Not really, at least, not early on. Everyone knows that the future ongoing revenue from "owning" the majority smart phone platform will dwarf the numbers from even the whole first decade of this race. The important thing is mindshare - in the consumer's mind and especially in the mind of businesses. Android is clearly making impressive gains though I hesitate to believe that it has actually reached anything like the brand recognition of the iPhone yet.
Actually, Android being open source means it doesn't really matter if Google does drop it or turn evil. It would certainly cause a hit and slow things down, but I think at this point it already has enough critical mass that it would continue on it's own. That's one of the beauties of the open source model, and it's also why a diverse range of device manufacturers are willing to buy into it - because unlike the iPhone, they always have the option to take it their own way if the OS maker betrays them.
It's nice during the short period when you're in transit, but it presents a dilemma once you get there because it is so deprived of basic capabilities that people do tend to want.
For example I go on holiday, I want to take pictures. I need something easy to plug my camera into to download and quickly crop and edit pictures. The iPad is just horrendously horrible for this due to Steve's obsession with locking it down and removing all the standard ports from it. So you are confronted with the dilemma of bringing both the iPad AND the laptop and doubling up on a lot of capabilities or doing without a lot of the basic things most people *do* want to do when they are travelling.
I had the same experience. I walked into Best Buy on launch day (this was in Boston) and they had a big display with 5 iPads. No lines, 3 of them were not even being used, so I wandered up and played with one for 10 minutes and only at the end did someone else come up behind me to try one out. I listened with amusement to the guy trying to avoid telling the elderly people who asked him how much RAM it had (he had a long explanation about how how a small amount of memory in an Apple device was like ten times as much in a windows computer, but couldn't bring himself to say the actual number).
Perhaps it was just incredibly uncool for any Apple devotee to ever cross the threshold of Best Buy, but I couldn't observe *any* kind of shortage either on launch day or in the weeks thereafter.
This was actually a fairly well documented fact. I remember they walked the line of people lined up outside the Apple stores and a good number of them really didn't know what they were going to use it for. They just wanted it. There were articles published about this phenomenon at the time (here's the best I can google right now: http://modmyi.com/forums/ipad-news/704633-surveys-100-dont-know-what-ipads.html )
Every time I open a new window and the stupid thing does its bizarre slow animation of zooming out and zooming in, wasting 3 seconds of my time and not even starting to load the new page until it is finished I feel like throwing the thing at the wall. Then at some point I hit the maximum number of open windows and it won't open any more. It's just an exercise in frustration.
I actually prefer to use my Nexus One, even with it's tiny screen, over the iPad.
>>and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support. > >Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
Your only criteria for web browsers is that they run flash well????
The built in browser in the iPad is *horrible* for casual browser. It's basically unusable for me. I do like the iPad for some things, but those are very specific & constrained uses, and web browsing is certainly not one of them.
The problem is that *because* people are protected from certain very basic screw ups in Java companies automatically downgrade the quality of programmer and the level of oversight they use. The result, I believe, is that the end product is *even worse* than it would have been for the "more vulnerable" language.
So - if you are talking academically about languages - Java is more secure by a long way. C has all the vulnerabilities that Java has plus a lot more. If you are talking about actual outcomes in the real world - C is probably more secure. But this in no way means you can take the same sloppy programmers and methodologies that you used for your Java app, tell them to write in C and get a more secure product. Quite the opposite.
I agree about touch interface for the scrolling being a nice feature, but don't forget, there is a whole category of netbooks now emerging that support touch screens as well. Touch screen != iPad.
> When I wanted to sit on my comfy chair on my deck wrapped in a blanket with a coffee in one hand and/. in the other.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but I have an iPad and it's horrible for that. At least a laptop sits nicely on your lap and holds it's own screen so you can read it easily. The iPad has to be held constantly, nursed like a baby. Any kind of background lighting causes reflections so you need to hold it just so which can be very unergonomic. Furthermore, Safari is horrific to use because of how it handles new windows (no tabs, it takes about 3 seconds for a window to open with ridiculous zooming in and out animations....).
Most geeks I know (including myself) aren't saying "No one is going to buy that". The whole reason I think it's a disaster is because it totally sucks (due to reasons you mention and more) and *huge* numbers of people will buy it. That's precisely why I find it so alarming.
> They make all of their profit on selling the Devices themselves.
And guess why people buy the devices? Because (among other things) of the App Store. Because it has applications that other platforms don't. Why don't other platforms have those applications? Because they were written in a non-cross-platform way! Why were they written that way? **Because Apple has banned cross platform apps from the app store**.
> practical reason 2) If apple makes an update that alters an API cal for security reasons, any apps coded in AIR can not take advantage of that change, and will remain broken, until not only Apple and the Dev make a code change, but the Dev has to wait on Adobe, meaning again, native apps have a significant market advantage to interpreted code.
Your reality distortion field seems to have affected your perception of the development process. Do you really imagine that Apple regularly alters API calls and all the applications in the app store get recompiled by their developers???? Do you actually think Apple even needs to modify the signatures of their API calls to make them secure? This is just a fantasy of yours.
> Because if a large amount of developers start using Flash to develop applications with, and then Apple wants to change the development environment, add APIs and features, then Apple is dependent on Adobe updating Flash to support those changes before developers can use them.
This is just misinformation. Nothing stops any cross platform framework from including hooks to let you call native APIs directly. People use cross platform tools for the bits they do well and supplement them with extra native code for the platform specific parts.
> I think the primary complaint (at least for me) for most flash games is the on hover effect
Sorry, this is irrelevant FUD. In what universe are hover effects a necessary requirement for Flash apps? If hover does not work on mobile devices then guess what - people will not make Flash apps for mobile devices that use hover effects! And if they do make stupid apps targeted at a device that rely on features the device doesn't have (why anybody thinks this would happen is beyond me) then Steve has all the power in the world to ban those apps from his app store.
The reason he doesn't want these kind of apps is obvious. Flash is a portable platform. A Flash game made for iPhone will run unchanged on Android. And Blackberry. And Windows Phone. He *knows* that if this stuff is allowed then the iPhone will lose its exclusivity & market advantage overnight as the world is swamped with Flash mobile content since developing once instead of 3 times cuts the cost dramatically. It's all about lock in, control, power. It's anti-developer, anti-competitive and ultimately anti-consumer because choice is reduced and cost is increased - all to benefit Apple's bottom line.
> If and when Apple exceeds 80% smartphone market share, is required in order to perform some function that no other device can replace, and/or starts telling developers that they cannot port the same product they submit to Apple to any other platform, then we'll talk about "Antitrust". But I don't see any of that happening any time soon.
Jobs couldn't stop crowing about how mobile safari had "more than double the browser traffic of all other mobile browsers combined" in his last pony show. They may be a while off in the "smart phone" market per se, but there are plenty of other categories where they are *very* close to being perceived as a monopoly.
> All Apple needs to do to avoid this is publish performance and stability guidelines that can only be met by Objective-C or C++ code
Exactly - and it's very notable that they did not do this. They could also easily have written that all applications must support touch interfaces into their agreement. But they didn't. Because they know that in 5 minutes time Adobe would produce a version of Flash that complied with just about anything they wrote in their agreement. So they just had to out and out ban it based on "how" you made it rather than "what" you made. This is one of the telling points that gives lie to their motives.
I might be ignorant, but it seems to me there is a big difference between only supporting a particular environment and writing it into your terms of use that only a particular environment can be used.
I'm quite ok if my dishwasher says I should only use a certain brand of dishwashing detergent. However having them come and turn it off or sue me if I put in another brand is a whole step worse.
>Mobile Safari sucks. It sucks a bit less than the default browser on an Adroid Archos but not by much.
Yes. Most of the UI stuff on the iPhone / iPad is great, but Safari is really almost broken in my view - at least for my browsing style. My N1 is way easier to use for general browsing - to the extent that if both are in easy reach when I'm on the couch I generally reach for the N1 with it's tiny screen instead of the iPad with it's giant screen. Simple things like opening a new window - on the iPad it seems to pause and think for a second, then it insists on zooming out to the screen of thumbnails and then it thinks for *another* second before zooming in on the new page, and *only then* does that page even start loading. For someone who's default browsing mode is to open a lot of links in new windows it's so ponderous it is totally unusable.
Indeed, that was the second change I made after disabling access to my birthday.
The worst part: these people weren't just super-observant about other people's birthdays. They had installed some "Birthday" application that notified them about birthdays of their friends. So not only were these "friends" aware of my birthday, but some unknown number of third party applications that I have no way to even identify now know my birthday and there is no way I can ever "delete" that information from their databases.
If you really think you understand your privacy settings on Facebook and you have not invested a significant amount of effort to do so then you've most definitely been "zuckerpunched". There are all kinds of odd things sequested away in dark corners of the settings and profile page.
My most recent was when a bunch of people I barely knew started congratulating me on my birthday. Even though I'd disabled all the ways I though that information was available. Turns out there was another setting somewhere under "Profile", I think, with a checkbox that said something like "reveal my birthday to everyone".
> I think it is completely stupid, since anyone can arbitrarily get around it.
Well, this is one of the great fears about it. Since people will be able to trivially bypass it, people most certainly will. Not only will they do it, they will make software and publish articles about how to do it. And then out of severe embarrassment, the government will react with new laws that make it illegal to own, sell, or distribute material about how to bypass the filter. Now suddenly whole classes of software and speech will be regulated. It's a downward spiral into total lockdown control of the internet.
This is the only really new occurrence that can have made a difference in the last month that I can think of. That and that Rudd is clearing the deck of any annoying issues as he is about to call an early election.
> Of course if Australia votes them in again, they'll say they have a mandate for this filter
This is what scares me. They probably WILL get voted in again just due to inertia and because the same secular majority that is scared of this filter are equally scared of lunatic religious whack job Tony Abbott. There's really nowhere left to turn if you want actual freedom in Australia.
I just hope that this stuff spurs a huge vote for the greens who seem to be the only sane party left (which is really disturbing in itself) and that sends a message to the other parties that they are way off track.
> I have to buy Windows to code for Windows Mobile
But nobody tells you what hardware to buy. Or how how *old* your OS must be. I just finished coughing up money to upgrade OSX so that I could compile an app for an iPad, something impossible on the current version of OSX from just 6 months ago.
I'm sure you can even code for Windows Mobile in a VM on your *Mac* if you so feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Revenue is what the game is all about.
Not really, at least, not early on. Everyone knows that the future ongoing revenue from "owning" the majority smart phone platform will dwarf the numbers from even the whole first decade of this race. The important thing is mindshare - in the consumer's mind and especially in the mind of businesses. Android is clearly making impressive gains though I hesitate to believe that it has actually reached anything like the brand recognition of the iPhone yet.
Actually, Android being open source means it doesn't really matter if Google does drop it or turn evil. It would certainly cause a hit and slow things down, but I think at this point it already has enough critical mass that it would continue on it's own. That's one of the beauties of the open source model, and it's also why a diverse range of device manufacturers are willing to buy into it - because unlike the iPhone, they always have the option to take it their own way if the OS maker betrays them.
It's nice during the short period when you're in transit, but it presents a dilemma once you get there because it is so deprived of basic capabilities that people do tend to want.
For example I go on holiday, I want to take pictures. I need something easy to plug my camera into to download and quickly crop and edit pictures. The iPad is just horrendously horrible for this due to Steve's obsession with locking it down and removing all the standard ports from it. So you are confronted with the dilemma of bringing both the iPad AND the laptop and doubling up on a lot of capabilities or doing without a lot of the basic things most people *do* want to do when they are travelling.
I had the same experience. I walked into Best Buy on launch day (this was in Boston) and they had a big display with 5 iPads. No lines, 3 of them were not even being used, so I wandered up and played with one for 10 minutes and only at the end did someone else come up behind me to try one out. I listened with amusement to the guy trying to avoid telling the elderly people who asked him how much RAM it had (he had a long explanation about how how a small amount of memory in an Apple device was like ten times as much in a windows computer, but couldn't bring himself to say the actual number).
Perhaps it was just incredibly uncool for any Apple devotee to ever cross the threshold of Best Buy, but I couldn't observe *any* kind of shortage either on launch day or in the weeks thereafter.
This was actually a fairly well documented fact. I remember they walked the line of people lined up outside the Apple stores and a good number of them really didn't know what they were going to use it for. They just wanted it. There were articles published about this phenomenon at the time (here's the best I can google right now: http://modmyi.com/forums/ipad-news/704633-surveys-100-dont-know-what-ipads.html )
Well, we must have very different usage styles.
Every time I open a new window and the stupid thing does its bizarre slow animation of zooming out and zooming in, wasting 3 seconds of my time and not even starting to load the new page until it is finished I feel like throwing the thing at the wall. Then at some point I hit the maximum number of open windows and it won't open any more. It's just an exercise in frustration.
I actually prefer to use my Nexus One, even with it's tiny screen, over the iPad.
>>and a crap web browser with no plugin or extension support.
>
>Flash runs like shit on netbooks.
Your only criteria for web browsers is that they run flash well????
The built in browser in the iPad is *horrible* for casual browser. It's basically unusable for me. I do like the iPad for some things, but those are very specific & constrained uses, and web browsing is certainly not one of them.
The problem is that *because* people are protected from certain very basic screw ups in Java companies automatically downgrade the quality of programmer and the level of oversight they use. The result, I believe, is that the end product is *even worse* than it would have been for the "more vulnerable" language.
So - if you are talking academically about languages - Java is more secure by a long way. C has all the vulnerabilities that Java has plus a lot more. If you are talking about actual outcomes in the real world - C is probably more secure. But this in no way means you can take the same sloppy programmers and methodologies that you used for your Java app, tell them to write in C and get a more secure product. Quite the opposite.
I agree about touch interface for the scrolling being a nice feature, but don't forget, there is a whole category of netbooks now emerging that support touch screens as well. Touch screen != iPad.
> When I wanted to sit on my comfy chair on my deck wrapped in a blanket with a coffee in one hand and /. in the other.
I don't want to burst your bubble, but I have an iPad and it's horrible for that. At least a laptop sits nicely on your lap and holds it's own screen so you can read it easily. The iPad has to be held constantly, nursed like a baby. Any kind of background lighting causes reflections so you need to hold it just so which can be very unergonomic. Furthermore, Safari is horrific to use because of how it handles new windows (no tabs, it takes about 3 seconds for a window to open with ridiculous zooming in and out animations ....).
Most geeks I know (including myself) aren't saying "No one is going to buy that". The whole reason I think it's a disaster is because it totally sucks (due to reasons you mention and more) and *huge* numbers of people will buy it. That's precisely why I find it so alarming.
> They make all of their profit on selling the Devices themselves.
And guess why people buy the devices? Because (among other things) of the App Store. Because it has applications that other platforms don't. Why don't other platforms have those applications? Because they were written in a non-cross-platform way! Why were they written that way? **Because Apple has banned cross platform apps from the app store**.
> practical reason 2) If apple makes an update that alters an API cal for security reasons, any apps coded in AIR can not take advantage of that change, and will remain broken, until not only Apple and the Dev make a code change, but the Dev has to wait on Adobe, meaning again, native apps have a significant market advantage to interpreted code.
Your reality distortion field seems to have affected your perception of the development process. Do you really imagine that Apple regularly alters API calls and all the applications in the app store get recompiled by their developers???? Do you actually think Apple even needs to modify the signatures of their API calls to make them secure? This is just a fantasy of yours.
> Because if a large amount of developers start using Flash to develop applications with, and then Apple wants to change the development environment, add APIs and features, then Apple is dependent on Adobe updating Flash to support those changes before developers can use them.
This is just misinformation. Nothing stops any cross platform framework from including hooks to let you call native APIs directly. People use cross platform tools for the bits they do well and supplement them with extra native code for the platform specific parts.
> I think the primary complaint (at least for me) for most flash games is the on hover effect
Sorry, this is irrelevant FUD. In what universe are hover effects a necessary requirement for Flash apps? If hover does not work on mobile devices then guess what - people will not make Flash apps for mobile devices that use hover effects! And if they do make stupid apps targeted at a device that rely on features the device doesn't have (why anybody thinks this would happen is beyond me) then Steve has all the power in the world to ban those apps from his app store.
The reason he doesn't want these kind of apps is obvious. Flash is a portable platform. A Flash game made for iPhone will run unchanged on Android. And Blackberry. And Windows Phone. He *knows* that if this stuff is allowed then the iPhone will lose its exclusivity & market advantage overnight as the world is swamped with Flash mobile content since developing once instead of 3 times cuts the cost dramatically. It's all about lock in, control, power. It's anti-developer, anti-competitive and ultimately anti-consumer because choice is reduced and cost is increased - all to benefit Apple's bottom line.
> If and when Apple exceeds 80% smartphone market share, is required in order to perform some function that no other device can replace, and/or starts telling developers that they cannot port the same product they submit to Apple to any other platform, then we'll talk about "Antitrust". But I don't see any of that happening any time soon.
Jobs couldn't stop crowing about how mobile safari had "more than double the browser traffic of all other mobile browsers combined" in his last pony show. They may be a while off in the "smart phone" market per se, but there are plenty of other categories where they are *very* close to being perceived as a monopoly.
> All Apple needs to do to avoid this is publish performance and stability guidelines that can only be met by Objective-C or C++ code
Exactly - and it's very notable that they did not do this. They could also easily have written that all applications must support touch interfaces into their agreement. But they didn't. Because they know that in 5 minutes time Adobe would produce a version of Flash that complied with just about anything they wrote in their agreement. So they just had to out and out ban it based on "how" you made it rather than "what" you made. This is one of the telling points that gives lie to their motives.
I might be ignorant, but it seems to me there is a big difference between only supporting a particular environment and writing it into your terms of use that only a particular environment can be used.
I'm quite ok if my dishwasher says I should only use a certain brand of dishwashing detergent. However having them come and turn it off or sue me if I put in another brand is a whole step worse.
>Mobile Safari sucks. It sucks a bit less than the default browser on an Adroid Archos but not by much.
Yes. Most of the UI stuff on the iPhone / iPad is great, but Safari is really almost broken in my view - at least for my browsing style. My N1 is way easier to use for general browsing - to the extent that if both are in easy reach when I'm on the couch I generally reach for the N1 with it's tiny screen instead of the iPad with it's giant screen. Simple things like opening a new window - on the iPad it seems to pause and think for a second, then it insists on zooming out to the screen of thumbnails and then it thinks for *another* second before zooming in on the new page, and *only then* does that page even start loading. For someone who's default browsing mode is to open a lot of links in new windows it's so ponderous it is totally unusable.
Indeed, that was the second change I made after disabling access to my birthday.
The worst part: these people weren't just super-observant about other people's birthdays. They had installed some "Birthday" application that notified them about birthdays of their friends. So not only were these "friends" aware of my birthday, but some unknown number of third party applications that I have no way to even identify now know my birthday and there is no way I can ever "delete" that information from their databases.
If you really think you understand your privacy settings on Facebook and you have not invested a significant amount of effort to do so then you've most definitely been "zuckerpunched". There are all kinds of odd things sequested away in dark corners of the settings and profile page.
My most recent was when a bunch of people I barely knew started congratulating me on my birthday. Even though I'd disabled all the ways I though that information was available. Turns out there was another setting somewhere under "Profile", I think, with a checkbox that said something like "reveal my birthday to everyone".
> I think it is completely stupid, since anyone can arbitrarily get around it.
Well, this is one of the great fears about it. Since people will be able to trivially bypass it, people most certainly will. Not only will they do it, they will make software and publish articles about how to do it. And then out of severe embarrassment, the government will react with new laws that make it illegal to own, sell, or distribute material about how to bypass the filter. Now suddenly whole classes of software and speech will be regulated. It's a downward spiral into total lockdown control of the internet.
> I wonder if this decision was related to the protest that had been organised?
After all that has been said and done and been ignored I would find that extraordinarily unlikely.
What is far more likely is that intervention by the US government has made a difference:
http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/us-ambassador-critical-of-conroys-internet-filters-20100413-s5fs.html
This is the only really new occurrence that can have made a difference in the last month that I can think of. That and that Rudd is clearing the deck of any annoying issues as he is about to call an early election.
> Of course if Australia votes them in again, they'll say they have a mandate for this filter
This is what scares me. They probably WILL get voted in again just due to inertia and because the same secular majority that is scared of this filter are equally scared of lunatic religious whack job Tony Abbott. There's really nowhere left to turn if you want actual freedom in Australia.
I just hope that this stuff spurs a huge vote for the greens who seem to be the only sane party left (which is really disturbing in itself) and that sends a message to the other parties that they are way off track.
> I have to buy Windows to code for Windows Mobile
But nobody tells you what hardware to buy. Or how how *old* your OS must be. I just finished coughing up money to upgrade OSX so that I could compile an app for an iPad, something impossible on the current version of OSX from just 6 months ago.
I'm sure you can even code for Windows Mobile in a VM on your *Mac* if you so feel like it.