If you're writing in C / C++ then you probably wouldn't be using the widget API in the first place except as glue - i.e. you might write a little Activity wrapper to host your native app but 99.99% of the code would be pure native code. Of course there may be apps which are hybrids with a lot but I suspect the majority of apps which need native execution are mostly native execution. Not that I think Dalvik is particularly slow at all. I have a quite compute intensive app which runs acceptably on a single core phone and it's pure Java.
Personally I think graphics performance in 2.2 is fine, certainly nothing I've ever felt myself complaining about but I expect it does preclude some of the fancier transitional effects this thread is referring to. So if it's changed for the better in 3.x/4.x then that's fine by me. We know that Android underwent quite a substantial reworking of the layout engine in 3.x to better utilise hardware acceleration and that is bound to carry through to 4.x. There is even a RenderScript language which allows performance / compute expensive operations to be specified in an agnostic fashion and then accelerated at runtime utilizing what ever hardware is best suited for the task.
I use filters in Gmail because it's a handy way to mass select mail that matches more than one criteria and get rid of it. e.g. my wife helpfully signed my up to a bunch of daily deals websites. So I tagged all this spam with a filter and I can delete that shit with a few clicks without typing out the pattern of each deal site every time. Labelling is also useful for highlighting particular important incoming email, or of tagging spam / automated crap. I still think folders are useful. I have emails going back years which match to a filter but I don't have any reason to reference them every day but I still want to keep them around. Gmail has a pseudo behaviour to do this - archive the email and it disappears from inbox but still filters, but I'd still prefer a regular folder.
BTW I'm only using GMail because Thunderbird became so utterly useless at spam filtering that I gave up on it. GMail is actually a really good email client and certainly the best web client I've used.
Tell me about it. Lotus Notes is one of the most atrocious user experiences ever devised by mankind. Even 8.x which superficially appears saner than it's predecessors is still a rat's nest of secondary dialogs, cryptic / arcane terminology, weird key combinations, unhelpful behaviours and all round pain-in-the-assery.
In this day and age where document / content management systems that run over http, webdav are a dime a dozen and numerous email products can interoperate through IMAP you would have to be mad to tie yourself into Domino or Notes. At least run IMAP on Domino and spare your poor users the pain and suffering of using the bloated client software.
Second, Objective-C, despite being what you claim is a nightmare to program for, has so many top notch applications that your claim falls flat on its ass. You can program in C / C++ for Android, but you're still running everything through Goggle's ripoff virtual machine, with no performance benefit over using Java. If your iOS programming buddy tells you to first get a webview, he may just not be the most awesome programmer ever.
Er hang on. If you write C / C++ apps they're running natively. There is little if any Java / Dalvik at all aside from some glue perhaps if you want to launch some other activity or something similar. As for performance benefits, Dalvik is a register based VM, Java is a stack based VM. Completely separate things. Since 2.2 Dalvik runs the app through a JIT after which would execute at a reasonable clip, certainly nothing to be bothered about in the vast majority of apps, and if it was an issue, well C/C++ support is there too.
Switching to Gnome 3 slowed down my workflow tremendously. I no longer have "last window I used" switching; I have to toggle between ALT-tab and ALT-`... I've lost rapid access to my system's status in my gnome-panel applets, and modal dialog handling has changed for the worse.
It obviously has a lot room for improvement, no denying that. But of those things you state none of them is insurmountable. Gnome-panel applets for example are just processes that render into a little widget through a specific panel API. GNOME3 implements shell extensions which are a more powerful API anyway - write the gui in css and JS and hook it up to something. There is already a system monitor extension and failing that you could run a more traditional process / system monitor and minimize it. It would still be visible from the activity screen.
If a government wishes to make a PSA, why shouldn't they tap business to fund the campaign assuming their goals and the industry's are in alignment? If "big pharma" (whatever the fuck that means) stump up some cash for some marketing materials that promote vaccination which turn means less people get sick and die then great.
Android allows people to develop apps in C/C++ and there are ports of perl, python etc. It's probably more likely done this way because mobile phone operators are less likely to impede a device for making an http request vs one which is trying to talk with an IRC server or whatever.
Linux is not as easy to use as any other OS. That is wishful thinking. It's true that it has become far easier to use in recent years thanks to usability efforts of people like GNOME and Ubuntu but it's still far too hit and miss, especially when supporting consumer devices.
I expect the main thing Jobs brought to the Pixar table was money and industry contacts. I doubt he did or even could play any part in the creative process. It worked out extremely profitably for him of course.
Hold down the Alt key and the drop down says Shutdown. It's another of those annoyances that could be fixed assuming someone in GNOME would realise that not everyone wants to suspend their PCs.
I don't see much about GNOME 3 which makes it especially touchscreen friendly. I'm sure it's in the back of developer's minds to make it that way (e.g. virtual keyboard landed in 3.2) but at the moment its designed for mouse and keyboard.
Why can't you alt+tab between apps in the one workspace. But I agree some kind of task bar / launcher / switcher is necessary at least as an option on the app screen. While flipping to the activity screen is pretty fast and slick I think it still causes a mental disconnect that a taskbar would alleviate. There is actually somewhere they could put this - in the notifications tray that pops up when you mouse into the bottom right corner.
I don't use multiple screens much to comment but I expect it would be nice to be able to persistently set how many there were at startup and to also set the background for each to be visually different.
Be in no doubt GNOME 3 has some pretty stupid omissions but the core experience is actually pretty slick and task centric. You can see and arrange all your activities from one screen, you use your apps from another screen. It comes second nature to use and it looks great, easily comparable to OS X or Windows 7.
As I said it has some issues and I wish they'd be sorted. Biggest for me is there are no desktop icons unless you enable it from a tweak tool. This oversight / omission is just bizarre. The second omission is lots of settings that gnome-tweak-tool exposes should have been in the options dialogs from the get go - things like enabling minimize / maximize buttons, font sizes and so on. I do not accept that these things are not basic configuration settings that every user should have access to by default. The final annoyance is while the activities screen is okay most of the time, the fact is that it would be useful to have a task launcher which is visible without flipping screens.
So I don't have bad impressions but it needs more refinement. Unity by comparison is really getting on my nerves and I used to be more favourably inclined to that effort than I was to GNOME. Maybe if Ubuntu actually fixed some of the more stupid "features" like the global menus and floating scrollbars it might be more tolerable.
And of course Disney Land loses nothing if they allow people to sell their tickets after they leave the park? Except of course Disney loses a great deal because many people who might have bought a ticket are hanging around looking for a second hand sale instead. And in addition these freeloaders who paid Disney nothing get to enjoy the same experience as actual customers and compete with them for positions in queues and so on.
Multiplayer is absolutely no different. At the end of the day publishers bear the cost of hosting servers for people who didn't pay them a penny. While I completely understand why it might be annoying for people who buy lots of secondhand games (though personally I rarely do), I also completely understand why companies do it. Deterring second hand sales will increase 1st hand sales and disabling multiplayer is an effective way they could do that. Sony won't be the only company to do this - I expect most of them will in time. For example ID are locking out entire chunks of Rage to second hand owners and I expect they'll flog them the unlock code at some point for $10 or whatever.
Of course it is more expensive. More players = more sustained demand on the server for longer. The second hand market could string out server costs quite considerably. In addition the publisher loses out because many of those 2nd hand purchases could have been 1st hand purchases.
And yeah maybe some people do buy because they can recoup costs by selling the title. It doesn't mean that they compensate for lost sales and increased server costs.
A merry go round sells tickets for $5 and lets people ride as long as they like. The operator knows most people get fed up after an average of 10 spins so their prices are set accordingly to cover costs and maximize profits. But then some people start selling their tickets to other people (some of whom were waiting in the queue to buy their own ticket) for $3.
So the operator loses twice, first losing a $5 sale prospect and secondly because the average spins per person goes up. Now perhaps the fact that the ride tickets could be resold was an incentive to some people to buy a ticket in the first place, recouping some of their outlay. But if the costs of supporting the freeloaders is greater than the profits from subsequently resold tickets then the operator is still losing money.
So what could the operater do? They could charge $6 for tickets to compensate for their losses but that's punishing people who bought a ticket and weren't freeloading. Or they could limit the number of spins but that would also punish legit ticket holders who wanted more spins. Or they could take the ticket at the gate so they couldn't sold later.
The third option is effectively what Sony and others are doing here. You redeem your code and it can't be used by someone else. Disagree with it all you like but it sure as hell costs a company money to run servers for people who never gave them a penny in the first place.
No, it's still free. Buy a retail copy of a game and the online comes with it. I expect even for 2nd hand sales the effect of a PSN pass will cause most games with heavy multiplayer content to be substantially discounted to the point of negating the cost of PSN Pass.
And if you think Sony are alone in trying to combat used game sales then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. This is like DLC all over again. EA started this ball rolling with "project ten dollar" and others are paying heed. Sony is doing here. ID is doing it with Rage. I bet there are lots of things like this in the pipeline and I would be deeply surprised if Microsoft didn't have a scheme of their own in the works.
It's just confirms that I won't be purchasing anything from you, ever. Good job killing your potential customers.
Except the issue here is you're not purchasing something from Sony. If you buy a second hand game from Gamestop, Sony (or EA, Microsoft et al) is not seeing a penny of that but they still have to host your ass when you turn up to play the multiplayer.
Now one could argue that the guy who bought the game in the first place paid for your multiplayer spot. The counterargument to Sony (et al) is that if two or more people play on their service in succession that it increases the amount of time that the same number of servers have to be kept running. Running servers costs money and therefore they want to claw some of that back.
With this move (which will just annoy me, as I hate punching in those tediously long codes every time I buy a game now) the PS3 has lost its only competitive advantage over the Xbox.
Well it hasn't really. If you buy brand new games it's no different. It's only second hand sales which are affected.
However I think it is very likely that if second hand games are effectively hobbled that they'll retail for less to compensate for the price of reactivation. So a game which might have retailed for $50 second hand might retail for $40 if it's substantially a multiplayer title. The main losers here will be people selling (not buying) second hand games and the likes of Gamestop for slapping such a high markup on second hand games in the first place.
I'd also not be so sure that Microsoft won't do something similar. At the end of the day it's basically a way to squelch second hand sales and claw back some of the money that otherwise goes into Gamestop's pocket.
I expect you'll be regretting that decision when you've hit the dpad for the umpteenth time to navigate your way through the menus as it sluggishly attempts to refresh each time. Touch really makes a huge difference.
The problem is by trolling like this they are doing the new tech a disservice and dampening sales. I doubt even the most ardent EV proponent could claim they have petrol / diesel levels of range or performance, but I expect EVs would be entirely suitable for a very large number of potential owners.
It's likely they shoved out a hobbled $80 model with the expectation that most people will buy the next one up but they can still claim the lower price point.
The HTC Desire was the Nexus One's half sibling - same basic design but modified Android and it sold extremely well. So I agree if Google had got its device into retail channels it could have sold extremely well.
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Personally I think graphics performance in 2.2 is fine, certainly nothing I've ever felt myself complaining about but I expect it does preclude some of the fancier transitional effects this thread is referring to. So if it's changed for the better in 3.x/4.x then that's fine by me. We know that Android underwent quite a substantial reworking of the layout engine in 3.x to better utilise hardware acceleration and that is bound to carry through to 4.x. There is even a RenderScript language which allows performance / compute expensive operations to be specified in an agnostic fashion and then accelerated at runtime utilizing what ever hardware is best suited for the task.
BTW I'm only using GMail because Thunderbird became so utterly useless at spam filtering that I gave up on it. GMail is actually a really good email client and certainly the best web client I've used.
In this day and age where document / content management systems that run over http, webdav are a dime a dozen and numerous email products can interoperate through IMAP you would have to be mad to tie yourself into Domino or Notes. At least run IMAP on Domino and spare your poor users the pain and suffering of using the bloated client software.
Second, Objective-C, despite being what you claim is a nightmare to program for, has so many top notch applications that your claim falls flat on its ass. You can program in C / C++ for Android, but you're still running everything through Goggle's ripoff virtual machine, with no performance benefit over using Java. If your iOS programming buddy tells you to first get a webview, he may just not be the most awesome programmer ever.
Er hang on. If you write C / C++ apps they're running natively. There is little if any Java / Dalvik at all aside from some glue perhaps if you want to launch some other activity or something similar. As for performance benefits, Dalvik is a register based VM, Java is a stack based VM. Completely separate things. Since 2.2 Dalvik runs the app through a JIT after which would execute at a reasonable clip, certainly nothing to be bothered about in the vast majority of apps, and if it was an issue, well C/C++ support is there too.
Switching to Gnome 3 slowed down my workflow tremendously. I no longer have "last window I used" switching; I have to toggle between ALT-tab and ALT-` ... I've lost rapid access to my system's status in my gnome-panel applets, and modal dialog handling has changed for the worse.
It obviously has a lot room for improvement, no denying that. But of those things you state none of them is insurmountable. Gnome-panel applets for example are just processes that render into a little widget through a specific panel API. GNOME3 implements shell extensions which are a more powerful API anyway - write the gui in css and JS and hook it up to something. There is already a system monitor extension and failing that you could run a more traditional process / system monitor and minimize it. It would still be visible from the activity screen.
If a government wishes to make a PSA, why shouldn't they tap business to fund the campaign assuming their goals and the industry's are in alignment? If "big pharma" (whatever the fuck that means) stump up some cash for some marketing materials that promote vaccination which turn means less people get sick and die then great.
As for the non walled garden approach, clearly most people prefer it given the popularity of Android.
Android allows people to develop apps in C/C++ and there are ports of perl, python etc. It's probably more likely done this way because mobile phone operators are less likely to impede a device for making an http request vs one which is trying to talk with an IRC server or whatever.
It ain't google's fault if people are stupid enough to download apps from some dodgy warez site and infect themselves in the process.
Linux is not as easy to use as any other OS. That is wishful thinking. It's true that it has become far easier to use in recent years thanks to usability efforts of people like GNOME and Ubuntu but it's still far too hit and miss, especially when supporting consumer devices.
I expect the main thing Jobs brought to the Pixar table was money and industry contacts. I doubt he did or even could play any part in the creative process. It worked out extremely profitably for him of course.
Hold down the Alt key and the drop down says Shutdown. It's another of those annoyances that could be fixed assuming someone in GNOME would realise that not everyone wants to suspend their PCs.
I don't see much about GNOME 3 which makes it especially touchscreen friendly. I'm sure it's in the back of developer's minds to make it that way (e.g. virtual keyboard landed in 3.2) but at the moment its designed for mouse and keyboard.
I don't use multiple screens much to comment but I expect it would be nice to be able to persistently set how many there were at startup and to also set the background for each to be visually different.
As I said it has some issues and I wish they'd be sorted. Biggest for me is there are no desktop icons unless you enable it from a tweak tool. This oversight / omission is just bizarre. The second omission is lots of settings that gnome-tweak-tool exposes should have been in the options dialogs from the get go - things like enabling minimize / maximize buttons, font sizes and so on. I do not accept that these things are not basic configuration settings that every user should have access to by default. The final annoyance is while the activities screen is okay most of the time, the fact is that it would be useful to have a task launcher which is visible without flipping screens.
So I don't have bad impressions but it needs more refinement. Unity by comparison is really getting on my nerves and I used to be more favourably inclined to that effort than I was to GNOME. Maybe if Ubuntu actually fixed some of the more stupid "features" like the global menus and floating scrollbars it might be more tolerable.
Multiplayer is absolutely no different. At the end of the day publishers bear the cost of hosting servers for people who didn't pay them a penny. While I completely understand why it might be annoying for people who buy lots of secondhand games (though personally I rarely do), I also completely understand why companies do it. Deterring second hand sales will increase 1st hand sales and disabling multiplayer is an effective way they could do that. Sony won't be the only company to do this - I expect most of them will in time. For example ID are locking out entire chunks of Rage to second hand owners and I expect they'll flog them the unlock code at some point for $10 or whatever.
And yeah maybe some people do buy because they can recoup costs by selling the title. It doesn't mean that they compensate for lost sales and increased server costs.
A merry go round sells tickets for $5 and lets people ride as long as they like. The operator knows most people get fed up after an average of 10 spins so their prices are set accordingly to cover costs and maximize profits. But then some people start selling their tickets to other people (some of whom were waiting in the queue to buy their own ticket) for $3.
So the operator loses twice, first losing a $5 sale prospect and secondly because the average spins per person goes up. Now perhaps the fact that the ride tickets could be resold was an incentive to some people to buy a ticket in the first place, recouping some of their outlay. But if the costs of supporting the freeloaders is greater than the profits from subsequently resold tickets then the operator is still losing money.
So what could the operater do? They could charge $6 for tickets to compensate for their losses but that's punishing people who bought a ticket and weren't freeloading. Or they could limit the number of spins but that would also punish legit ticket holders who wanted more spins. Or they could take the ticket at the gate so they couldn't sold later.
The third option is effectively what Sony and others are doing here. You redeem your code and it can't be used by someone else. Disagree with it all you like but it sure as hell costs a company money to run servers for people who never gave them a penny in the first place.
And if you think Sony are alone in trying to combat used game sales then you're living in cloud cuckoo land. This is like DLC all over again. EA started this ball rolling with "project ten dollar" and others are paying heed. Sony is doing here. ID is doing it with Rage. I bet there are lots of things like this in the pipeline and I would be deeply surprised if Microsoft didn't have a scheme of their own in the works.
It's just confirms that I won't be purchasing anything from you, ever. Good job killing your potential customers.
Except the issue here is you're not purchasing something from Sony. If you buy a second hand game from Gamestop, Sony (or EA, Microsoft et al) is not seeing a penny of that but they still have to host your ass when you turn up to play the multiplayer.
Now one could argue that the guy who bought the game in the first place paid for your multiplayer spot. The counterargument to Sony (et al) is that if two or more people play on their service in succession that it increases the amount of time that the same number of servers have to be kept running. Running servers costs money and therefore they want to claw some of that back.
With this move (which will just annoy me, as I hate punching in those tediously long codes every time I buy a game now) the PS3 has lost its only competitive advantage over the Xbox.
Well it hasn't really. If you buy brand new games it's no different. It's only second hand sales which are affected.
However I think it is very likely that if second hand games are effectively hobbled that they'll retail for less to compensate for the price of reactivation. So a game which might have retailed for $50 second hand might retail for $40 if it's substantially a multiplayer title. The main losers here will be people selling (not buying) second hand games and the likes of Gamestop for slapping such a high markup on second hand games in the first place.
I'd also not be so sure that Microsoft won't do something similar. At the end of the day it's basically a way to squelch second hand sales and claw back some of the money that otherwise goes into Gamestop's pocket.
I expect you'll be regretting that decision when you've hit the dpad for the umpteenth time to navigate your way through the menus as it sluggishly attempts to refresh each time. Touch really makes a huge difference.
The problem is by trolling like this they are doing the new tech a disservice and dampening sales. I doubt even the most ardent EV proponent could claim they have petrol / diesel levels of range or performance, but I expect EVs would be entirely suitable for a very large number of potential owners.
It's likely they shoved out a hobbled $80 model with the expectation that most people will buy the next one up but they can still claim the lower price point.
The HTC Desire was the Nexus One's half sibling - same basic design but modified Android and it sold extremely well. So I agree if Google had got its device into retail channels it could have sold extremely well.