netbooks are awkward to hold, previous tablets are heavy and run desktop OS that are awkward to use. How about you list some of these netbooks that are a fraction of the price, so I can have a look at the specs? Do any of them have an IPS display, for instance?
Apple did, in fact, make a multi-touch computer. It's called the iPad.
Simply slapping a multi-touch screen on a MacBook—which is what it seems a lot of people think Apple should have done—would have been a huge, huge mistake. Touch is worthless without software designed to be touched.
Software designed for Windows, Mac OS, KDE, Gnome, etc. is intended to be used with a keyboard and mouse as primary input devices. There simply isn't a way to create a good experience using these applications when you replace the keyboard and mouse with an intermittent on-screen keyboard and fingers. So that leaves Apple with two choices:
1) Create a new variant of Mac OS X designed around touch interaction
2) Use the one they already created
Apple chose option 2. This not only makes it simpler for Apple to manage, but it also gives developers for the platform a relatively easy way to create applications for both iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch.
Think, Message and Note are more significant than simply "i". Furthermore, messagepad and notepad are pre-existing words
Doesn't matter. iPod is now a word, Wii is now a word. Both sounded pretty dumb when they first came out. iPad will go through the exact same process.
it's vaporware (remember, it's not even released yet)
Not really. It's a finished product, primarily awaiting manufacture. Vaporware is more about when people talk about what they're *going* to create, not what they've already finished. Also, there's an implied sense of ongoingness.
Strictly speaking, you may be able to call it vaporware without being technically wrong, but pretty much *none* of the implications that accompany that word apply here, so it's, at best, deliberately misleading.
Unless you honestly believe it's not going to be released any time soon.
What happened to "One mouse button is better"?
What the hell are you talking about? There's no mouse.
Adding complex gestures doesn't necessarily make things easier
You're making the same mistake so many other geek-types make when they decry the one-button mouse (and it hasn't been "one-button" in the sense most people mean by that for a long time now). It's not removing options to be simpler, it's about being more natural. Multitouch *is* more complex, mechanically, than a single-button mouse, but it's so much more natural.
The idea behind multitouch is that it builds upon your pre-existing knowledge about how real-world objects work.
But let's take an example of poorly designed gestures. Instead of pinching-to-zoom (which is so fundamentally natural, everyone gets it instantly, from 2 years old to 100, where as teaching people about dragging or right-clicking, etc., with a mouse can be quite tedious), you have some funky shit like, make a sideways figure-eight to bring up the hud, a triangle to fire missiles, a z-shape to make a 180, and so on. *That* would be not only more complex, but extremely unnatural.
plus you have the downside of a less accurate touchscreen (capacitive versus resistive).
Who cares? It works, and it works extremely well. Capacitive touch screen is really the way to go for multitouch. You always make these really absurd criticisms, which are not only wrong on the face of it, but miss the whole point. It doesn't matter if the screen is capacitive, resistive, or if there are magical gnomes running the show. What matters is how well it works, and the iPhone screen works *wonderfully*.
Welcome to 2002. What portable touch device doesn't have that these days? And I'd rather do that with a stylus, not my finger.
You clearly misread my statement. I'll reconstruct it to clarify:
The brilliance of the iPhone OS is that it's designed specifically for multitouch. You're not just using your finger (or stylus) as a mouse, with handwriting recognition thrown in for good measure.
The brilliance of the iPhone is that you're *not* using your finger (or stylus) to act like a mouse that does mousing and also has handwriting recognition.
And, "welcome to 2002"? Really? Apple shipped a product with handwriting recognition in '93, which they were working on all the way back into the '80s. It's somewhat ironic you would mention 2002 specifically, since that's when Jaguar shipped with Inkwell. So yeah, welcome to 2002, except Apple was already there 9 years before *that*.
Besides, my mention of handwriting input was incidental. My main point was that the iPhone OS isn't just your regular WIMP model with a stylus (or finger) instead of a mouse. Windows and Mac OS are designed around the mouse. The iPhone OS is designed around multitouch. This is far superior to simply using your finger (or stylus) as a mouse.
This whole, WIMP with a stylus is why all the p
here you go
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I agree. It's like there's a campaign to smear apple - one of the best run companies out there, led by a visionary who literally did build the company out of his garage with the help of Wozniak and others. It's a true American company - an example to the world. They have a vision to not just dump technology into peoples hands but instead take responsibility for delivering technology that humans control, rather than technology to control humans.
Federalist government spooks are probably behind the smear.
Here's a better link to the highligts or Engelbart's demo .
Be sure to check out the one about real time communication an 1968 and think about how we don't even have that yet! we have the video ichat and we have some collaborative real time editors, but they had both working together with shared real-time mouses on screen in 1968.
One of the more amusing things to me is that they are demostrating other technologies no one in the audience had scene while barely remarking on it. For example the minature microphone head sets, the closed circuit microwave com links providing the video and audio connections. all in 1968.
the computer system had a whopping 4 banks of 16K and was shared by mulitple users. the screens were created by writing directly to vector graphic phosphors and raster video capture of that. That's how they can have things like characters combined with a moving mouse, overlayed on inset video.
it's mind bending how much of modern computing was anticipated by this small team in 1968.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
UNIX is celebrating 40th year, it is older if you think its roots (MULTICS). It is running on most trendy mobile devices ever, N900 and iPhone and industry has already decided one way or another, it is the only feasible set of standards and philosophy for next 10-20 years. Perhaps, if the real ubiquitous computing rises, its upgrade, Plan 9 will take over the mission.
NeXT is older too, if you put the smalltalk language to its true beginning. Look deeper, you will still see IBM and Apple behind it.
Have fun with your .exe files.
Do you know that, on average, iPhone users pay more per month and more per app for apps than any other smart-phone user. It may be true that there are just more useful apps for the iPhone than its competitors, but the fact remains that iPhone users pay more for similar functionality. Eventually, there will be mainstream smart phones and tablets that allow developers to use free tools on those devices. The average cost of apps on the non-Apple devices will be lower and, everything else being equal, most people will choose not to pay extra for the same thing.