They even have implementations you can download. I just downloaded and tested the Objective-C library they provide, and it did indeed let me do some of the things Microsoft said they were blocking.
Yeah, the ports thing... he thinks MacOS's poor situation with regard to package management (and he's right that it is poor) indicates not understanding "the Unix way" or somesuch?
I think the fellow has no sense of pre-Linux Unix. OSF/1, SunOS, HP-UX, Digital Unix, IBM (both AOS and AIX)... I can't remember truly useful package management on any of 'em.
I really can't remember a Unix package management system that I found tolerable, until I came across Debian (back before release 1.0 -- been using Debian on my own servers for something like... my god, is it really 16 years now?).
What burns me up about MacOS package management is, this is something NeXTstep did better than MacOS X does! The gratuitous (IMO) switch of internal file format from "tar" to "pax" ended up breaking some useful NeXTstep package management features as a side-effect, and those features have never been restored. Such a shame. Sigh.
I think I'll go sit on a rocker on my lawn and yell randomly at the neighborhood kids now.
I'm not sure why "TextMate versus Emacs" enters into this, especially since MacOS ships with Emacs and does not ship with TextMate. Can anyone explain?
I'm a developer (sometimes web) with a MacOS desktop. I've never heard of TextMate. I use Emacs quite regularly (and have since 1986, on equipment by Sun, IBM, DEC, NeXT, et cetera).
Heh, and that's exactly why an iPad and a wireless keyboard are what I take to meetings or when I'm out-and-about myself. I've replaced my laptop with that combo. I certainly recognize that not everyone can, but I've managed it and it's awesome.
(A good ssh client can help tremendously.)
But, it's still not quite as convenient to rapidly pick up and carry as a "netbook". If the keyboard quickly folded to fit in my pocket, it would, but right now the keyboard only fits in my pocket if I'm wearing my trench coat or lab coat.
I've got a rooted Nook Color to play with as well, and at some point I'm going to try throwing "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" on the thing and using it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I have to learn more about the thing's boot process and building bootable HDSC card images before I can really get started on that though.
Yeah, it's extremely outdated hardware at this point. It was one of the family of laptop-sized ("netbook" hadn't been invented yet) WinCE devices from that brief fad years back.
It could be used in "laptop", "tablet", and "easel" form-factors (the third being propped up like an artist's easel, which is outstanding for small presentations, video viewing, and some other uses). Lovely design, but it never took off, alas.
I've used a wide variety of devices in a wide variety of form factors, and I have to say: laptop sucks. Why? Because the physical relationship between the keyboard and the display is fixed within limits that are ergonomically terrible.
Know what's better, if cost is not an issue, and everything can be made light enough and convenient enough to transport? A tablet coupled with a wireless keyboard. In terms of actual utility, a laptop's got nothing on that combination. In fact, stick 'em into a case and you get the laptop form factor exactly, so the result is basically a "superset" of the laptop.
Now, we're not there yet, the combination isn't cheap enough or convenient enough yet. But laptops are just a step on the way towards that (which is itself just a step on the way towards a mind/machine interface).
A "user changed" input would help a lot, but you're right, parents would forget to do it. A potential fix -- and I know a lot of people will hate the big-brother-ish side of this -- is to use the front-facing camera to automatically figure out when the user changes. For many people this would result in a better experience. (Heck, taken to an extreme, the device could figure out that it should lock itself if stolen.)
The "problem" arises here when the parent hands their own iOS device with their own account to the kid within epsilon of using the account themselves (eg. right after they installed a game). If the kids really had their own iOS devices and iTunes accounts to begin with, the problems aren't the same.
I just don't understand why americans tolerate ISPs enforcing ridiculous caps.
Huh? In America, it's the corporations who are the ones to tolerate or not tolerate policies. I'm pretty surprised they've tolerated unlimited usage for as long as they have.
My iPad never leaves my coffee table. I've seen people using them at work, but honestly unless you're planning on doing stuff while walking around, a laptop/netbook will serve better.
Depends. At the office, I've replaced my laptop with an iPad, and I'm quite happy with the results.
Yeah, I need to type a lot sometimes, so I have a bluetooth keyboard. This lets me enter text as quickly on my iPad as I would on a laptop.
So what's the advantage?
Well, sometimes I'm doing things for which a tablet is better suited, and then the advantage is obvious. One device fills both roles.
But another advantage is, the keyboard and display don't have to be near each other. I put the display off to the side propped up at a shallow angle, with the keyboard comfortably in front of me. Then, during meetings, I can take notes without having something in between me and the people I'm talking to. It's not in the way like my laptop was. It ends up improving my participation. (It doesn't hurt that it makes it absolutely clear to everyone else that I'm not ignoring them to answer IMs and respond to email and play web games et cetera.)
People were doing that. The thing is, if you've already got development and distribution and promotion and all that stuff handled otherwise, factoring in 30% for essentially nothing but payment processing is pretty much unprecedented.
Something like 2% or 3% is closer to normal. Given the tie-in to an existing and popular gift card ecosystem (iTunes cards) and the near universal participation in the system by iOS users, maybe even 5% would have been reasonable. But 30%, for just payment processing? Even as an avid iPhone/iPad/MacOS user myself... too much, too much.
(Unless you're allowed to charge more to make up for it. That'd be better.)
The Nook Color is only $250ish, no? Seems to me that it offers a tremendous potential value for a pretty reasonable price, especially if you do the "Honeycomb on an SD card" thing to make it a full-fledged Android-designed-for-tablets device. I'm seriously thinking about trying that myself.
One thing that's been driving up the cost of tablets is the inclusion of all sorts of hardware in 'em. Lots have 3G radios. Why? Who exactly is it that needs 3G in their tablet but doesn't carry a 3G-enabled phone? Why not just let the tablet use the phone's data connection? Likewise camera. I have no problem taking my pictures and videos on another device that I'm going to be carrying anyway, as long as it's very easy to connect 'em.
Web use and media consumption and some other activities are really really pleasant on a well-designed tablet. I think it may be time to find out of the Nook Color is well-designed enough...
I use an app to track my hiking (keep a record of GPS coordinates and time basically), while listening to pandora while checking email and such. It is my understanding iPhone would not even do that today.
Actually, the iPhone will indeed do that today. There's all sorts of multitasking in there.
Your app can do anything it wants for up to ten minutes in the background, but after ten minutes if you want to keep background processing, you have to ask for permission (via a pop-up alert).
But that's not needed for what you're talking about. There are specific categories of use that permit unlimited background processing without requiring the user to re-authorize it on a periodic basis.
One of those is background GPS tracking. It's available in two modes, basically a "high resolution, high power consumption" mode that fires off precise location events and a "lower resolution, lower power consumption" mode that only triggers on more extreme location change events (I think for that one you have to at least change cell towers for it to trigger). So that covers your "track my hiking" part.
Another permitted mode is background audio (which people sometimes don't realize potentially includes both input and output). So this covers the "Pandora" part.
You can have both the GPS tracking part and the Pandora part in the background no problem. And then you can do "checking email and such" in the foreground without having an impact on that (unless you run out of memory -- then all the running apps get a low memory warning signal, and if they can't cooperatively deal with it, something may get killed).
So, yeah, the exact scenario you describe presents no problem at all on today's iPhone running the updated OS.
I'm curious: does turning on "do everything over https" end up breaking third-party clients, like some of the iPad clients or like the Facebook upload plugins for some photo software?
Also, how does it interact with the ajaxy "like" buttons on third-party web sites?
(The option hasn't been rolled out to me yet, so I can't check on the answers myself yet.)
Blizzard is suing people for a mod that makes one of Blizzard's games, Starcraft 2, more like another one of Blizzard's games, World of Warcraft? How exactly is Blizzard harmed by this; is it causing Blizzard to lose game sales to themselves?
Well, yes. Remember that StarCraft 2 is something you purchase once and then are finished spending money on, while World of Warcraft requires a monthly subscription.
I didn't see many people leave. I am not sure why many would, myself -- I only add people to my battle.net friends list if I'm friends with the actual human being in real life. If I'm not, the in-game character-based friends lists are sufficient.
Maybe Blizzard's (and Apple's) intent is to just get more gamers to think like me and my friends (you don't get on my friend list unless I'd go drinking with you in real life), and less like XBLA gamers (who often invite people to their friends lists simply because they had a good gaming experience with them, which I confess to not understand myself.).
Netflix is a better experience with an Apple TV anyway.
I agree, especially if you have an iPhone or iPad to use as a remote. The XBox used to be the best way for me to get Netflix on my TV, but since the AppleTV came out, and since they raised the price of an XBox Live Gold membership... I've gone ahead and canceled my Gold membership.
If they get some good streaming partnerships going, like the ESPN3 stuff but for content that doesn't suck, I could see maybe bringing my Gold membership back.
Actually, Blizzard's "similar" idea that got the bad reaction was to use real names on forums, not on in-game friend-lists and invites. Blizzards system does show me real-life names on friend-lists and invites to friend-lists, and my friends and I are as a rule not upset about it. They're only copying what Blizzard has succesfully implemented here.
Back when digital photography was in its infancy, what I did was shoot pictures with 35mm film, and then mount the negatives as slides, and fed them into a slide scanner.
As far as I can tell, none of the technology involved in that workflow would come under this ban. So...?
I'm guessing one of two things happened -- you mixed up AirPlay with AirPrint, or you saw that it works streaming from iTunes (which it does) and misinterpreted that as streaming to iTunes (which wasn't in any announcements).
For audio, you're certainly not correct -- run any video game with AirPlay turned on, and the sound of the game will come through the device you're streaming to, even the blips and bloops in response to your actions.
For video, I don't know for certain exactly what's going on yet. I don't know if it only works properly on a multi-band 802.11n network, or if the device transcodes to something other than uncompressed that the AppleTV decodes, or if it does the proxying thing, or what. I may run a network sniffer to try and suss it out this holiday weekend.
Sure. But the feature I'm responding to a comment on is AirPlay, not AirPrint. You can send to an AirPlay device from a Macintosh (or Windows PC), but not to a computer.
(Which is no shock. I'm sure content providers would see streaming to a general purpose computer as a way to enable content piracy. So we can stream to the AppleTV, which only has HDCP-enabled HDMI as a video output option, but not to computers, which can often do all sorts of things with video beyond simply displaying it.)
It's not the same thing -- with AirPlay, you're streaming video content decoded on the iOS device to the AirPlay "target". So you can do it with Netflix, YouTube, not just things where you have the media files stored locally. I've even used it to send the audio from iOS games to external speakers (by sending to an AirPort Express, which has no video, so the test was audio-only). It's more like a network-connected external monitor+speakers than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they claiming that Google is blocking them from using this?
http://code.google.com/apis/youtube/getting_started.html#data_api
They even have implementations you can download. I just downloaded and tested the Objective-C library they provide, and it did indeed let me do some of the things Microsoft said they were blocking.
Yeah, the ports thing... he thinks MacOS's poor situation with regard to package management (and he's right that it is poor) indicates not understanding "the Unix way" or somesuch?
I think the fellow has no sense of pre-Linux Unix. OSF/1, SunOS, HP-UX, Digital Unix, IBM (both AOS and AIX)... I can't remember truly useful package management on any of 'em.
I really can't remember a Unix package management system that I found tolerable, until I came across Debian (back before release 1.0 -- been using Debian on my own servers for something like ... my god, is it really 16 years now?).
What burns me up about MacOS package management is, this is something NeXTstep did better than MacOS X does! The gratuitous (IMO) switch of internal file format from "tar" to "pax" ended up breaking some useful NeXTstep package management features as a side-effect, and those features have never been restored. Such a shame. Sigh.
I think I'll go sit on a rocker on my lawn and yell randomly at the neighborhood kids now.
I'm not sure why "TextMate versus Emacs" enters into this, especially since MacOS ships with Emacs and does not ship with TextMate. Can anyone explain?
I'm a developer (sometimes web) with a MacOS desktop. I've never heard of TextMate. I use Emacs quite regularly (and have since 1986, on equipment by Sun, IBM, DEC, NeXT, et cetera).
Heh, and that's exactly why an iPad and a wireless keyboard are what I take to meetings or when I'm out-and-about myself. I've replaced my laptop with that combo. I certainly recognize that not everyone can, but I've managed it and it's awesome.
(A good ssh client can help tremendously.)
But, it's still not quite as convenient to rapidly pick up and carry as a "netbook". If the keyboard quickly folded to fit in my pocket, it would, but right now the keyboard only fits in my pocket if I'm wearing my trench coat or lab coat.
I've got a rooted Nook Color to play with as well, and at some point I'm going to try throwing "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" on the thing and using it with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse. I have to learn more about the thing's boot process and building bootable HDSC card images before I can really get started on that though.
Yeah, it's extremely outdated hardware at this point. It was one of the family of laptop-sized ("netbook" hadn't been invented yet) WinCE devices from that brief fad years back.
No, the future is mind/machine interfaces.
As for convertible laptops as a form factor, it's been done. I've actually got one of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vadem_Clio
It could be used in "laptop", "tablet", and "easel" form-factors (the third being propped up like an artist's easel, which is outstanding for small presentations, video viewing, and some other uses). Lovely design, but it never took off, alas.
I've used a wide variety of devices in a wide variety of form factors, and I have to say: laptop sucks. Why? Because the physical relationship between the keyboard and the display is fixed within limits that are ergonomically terrible.
Know what's better, if cost is not an issue, and everything can be made light enough and convenient enough to transport? A tablet coupled with a wireless keyboard. In terms of actual utility, a laptop's got nothing on that combination. In fact, stick 'em into a case and you get the laptop form factor exactly, so the result is basically a "superset" of the laptop.
Now, we're not there yet, the combination isn't cheap enough or convenient enough yet. But laptops are just a step on the way towards that (which is itself just a step on the way towards a mind/machine interface).
A "user changed" input would help a lot, but you're right, parents would forget to do it. A potential fix -- and I know a lot of people will hate the big-brother-ish side of this -- is to use the front-facing camera to automatically figure out when the user changes. For many people this would result in a better experience. (Heck, taken to an extreme, the device could figure out that it should lock itself if stolen.)
They already have that kind of thing, and even the concept of giving an allowance to a kid's iTunes account.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2105
The "problem" arises here when the parent hands their own iOS device with their own account to the kid within epsilon of using the account themselves (eg. right after they installed a game). If the kids really had their own iOS devices and iTunes accounts to begin with, the problems aren't the same.
...before I read the last two words.
Huh? In America, it's the corporations who are the ones to tolerate or not tolerate policies. I'm pretty surprised they've tolerated unlimited usage for as long as they have.
Depends. At the office, I've replaced my laptop with an iPad, and I'm quite happy with the results.
Yeah, I need to type a lot sometimes, so I have a bluetooth keyboard. This lets me enter text as quickly on my iPad as I would on a laptop.
So what's the advantage?
Well, sometimes I'm doing things for which a tablet is better suited, and then the advantage is obvious. One device fills both roles.
But another advantage is, the keyboard and display don't have to be near each other. I put the display off to the side propped up at a shallow angle, with the keyboard comfortably in front of me. Then, during meetings, I can take notes without having something in between me and the people I'm talking to. It's not in the way like my laptop was. It ends up improving my participation. (It doesn't hurt that it makes it absolutely clear to everyone else that I'm not ignoring them to answer IMs and respond to email and play web games et cetera.)
People were doing that. The thing is, if you've already got development and distribution and promotion and all that stuff handled otherwise, factoring in 30% for essentially nothing but payment processing is pretty much unprecedented.
Something like 2% or 3% is closer to normal. Given the tie-in to an existing and popular gift card ecosystem (iTunes cards) and the near universal participation in the system by iOS users, maybe even 5% would have been reasonable. But 30%, for just payment processing? Even as an avid iPhone/iPad/MacOS user myself... too much, too much.
(Unless you're allowed to charge more to make up for it. That'd be better.)
The Nook Color is only $250ish, no? Seems to me that it offers a tremendous potential value for a pretty reasonable price, especially if you do the "Honeycomb on an SD card" thing to make it a full-fledged Android-designed-for-tablets device. I'm seriously thinking about trying that myself.
One thing that's been driving up the cost of tablets is the inclusion of all sorts of hardware in 'em. Lots have 3G radios. Why? Who exactly is it that needs 3G in their tablet but doesn't carry a 3G-enabled phone? Why not just let the tablet use the phone's data connection? Likewise camera. I have no problem taking my pictures and videos on another device that I'm going to be carrying anyway, as long as it's very easy to connect 'em.
Web use and media consumption and some other activities are really really pleasant on a well-designed tablet. I think it may be time to find out of the Nook Color is well-designed enough...
I use an app to track my hiking (keep a record of GPS coordinates and time basically), while listening to pandora while checking email and such. It is my understanding iPhone would not even do that today.
Actually, the iPhone will indeed do that today. There's all sorts of multitasking in there.
Your app can do anything it wants for up to ten minutes in the background, but after ten minutes if you want to keep background processing, you have to ask for permission (via a pop-up alert).
But that's not needed for what you're talking about. There are specific categories of use that permit unlimited background processing without requiring the user to re-authorize it on a periodic basis.
One of those is background GPS tracking. It's available in two modes, basically a "high resolution, high power consumption" mode that fires off precise location events and a "lower resolution, lower power consumption" mode that only triggers on more extreme location change events (I think for that one you have to at least change cell towers for it to trigger). So that covers your "track my hiking" part.
Another permitted mode is background audio (which people sometimes don't realize potentially includes both input and output). So this covers the "Pandora" part.
You can have both the GPS tracking part and the Pandora part in the background no problem. And then you can do "checking email and such" in the foreground without having an impact on that (unless you run out of memory -- then all the running apps get a low memory warning signal, and if they can't cooperatively deal with it, something may get killed).
So, yeah, the exact scenario you describe presents no problem at all on today's iPhone running the updated OS.
I'm curious: does turning on "do everything over https" end up breaking third-party clients, like some of the iPad clients or like the Facebook upload plugins for some photo software?
Also, how does it interact with the ajaxy "like" buttons on third-party web sites?
(The option hasn't been rolled out to me yet, so I can't check on the answers myself yet.)
Well, yes. Remember that StarCraft 2 is something you purchase once and then are finished spending money on, while World of Warcraft requires a monthly subscription.
The people who are upset about it left.
I didn't see many people leave. I am not sure why many would, myself -- I only add people to my battle.net friends list if I'm friends with the actual human being in real life. If I'm not, the in-game character-based friends lists are sufficient.
Maybe Blizzard's (and Apple's) intent is to just get more gamers to think like me and my friends (you don't get on my friend list unless I'd go drinking with you in real life), and less like XBLA gamers (who often invite people to their friends lists simply because they had a good gaming experience with them, which I confess to not understand myself.).
Netflix is a better experience with an Apple TV anyway.
I agree, especially if you have an iPhone or iPad to use as a remote. The XBox used to be the best way for me to get Netflix on my TV, but since the AppleTV came out, and since they raised the price of an XBox Live Gold membership... I've gone ahead and canceled my Gold membership.
If they get some good streaming partnerships going, like the ESPN3 stuff but for content that doesn't suck, I could see maybe bringing my Gold membership back.
Actually, Blizzard's "similar" idea that got the bad reaction was to use real names on forums, not on in-game friend-lists and invites. Blizzards system does show me real-life names on friend-lists and invites to friend-lists, and my friends and I are as a rule not upset about it. They're only copying what Blizzard has succesfully implemented here.
Back when digital photography was in its infancy, what I did was shoot pictures with 35mm film, and then mount the negatives as slides, and fed them into a slide scanner.
As far as I can tell, none of the technology involved in that workflow would come under this ban. So...?
I'm guessing one of two things happened -- you mixed up AirPlay with AirPrint, or you saw that it works streaming from iTunes (which it does) and misinterpreted that as streaming to iTunes (which wasn't in any announcements).
For audio, you're certainly not correct -- run any video game with AirPlay turned on, and the sound of the game will come through the device you're streaming to, even the blips and bloops in response to your actions.
For video, I don't know for certain exactly what's going on yet. I don't know if it only works properly on a multi-band 802.11n network, or if the device transcodes to something other than uncompressed that the AppleTV decodes, or if it does the proxying thing, or what. I may run a network sniffer to try and suss it out this holiday weekend.
Sure. But the feature I'm responding to a comment on is AirPlay, not AirPrint. You can send to an AirPlay device from a Macintosh (or Windows PC), but not to a computer.
(Which is no shock. I'm sure content providers would see streaming to a general purpose computer as a way to enable content piracy. So we can stream to the AppleTV, which only has HDCP-enabled HDMI as a video output option, but not to computers, which can often do all sorts of things with video beyond simply displaying it.)
It's not the same thing -- with AirPlay, you're streaming video content decoded on the iOS device to the AirPlay "target". So you can do it with Netflix, YouTube, not just things where you have the media files stored locally. I've even used it to send the audio from iOS games to external speakers (by sending to an AirPort Express, which has no video, so the test was audio-only). It's more like a network-connected external monitor+speakers than that.
It doesn't, because you can AirPlay to any Mac.
How?
This is the first anyone has mentioned this. Also, none of the people on the iOS developer forums seem to know how.
Are you sure you're not confusing AirPlay and AirPrint?