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."

Comments

xna

[Anonymous Coward]

this would mean we could get xna games for the iPad

Re:xna

[Anonymous Coward]

this would mean we could get xna games for the iPad

The iPad is only useful when you're on your iPeriod.

Re:xna

[blai]

No it doesn't.

Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

The iPad won't displace the netbook. Because of its price and lack of perennial netbook features, such as a physical keyboard.

Re:Pffff

[Ethanol-fueled]

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:

Many women are saying the name evokes awkward associations with feminine hygiene products. People from Boston to Ireland are complaining that "iPad," in their regional brogue, sounds almost indistinguishable from "iPod," Apple's music player.

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:

He is not sure Apple could have found an alternative that ties in as perfectly to its famous brands. "I think we're going to get over this fairly quickly and we'll get on with enjoying the experience."

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.

Re:Pffff

[NemoinSpace]

and I'm often the first to question the sexual orientation of male Mac users.

Umm, Metaphorically or Inquisitively? and Umm, How often?

Re:Pffff

[labradore]

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

Both Merriam and Webster are dead. Try http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pad

Re:Pffff

[clang_jangle]

Merriam-Webster has 13 definitions for pad. None of them refer to feminine hygiene.

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.

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.

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...

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

"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":

And I still remember Mama,
With her apron and her pad,
Feeding all the boys at Ed's Cafe --

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

Re:Pffff

[jo42]

...ambiguous vulgarity...

Then we have the Nintendo Wii (piss, pee, urinate, tinkle). No one made a big fuss when that was announced.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a pretty bad baby at that. Its a giant itouch without the camera. Thats it. No pen, no tablet like features, a giant I touch. I combines the best of nothing. I can't code on that thing or take notes in a meeting, for that I need a laptop. I can't make phone calls on it an it has NO SD card slot, no cd drive no usb port. Its a web surfing thingy for the trendy retards that will inevitably go out and buy it. Don't get me wrong, its snazzy, even kinda impressive. But not all that useful.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Pffff

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Pffff

[dangitman]

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.

Re:Pffff

[node 3]

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.

Re:Pffff

[node 3]

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.

Re:Pffff

[node 3]

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to say anything negative about Apple here, but to those of us not in the gamer community, Wii still sounds asinine.

Re:Pffff

[node 3]

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

So in the same vain: The iPad is the one tablet that appeals to non-computer users?

Re:Pffff

[Anarchduke]

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.

Re:Pffff

[am 2k]

That pretty much describes the target audience: People that don't want to use complicated computers and/or don't care about using them.

Re:Pffff

[evanspw]

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.

Re:Pffff

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Pffff

[siride]

In the US, we have BJs and Dick's Sporting Goods and people are usually fine with those as well.

Re:Pffff

[hiscross]

Economy, you want to talk about economy, then go to washington as talk to berry. Apple, like any free enterprise company, can charge anything they want for a product they make. It's up the buyers to decide if they wan to buy it. Price control is called socialism and screw that.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:Pffff

[poetmatt]

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.

Re:Pffff

[WCguru42]

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:

Many women are saying the name evokes awkward associations with feminine hygiene products. People from Boston to Ireland are complaining that "iPad," in their regional brogue, sounds almost indistinguishable from "iPod," Apple's music player.

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.

Re:Pffff

[WCguru42]

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

And since you're a woman, you're supposed to be the voice of reason around here or something?

She didn't say anything remotely like that.

Most people won't care about the name. Not all of us giggle or blush when we hear the word "tampon", you know.

She said it was "awkward", nothing about giggle and blush.

Where I live, we have Dick Smiths Electronics, and people seem comfortable with that.

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.

Re:Pffff

[Anonymous Coward]

Wii is the one console that appeals to non-gamers.

Apparently you don't understand the term non-gamers .

Re:Pffff

[mdwh2]

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.

Re:Pffff

[mdwh2]

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?

Re:Pffff

[black88]

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.

Re:Pffff

[black88]

Any less asinine than "Gamer" "l33t" "teh" etc?

I think iPad is an obvious and smart choice for the name of this device.

Re:Pffff

[black88]

Why in hell is it awkward? Are we all fucking FIVE?

Re:Pffff

[black88]

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!

Re:Pffff

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

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?

Re:Pffff

[TheGreek]

I do wish they had decided to simply make a multi touch computer instead, it would have been much more exciting.

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.

Re:Pffff

[node 3]

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

Re:Pffff

[labradore]

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.

Easier?

[gyrogeerloose]

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?

Re:Easier?

[bheer]

Objective C is not a hard language to learn: it's a sibling to C++ in that both tried to add OOP to C. ObjC as used on the Mac combines the best of both worlds -- you get pointers for low level control, *and* a nice OO framework/API and niceties like garbage collection. And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.

Where C# wins over ObjC though is its similarity to Java (which in turn is fairly comfortable to C++/C programmers).

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, C#, like JAVA, is easier to develop with and easier to debug than C or Objective C.

It's got many advantages, especially garbage collection (no pointer to memory to keep track of).

Performance wise, you can do better in well-written Objective C or C, but it's a lot more error prone.

Re:Easier?

[biryokumaru]

The difference between C# and C is like the difference between hiragana and kanji. You can write the same stuff with hiragana a lot easier, but you look like an idiot.

Disclaimer: I only know a very small amount of hiragana, and my only data point is a Japanese friend who laughs at my illiteracy.

Re:Easier?

[obarthelemy]

a pizza or a car analogy would work better. Nobody understood that one.

Re:Easier?

[ascari]

Or is it just a matter of there being more people who are familiar with it?

Yes and no. Using .NET is not synonymous with using C#. There's VB.NET, Ruby and Python flavors and so on. So many, many more people are familiar with something or the other that will work as a .NET language. By comparison very few know Objective-C.

At the same time .NET framework (or Mono in this case) handles a lot of the programming tedium associated with "regular" C, like memory allocation/deallocation, variable initialization, dangling pointers and such. Fewer opportunities for bugs. But I don't know how Objective C stacks up here.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounded so stupid.

Re:Easier?

[forkazoo]

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?

C# is easier to work with than C for many people, but not significantly easier than Objective C. C expects that you have some awareness of memory allocations and whatnot, but higher level languages insulate you from a lot of the details and let you worry more about your actual application.

The advantage that C# has over Objective C on iPad is not anything inherent about the language. Parentage aside, there is nothing extraordinarily wrong or amazingly good with C#. It just has hordes of Windows developers who learned C# for some reason, who want to migrate their windows specific skillset to additional platforms, but don't feel like learning new tools.

Re:Easier?

[Tsiangkun]

and if someone likes Java, XMLVM is pretty decent at getting software you already have, translated to something that will run on the iPhoneOS.

Re:Easier?

[AHuxley]

Apple is like merc/bmw with its own way via ObjC. Buggy, expensive and slips quality every few years, but you know what your getting.
Java is like Toyota, it works, you can load it up with work stuff, family, freedom fighters.
C# is the toyota clone car brand build in a Communist or ex Communist zone that will get you from A to B but just dont ask too many questions.
If you crash your data is gone.

Re:Easier?

[mdarksbane]

Old-school Objective-C supports a midway point between C++ memory allocations and garbage collection in reference counting. The newer runtimes in OS X support full-on garbage collection, although I'm not sure whether that version is in the iPod or not.

Objective-C and C# are easy to pick up if you know any object oriented language. Most competent programmers can run through a couple tutorials and be programming at close to full speed in a couple days. Learning which of the different support frameworks and libraries to use can take a bit longer, though (especially if you heavily rely on something that doesn't have a direct replacement).

One of the earliest truths I've learned about programming - newcomers to the field confuse knowing a language with knowing how to program, and consider switching languages to be a similar level of difficulty. In my experience, I've pretty much had to pick up a new language at every new job I've had. You get annoyed at the little differences for a week or two, and then you're just moving. There are always more little details you can learn to make things easier on yourself or to write more efficient code, but in general, for as much as a language and framework can make things easier or more annoying in different areas, going to a new one of the same class (Java vs C++ vs Obj C vs C#) for a new project is rarely that big of a deal.

Now, if you've got a bunch of existing code that you want to run on a new platform... then it can be a pain in the ass. But it's going to be that regardless if you didn't plan the project to be portable to begin with.

Re:Easier?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I think the message sending syntax was a little bit strange to get used to. The idea of intermixing names and parameters just seems odd. Still, when I had to do something in Obj-C I was up and running in less than an hour.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

Garbage collection is not available for objective c on the iphone.

Re:Easier?

[nmb3000]

The difference between C and x86 assembly is like the difference between hiragana and kanji. You can write the same stuff with hiragana a lot easier, but you look like an idiot.

Disclaimer: I don't know anything about hiragana, and my only data point is a some guy on Slashdot that was talking about it.

Hmm, nope. That doesn't work either.

Re:Easier?

[Sabalon]

Sadly it made sense to me.

Re:Easier?

[cyfer2000]

Do we get garbage collection on iPhone OS? Last time I check, like several months ago, it was a no.

Re:Easier?

[bondsbw]

You really have no clue what you're talking about, do you?

Objective-C is solid, only on its second release (2.0). It has a learning curve for most non-Apple devs. Based on Smalltalk, messages (methods) are bound at runtime. Garbage collection and properties were added in the latest version.

Java is very stable, but given the number of releases I would say less solid (it's on its seventh major release, with a beta for it's eighth). Based loosely on C++, but with garbage collection (no pointers), it is really the only system that produces true cross-platform binaries.

C# is on its third version (3), although the runtime is on its fifth (3.5). Most people agree that as a language, it is superior to Java due to support for events, functional/lambda-style programming, LINQ, generics (which are generally considered better than Java's), etc. C# is standardized, but open source/cross platform implementations (Mono) are behind those from Microsoft. Silverlight, however, is available cross-platform via Moonlight. The next version is in the works (C#/.NET 4.0).

I really don't get where you were saying "if you crash your data is gone". That doesn't even make sense, in the context of a computer programming language.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

I trust M$ products the same way I trust M$ itself and nothing can change that.

Your answer about number versions already totally denounces you. Do you think developers are like those morons who keep infested Winblows PCs at home?

How lame!

Re:Easier?

[ucblockhead]

Given that nearly every Japanese sentence contains both hiragana and kanji, that analogy makes no sense.

Re:Easier?

[grouchomarxist]

It is still no.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

It comes down to a couple of things. ObjC is fine and it's not crazy hard to learn because of it's structure or the language itself. It's primarily two things that make C# a more programmer friendly language and those are tools and community. Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 are pretty impressive IDEs while still being extremely developer friendly and despite the fact that Apple provides Xcode it's just not the same. Second there are a ton more C# developers out there than ObjC hence there are more websites, more books, more blogs, etc...basically more of all the support that helps you beat a learning curve. As a side note, Java has better community too but the tools aren't as friendly (note java IDEs are extremely powerful but they're definitely not as friendly). Having programmed in all three I personally prefer java because hosting is easier to come buy for web stuff and you have more choices of what app servers and OSes to run on, but it has nothing to do with the language being innately harder or easier. My current mode of operation is I do C# at a corporate gig, I do most of my home stuff in Java, and I use ObjC for my iPhone only despite the fact that I own several Macs.

Re:Easier?

[zullnero]

C# is a lot easier and cleaner. Don't listen to the plethora of Apple and Linux fans...there's a reason Mono is still around and people invest in it. Without going into too many technical details, C# is just a flat out better language than C++. Objective C just isn't that great an improvement. C# really comes a lot closer to bridging the difference between Java and C than Objective C could ever do. I've done all of the above aforementioned languages professionally, so I'd know. My preference is C#. The .NET framework is mostly the only thing Microsoft that I actually am a fan of, and would love to see that sort of platform development effort for every platform out there.

Re:Easier?

[ClosedSource]

I don't think many Windows developers learned C# so they could "migrate their windows specific skillset to additional platforms".

C# is just the logical language to learn if you want to program for the .Net framework and you have a C/C++ background.

Re:Easier?

[Fnord]

Objective-C and C# use different OO models. C#, like Java, is a strictly typed, statically bound language. Objective-C is a dynamically bound, loosely typed OO layer on top of C (though not as loose as languages like Python and Ruby). Which is better depends on what school of programming you come from. There are techniques to make simpler and more dynamic designs in Objective-C, while the predictability of static languages allows more errors to be caught at runtime and IDEs to do more work for you in C#.

Re:Easier?

[rdnetto]

I actually understood that, and it was a terrible analogy. Try this one: the difference between C and C# is like the difference between a manual and automatic transmission - while a manual (C) is preferred when you need better performance and more control, most people prefer automatic (C#) because it's a lot easier to use, still achieves decent performance and has some nice new features like cruise control (LINQ, anonymous methods, etc.).

Re:Easier?

[McBeer]

Objective C is not a hard language to learn: it's a sibling to C++ in that both tried to add OOP to C. ObjC as used on the Mac combines the best of both worlds -- you get pointers for low level control, *and* a nice OO framework/API and niceties like garbage collection. And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.

C# has pointers, a larger class library then objective C, and no dependency on the win32 apis... You are correct that the syntactic similarities between c++, java, and c# lead to a win for C# though.

Re:Easier?

[shutdown -p now]

ObjC as used on the Mac combines the best of both worlds -- you get pointers for low level control, *and* a nice OO framework/API and niceties like garbage collection.

It should be noted that this is equally true for C# - it also has raw pointers and related stuff available for when you need it, but otherwise it's fully OO, runs under VM with GC, and so on.

Out of my head, I can think of a few advantages either one has over the other.

C# advantages:
- namespaces
- generics, so all collections can be statically typed
- first-class functions and lambdas (closures) with argument type inference
- LINQ query comprehensions (a la Python's "[x for x in ...]", but much more extensive - covering sorting, grouping, joins etc.
- portable code generation with JIT(System.Reflection.Emit & DynamicMethod)
- mark-compact generational GC (ObjC one is a conservative mark & sweep, which means that it's both slower and suffers more from heap fragmentation)

ObjC advantages:
- truly dynamic dispatch, objects can intercept unknown messages sent to them, redirect them etc
- duck typing (C# is going to have it in 4.0, though, which is right around the corner)
- can avoid GC altogether even when using all OO-related language facilities, which can have some performance benefits
- can use C/C++ libraries directly, no wrapping or FFI declarations needed
- gcc generally produces better optimized code than .NET JIT, much less Mono JIT

In general, I'd say that C# is a little bit more high-level, but overall the preference for one or another depends on whether you like static or dynamic typing more. ObjC provides more features to go with the latter, but can be type-unsafe at times (e.g. due to non-generic collections).

Re:Easier?

[shutdown -p now]

C# is standardized, but open source/cross platform implementations (Mono) are behind those from Microsoft.

IIRC, in terms of language implementation, Mono is actually not beyond Visual C# - at least all C# 3.5 features seem to be fully supported. Where Mono lags behind is the libraries, and generally those which aren't covered by the Ecma CLI spec.

Java is very stable, but given the number of releases I would say less solid (it's on its seventh major release, with a beta for it's eighth). Based loosely on C++, but with garbage collection (no pointers), it is really the only system that produces true cross-platform binaries.

CLR (.NET) binaries are equally cross-platform, since a basic implementation of CLR VM is fairly trivial. Both Mono and Portable.NET are good enough to run the binaries on all platforms they themselves run on. The problem with portability is also due to libraries.

Re:Easier?

[shutdown -p now]

Without going into too many technical details, C# is just a flat out better language than C++.

Uh, no, it's not. They are two languages for two different niches, so even trying to compare them to each other is rather moot. You should be using both together, each for things where it makes more sense. That's why C# has P/Invoke and COM Interop in the first place - so that C++ backends are easy to use from C# code.

But if you're going to try a comparison, then C# will have to somehow beat the power of C++ templates to claim superiority...

Re:Easier?

[Vahokif]

Mono isn't actually behind. The compiler supports all the latest features of C# (and even some of their own extensions), and the Mono runtime supports 99% of what people actually use. The rest is either obscure or uneconomical to implement (like WPF). They even have their own libraries for doing SIMD (which you can't do on official .NET) and other things.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

WPF is not "uneconomical". You might take time to understand what you are talking about before making a goofy and uneducated post.

Re:Easier?

[DrXym]

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?

Yes its massively easier to program. Not having to worry about so much about memory allocation / freeing or buffer overruns means faster developent and a more stable application. Same applies for Java and other high level languages of course. .NET & Java both also have excellent system libraries that have a lot more functionality than you'd find in C languages without dragging in 3rd party libs. The IDEs for developing apps are also considerably more friendly than those for C with reliable intellisense / refactoring functionality.

The penalties of course are a slower / heavier runtime but for most apps that really doesn't matter.

Re:Easier?

[jcr]

it's a sibling to C++

Oh, come on. Objective-C isn't perfect, but that is way too harsh.

-jcr

Re:Easier?

[nstlgc]

If Mono is behind, it'll be with respect to the .NET framework, not the C# language itself.

Re:Easier?

[jcr]

Uh, no, it's not.

I've never had to use C#, but I find it hard to imagine that it's as bad as C++.

-jcr

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me the memory management isn't the problem but even the most simple data structures need a lot more work in C.

Like a simple list. You either implement every operation yourself or you include and use preprocessor magic in C. In C# you just declare a list variable. And then the C# version is probably faster, because the C version is a linked list.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes perfect sense, though I've no idea if the analogy is valid. He said you can write with only hiragana, but it makes a person look uneducated. This is completely true.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't use C++ code from anywhere but C++. C is what you are looking for. And if you want to expose C++ code to other languages you have to wrap it in C functions. And you loose everything that makes C++ worthwhile: Templates.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're correct, but my points were about cross-platform capability. I can install the Java runtime on Windows, Linux, Mac, etc. and expect most software to work from one to the other. I cannot do the same for C#/.NET. And I'm not saying this is the fault of the implementers of Mono... not at all. It is more because of abuse of P/Invoking Win32 libraries and wide use of non-standard Microsoft .NET libraries.

Trust me, I wish it were different... I've worked in a C# shop since 1.0, and I would love to see our software run on Linux without virtualization. But alas, I'm but a simple developer and there's no immediate business benefit to rewriting tons of code so that it only uses standard libraries.

Re:Easier?

[gladish]

- mark-compact generational GC (ObjC one is a conservative mark & sweep, which means that it's both slower and suffers more from heap fragmentation)

Mono currently does not have a compacting garbage collector. One is in the works, and can be included as an unsupported feature when building from source.

Re:Easier?

[RingDev]

C# is on its third version (3), although the runtime is on its fifth (3.5).

.Net is still on it's second run time (2.0), but the 5th library version. The easiest way to see this is to go to an IIS server that has .Net 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 installed, open up the configuration for a web site and look for the application settings. Even though you have all 5 versions of .Net installed, the only two options IIS will give you is for the 1.0 and 2.0 .Net engines.

The fact that the 2.0 engine has been robust enough to handle all of the additions in features from 2.0 on is quite an impressive feat IMO.

Silverlight, however, is available cross-platform via Moonlight.

Silverlight is available cross-platform with out moonlight as well, just not on many platforms ;)

-Rick

Re:Easier?

[DrXym]

In C perhaps but C++ has some extremely reliable collection classes and other helper code. The biggest issue for C++ is that the breadth is the standard lib is very weak by comparison to Java and .NET The latter benefits from slightly better thought out functionality but they're both much of a muchness.

Re:Easier?

[Hurricane78]

In one sentence: Objective C is C++ (C, but object oriented) done right. ^^

Although of course, watching them compete from a Haskell viewpoint, still is like watching two drooling retards from the dark ages beat the crap out of each other. :D

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where C# wins over ObjC though is its similarity to Java

I think it's strange that we should always compare languages. What about the many students learning C# without knowing Java?

I would say that C# is nice because of delegates and events, generics, lambdas and linq.

Re:Easier?

[Anonymous Coward]

The preference for one or the other has nothing to do with static or dynamic typing.

The reason nobody likes or uses ObjC is that syntax is horrible and it's pretty much useless outside of the Apple sphere of products. End of story.

Re:Easier?

[TheRaven64]

Well, it's ha half-brother. Objective-C is the child of C and Smalltalk. C++ is its retarded half-brother from when C was screwing around with Simula.

Re:Easier?

[TheRaven64]

Objective-C is solid, only on its second release (2.0)

Categorically not true. What Apple calls Objective-C 1 is actually Objective-C 4, but they reset the versioning for the Apple version with the release of OS X 10.0. There was no version increment when they added @try/@catch/@finally/@synchronized to the language, but if there had been then what Apple calls Objective-C 2 would really have been Objective-C 6.

Re:Easier?

[pydev]

And of course OS X is beautifully designed, none of the back compat cruft that makes one want to stay away from Win32.

OS X has all the backwards compatibility cruft with C, Mach, and NeXTStep--and the backwards compatibility with C is a real problem.

Where C# wins over ObjC though is its similarity to Java (which in turn is fairly comfortable to C++/C programmers).

More importantly, C# has runtime safety, something that Objective-C lacks. Lack of runtime safety is a very serious limitation.

Re:Easier?

[pydev]

If you crash your data is gone.

Yes, in Objective-C, when you crash, your data is gone. That's a serious problem with Objective-C. In C# and Java, when you crash, you can recover.

Re:Easier?

[Ilgaz]

"OS X has all the backwards compatibility cruft with C, Mach, and NeXTStep--and the backwards compatibility with C is a real problem."

Did you guys totally lose it finally? OS X _IS_ Mach/Objective C/NeXTSTep/BSD Lite for God's sake. Oh yes, every UNIX adheres to 40 year old coding paradigm and standards too.

And no, you haven't been following OS X releases. If Apple warns you that something is depreciated, take it very serious since next major version can easily say "fsck off" to your application. It happened to many. Apple and their users are a moving target.

Re:Easier?

[shutdown -p now]

You can't use C++ code from anywhere but C++. C is what you are looking for. And if you want to expose C++ code to other languages you have to wrap it in C functions.

Not really. Since we're talking about C# here, it has this thing called "COM interop" - which, despite the name, is actually cross-platform (Mono implements it), and lets you work with C++ classes directly, so long as they conform to certain rules, and the compiler guarantees a certain vtable layout (g++ does).

Even for other languages, you don't need to write the wrappers yourself, since SWIG will take care of that for you.

nd you loose everything that makes C++ worthwhile: Templates.

It's by far not the only thing that makes C++ preferable over C. It's still a native language with good optimizing compilers - but it also has OOP facilities, and RAII. Those two alone are well worth it, even without templates. And, of course, you can still use templates internally to your heart content, they just can't cross the language boundary.

Re:Easier?

[pydev]

Did you guys totally lose it finally? OS X _IS_ Mach/Objective C/NeXTSTep/BSD Lite for God's sake.

Whichever way you want to put it, it's 25 year old technology and it shows: it's quite primitive.

What, no itsatrap tag?

[bheer]

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.

Re:What, no itsatrap tag?

[__aaclcg7560]

News Flash - You still need a Mac for installing the iPhone SDK and Mono.

To begin using MonoTouch, you will need to have:
* Apple's iPhone SDK 3.0 or higher, available from Apple's iPhone Dev Center (http://developer.apple.com/iphone/).
* An Intel Mac computer running MacOS 10.5 or 10.6 (Leopard or Snow Leopard).
* The latest release of Mono for OSX

You still pay the Apple hardware tax.

Re:What, no itsatrap tag?

[jisatsusha]

It's an annual cost, not a one-time cost, and it makes one of the most important things about open source software far more difficult than it should be, namely taking the source code and adapting it for your own needs.

Re:What, no itsatrap tag?

[jo_ham]

Unaffordable?

Hardly really, plus you can always just build a hackintosh, those are pretty cheap I hear.

Re:What, no itsatrap tag?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vmware running Leopard FTW!!!

Apple to Oranges

[anglophobe_0]

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.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[ascari]

Another angle: 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.) Fat chance they'll take over the world. Nobody will ever want to call tech support and complain about a Mono-problem.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[icebraining]

Not everything revolves around English, you know? In its creator language, the name "Mono" doesn't have that bad connotation.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[Draek]

And then there's the whole issue with pricing, which was the whole reason the netbook movement caught on in the first place. $500 may be cheap for a tablet PC, but it's certainly not for a netbook replacement.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[jhoegl]

I am copywriting IWang.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[ascari]

No, for sure. As in: "Is that a monkey in your iPad or are you just happy to see me?"

Re:Apple to Oranges

[Stormwatch]

Mono means monkey... not really a good connotation.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[icebraining]

It has a double meaning.

"Un mono" means "a monkey", but "es un bebé muy mono" means "it's a very cute baby".

So mono, colloquially, means cute, adorable.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[icebraining]

Sorry, "he's a very cute baby", not "it's" :|

Re:Apple to Oranges

[cgomezr]

I'm Spanish and, although of course what you say is true, I have never made the mental association of Mono the platform to cuteness. I have never even thought that that could be the reason behind the name, it always makes me think about a monkey.

It might be just because I don't like Mono so my mind automatically ignores the positive meaning, though.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Well, that all depends on what the consumers think. If the iPad becomes as popular as the iPhone and iPod, then a large number of developers will be developing for the iPad no matter what your average Slashdotter thinks of it.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[that this is not und]

The iPad won't become as popular as the iPhone and iPod.

It doesn't fill anywhere nearly as compelling a consumer need.

Not unless 'real paper publishing' gets sucked down the memory hole, that is. And if that happens.... yes, Apple has always been the Best Computer Company. Eurasia has always been at war with Oceania....

Re:Apple to Oranges

[hal2814]

Last I checked, the Wii is going just fine in sales.

Re:Apple to Oranges

[anglophobe_0]

My point was that, no matter how popular the iPad gets, it won't be a netbook, and won't fill the same market spot as the netbook.

Nothing new here

[BitZtream]

Jesus christ stop with the Apple spam.

There are already RDP clients for the iPhone and Mono Touch isn't freaking new.

Re:Nothing new here

[Bloopie]

Jesus christ stop with the Apple spam.

Why? This is technology-related news. It's relevant.

Is it really going to painfully hurt you to skip over the articles you don't want to read?

I think if some other company that was more "fashionable" around here than Apple had made exactly the same product instead of Apple, there wouldn't be so much crying. To the editors: These kinds of articles are relevant. Please continue posting them.

Re:Nothing new here

[IronChef]

But without these kind of posts, we'd be deprived of some true comedy gold. Check out the last link in the summary. The first paragraph reads:

Apple has just fired a death shot at the netbook. The new iPad could easily displace the netbook category, and I believe it will. Cheap laptops are at risk of extinction as well.

I am typing this on an expensive, arguably even overpriced Macbook Pro so I am not drinking the Apple Haterade. But this kind of hyperbole is... pretty astounding.

The only revolutionary thing about the iPad is a business thing, not a tech thing... the new AT&T data plans.

Hopefully, someday, I will be able to get a $30/mo, no contract, unlimited data plan that I can stick onto any computer I happen to have. (Hell, I might settle for adding a $30 data plan to my hacktivated iPhone. It isn't possible to do without a contract extension... for all lines on the family plan the phone is on. But I should complain on HowardForums, not here...)

Re:Nothing new here

[Sir_Lewk]

If you read the rest of his comment, instead immediately jumping on him for doing anything remotely resembling criticizing Apple, you would have read him explaining how this is not news, and thus is not technology related news.

Re:Nothing new here

[Bloopie]

If you had bothered to read the article, you would see that it is news because there is a new version of MonoTouch that supports the new iPad capabilities. It didn't before. That's what this article is about!

The Citrix article talks about how the iPad is a better interface for their users than the iPhone because of the larger screen and keyboard, which means it may be useful for the first time in certain work environments.

I'm tired of smug, arrogant morons whining about "old news" on Slashdot, especially when it isn't old news. But of course it's oh, so fashionable to bash Apple around here.

Re:Nothing new here

[BitZtream]

Yes, they recompiled MonoTouch against the new SDK with minor changes for being aware of the resolution. Do we post a new article for any of the previous MonoTouch releases when new iPhone SDKs came out? No.

And DUH a screen bigger than a few inches is better for remote desktop support. Guess what, your PC is far better at a remote desktop client than a phone is. Surprise surprise surprise.

I don't bash Apple, I actually love their products, which is why I'm posting from my MacBook Pro, own an iPhone and will probably by an iPad ... since I have several apps on the AppStore and a few new ones in the works for the iPad.

I'm fine with calling myself an Apple fanboy, my comment history will make it clear.

But ... there are freaking limits, and this isn't notable news in any sense of the word.

This is just another TIMMAH article with little to no value, I'm leaning towards no.

iCrap news overload

[sakdoctor]

It's getting like Steve jobs twitter page around here.

Re:iCrap news overload

[Andorin]

I agree. Every tech news website that I've visited is flooded with articles about the iPad. I do not care about the iPad and am already rather tired of the spam. The only saving grace here is that other news is still flowing (hur hur, iPad, flowing, I'm so clever).

Re:iCrap news overload

[Anonymous Coward]

I won't be interested until these stories link to Australian sites.

Re:iCrap news overload

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Steve Jobs was chosen the upper-class twitter of the year, or something.

Re:iCrap news overload

[Anonymous Coward]

Zomg! Steve Jobs' twitter page? Where, where?

Not interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll wait six hours until the next ipad story.

as someone who programmed for both

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[NemoinSpace]

Since you are someone has programmed both. You'll have a unique understanding of my gut feeling - that this thing is *really* gonna suck. What's Steve gonna do next develop some kind of android rip off and tie it to some monopolistic godawful carrier? - oh wait.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[jisatsusha]

iPhone has no garbage collection, for one thing.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[AdmiralXyz]

iPhone has no garbage collection, for one thing.

That's an iPhone thing, not an Objective-C thing. Apple has explicitly stated the iPhone won't support garbage collection for performance reasons.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[jisatsusha]

We're specifically talking about developing for iPhone/iPad. Why does it matter that "Objective-C" does have garbage collection, if you can't use it? It's one advantage that this Mono/.NET thing would have, that makes things easier for developers.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[furball]

Garbage collection doesn't save you from leaks. A developer still has to be conscious of memory usage even in systems with GC.

At the same time, Xcode offers static code analysis that tells you when you are leaking memory at compile time. There are a lot of language innovations in Objective-C that is noteworthy. As the iPhone's hardware capabilities catches up (that A4 chip sure is interesting), I'd expect to see GC and the introduction of blocks into the iPhone SDK.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody buy this man a beer. It's on me.

I just spent the last week cleaning up some Java code written in India. As you can imagine, it's pretty fucked up to begin with. It was even more fucked up when I saw them holding references to large objects (in one case, arrays with over 5 million items each) in private static member variables, and then in comments bragging about how the garbage collector will take care of them! The worst part, though, is that nothing even referenced these member variables. I couldn't believe it.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[Anonymous Coward]

And make performance worse. Jesus fucking christ, just learn to keep track of your shit and organize your program properly. It's really not that difficult.

Re:as someone who programmed for both

[WarlockD]

No, it really doesn't. Garbarge collection in the Macro or Compact framework is kind of bare-bones.

I can see it now, however. Someone used to designing a full fledged .NET web app or desktop app told to make a .NET app for the iPhone. Then they will wonder why its so slow...

I like .NET because its GC is much much better than Java's. I am even tempted to mess around with some of the cheap .NET Micro development kits that are floating around. But if its performance you need, go to C++ or even Apples Obj-C. Garbage collection is both a method to make program's easier to write and a safeguard for memory leaks. Its not a tell all cure:P

Certainly won't displace it in...

[weston]

... 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.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

The problem is, iPhone OS. Sure, an iPad might be able to do a lot of the things that a regular tablet can, but can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground? Nope. What about Flash? Nope. Yeah, perhaps Apple will release a breakthrough version that makes it usable, but Apple is going into netbook territory with neither the most user-friendly, innovative, feature complete or robust software library. On paper, the iPad is doomed to fail. Perhaps in person it might be different, but I tend to side with the people who think its going to fail to appeal to the masses.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[tepples]

You're right that iPhone OS makes even the early plan for Windows Starter Edition (with its 3-app limit) look like a multitasking powerhouse.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

If anybody on this planet has had time to play with an iPad, it's Steve Jobs. Seeing him fumble the device and make repeated typing errors during a public presentation does not inspire my confidence about its utility.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[weston]

The problem is, iPhone OS. Sure, an iPad might be able to do a lot of the things that a regular tablet can, but can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground? Nope. What about Flash? Nope.

Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone, and while there are setups in which it's a pretty big plus to have multiple apps open at the same time, it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now. Modal use might well be fine for a good chunk of people. Heck, sometimes I wonder if modal use might not be better for me. Maybe I'd spend less time farting around on slashdot if I had to close the app I was working in to read and post here. :)

On paper, the iPad is doomed to fail.

On paper. That's all anybody's got right now. :)

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[NatasRevol]

What the hell is it with you flash boys?

The multitasking I get - it would make it so much better as a useful appliance/netbook/superTouch.

But really why the hell should most people care about flash? So I can't play Bloons Tower Defender 4, or some other stupid game. Give me a real reason to need flash. My guess is whatever your reason, there's already an app for that.

I have <a href="http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/">click-to-flash</a> installed on my system. I love having nice grey boxes instead of ads, videos, etc. I love having the *control* to see them if I want and not if the advertiser wants me to.

That's fine if you like flash, but not everyone likes or even wants it.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone,

Not yet, but you have to realize that the iPhone was ahead of its time. When it was introduced you couldn't find a captive touch screen phone with Wi-Fi and a decent browser. It didn't exist. Today? There are dozens of them. The iPhone though has an installed user-base, many, many, many applications at this point. Android is getting closer and closer but the number of apps just isn't close to the same and a lot of games are iPhone exclusives from large game studios. Mix this in with no Android phones on AT&T yet, and restrictive contracts and you have a bunch of people who can't jump ship quite yet.

and while there are setups in which it's a pretty big plus to have multiple apps open at the same time, it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.

Has removing features ever been a good feature? There are very, very few setups where it -wouldnt- be a good thing to have multiple applications running the only time I can think of is with a phone or an underpowered machine. The iPad is neither a phone, nor an underpowered machine.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Anonymusing]

can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground?

Actually, I bet it can.

The only reason it doesn't, is because of the OS. It isn't a hardware limitation. Apple apps can background just fine: you can listen to your iTunes library while playing a game, or look up something on Google Maps while you're talking on the phone. Apple simply does not allow non-Apple apps to run in the background.

At least, it doesn't allow it yet. If it becomes an issue for marketing/selling the device, you can be sure that the Almighty Jobs will wave his magic engineering wand and *presto* suddenly the iPhone will be able to multitask. Probably already has it working back in the lab... along with Flash.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

What the hell is it with you flash boys?

Flash would open up a -lot- of content. Things like Hulu, Homestar Runner and many, many Flash games. How many times have you run into sites that are Flash only? There are still a lot of them out there, or sites with HTML, but Flash navigation.

But really why the hell should most people care about flash? So I can't play Bloons Tower Defender 4, or some other stupid game. Give me a real reason to need flash. My guess is whatever your reason, there's already an app for that.

Hulu.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[BearRanger]

Oh no! Steve Jobs is ill! Fumbling his new tablet proves it! He'll be dead inside of a week! As a previous poster said, let's wait and see for ourselves.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

....Which is why I said that

The problem is, iPhone OS

I never said anything about the hardware, only the OS powering it.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Draek]

Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone

Because it's a phone. People are used to downloading specialized, overpriced, horrible 'ports' of games for their phones already. Netbooks, however, are a whole different experience with whole different (and higher) expectations.

it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.

Two words: music listening. If you had to close down your browser to listen to music on your netbook, the entire market would likely dissapear overnight.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[bar-agent]

Has removing features ever been a good feature?

Er, yeah. The feature of fewer features generally gets described as "now even easier to use," and a lot of software would benefit from it. (Background apps might not be one of the features that is good to remove, but that is a different question.)

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[introspekt.i]

Blegh, Flash. Apple not supporting it gives the web world a smidge more incentive to make the leap to HTML5, webGL, and Javascript for the two instead of lugging around the bear that is Flash. Hulu and all those other guys can work to integrate that stuff in to the new HTML5 like Youtube is currently doing. Hulu can also (and probably will) make an App for the iPad that will sidestep this problem entirely.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[introspekt.i]

Oh, and Homestar Runner publishes a lot of its content on iTunes already. There are also tons and tons a cheap/free games in the App Store to stave off the desire to go play those awesome cheap/free Flash games out there on the net.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

Hulu has been saying that they are going to release an app for the iPhone since April of last year with now no progress. Apple is not the main opponent to HTML5, webGL and advanced Javascript features, Microsoft and IE are. And yes, even when IE doesn't have a majority marketshare it still will be a problem. No one wants to lock out 30% of potential users, and Flash will still be supported on every major desktop platform for the near future and Apple mobile devices make up a tiny amount of marketshare in the grand scheme of things.

And about your other post about Homestar Runner offering stuff via iTunes, that is great, but it still takes up space, isn't fast downloading and may require you to sync your iPad with the computer which, if my iPod is any indication will take longer to "process" the file than it does to actually download it.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

It may be described as easy to use, but is it really any easier to use? For example, Chrome may be "easier to use" than Firefox, but is so limited in its options there are a lot of people still using Firefox which is inferior in many features, but has more features that Chrome lacks.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[NatasRevol]

Really???? Your one real reason is Hulu?!?!?

That's V E R Y F U C K I N G L A M E.

TV sucks. Putting it through a flash player doesn't make it any better.

And I know that as I watch out of market hockey games on flash-only justin.tv.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[DarkJC]

Yeah, just like he was a speed demon on the iPhone when he announced that in 2007 right? How is this modded insightful?

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

So what you're saying is that you are okay with a full size device suffering from the same user input flaws as the iPhone.

Alright.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Gee. Hulu. A way to get TV shows that isn't the iTunes store. A way to get TV shows without paying Apple. I think I see why there is no Flash for the iDevice lineup.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Anonymous Coward]

it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.

Two words: music listening. If you had to close down your browser to listen to music on your netbook, the entire market would likely dissapear overnight.

Sure - but if the iPad works the same way the iPhone/iPad works, listing to music while you do other things isn't a problem. The lack of multitasking just means that you can't listen to external music streams (last.fm, pandora, etc). By all means, complain about the lack of multitasking, but at least complain about it for the right reason...

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[naz404]

News Flash bro.

You may not like/need Flash, but a lot of people like it, maybe most.

Why don't you check out the current Ars Technica poll on how many people would like to have Flash on the iPad:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/01/poll-technica-do-you-want-flash-on-the-ipad.ars

And yes, Flash is a gaming platform unparalleled on the browser. You may not like Flash games, but a lot of people do. Flash has also ushered back the golden age of game development in the 80s where you could have just 1-3 people teams pumping out fun games, unlike in the late 90's to early 2000s before the explosion of casual gaming where to push out a game in the industry meant spending millions of dollars with tens to hundreds of developers per project, and it was all 3D, 3D, 3D and idea rehashes.

The ease with which authors can ties together together animation, illustration, design, sound & interaction on Flash is has no equal. Not everyone is a developer and that's why HTML5 will not kill Flash.

Coding slick GUIs and programmatic animation ain't an easy task and designers/animators/multimedia artists without programming backgrounds can't pull those off easily. Flash changed that.

H.264 video is also here now with YouTube, but Mozilla Foundation ain't willing to pony up for the proprietary codec so don't expect to see an H.264 bundled video player on Firefox soon. These HTML5 in-browser media players ain't as easy to reskin and meld with other interactive elements as Flash though so you can go stay in your bland Jakob Nielsen-esque world for all everyone else cares.

Btw, re: Flash's sub-par performance on the Mac, it's not all Adobe's fault. See this post from Lee Brimelow of Adobe (scroll down to comment #62):

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703
"Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business. Another thing to note is that the site you showed is filled with Flash and just because it takes up a lot of CPU doesnt mean that kids will not want to play with it. Give people the option is what Im saying."

It is a humorous world in how Microsoft is much more open than Apple.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Anonymusing]

I never said anything about the hardware, only the OS powering it.

Quite true. I shouldn't have inserted the hardware comment.

I still think the OS is perfectly capable of multitasking because it DOES multitask very nicely. I guess I was trying to differentiate between "The iPhone OS is incapable of multitasking" and "Apple has simply introduced an artificial limit on multitasking".

My apologies if I'm splitting hairs.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Tsiangkun]

+1

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[DarkJC]

No, but thanks for putting words in my mouth. I'm saying making an assumption about the typing experience based on the abilities of Steve Jobs is idiotic, because he was a piss poor typer on the iPhone too.

Anyone who owns an iPhone knows that the typing abilities of Steve Jobs during the 2007 conference are in no way an indication of what the software keyboard is capable of. This has nothing to do with whether I think the software keyboard on the iPad will be something I'm ok with.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[node 3]

can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground?

This isn't going to be much of a hinderance. While there are some YouTube clips that are really just audio with unimportant video (Feynman lectures, for example), but it's a fairly safe assumption that you'll want to actually watch the YouTube clip you are playing.

Nope. What about Flash? Nope.

Aside from Hulu (which could quite simply create an app, which one must assume they are working on), what's the loss? Porn? I suppose that's not to be completely discounted.

Or flash games? Really? There's no keyboard or mouse to play them, assuming that flash performance is going to be worthwhile anyway. How many flash games are there that are completely playable via clicking? This isn't a huge loss, and more than made up for in app store games.

Apple is going into netbook territory with neither the most user-friendly, innovative, feature complete or robust software library.

Are you kidding? Netbooks are pretty much the bottom of the barrel in terms of user-friendliness, innovation, or features. All they are are miniature, and very slow notebooks, running a full-sized OS, which does poorly at the limited screen size and resolution.

But since Apple has chosen to write an OS specifically designed for the form factor, the multitouch interface, and portable usage patterns. You don't see this sort of specialization in the netbook realm except for things like Ubuntu Netbook Remix (which is done very well), ChromeOS (which also unfairly gets put down for not being a full-featured OS--well, that's the whole point!), Android (not terribly compelling), and a handful of other Linux projects.

On paper, the iPad is doomed to fail. Perhaps in person it might be different, but I tend to side with the people who think its going to fail to appeal to the masses.

Why? The people who say it's going to fail are those that are basically complaining about it not being Mac OS X with a stylus. Having seen the demo, and reading the reviews of people who've actually used them, I have no doubt that people will find them very appealing. The only thing in doubt, in my mind, is whether people will decide they want to buy that mid-range product. I think they will, but only time will tell.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Anonymous Coward]

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[UttBuggly]

Actually, the iPhone and the iPad DO multi-task, just not with 3rd party apps. Flash is ugly; HTML5 or even SilverLight is a better choice. People have found methods for an iPad camera in the SDK; what else is in there that's not enabled....yet?

The reasons for WHEN and WHAT the iPad is and is not are not technical at all. It's financial. Apple wanted to get in front of the buying public with the iPad before some competing tablets hit the market. The price isn't the $999 some predicted; even the 64GB/3G model is less than that.

If they enabled multi-tasking out of the box, they risk performance and reliability issues with the 1st gen release and lose some revenue from the closed ecosystem of iTunes, etc. and bad press. Basically, I think Apple is gambling a bit until OS 4.0 is ready, at which time they'll allow/turn on all the "stuff" people are crying about being absent.

And no one I know has any problem saying "Gonna play with my Wii" with a straight face.

My 2 cents...

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[node 3]

Missing Flash hasn't killed the iPhone

Because it's a phone. People are used to downloading specialized, overpriced, horrible 'ports' of games for their phones already. Netbooks, however, are a whole different experience with whole different (and higher) expectations.

How many flash games are playable via multitouch? Specifically, no keyboard, just clicking on parts of the board.

Besides, there's no reason to assume that people who currently buy apps on the iPhone will suddenly balk at the prospect of buying them on the iPad. And it's not like there's going to be a shortage of free games, as well.

it's an open question whether it's important to have multiple applications open at the same time in the market netbooks are filling into right now.

Two words: music listening. If you had to close down your browser to listen to music on your netbook, the entire market would likely dissapear overnight.

How has this notion that somehow the iPad can't play music while doing other things become such a common myth? The iPhone has been able to do this since day one.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[node 3]

Gee. Hulu. A way to get TV shows that isn't the iTunes store. A way to get TV shows without paying Apple. I think I see why there is no Flash for the iDevice lineup.

Both SlingBox and EyeTV have apps in the App Store. There's no reason to believe Apple will deny a Hulu app.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[kramerd]

I agree, you have no idea what you are talking about.

For half of the cost of the cheapest ipad, you can get a netbook, which has more features, and 10x the hard drive (if not 30x).

After giving apple a shot. I have noticed that on literally every product produced, a cheaper, better alternative already exists.

You are claiming that I should give apple a shot, and compare the ipad to anything else. I'm not gonna buy one unless its better, regardless of price. Don't hold your breath.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[node 3]

Why don't you check out the current Ars Technica poll on how many people would like to have Flash on the iPad:

Polls like this have the problem of people are just going to say yes, after all, why not? The proof is in the pudding, and the iPhone and iPod touch have done just fine without Flash.

I'm not saying that people don't actually want it, but it really doesn't matter all that much.

And yes, Flash is a gaming platform unparalleled on the browser. You may not like Flash games, but a lot of people do. Flash has also ushered back the golden age of game development in the 80s where you could have just 1-3 people teams pumping out fun games

The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.

Btw, re: Flash's sub-par performance on the Mac, it's not all Adobe's fault. See this post from Lee Brimelow of Adobe (scroll down to comment #62):

http://theflashblog.com/?p=1703 [theflashblog.com]
"Apple is not cooperating in our attempts to improve the performance of the Flash Player on the Mac. Microsoft is, and in FP 10.1 we cut the CPU utilization in half for watching video. Same with other mobile device manufactures. We would love to work with Apple to do the same but they are making a strategic decision not too so that they can increase their revenue. Hey thats business. Another thing to note is that the site you showed is filled with Flash and just because it takes up a lot of CPU doesnt mean that kids will not want to play with it. Give people the option is what Im saying."

That's absurd. Apple isn't keeping Flash running poorly for financial reasons. Apple has a specific way to accelerate video on Mac OS X. If Flash can't utilize this, that's Adobe's fault. Of course, the way Flash works, it doesn't really have a way to interact with QuickTime, but it seems they should be able to do something with OpenCL.

What's more, Flash on Linux also isn't accelerated, and Adobe has full access to the source code there. The problem isn't openness or financial incentives, it's in how Flash interacts with the system. Adobe keeps taking jabs at Apple about openness, or insinuating financial motives, simply because they know it will resonate with a certain audience.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[naz404]

The same is true for iPhone games. Further, the overwhelming majority of Flash games will be unplayable on a multitouch device. They just aren't designed to be played by nothing more than clicking the mouse.

Huh? You obviously haven't been playing much Flash games, have you? Mouse-only Flash games have been around since forever. They constitute quite a significant portion of Flash games and would have no problems running on a stylus/tablet device. Try visiting Ferry Halim's awards-winning Orisinal games. Tapping on touch devices/tablets is no problem too since those are just normal mouse calls on Flash. No problem with em running on multi-touch too since since the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 (coming out on both desktop and mobile devices) has multi-touch support.

Regarding Mac performance, from what I know, there's an certain class & method needed by Adobe engineers to do certain acceleration on OSX, but access isn't being given by Apple's APIs. With Linux acceleration (Flash has now been using the GPU for acceleration for a while), there's quite a number of complications like incompatibility with Compiz Fusion enabled (See this entry by Penguin.swf, one of the lead Flash engineers working on Linux -> http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2008/05/flash_uses_the_gpu.html.

Check out John Gruber's excellent post at http://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash:
I've been hard on Flash Player for Mac OS X, but this performance situation is not entirely in Adobe's hands. On Windows, Flash makes use of hardware decoding for H.264, if available. On Mac OS X, it does not. This is one reason why Flash video playback performs better on Windows than Mac OS X, and also why H.264 playback on Mac OS X is better through QuickTime (which does use hardware decoding).

According to Adobe, though, this is because they can't. Heres an entry from their Flash Player FAQ:

Q. Why is hardware decoding of H.264 only supported on the Windows platform?

A. In Flash Player 10.1, H.264 hardware acceleration is not supported under Linux and Mac OS. Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs. We will continue to evaluate when to support this feature on Mac and Linux platforms in future releases.

Adobe platform evangelist Lee Brimelow posted a weblog entry addressing this:

But let's talk more about the Flash Player on the Mac. If it is not 100% on par with the Windows player people assume that it is all our fault. The facts show that this is simply not the case. Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video that we released with Flash Player 10.1. Here you can see some published results for how much the situation has improved on Windows. Unfortunately we could not add this acceleration to the Mac player because Apple does not provide a public API to make this happen. You can easily verify that by asking Apple. Im happy to say that we still made some improvements for the Mac player when it comes to video playback, but we simply could not implement the hardware acceleration. This is but one example of stumbling blocks we face when it comes to Apple.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[naz404]

Or flash games? Really? There's no keyboard or mouse to play them, assuming that flash performance is going to be worthwhile anyway. How many flash games are there that are completely playable via clicking?

You, good sir, are talking out of your ass. Obviously you haven't been playing Flash games. Mouse-only Flash games used to be the predominant form of Flash games and they still consist a significant portion of them. Just do a simple Google search on the top Flash games of the past decade and look at the lists. Example. Be sure to also check out Ferry Halim's Orisinal. These would have no problems running on a 1024x768 tablet.

This isn't a huge loss, and more than made up for in app store games.

There are more and better fun flash games on the browser than there are App store games. The wealth of flash games is just incredible. The App Store does not more than make up for this and not all App Store games are free.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[node 3]

You, good sir, are talking out of your ass. Obviously you haven't been playing Flash games. Mouse-only Flash games used to be the predominant form of Flash games and they still consist a significant portion of them.

The iPad doesn't have a mouse. All you can do is click. No dragging, not right-clicking, just click. And what happens if you click two places?

My point isn't that there are no games that would work, but that it's not like simply having Flash on the iPad would mean you can instantly use all those Flash apps out there. Quite a large portion will be unusable.

There are more and better fun flash games on the browser than there are App store games. The wealth of flash games is just incredible. The App Store does not more than make up for this and not all App Store games are free.

There are more games in the App Store than a person can possibly ever play. So it can't play Flash games, so what? The Xbox 360 can't play PS3 games, which can't play Wii games, etc. It's not a big deal, because they have their own games, just like the iPhone, and soon to be iPad do.

Lack of Flash is not going to be much of a problem, just as it's not a problem on the iPhone.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[evanspw]

but think how you'd use this. it's an appliance for consuming digital entertainment and information. it's not that big. this will not be used like a regular general purpose laptop is used. the only issue i see is flash support, but i'm willing to bet my own money that adobe will be on the platform in 60 days when Jobs is announcing a lot more details on this thing, and a few more features. adobe will have got their shit together and released a much less fucked up flash (probably with some DRM in it so apple can keep pron of the thing!)

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

but can it, say, play a YouTube video in the background while working on something in the foreground?

When are people here going to realise that such functionality is so far from critical that it just doesn't matter to most users. I certainly don't care about that sort of functionality for a small tablet device.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[TheRaven64]

Btw, re: Flash's sub-par performance on the Mac, it's not all Adobe's fault. See this post from Lee Brimelow of Adobe (scroll down to comment #62):

Yes it is. There are two ways of playing H.264 video on OS X. You can roll your own CODEC, run it entirely in software (on the CPU or GPU with shaders), or you can use the one in QuickTime, which will use whatever hardware is available. VLC does the former, and still manages to get a pretty low CPU load. Flash ships its own CODEC which is slower than both QuickTime and VLC. I can play 720p content in VLC or QuickTime player on my 1.5GHz PowerBook, but flash stutters and displays about two frames per second. On my C2D MacBook Pro, YouTube videos take about 5-10% of my CPU when played with QuickTime (than you ClickToFlash) or about 60% with the Flash plugin.

Adobe wants custom interfaces added to the graphics card interface for them, and that's not going to happen. Apple wants them to just use the same QuickTime code that everyone else uses for H.264, but Adobe refuses and insists on bloating their plugin with a lower-quality implementation of something that's shipped with the platform's standard libraries.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[TheRaven64]

Just to clarify, it's a problem with the window manager, not with the OS. The iPhone kernel is the same XNU kernel that you get on desktop OS X and does run several processes at once (the foreground app, the window server, various background services). When you switch between apps in the GUI, however, it kills the one that you switch away from. This isn't a technical limitation, it's a design decision. It's not a case of fixing the bug, it's a case of choosing not to have that behaviour.

Disabling multitasking was done because they didn't want to require swap. If only one app is running, then the amount of RAM available to the active app is fairly constant. This means that you are unlikely to hit out-of-memory conditions on an iPhone. Contrast this with Maemo, where the kernel will randomly decide to kill some of your processes if you run out of memory.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[SimonTheSoundMan]

We have Sky TV here in the UK, Apple has nothing against this app, or even streaming high quality video over 3G.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Phrogman]

Well if I never saw flash again, I wouldn't miss it. The most common place I see it? In advertisements where I am sure its bypassing any privacy settings I might have. Does it add to a webpage - not to me it doesn't.
The few games I couldn't play because I lacked flash, would be the exact same games I never play anyways.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Webcommando]

Disabling multitasking was done because they didn't want to require swap. If only one app is running, then the amount of RAM available to the active app is fairly constant. This means that you are unlikely to hit out-of-memory conditions on an iPhone. Contrast this with Maemo, where the kernel will randomly decide to kill some of your processes if you run out of memory.

This is probably true and isn't that bad (I remember having to clear memory on my old PDA which was odd since it supposedly hid that from the user) in most cases.

However, I would like to be able to copy/paste between applications without having to start and stop each as I move between them. Since copy/paste is the only real way to move data between most applications, the start and stop and start process gets a bit old after awhile. Perhaps we can have one background task in a new iPhone OS?

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Anonymous Coward]

i swear to god they got rid of that limit... im running win7 starter on my acer aspire one, and it has definitely had more than 3 apps at a time open on it

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[WCguru42]

The lack of multitasking just means that you can't listen to external music streams (last.fm, pandora, etc).

That's the real shame. It made sense with the iPhone to limit the number of apps that could run at once to increase battery life. I hope that they release a modification to the OS for the iPad that would lift that restriction so pandora could run in the background as iTunes does.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[WCguru42]

How has this notion that somehow the iPad can't play music while doing other things become such a common myth? The iPhone has been able to do this since day one.

Probably well before day one of release. Probably around day one of design discussions.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[mdwh2]

But the burden is upon those who claim it will be successful. I can criticise those claims, without having ever seen one.

No, I haven't seen an Ipad. But I haven't seen most other tech products, just as most Apple fans haven't tried every other single tech product out there. But that doesn't stop them making claims about how Apple products are best, and for some reason we still have endless coverage over the unreleased iStale... You're right, I wish the speculation and media coverage would stop until (if) the thing is actually released. Then, it can have a single article, at most, just as happens with any other tech product.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[That's Unpossible!]

The difference is that this is a fucking media consuming device, not a desktop computer.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Darkness404]

How has this notion that somehow the iPad can't play music while doing other things become such a common myth? The iPhone has been able to do this since day one.

I listen to music from external sources (Pandora, YouTube, Last.FM) far more often than my media collection. I'd expect most other people do too.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[TheGreek]

This is probably true and isn't that bad (I remember having to clear memory on my old PDA which was odd since it supposedly hid that from the user) in most cases.

Why hide it from the user when you can eliminate it as a concern instead?

However, I would like to be able to copy/paste between applications without having to start and stop each as I move between them. Since copy/paste is the only real way to move data between most applications, the start and stop and start process gets a bit old after awhile. Perhaps we can have one background task in a new iPhone OS?

Or maybe application developers can follow Apple's guidelines and write applications that retain state and launch quickly.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[NatasRevol]

The one question Adobe can't answer about this:

Why is it that VLC can play a FLW video fine with good (ie low) CPU usage but Adobe can't?

And it shows that Adobe is lying.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[introspekt.i]

Hulu has been saying that they are going to release an app for the iPhone since April of last year with now no progress.

Doesn't mean they won't, especially with a better device for movies like the iPad.

Apple is not the main opponent to HTML5, webGL and advanced Javascript features

Apple actually supports those, making it a proponent, not an opponent.

And yes, even when IE doesn't have a majority marketshare it still will be a problem.

IE will be an ever shrinking problem to open standards. Especially with other players in the desktop market like Apple.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Wovel]

I'd expect you are wrong..

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Wovel]

Why not go after the content providers to use a better platform for presenting their content than attacking apple for not supporting what is far and away the buggiest piece of software in wide spread use on personal computing devices of all types.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Wovel]

You sure you want to support FP 10? It kind of goes against everything else you said in your post. It appears you do not know quite as much about the world of flash as you purport.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Wovel]

You do realize that apple would love all digital media to be DRM free right. People always seem to confuse the people who implement DRM when required by content owners with the content owners that require the implementation.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[Wovel]

And those products are thicker, heavier, more complex to operate and more prone to failure. Your right the alternatives are better if you ignore all of the things real people care about.

Re:Certainly won't displace it in...

[kramerd]

What "real people" are you talking about? Are there fake people standing around somewhere, buying things without thinking first (besides apple fanbois)? How is thinner a benefit? Oh wait, I get it; you want to pretend that you are strong by shattering the screen by flicking it.

More complex to operate is a plus in this case, because it means that it can do more things.

The heaviest netbooks are about 3.5 pounds (that's weight, not cost, pedantic British people). Unless you are physically disabled (in which case you don't need a portable computer), weight carries no weight in purchasing decisions.

As far as more prone to failure, what the fuck are you talking about? No one has any idea what the failure rate of an ipad might be. You have less than 0 basis for making such a claim.

Displace the netbook?

[nurb432]

Umm no.

1 - its far more expensive
2 - it has no keyboard
3 - did i mention it was expensive?

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

- It's more portable.
- It lasts longer on a charge.
- It gets you to the point (i.e. web browsing) faster than a netbook does.

Plausible, but not guaranteed to succeed or fail.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[icebraining]

4 - No Flash
5 - No builtin USB port

Re:Displace the netbook?

[tftp]

It doesn't matter if it is 1" smaller or larger than competing netbooks (of which there are many, of all sizes.) What matters is "does it do what I need it to do?" I think it doesn't. iPad is a pure consumption device; you can only consume services with it, but not create new stuff and not be creative generally. It doesn't even have a keyboard, which clearly shows that Apple doesn't intend you to type much (though you can buy an external kb.)

A netbook, on the other hand, is a complete small computer that can be used for anything that a computer is good for. You can type, you can browse, you can open PDFs (a big deal, actually!) and you can use Web sites that require Flash (there aren't many of those, but they do exist; some use Flash for perfectly good reasons;) I don't recall if iPad has Java - probably not, for the same reason as Flash. You can't have an interpreter on iPad, so Perl or Python or some other scripting language of choice is not possible. If you have a netbook, for example, you can pull photos out of your camera, edit them in Paint.Net (or GIMP) and email them on the go - with the iPad you can't do that. Lack of wire interfaces also makes the iPad useless as a controller for peripherals - no external HDD, no microphone or camera, no printer, etc. It's just for pure consumption - "sit still and consume what we tell you to." Hardly empowering.

So iPad can be used as a "tertiary" computer in an ultra-rich household, where it is fashionable to have a tablet for just browsing around. Those are the same people who bought Segways and pet rocks, I guess. Great market :-) Seriously, the world is large, and you can always sell any junk, the question is only "how many units."

I think Apple got blinded with success of iPhone. However iPhone's main advantage is that it is a phone; the fact that you can *also* run other programs on it is secondary. But iPad makes it a primary function, and I don't see too many people who want to spend around a $1K ($800 + taxes + data plan) just to run primitive software that is developed for iPhone and sold exactly for what it is worth.

I also don't know if it "gets you to the point" faster than the competition. I have an old Sansung Q1 UMPC; it needs about 45 seconds to come out of *hibernation* (and a couple of seconds from sleep) - I doubt that anyone is that much short on time to see any difference if he is setting down to do some work. My UMPC runs Windows (Vista, unfortunately - I haven't tried other options yet, want another HDD for that) but I can (and do) install any software that I need; I have several ebook readers (LIT from MS, for example) and Firefox with every adblocker under the Sun, etc. etc. That's value. I don't care if the Apple's tablet is thinner and lighter (it is lighter by 0.25 lb - big deal!) but I do care that my computer does what I want it to do.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I didn't say it was smaller, I said it was more portable. A netbook you have to unfold, set on a surface, then get the mouse out. "Deploy" is a better word. A tablet, in general I mean not just the iPad, has a better form factor for doing things like looking up information or doing small chunks of data entry. A netbook is lousy at this. When you do want to web browse or take notes or show a video to somebody, you take it out, hit the button, and you're already moving. Whether it satisfies you or not, a netbook trying to run a desktop OS is shooting itself in the foot in this regard.

Additionally, the iPad is almost all screen, so your PDF viewing would actually be a better experience. You're right that it's not at versatile at being 'creative', but I think you give too much credit to netbooks for this. I mean, really, are you going to do concept paintings on one? No. I've seen a number of netbook users over the last year or two and it's always about instant messaging, email, or hulu. The small screen and awkward configuration limit it to little more than that unless you like writing code on the bus.

There are benefits to it. Anybody with an iPhone or an iPod Touch can see the potential. Whether or not they back it up with money, well who knows. I don't see it being anywhere near as successful as its cousins. Then again, I'd much rather have one of those than a netbook. (I'd rather have a 17" laptop than both of them combined.) It is designed to do a few things well, and if those are things you value, you're good. A netbook does a lot of things... poorly. It might be adequate in some cases, but a lot of times it becomes a 'tertiary' computer in a household that can blow $400 in case they benefit a little from it. Sounds familiar, mm?

Funny thing is, the lowest-priced entry-level iPad would be more useful to me than a typical netbook. Heh.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You know I think my reply sounds snippier than I intended. My apologies, I'm not trying to antagonize you. I just wrote that in a little too much of a hurry.

If it helps to know, I'm mildly curious about the iPad, but I'm not chomping at the bit to buy one.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[tftp]

A tablet, in general I mean not just the iPad, has a better form factor for doing things like looking up information or doing small chunks of data entry.

I believe I mentioned that I have a tablet myself, and it has practically the same weight as the iPad. I can tell you, it is an awful fit for any computing "on the go". Too heavy to begin with, then iPad is hard to hold with one hand (my UMPC has grip space, thankfully). And it's just awkward all around to walk with the thing. I use my tablet for reading in bed, and I hold it with both hands, like a book. If you believe any data input is possible "on the go" - it just isn't so. You want to sit down, put the thing on the table (my UMPC has a flap on the back for that) and then you use the stylus (provided with mine) or the greasy fingers to work it.

I don't know how people are supposed to use the iPad. The keyboard demo shows that it should be standing nearly vertically (maybe at 75-80 degrees), but how do you do that without the keyboard stand? If you sit somewhere, like at a coffee shop, do you need to stack books behind it, or you must hold it in your hand all the time? If the latter, it sounds not very ergonomic. I understand that crew in ST:TNG are carrying tablets all the time, but rarely they are shown actually working on them; a tablet is mostly used to glance at. The computer in Captain's ready room is a desktop.

This is not something iPhone users are encountering because their device is small, and it doesn't need to be held for long (only while you dial a number, and do some other occasional computing.) Most of the time iPhone spends in the pocket, even if it plays music.

Then again, I'd much rather have one of those than a netbook. (I'd rather have a 17" laptop than both of them combined.)

As matter of fact, my main computer (that I type this on) is a 17" Fujitsu LifeBook. This was actually a nice purchase, previously I had only desktops. But now I know that there is a lot of value in a "desktop replacement" type of a notebook. I can carry it if necessary, but usually it sits on the desk and I use it as a desktop. It's plenty fast. The other computer, as I said, is the UMPC, and I have a PDA also. That's why I am so sure that the tablet idea is so limited and limiting - I have the thing for several years.

Funny thing is, the lowest-priced entry-level iPad would be more useful to me than a typical netbook. Heh.

Well, of course it's your decision, I only point out that the iPad will not have the selection of software that Windows/Linux users are familiar with, and it won't have a keyboard, and it won't have USB host or camera - something that netbooks usually have; even my Q1 tablet has all of the above, along with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, VGA output, *stereo* speakers and *stereo* microphones.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[tftp]

You know I think my reply sounds snippier than I intended.

I have no way of knowing what you intended, but I double-checked your comment, and my meter of snippiness is steadily showing zero :-)

As I said, it is not my purpose in life to stop you from buying a tablet :-) I just want to tell more about how well (or not) those devices perform in real world. The iPad - which nobody has, so far - may be better or worse in some aspects, but until it starts selling we won't know. That's why most of my concerns center around the generalities - how you hold it, how you use it. And of course we already know that it is a closed ecosystem.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with "more portable" than a netbook. Less weight is not the same as more portable for me. If I have to carry it in my hand or in a backpack, it has about the same portability as a netbook. If I can stick it in a pocket and still sit down, then I call it more portable.

I also believe that it will end up being less ergonomic in some situations:
1. If I want to attach a keyboard, I will also need some way to prop-up the iPad to the correct angle for me to see.
2. If I want to watch it like a TV, I need to prop it up again.
3. If I am carrying it around in a protective cover (because a big screen is just asking for scratches), I will need to remove the cover to get to it.

There are some situations where tablets are easier to handle, but there are also some where it is worse off than a netbook or laptop. And I don't think most users are going to want to buy an iPhone (for optimal portability), a netbook or laptop (for when you need an actual computer), AND a tablet (because it is sometimes a little better than a laptop/netbook). Again, for me, having one of these would feel like carrying around two iPhones, one of which won't fit in my pocket.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

- It's more portable.

Not substantially. Sure, its about 60% of the weight of most 8.9"-11.6" netbooks I've seen -- all of which are around 2.5-2.75 lbs -- but that doesn't make much practical difference. Its esaier to use standing up, but no more so than tablet convertibles (most of which are now also styled as "netbooks") that are available at similar prices to the iPad.

- It lasts longer on a charge.

Apple claims "up to 10 hours" active use, which is about the same as, or a little less than, I've seen claimed by most manufacturers of Atom N450 or N280 netbooks with 6-cell batteries; also, the same that is claimed by the manufacturer for the Atom Z520 powered netbook I'm using right now.

- It gets you to the point (i.e. web browsing) faster than a netbook does.

From standby, my netbook gets to web browsing pretty much instantly. If the iPad behaves like its cousins (e.g., iPhone), its quick to get to an app -- if you haven't actually turned it off. Which is analogous to standby on a netbook. Don't see a big advantage there.

Plus, netbooks -- in addition to being available much cheaper -- don't depend on the user having another computer available. A netbook can be the users only computer, an iPad can't.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

A netbook, on the other hand, is a complete small computer that can be used for anything that a computer is good for. You can type, you can browse, you can open PDFs (a big deal, actually!) and you can use Web sites that require Flash (there aren't many of those, but they do exist; some use Flash for perfectly good reasons;)

Very many popular Facebook games, for instance, use Flash. Whether or not this is a good reason or not, it something that means lots of people are going to disappointed if they spend twice the cost of a netbook for a mobile device whose big selling point is convenience for browsing the web and they find they can't do one of their main uses of the web on it.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Are you actually having a fully functional standby on your netbook? Which OS? The only laptop I've ever had that had a standby that worked for more than a few weeks after purchase was my Mac. In Windows land it's been my experience that you're risking having to do a full reboot every time yous standby.

> A netbook can be the users only computer, an iPad can't.

^ I don't understand this statement. I haven't synced my iPhone in ages, but I've installed plenty of things on it. The main reason I don't have a netbook right now is because my iPhone is doing 90% of the work I'd use a netbook for. A bigger one would be nice. (Although it's not nice enough yet for me to drop $500 on it.)

Re:Displace the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

Are you actually having a fully functional standby on your netbook? Which OS? The only laptop I've ever had that had a standby that worked for more than a few weeks after purchase was my Mac. In Windows land it's been my experience that you're risking having to do a full reboot every time yous standby.

I've never had a problem, with either this netbook -- which I've only had a few days -- or either of the two previous WinXP laptops I've had (one of which eventually mostly died for other reasons) with standby. Linux, sure, there I've seen problems with standby on laptops -- though Ubuntu 9.10 seems much better than previous versions -- but not Windows.

I don't understand this statement. I haven't synced my iPhone in ages, but I've installed plenty of things on it.

For iPhone, the two things for which a computer with iTunes is required that I see as basic functionality are, IIRC, (1) initial activation of some functionality, and (2) -- which I'm more sure of -- OS updates. From what I've heard, the iPad will be similarly dependent on iTunes, thus the Mac and Windows system requirements on the iPad tech specs. Its not a constant dependency, but its something that makes an iPad not viable as the only computer for a user.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

A netbook you have to unfold, set on a surface, then get the mouse out.

Unfold, sure. I can use mine in my hand, and I've yet to see a netbook that requires an external mouse (sure, most support one -- or anything else you feel like plugging into their USB ports -- but they are fully functional without one. They have touchpads for a reason.

Sure, Its more efficient for heavy use to set it on a surface -- particularly if I'm going to be doing heavy typing. But if I'm going to be doing that with an iPad with anything like the same facility, I need to setup the stand for the display and the dock-connnected keyboard accessory, which is a lot more deployment than for the netbook.

Additionally, the iPad is almost all screen, so your PDF viewing would actually be a better experience.

I dunno, I prefer a netbook for that. Sure, the iPod is all -- 9.7", 1024x768 -- screen. My netbook is only half screen, but that half is 11.6", 1366x768. Held like a book in the left hand, page controls worked with the right, its a decent PDF reading experience. Not ideal --
I'd prefer a bigger, e-Ink reader device. But not something that makes me wish I had a smaller LCD screen, either.

You're right that it's not at versatile at being 'creative', but I think you give too much credit to netbooks for this. I mean, really, are you going to do concept paintings on one? No. I've seen a number of netbook users over the last year or two and it's always about instant messaging, email, or hulu.

The most common thing I've seen people doing with netbooks over the years is taking notes in meetings -- which, in fact, is what sold me on the one I'm using right now. I wouldn't really want to use a touch-screen keyboard for that -- there's a pretty big advantage to tactile feedback.

There are benefits to it. Anybody with an iPhone or an iPod Touch can see the potential.

I have an iPhone. That makes me very conscious of both the possibilities and the limitation of the interface style. I think the iPad will carve a decent market niche out for itself, but I don't think it has the slightest chance of displacing netbooks in general because, price aside, the things its good at aren't the things netbooks are best at. Their niches are different. The markets overlap somewwhat (especially now that UMPCs that aren't notebook-style and tablet convertibles are being marketed as "netbooks"), but there is still quite a bit where they don't.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[unity]

Standby works great on my netbook running windows 7. Takes only a second or two at most to come back alive and ready to go. Works just fine on my vista laptops too from various manufacturers. XP had some issues but long ago and primarily due to needing uninterupted disk space large enough to handle all the ram on the box, so if you added more ram you ran into issues.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Thanks for the info. I wish I could say I've had such a pleasant experience with XP and standby.

For iPhone, the two things for which a computer with iTunes is required that I see as basic functionality are, IIRC, (1) initial activation of some functionality, and (2) -- which I'm more sure of -- OS updates. From what I've heard, the iPad will be similarly dependent on iTunes, thus the Mac and Windows system requirements on the iPad tech specs. Its not a constant dependency, but its something that makes an iPad not viable as the only computer for a user.

I have to admit, I don't really understand where you're coming from, here. First, the OS updates are infrequent. Honestly, they're not typically that big of deal, either. They're optional. If you're going to make that a requirement, then what about updating your netbook to Windows 7? You're not doing that without a computer, either. I'll concede, though, that an urgent security update would indeed be obnoxious. However, this hasn't really happened, yet. *fingers crossed*

Second, I'm not sure where this 'only computer' requirement came from. It's not something Apple's pushing, and frankly, I don't see why a netbook would be held to that standard. It's neat that on a fundamental level a netbook can do what your desktop does. Now maybe my requirements for a computer are steeper than most, but between the low-res screen, lack of storage, and its running on a low-power CPU, I can't imagine somebody getting a netbook and going "yep, that'll be my only computer!" That's not what you'd buy a netbook or a tablet for. You'd buy either because you have a need where a portable device would work. If you need a keyboard to take notes in a meeting, blammo, netbook. If you need to read docs, browse the web, view quicktimes etc (which would help me at my job), the iPad would potentially kick its butt. (Actually this brings up a point in your favor: If I have to sync the stupid thing just to get a quicktime on it, that blows goats. FFS Apple, put an SD slot in it!)

This is too much like the Kindle vs. Netbook debate a few months ago. I see room for both.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

I have to admit, I don't really understand where you're coming from, here. First, the OS updates are infrequent. Honestly, they're not typically that big of deal, either. They're optional. If you're going to make that a requirement, then what about updating your netbook to Windows 7? You're not doing that without a computer, either.

Actually, what I'd need to do that if I wanted to is an external optical drive, not another computer. (At least, AFAIK, you need an optical drive to do a Win7 update, there may be some other means I don't know about.)

Certainly, I've already -- and I only got the computer this week -- added Ubuntu 9.10 to it alongside Windows (via Wubi) without either another computer or an optical drive.

Second, I'm not sure where this 'only computer' requirement came from.

From reality. There are people that buy netbooks as their only computer, because it does what they need.

It's not something Apple's pushing

Right, in fact, its something Apple flat out says that the iPad can't do. Along with the things the iPad is poorly suited to that netbooks are well suited for, this is why I believe the idea posited in TFS of the iPad displacing netbooks rather than -- assuming it succeeds -- coexisting alongside them is not particularly credible.

That's not what you'd buy a netbook or a tablet for. You'd buy either because you have a need where a portable device would work. If you need a keyboard to take notes in a meeting, blammo, netbook. If you need to read docs, browse the web, view quicktimes etc (which would help me at my job), the iPad would potentially kick its butt.

I'm having trouble seeing how an iPad would kick a netbooks butt at browsing the web, viewing quicktimes, or reading docs.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Along with the things the iPad is poorly suited to that netbooks are well suited for, this is why I believe the idea posited in TFS of the iPad displacing netbooks rather than -- assuming it succeeds -- coexisting alongside them is not particularly credible.

That really hinges on what the masses really buy netbooks for. I seriously seriously seriously doubt the majority of them are buying them as machine replacements. Reality may disagree with me, but I think they're mainly purchased for web-browsing on the go. And again, this is just opinion here, but I think that's also why both the iPhone and iPod Touch have been successful despite the offerings of the competition.

I'm having trouble seeing how an iPad would kick a netbooks butt at browsing the web, viewing quicktimes, or reading docs.

It's all display. A netbook, at best, is half-display. It also has an OS and apps tuned to its configuration all the way down to the application level. Somebody browsing with Safari's touch-interface is going to run circles around the guy trying to use a trackpad, for example. The netbook you mentioned is short 168 pixels vertically and it's running a browser not specifically designed to fit in that context.

As I write this, though, I'm realizing that my sense of scale of how big a netbook and an iPad in relation to each other is probably skewed. Is your netbook's display roughly the size of the Tablet's? If so, I may have shot one of my own points in the foot. Oh well. :)

Re:Displace the netbook?

[selven]

No keyboard's the big one. Even photoshop use is sped up dramatically with keyboard shortcuts. Vim users would die trying to do their work with a touchscreen keyboard.

Re:Displace the netbook?

[Anonymous Coward]

So use a real keyboard? If that's "the big one", I'm curious what the others are, because the no keyboard thing is about as close to a non-issue as one can get. You've got an option for a dockable keyboard, and Bluetooth keyboards as well. No need to use the touchscreen keyboard for those tasks where a real one is neeeded.

A tablet (not necessarily an Apple one) and a Bluetooth keyboard is a dream portable for many users.

Not seeing any netbook displacement

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Not seeing any netbook displacement

[DragonWriter]

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 real problem, as I see it, has nothing to do with developers. A netbook can be the one and only computer for a user that doesn't need a lot of horsepower, but needs mobility, and a model with 3G support costs less than half as much as an iPad with 3G support (and, if you need 3G support, your going to get a data plan anyway, and a netbook is even cheaper up-front when carrier subsidized with a contract for a data plan.) An iPad, on the other hand, is substantially more expensive and requires the user to have and keep another computer just to run iTunes.

The iPad might succeed, but until it can be a first computer and becomes more price competitive, its not going to displace netbooks. Plus, the lack of an integral keyboard makes it not particularly useful for certain roles for which netbooks are ideal.

Re:Not seeing any netbook displacement

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Multitasking on such a device is overrated. It hasn't stopped the iPhone from becoming popular. The iPad is not meant to be a desktop or laptop replacement, so why are so many people assuming it needs such capabilities?

Re:Not seeing any netbook displacement

[Anonymous Coward]

I know it's an Apple product, but you actually have to look at the price before calling it steep.

Re:Not seeing any netbook displacement

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

How is this flamebait? Some people here have no idea how people use computers. Why is multitasking so important on a small, portable device? There are definitely a few cases where lack of multitasking is inconvenient or even a big problem, but most of the time, for most people, it's not an issue. Tell me why it's a problem rather than modding me down.

umm...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Missing Remoting

[chrpai]

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.

Raskin's Dream incarnate

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[The End Of Days]

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

No, I really do. I want to upload a picture, listen to music, and chat with friends at the same time. I want to be able to start a long network action and not have to watch it finish because switching away will cause it to abort.

And just so you don't think I'm talking out my ass, these are things that annoy me about my iPhone today. Raskin's vision is interesting, but like all ideals, it needs tempering with reality.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[seandiggity]

Let's not forget, Raskin is responsible for the one-button mouse :P

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[DragonWriter]

it's 1.5 times the width of your fingers so it balances perfectly in one hand.

My iPhone certainly isn't 1.5 times the width of my fingers. Newsflash: humans come in a fairly wide variety of sizes.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[goombah99]

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

No, I really do. I want to upload a picture, listen to music, and chat with friends at the same time. I want to be able to start a long network action and not have to watch it finish because switching away will cause it to abort.

And just so you don't think I'm talking out my ass, these are things that annoy me about my iPhone today. Raskin's vision is interesting, but like all ideals, it needs tempering with reality.

Well dandy, then get a laptop. I'm not saying there is no place for laptops. I'm saying this device is the info appliance and on that kind of device it needs to be task focused.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Anonymous Coward]

You are such an Apple whore

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Anonymous Coward]

Euh, he was talking about the iPad, not the iPhone.

In more words: the iPad is 1.5 times as wide as your fingers are long.

And not that it really matters, but there is more variation in the height and weight of humans than in the length of their fingers. Most people will be able to comfortably hold the iPad in one hand, just like most people have no trouble using a phone.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I find "eberharts classic video showing off mouse and button based editing, along with cellular communications"? Thanks!

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This makes no sense. How is a daemon not background processing?

Anyway, the issue is not that the iPad lacks multitasking capability, rather that it imposes constraints on it.

You did not need it and you are now better off without it.

Gee, and here I was thinking that it was devices that needed to cater to my requirements, when really it's the other way round. However did we ever get on without people like you?

This is why other devices that don't get what's being created here are going to fail.

And what exactly IS being created here? A device whose main selling point (direct from the CEO, no less) is the "phenomonal" ability to view a single web page, and is overall unspecialised, less functional and costs more than competing devices? Yep, sounds like a sure-fire market success to me...

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[evanspw]

bang on goombah99. a corollary of what you've said is that the maintenance for this thing is gonna be much much simpler than for a general purpose PC. i reckon that will be a monster word-of-mouth selling point. folks will be telling each other other how bloody simple it all is compared to the PC that's gathering dust in the back room.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[ricotest]

I just find the implementation to clunky to tolerate and I miss my multi-tasking view. The iphone OS enforces this work mode

Yeah, I think you said just about all that needs to be said.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[siride]

A hammer is obvious to use because it has one extremely specific and very simple purpose. We already have plenty of tech devices like that, like digital thermometers, watches, etc. But for anything informational that is more complicated than those things, the ability for the device to be "as obvious as a hammer" is going to become impossible.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[TheRaven64]

I actually had this argument with him a few months before he died. He had changed his mind about mice, and thought that they should have multiple buttons, each with a well-defined function (like the RiscOS model), but didn't see the advantage of shipping one-button mice, specifically that it forced people to design user interfaces that worked with a touchscreen.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[tomhudson]

A hammer is obvious to use because it has one extremely specific and very simple purpose.

... ummm ... you lack imagination? ... or missed your morning coffee?

Whacking things is only one of the many fine uses for a hammer.

It's also a m nail puller.

And if it's big enough, you can use it as an anvil

You can also use the claw on it for help in climbing. Ask any mountaineer or tree-climber.

Or for making holes in drywall when you want to mount something into a wall space.

Or for wedging a door open.

Sure, it's not as general-purpose as a nice big screwdriver, but it's not just for hammering.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put, and do not forget the SECURITY advantage of not having nasty crap running in the background ...

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[The End Of Days]

I get that you're saying that. I'm saying what you are insisting is what this device needs to be is something that no one really wants.

People don't want to be bothered with explicit management of multitasking and system resources and so forth, certainly. That fits in with the Raskin dream. They definitely don't want to have to stare at a machine trying to finish something because they can't start something else, though. That's the big multitasking win, if you aren't aware. It's not doing multiple things at the same time, it's being able to let something that needs no attention finish itself why you do something else.

Don't know where the UI theorists lost sight of that simple fact. No one wants to stare at a progress bar and not be able to do anything else, and with this paradigm it happens way too frequently and it really isn't necessary. Stepping away from a task doesn't need to end it, and insisting that it does is just going to alienate people. The proof, of course, is that Apple-blessed apps can multitask. Quit the iPod app, the music keeps playing. Quit the Pandora app, bye bye. This is just a market power grab, not devotion to a UI style.

The market will tell, of course, but I suspect this is going to be a war between the iDevice way and the Chrome netbook way, with Chrome the winner unless Steve loosens the task switching reins a little.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[TheGreek]

How is a daemon not background processing?

It is background processing.

But instead of 10 background tasks monitoring twitter, RSS, AIM, Facebook, etc., there's just one task.

And chances are it's not killing the battery by chewing 10% CPU all the time for no reason just because the guy who wrote it doesn't know what Instruments is or how to use it.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[sootman]

Some good points, but one little snag...

"Multi-tasking is a dumb way to do this. it puts the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device."

Er, the device isn't SENTIENT, you know. You can ONLY interact in ways that programmers have PREDICTED and PROGRAMMED FOR. For example*, it is a HUGE PAIN IN THE ASS to send multiple pics in an email. Select a pic, copy, press the "home" button, tap "Mail", paste, press "home", tap on "Pictures", find the pic again (starting again at the bottom--the damn thing doesn't even stay where you left it!), etc etc etc. This is very much a case of "[putting] the load for managing the interaction on the human not the device"!!!

Think I should post them to Flickr or Facebook? Well, I can use the app, if one has been written. But what if I want to post to a smaller service? What if I already have my own online gallery? Hell, I can't even send my pics to Walgreens, since they have a web-based uploader (no user-browsable filesystem!) and they haven't written an app.

I agree that there's a place for simplicity and I think the iPad is pretty spiffy but come on, you can't even easily switch between an IM session and another app. Yes, there are some IM apps with notifications, but what if you want to IM while playing a game, and the game is one that doesn't save state perfectly when you press "home"?

Furthermore, push notifications are NOT equal to local daemons in all cases. They're great if you want to get data from the outside world, but what if you want to a) ACT on data from the outside world (example: I want my iPhone to download the local temperature hourly and sound an alarm if it goes above or below a certain point), or b) what if you want to SEND data from the iPhone--for example, I want my phone to post its location to a server every hour. There are some truly great things that could be done with background processes and it'd be great to have an inch of leeway here.

* not so much an example of multitasking being needed per se, but an example of how hard it is to do things that weren't accounted for, or if they were, that weren't accounted for well.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[goombah99]

I understand what you are saying. And for us power geeks it makes sense to go to something else while waiting. But for most folks it does not I think. Certainly not my mother. And oddly I have to admit that enforcing some discipline on me would help too.

By the latter what I mean is, my first encounter with a mac in 1984, was frustrating. I would get livid that I could not eject the disk. I had to wait for the app to quit, then the finder to eject the disk under computer control. Just let me push the button like on my PC.

But then after a while I noticed something. I never lost any unsaved data on the mac. I could do a lot more complex things on the mac because I could undo them. All that time I felt was wasted when it was caching undo or saving not just text but graphics and font info, and not letting me eject an inconsistent state floppy, let me actually do more.

SO I gained some respect for enforcing consistency because it became empowering rather than a limitation. I was freed to do more because of the computer took care of the things I really should not have to worry about but did. When I go to another computer, should I worry if my graphics are stored in the resource fork or some other place? The mac was bundling those while the windows machine was just a mess you had to manage yourself.

Consider the lowly one button mouse. I don't like them but I do appreciate what they gained me. They required application designers to desing apps that could use a one button mouse. that created a lot of consistency in the apple interface so that you could move from application to application and not have to re-learn the interface.

perhaps you are to young to remember the days of windows apps where some apps had menus that only could be reaced from certain buttons. Had different ways of cutting and pasting. It was nuts. That's no longer true of course in the windows world. but it was true till window 95.

So yes, I am of two minds. I like to have the ability to play conductor and tell each app to play when I want it to play. But I also appreciate what it gets you. the 1984 mac taught me that patience is a virtue.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[goombah99]

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 these working together.

Re:Raskin's Dream incarnate

[Wovel]

I can actually do that on the iphone right now.

Interop

[Anonymous Coward]

say goodbye to pinvokes

Garbage collection is over rated

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I don't see why people are so obsessed with garbage collection. Automatic garbage collection should be used sparingly. If the "ownership" of an object is not clear, or could not be efficiently tracked, or if you cant be sure if all the entities holding the pointer or the reference have to release it then you should use garbage collection. But blindly using it for classes that will be instantiated in the millions of instances where the ownership and referers are clearly known and can be notified automatic garbage collection comes with severe performance penalty.

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.

Re:Garbage collection is over rated

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why people are so obsessed with garbage collection. Automatic garbage collection should be used sparingly. If the "ownership" of an object is not clear, or could not be efficiently tracked, or if you cant be sure if all the entities holding the pointer or the reference have to release it then you should use garbage collection. But blindly using it for classes that will be instantiated in the millions of instances where the ownership and referers are clearly known and can be notified automatic garbage collection comes with severe performance penalty.

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.

I don't think most software business owners give a ___ that you know how to create highly efficient software if it takes 4x as long as RAD languages can complete the same task.

Re:Garbage collection is over rated

[Anonymous Coward]

I understood every single word you wrote, and I think I divined your intent, but your mode of expression is so sloppy I wonder how you could demand precision from anybody else.

If you run whatever you hire for as incoherently as you rant, I wouldn't work for you.

Re:Garbage collection is over rated

[shutdown -p now]

I don't see why people are so obsessed with garbage collection. Automatic garbage collection should be used sparingly.

You pretty much can't have proper closures without some form of automatic garbage collection. And, while you can have them with reference counting (which is still a form of automatic garbage collection), it's really easy to inadvertently create a cyclic reference with closures, so you really want a tracing GC there. Hence why, historically, pretty much all proper functional languages - Scheme, the whole ML family, Haskell etc - used GC, even back when it was still considered to be strictly a toy of the academia.

Re:Garbage collection is over rated

[shutdown -p now]

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.

By the way, this is actually a very wrong way to go around this. Memory allocation in C and C++ (and other languages with memory allocation) is expensive precisely because they don't have compacting GCs - it means that allocation algorithm is that much more complex (and time-consuming), as it has to search for a fitting free block, and update the corresponding memory structures. And, as you keep the program running, and the heap gets fragmented more and more, allocation performance gets worse.

In comparison, a compacting generational GC, as used in Java or .NET, periodically defragments the heap so that unallocated memory is always on top. The result is that a single allocation from a GC heap is quite often literally a single pointer (to lower boundary of unallocated space) increment instruction.

Furthermore, depending on allocation patterns, deallocation with GC can be faster as well - e.g. if you call "new" in a loop in Java, all objects it'll allocate will be in a single contiguous block - and GC knows about that, and will be able to deallocate all objects in that block together (in a perfect case, with a single pointer decrement), if their lifetimes all end at the same time.

Re:Garbage collection is over rated

[Rockoon]

If the "ownership" of an object is not clear, or could not be efficiently tracked, or if you cant be sure if all the entities holding the pointer or the reference have to release it then you should use garbage collection.

If the ownership and lifetime is easily tracked, then a decent compiler can track it just as well as the human and will not generate code that requires a hunt for garbage at all (contrary to your efficiency argument), but instead will explicitly alloc and then explicitly free just like the programmer would have had to do manually.

Once the expert understands the garbage collection system, he can avoid the inefficiencies that you are afraid of while still getting all the bang-for-his-buck in those cases where the hunt for garbage makes sense... and while we are on the subject, if efficiency is important then you arent New'ing inside that loop anyways. If you want efficiency, stop being lazy.

I'm an Apple fan, but...

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

Re:I'm an Apple fan, but...

[ascari]

"Mono Touch". Lame. We want stereo!

Disclaimer: before everybody goes apeshit with their mod points, that was a joke. Not a good one perhaps, but still a joke.

Re:I'm an Apple fan, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's almost like Slashdot is perpetually trying to make up for that whole "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame." thing.

That's funny - judging by most of the reactions to the iPad I've been seeing around here it seems more like Slashdot is trying for a repeat. The FUD level seems unusually think. That doesn't change the fact that I agree with you... but waiting a whole month seems so, I don't know rational...

Re:I'm an Apple fan, but...

[noidentity]

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?

NO NO NO! TOO LONG! You're suggesting we wait days, maybe weeks to find out. You may have infinite patience, but I have to decide now whether I'm going to buy one, and what model I will buy, and whether I will develop software for it, and whether Apple will have a future 100 years from now, an... wow, just found a new opinion story on the iPad, gotta go.

Re:I'm an Apple fan, but...

[flydpnkrtn]

Yea the Taco really put his foot in his mouth on that one :)

( http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257 is the article in question for those wondering what the frack we're talking about)

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

the most insightful post in a week.

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[MrHanky]

You mean it's the only somewhat credible sales pitch for Apple's new gadget. And it's only credible because it's entirely abstract and out of touch with the real world.

I guess I sorta see the point

[seebs]

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.

iPad, Mono, Wang, GIMP, Ayds

[tepples]

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).

Re:iPad, Mono, Wang, GIMP, Ayds

[kevingolding2001]

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).

There was a window manager being discussed the other day on /. called scrotwm.
sigh...
And people wonder why open source software hasn't made it on the desktop yet.

Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

So a Linux company is bringing Microsoft development to an Apple device? And it's STILL useless?

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a Linux company is bringing a Microsoft clone of an Oracle (nee Sun) technology to an Apple device.

and yep, it's still useless.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ClosedSource]

If .NET (or C#) is just a clone of Java, I should be able to delete Java from my computer and still run Java apps. Have you tried it?

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever used Java and .NET, you'd KNOW that .NET is a clone of Java (Java came out years before .NET, fyi).

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ClosedSource]

As a developer who has written commercial applications for both Java and .NET platforms, I can assure you that .NET isn't a clone of Java.

Most languages/platforms are a particular mix of existing practices. There are very few brand-new ideas. The most original idea in Java is checked exceptions, and .NET doesn't include it.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you must be a noob!

Re:Let me get this straight...

[ClosedSource]

With over 20 years in this business if I'm a noob, what does that make you?

It has many keyboards, and more options

[SuperKendall]

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.

You can do pretty much all that

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:You can do pretty much all that

[Darkness404]

I guess all 140K applications do the same exact thing? Since Apple "doesn't et you do much".

Just because you can build a lot of things with wooden building blocks doesn't mean you can build everything with them. While it is true that there are a lot of applications you simply can't -do- much. 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.

The reality is that Apple has a few areas they don't let you go, but everything else is wide open.

...and a lot of those "few areas" are things that are basic. Like running multiple applications, alternate media players, etc.

Imagine if Microsoft exerted as much control over Windows as Apple does over iPhone OS. We wouldn't have: Firefox, VLC, Cygwin, OpenOffice, any sort of "vulgar" content, and a lot less applications. Oh and to add in a bugfix you have to wait who knows how long to get it "approved".

And on an iPad (or iPhone) you can play music while you type a document

You can play music stored on there, but you can't play internet radio in the background, you can't listen to YouTube in the background, etc.

and get a stream of notifications when there's some new twitter or facebook post you really care about.

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.

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.

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. Same thing with windows, I can switch between a document and my browser in an instant, much quicker than on an iPhone.

Just because you have a terrible way of doing things compared to the rest of the world doesn't mean its "optimized" for it.

What? Where is is major use?

Video, gaming, navigation, etc. While its use has diminished some, its still a vital part of most systems. I don't see it suddenly becoming obsolete anytime soon.

are you really arguing the iPhone/iPad platform is hurting for free casual games?

The problems with "free" iPod games

A) Ad-supported
B) Demo versions
C) Cash influenced (you can complete some of the game normally but you need to use real money to get decent items)
D) Buggy

There are a lot of decent-quality Flash games free of these limitations and they also don't take up space on your iPhone.

There is no Flash based game so compelling it would make people choose a platform,

Ok, lets compare the "iPad" and a typical netbook

iPad: iPhone OS, access to about 150K apps, wi-fi, 16 GB flash memory, must be tethered to a computer to do advanced functions, keyboard sold separately, large captive touchscreen, no multiple app support, partial media support, closed development $599

Netbook: Windows XP/7/Linux, access to millions of programs, 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

Other than the form factor and the touchscreen, the iPad simply loses in comparison to a cheaper netbook. 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.

Re:You can do pretty much all that

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

once again, just stating what a PC, and even a mac does. also, if you don't like your startup, try hibernating or sleeping, my computer wakes up in like 12 seconds, the iPhone boot is like a minute

Re:You can do pretty much all that

[Wovel]

compare the experience of playing need for speed (for example) on a netbook versus an iPad. You also go the price wrong on the 16GB Wifi iPad. How much does your netbook weigh? How long can you watch video on a single charge? How thick is your netbook. All of these things matter and likely matter more to consumers than "open development".

The ipad does not need to be tethered to a computer to do advanced functions, it has to be tethered to a computer to A. Upgrade the OS or B. Sync with the computer..

Desire and impedance mismatch

[SuperKendall]

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.

This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[aristotle-dude]

When I joined my current employer, I did not know how to write in perl but I learned quickly and took over development of our first e-commerce service and we launched on time. During my time there I've learned perl, VFP, C#, Python and Java.

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.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

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.

Right, because the only type of applications is a thin client that connects to web services.

Maybe you have an existing codebase that you want to run on the iPhone.

Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.

No, it smacks of wanting to re-use code to deliver a solution at lower cost in less time and with fewer bugs compared with trying to rewrite things from scratch.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[shutdown -p now]

If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.

You didn't gave any particular reasons as to why someone who already knows C# (or knows both languages, but prefers C#) should need to learn Objective-C. Just because Apple says it's the "main native language" on the platform doesn't automatically make it the best choice. And end user couldn't care less what his applications are written in, so long as they run well.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[darjen]

not really. I don't have a mac as my primary development machine. so I couln't develop iPad apps even if I wanted to learn objective C. But I might have more luck being able to write c# on my thinkpad instead. nothing about laziness at all here.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[aristotle-dude]

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.

Right, because the only type of applications is a thin client that connects to web services.

Maybe you have an existing codebase that you want to run on the iPhone.

Trying to use Mono Touch as a crutch smacks of laziness and fear of learning.

No, it smacks of wanting to re-use code to deliver a solution at lower cost in less time and with fewer bugs compared with trying to rewrite things from scratch.

If you are developing something other than a thin client, then most of your code is throw away anyway when you are porting to a new platform.

As to your second point, refactoring code is now encouraged by the agile movement. Trying to reuse code on a new platform may not be a good idea. Old code can contain bugs which are exposed on a new platform. Are you advocating emulation? Much of Mono code emulates the windows way of doing things in the same way as Wine does. A rewrite is a better option and it could expose bugs in the existing codebase that you might not catch if you just to a quick port.

Reuse of C code for generic functions can make sense but using C# does not make sense because you have to embed a lot of extra code into the resulting executable during the recompile to native.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[aristotle-dude]

If you want to learn how to develop for the iPhone OS then you need to learn Objective-C.

You didn't gave any particular reasons as to why someone who already knows C# (or knows both languages, but prefers C#) should need to learn Objective-C. Just because Apple says it's the "main native language" on the platform doesn't automatically make it the best choice. And end user couldn't care less what his applications are written in, so long as they run well.

Ok, here are some reasons:

1. Even with the recompile to native, you will end up including a lot of useless baggage in the resulting executable. This is known as bloat which is something you want to avoid.

2. Mono Touch does not support everything that Objective-C does so it is best practice to choose the language with the most support for the task at hand.

3. Mono Touch costs extra money and you lose a lot of the debugging functionality which you get with a natively developed app.

4. Performance will suffer. See point 1.

5. Use the best tool or language for the job. We used Java and Python in one project because it was what was supported the third party vendor we were integrating with even though most of our codebase is C#. Build tools and standards for versioning were brought across to have an integrated build across languages.

6. Learning a new language should be viewed as an opportunity rather than a burden. Any developer that has the attitude of not wanting to learn should be shown the door IMHO.

Re:This is pathetic. Don't be afraid to learn.

[aristotle-dude]

not really. I don't have a mac as my primary development machine. so I couln't develop iPad apps even if I wanted to learn objective C. But I might have more luck being able to write c# on my thinkpad instead. nothing about laziness at all here.

If you are not willing to use the right tools for the job then you should avoid the iPhone platform. I prefer using macs at home but guess what? I use windows, VS.NET and whatever other tools that I have to get my work done at work. I put my platform preferences aside when I arrive at work.

Are you a professional developer or a fanboy? You cannot be both when you are at work.

Displacing the netbook?

[DragonWriter]

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.

Re:Displacing the netbook?

[wkearney99]

The iPad hasn't shipped. So claiming it's a "better" solution is fantasy, as best.

Yes, lets compare

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Yes, lets compare

[Darkness404]

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".

I don't really call letting other apps sending notifications in the background to be multitasking. I'd call it hardly any multitasking. If it supported even limited multitasking I should be able to listen to Last.FM/Pandora/Shoutcast while doing something else.

As for censorship, basically - no porn (in an app).

Or "foul" language, or any number of ill-defined things. Apple even blocked a Twitter app because tweets could have foul language ( http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/apple-stupidly-rejects-tweetie-1-3-for-foul-language-in-twitter/ )

I have not found developer communications to be that bad. If I had a question they answered.

Then how do you explain the thousands of rejected apps where people can resubmit the app and get it approved with -no change- and then the others that never have a clear reason for it being blocked. If communication was there, it would be really easy to find out what was the "problem" and change it. Not true.

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.

And seven to fourteen days to patch a severe exploitable flaw or to fix some bugs is a really long time.

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.

So you mean to tell me at this point in time you have a single browser window open, no tabs nothing else, no music, no IM, no compiler running in the background and to say check your facebook you have your browser save your session, close it, open up a different browser check your Facebook, close it, then resume your other work? Because basically that is what the iPhone OS forces you do to.

But not on a netbook compared to the iPad. It's really not that much slower.

On my first generation netbook (EEE PC 4G Surf, Intel Celeron M underclocked to 633 mhz, 512 MB of RAM running Xubuntu) its still a lot faster than my second generation iPod touch.

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

There are a few ads, but usually after the first 10 seconds they go away never to be seen again. With iPod games they are perpetually below the screen in many games.

"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...

Perhaps for the sites you visit that is true, for a lot of other people, Flash is really needed to actually do much on the web.

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.

You mean I can add my Amazon/Wal-Mart-purchased MP3 files onto the device and have them show up in music without having to sync them via iTunes?

You mean I can save YouTube videos in memory and have them show up in videos without having to sync it to iTunes?

You mean I can take the device out of the box and start using it when I walk out of the store without having to sync it to iTunes?

You mean I can download OS patches and download them over wi-fi or 3G and install them without havi

Re:Yes, lets compare

[Wovel]

The iPhone and iPad can have multiple browser tabs open too, I am not sure what switching speed you are concerned with. You can access facebook through the browser on the iPhone, the app is just another option.

Re:Yes, lets compare

[Wovel]

Yes the iPad requires a computer. It will happily synch with your netbook.....

multi-task

[codepunk]

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.

Re:multi-task

[dunkelfalke]

Well, other devices seem to manage multitasking perfectly well without really sacrificing battery life so your point makes it kind of easy to jump to conclusions about apple developers.

Its a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Its a shame

[symbolset]

That is indeed the ticket. Get that thing to an online store by the end of June for less than $500 and I'm buying several. I would rather have this than the iPad by a long shot.

Re:Its a shame

[aristotle-dude]

Software, software, software attracts developer, developers, developer. Hardware specs give hardware fanboys a hardon but without a good API and distribution system, developers and consumers will not go with it.

Can we end this now, please?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

As I said on my Journal...

[jcr]

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.

CITRIX Children...

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Not definsible..

[Junta]

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.

Working for the enemy

[paxcoder]

Microsoft must be loving this.

Re:Working for the enemy

[symbolset]

They paid good money for it.

Re:Working for the enemy

[Wovel]

Loving it so much they rushed out that joke of a tablet announcement at CES to try and be ahead. Apple simply embarrassed them (again).

Re:Working for the enemy

[paxcoder]

That's just because they want a piece of every cake - just in case. Nothing new there (remember Zune?). I'm talking about getting everyone used to their technology hoping that they convert to their platform (see http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100124111743687).

The problem is Apple lied about the iPhone as well

[tomhudson]

When they first announced it, Apple said the iPhone was a true multi-tasking device.

iPhone features a rich HTML email client which fetches your email in the background from most POP3 or IMAP mail services and displays photos and graphics right along with the text. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can be reading a web page while downloading your email in the background.

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).

There are already hundreds of Mono iPhone apps...

[AmazingRuss]

... built with Unity (www.unity3d.com).

meh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Double Standard!

[mdwh2]

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.

There should be some kind of warning

[Ilgaz]

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.

It is not easier

[Ilgaz]

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.

Except that the iPhone SDK doesn't support SOAP

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Except that the iPhone SDK doesn't support SOAP

[aristotle-dude]

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.

Hand in your geek card. I've had to use wireshark and manually code a webservice client in python by connecting via network sockets and sending the mime encoded XML SOAP request. I was integrating with a third party enterprise system which had a webservice that was so locked down that it did not provide a way of requesting a WSDL. I had to take a some vendor supplied example code written in Java, run it against the webservice, capture the response request and response in wireshark and then use that to code the python webservice client.

If you cannot write a soap handler without libraries then you you are not a real coder but one of those Visual Basic "burger flippers" pretending to be a professional developer.

Then what's a netbook?

[tepples]

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"?

What's the switch?

[weston]

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...

Re:What's the switch?

[__aaclcg7560]

Here's the article for switching on single-application mode in Mac OS X. This is the switch:

defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true

Doug Eberhart video demoing the first mouse.

[goombah99]

here you go

me too

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Engelbart's 1968 demo

[goombah99]

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.

25? No, 40

[Ilgaz]

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.

Re:25? No, 40

[pydev]

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

To claim that the iPhone or the Mac run UNIX is a bald-faced marketing lie; OS X is based on Mach, a completely different design from UNIX. It happens to have some UNIX compatibility, but so does NT.

N900 runs Linux, which also has almost nothing to do with the UNIX of 40 years ago (or even the UNIX of 20 years ago). As someone who was hacking UNIX kernels in the 80's, trust me, I know.

NeXT is older too, if you put the smalltalk language to its true beginning.

NeXT was a cheap rip-off of parts of Smalltalk language and philosophy, and that's where it has stagnated to this day as OS X.

Have fun with your .exe files.

I mostly develop on Linux, and I prefer modern languages and environments, as opposed to NeXT's/Apple's 25 year old Smalltalk rip-off.

Have fun chasing pointer bugs in your Objective-C code. Well, until Apple closes their platform completely, that is.