Disney paid who knows how much to developers to bring Photoshop support to Wine so that they could use it in their Linux environment. I am sure they would have preferred to pay $1000 for a native Linux version.
OSX doesn't provide a suitable API to play hardware accelerated video.
10.6.4 does. The question is: Will Adobe update Flash to take advantage of the new API in a timely fashion or will we be waiting months before usable Flash comes to OS X?
So that way, Adobe knows they can't decide to build a version of Flash that takes a FLA file and emits an XCode project that's ready to build.
Actually, the license terms could allow for that. You can write supporting libraries for your iPhone app in any language you want, generated by any tool you want. The catch is that you cannot link to the APIs provided in the SDK. All Adobe, or anyone else, has to do is provide an Objective-C application that provides the necessary bridge between the SDK and the external libraries.
Most calves, no matter what they are destined to produce (veal, beef, dairy, etc.), are bottle fed and restrained. It is the only way you can realistically ensure they are fed without compromising the mother's milk. Once they are old enough to feed without intervention, they are moved to less restrictive quarters.
The only difference between veal and any other kind of beef is the size of the animal at the time it goes to market. Perhaps it is cruel to shorten the lifespan of the animal by a few months, but otherwise a veal cow sees the same life that any other beef cow does.
I am sure that some farmers do mistreat their animals. But it is not fair to paint all farmers with the same brush. Most farmers who raise veal do care about the well-being of their animals during their lifespan and do not trap them in a tiny box.
We raise veal cattle here. The cattle have free rein of the barn, and a large outdoor area. I am sure there are some farms that do pen in their cattle in a tiny pen for life, but that is hardly the norm.
The only difference between veal and your normal beef cow is the weight at which the beast goes to market. The procedure of raising the animal is virtually the same either way.
The byproduct of ethanol is an excellent food source for cattle. Arguably better than whole corn itself. Why not produce ethanol and feed the same corn to cattle who can walk on treadmills?
Also, who buries their manure in a landfill? Manure makes for a nice fertilizer when spread on fields, and it also makes for another nice power source when put in a digester.
There is no reason why the originally written in Objective-C app cannot provide the necessary bridge to the UI and graphics tasks on behalf of the library. In fact, this route would actually be better for Flash developers because it would allow them to utilize the native features of iPhone OS when Flash is not suitable for the job.
And that is why everyone is lining up to buy Palm devices and why they are not putting the company up for sale, right?
Geeks, which I am assuming you tend towards because you are reading Slashdot, understand the limitations of multitasking and are generally willing to make the necessary sacrifices to allow for its use. iPhone users, on the other hand, are typically not geeks. They expect it to work perfectly out of the box. That is a hard problem when developers are generally free to execute any kind of code they wish, bugs and all.
I have not had the pleasure of using a Pre myself, but the reviews I have heard are generally negative in regards to performance and battery life. That is the exact situation Apple is trying to avoid from developers who don't have the resources to do what Apple is able to do.
iPhone OS has supported multitasking since day one. The issue is finding a solution that prevents developers from doing stupid things, with respect to battery life, with their new-found multitasking abilities.
Not exactly. The SDK agreement places no restrictions on the language or processes used to generate libraries for your application. The core of your application, the one that links against documented APIs, must conform to those terms, but there is no reason why that core cannot make calls out to those libraries written in Flash, for example.
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, or C++. Third-party libraries, however, are not applications and seem to be exempt from the rules so long as they do not link against any documented APIs.
The answer: Compile the Flash down to a third-party library that talks to the documented APIs through a handwritten Objective-C, C, or C++ application.
The resultant Flash app would have to be built using Xcode instead of directly out of Flash, but otherwise Adobe can continue to provide the option to their customers. That is, at least, until Apple changes the rules again in the next update.
Since I only broached this question in a roundabout way in my previous message, I will be more direct this time: What makes your place of employment worthy of a skilled developer jumping through all of those hoops you are imposing?
Yes, any developer worth his or her salt will have the skills and means to prepare a Word document. That is not the point. The point is that a good developer will already have several job offers coming their way and being courted by cool companies left and right. Why would someone with talent want to spend excessive amount of time to prepare their resume in a non-convinient way just to have a chance to talk with you?
I am going to assume that you work for Google or Apple. Developers most certainly will jump through any hoops necessary just for the chance to talk with those companies. They hold prestige for many developers and for them it would be an honour to work for such companies. Although, honestly, I cannot really see either company having your policy.
If you are Joe Sixpack Software, I am honestly curious about what you are doing that is so interesting that is attracting skilled developers despite your policy. I might be interested in investment opportunities, because you must be doing something really cool.
A good programmer will have spent that time learning and perfecting their craft instead of using that time to take a test. It is not that they make a person worse by having one, but it is a poor allocation of resources for someone looking to be the best that they can be.
That does sound like a good way to find bad programmers. Programmers have no need for word processors; we have a multitude of programming and markup languages designed to make document creation simple. Who wants to fumble around with Word?
But more to the point, good programmers will typically not have a word processor installed. It is simply not a tool that a programmer ever needs to use. A quick Froogle search reveals that it would cost almost $200* for a good programmer to legitimately send a resume in Word format.
What would motivate a good programmer to spend $200 just to talk to you when there are plenty of other companies who would jump at the chance to hire said person?
* It is possible one could use OpenOffice, or similar, for free. But there are no guarantees that the output will be readable in Word. Again, not really worth the effort when there are plenty of other people looking for good programmers.
Fact is, a higher level language like Java is just faster to program in, and for a basic application it's more than fast enough. But we'll never lose C, at least because all these higher-level fancy applications need to run on something, and nobody wants to write that "something" in straight assembly.
Therein lies the beauty of Objective-C. You have a high level dynamic message passing language (not unlike Ruby) that has most of the modern features one comes to expect from a programming language and allows for the rapid development you speak of, and yet at the same time it is C and can do everything that C can do without compromise.
Objective-C is certainly not the right tool for every job, but it does go to show that you do not have to compromise high level conveniences for low level access.
Why would people develop for a market where nobody wants to pay for software, and the hardware market is so fragmentet that you don't even know if you have a display ?
That is a valid question. Generally speaking, the indie Mac developers do much better than indie Windows developers in, despite the larger Windows audience. If we extrapolate that out to cell phones, the major players might do well on Android, but will the smaller companies?
iPhone apps run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, and now the iPad. Commercially, Android, so far, only runs on cell phones. So even if Android does surpass the iPhone, you are only accounting for a percentage of the devices Apple sells in the same marketplace.
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Disney paid who knows how much to developers to bring Photoshop support to Wine so that they could use it in their Linux environment. I am sure they would have preferred to pay $1000 for a native Linux version.
10.6.4 does. The question is: Will Adobe update Flash to take advantage of the new API in a timely fashion or will we be waiting months before usable Flash comes to OS X?
Actually, the license terms could allow for that. You can write supporting libraries for your iPhone app in any language you want, generated by any tool you want. The catch is that you cannot link to the APIs provided in the SDK. All Adobe, or anyone else, has to do is provide an Objective-C application that provides the necessary bridge between the SDK and the external libraries.
Most calves, no matter what they are destined to produce (veal, beef, dairy, etc.), are bottle fed and restrained. It is the only way you can realistically ensure they are fed without compromising the mother's milk. Once they are old enough to feed without intervention, they are moved to less restrictive quarters.
Even veal are free to roam as they please on most farms. Placing the animal in a small box is not a requirement for producing veal meat.
The only difference between veal and any other kind of beef is the size of the animal at the time it goes to market. Perhaps it is cruel to shorten the lifespan of the animal by a few months, but otherwise a veal cow sees the same life that any other beef cow does.
I am sure that some farmers do mistreat their animals. But it is not fair to paint all farmers with the same brush. Most farmers who raise veal do care about the well-being of their animals during their lifespan and do not trap them in a tiny box.
We raise veal cattle here. The cattle have free rein of the barn, and a large outdoor area. I am sure there are some farms that do pen in their cattle in a tiny pen for life, but that is hardly the norm.
The only difference between veal and your normal beef cow is the weight at which the beast goes to market. The procedure of raising the animal is virtually the same either way.
The byproduct of ethanol is an excellent food source for cattle. Arguably better than whole corn itself. Why not produce ethanol and feed the same corn to cattle who can walk on treadmills?
Also, who buries their manure in a landfill? Manure makes for a nice fertilizer when spread on fields, and it also makes for another nice power source when put in a digester.
There is no reason why the originally written in Objective-C app cannot provide the necessary bridge to the UI and graphics tasks on behalf of the library. In fact, this route would actually be better for Flash developers because it would allow them to utilize the native features of iPhone OS when Flash is not suitable for the job.
And that is why everyone is lining up to buy Palm devices and why they are not putting the company up for sale, right?
Geeks, which I am assuming you tend towards because you are reading Slashdot, understand the limitations of multitasking and are generally willing to make the necessary sacrifices to allow for its use. iPhone users, on the other hand, are typically not geeks. They expect it to work perfectly out of the box. That is a hard problem when developers are generally free to execute any kind of code they wish, bugs and all.
I have not had the pleasure of using a Pre myself, but the reviews I have heard are generally negative in regards to performance and battery life. That is the exact situation Apple is trying to avoid from developers who don't have the resources to do what Apple is able to do.
Technically, it is questionable if one can even use Interface Builder.
iPhone OS has supported multitasking since day one. The issue is finding a solution that prevents developers from doing stupid things, with respect to battery life, with their new-found multitasking abilities.
Not exactly. The SDK agreement places no restrictions on the language or processes used to generate libraries for your application. The core of your application, the one that links against documented APIs, must conform to those terms, but there is no reason why that core cannot make calls out to those libraries written in Flash, for example.
Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, or C++. Third-party libraries, however, are not applications and seem to be exempt from the rules so long as they do not link against any documented APIs.
The answer: Compile the Flash down to a third-party library that talks to the documented APIs through a handwritten Objective-C, C, or C++ application.
The resultant Flash app would have to be built using Xcode instead of directly out of Flash, but otherwise Adobe can continue to provide the option to their customers. That is, at least, until Apple changes the rules again in the next update.
Since I only broached this question in a roundabout way in my previous message, I will be more direct this time: What makes your place of employment worthy of a skilled developer jumping through all of those hoops you are imposing?
Yes, any developer worth his or her salt will have the skills and means to prepare a Word document. That is not the point. The point is that a good developer will already have several job offers coming their way and being courted by cool companies left and right. Why would someone with talent want to spend excessive amount of time to prepare their resume in a non-convinient way just to have a chance to talk with you?
I am going to assume that you work for Google or Apple. Developers most certainly will jump through any hoops necessary just for the chance to talk with those companies. They hold prestige for many developers and for them it would be an honour to work for such companies. Although, honestly, I cannot really see either company having your policy.
If you are Joe Sixpack Software, I am honestly curious about what you are doing that is so interesting that is attracting skilled developers despite your policy. I might be interested in investment opportunities, because you must be doing something really cool.
A good programmer will have spent that time learning and perfecting their craft instead of using that time to take a test. It is not that they make a person worse by having one, but it is a poor allocation of resources for someone looking to be the best that they can be.
That does sound like a good way to find bad programmers. Programmers have no need for word processors; we have a multitude of programming and markup languages designed to make document creation simple. Who wants to fumble around with Word?
But more to the point, good programmers will typically not have a word processor installed. It is simply not a tool that a programmer ever needs to use. A quick Froogle search reveals that it would cost almost $200* for a good programmer to legitimately send a resume in Word format.
What would motivate a good programmer to spend $200 just to talk to you when there are plenty of other companies who would jump at the chance to hire said person?
* It is possible one could use OpenOffice, or similar, for free. But there are no guarantees that the output will be readable in Word. Again, not really worth the effort when there are plenty of other people looking for good programmers.
Are you referring to HipHop?
No JIT going on here.
Therein lies the beauty of Objective-C. You have a high level dynamic message passing language (not unlike Ruby) that has most of the modern features one comes to expect from a programming language and allows for the rapid development you speak of, and yet at the same time it is C and can do everything that C can do without compromise.
Objective-C is certainly not the right tool for every job, but it does go to show that you do not have to compromise high level conveniences for low level access.
That is a valid question. Generally speaking, the indie Mac developers do much better than indie Windows developers in, despite the larger Windows audience. If we extrapolate that out to cell phones, the major players might do well on Android, but will the smaller companies?
iPhone apps run on the iPhone, the iPod touch, and now the iPad. Commercially, Android, so far, only runs on cell phones. So even if Android does surpass the iPhone, you are only accounting for a percentage of the devices Apple sells in the same marketplace.
You can add a bluetooth external keyboard.
The aluminum Powerbooks had this problem. They later moved the antenna for the Macbook Pros.
And all future Apple products.
You laugh, but Mozilla Raindrop, the latest project by the Thunderbird devs, uses CouchDB. No April fools here.