That wasn't the way it came across to me. "You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do" Maybe there's an unintended ambiguity there.
Emphasis added. You would need to already be making money to not need a day job.
You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do.
On the other hand, it's the "making money" bit of that sentence that's problematical. I expect there are plenty of successful app developers who'll tell you they got that way by having fun and playing their cards right. The trouble is that the relationship rarely works in reverse. Having fun does not ensure success, any more than playing your cards right ensures winning the game.
I'm fairly confident that for every mobile app that makes a ton of money, there are a hundred that get maybe two or three sales. Not giving up the day job is a smart move.
On the other hand, there is not worse looser than he who does not even bother to try.
Besides, no one suggest you quit your day job first. You would first develop and should you meet moderate success, then you can quit the dayjob. Also, an app does not have to make huge success to support you. A huge amount off developers make moderate success that is still better paying than a regular dayjob, although it is, in the end, a day job as you are forced to keep making new software to make sure those founds don't run out.
In the worst case scenario, if you play your cards right, the potentially minimal income you get developing software and selling it 99c a pop can be an additional supplement to your salary. Perhaps manage to pay the electricity bill one month.
There are not very many words there (not much of a reader, are you?) and they do not say anything about a headache.
The article has 430 words, and it can be summarized in "we can't support all Android units.
Also, from the link:
With our latest update, we worked hard to bring Angry Birds to even more Android devices. Despite our efforts, we were unsuccessful in delivering optimal performance.
I don't know you, but with my basic knowledge of slang, I'd call a headache anything I worked hard to do and despite all my efforts I found myself unsuccessful at doing it.
They do whine about their game not running on older, slower devices. Guess what? You have precisely the same problem on iOS devices, where your app will behave differently on iPhone, iPhone 3GS, older iPod touch, newer iPod touch, and iPad.
You do realize that they list newer hardware in the article (like the TMobile G2) and that Angry Birds runs flawlessly smooth in first generation iPhones despite those units only having 412mhz chips? Same game. Slower hardware. Running smoother.
That is what comes with hardware fragmentation. Graphic chips, ram speed, all that changes on every unit, sometimes even units made by the same manufacturer. Chip changes specially are a huge deal, as not all handle OpenGl the same way, making it forceful to test your code on every single unit and somtimes optimize for each, regardless how new the hardware is. THAT is fragmentation, not in the OS but in the hardware.
Oh and yea, it happens in the PC world too. Big studios spend a lot of money in Q&A to test across many configurations and the most common variety off video cards. At the end of the day they tend to only support two of all the graphic chip brands out there, because it's just not viable to test for all. That seems to be the way of the Android, developers will have to test certain cellphones with certain chips and just tell their users they can only support those.
You are an Apple fanboy or shill. Go away.
You are an Android fanboy who cant read and accept the facts. I accept iPhones are closed and not everyone can develop completely freely for them, and the fact that they are locked up with the second worst carrier in the US. Why can't you accept Android's flaws too?
2) Look at their site, the TMobile G2 (800mhz) running Android 2.2 is also in their problematic unsupported list.
Or perhaps the iOS is so amazing that it makes old hardware perform faster than new one?! That would make the iOS even better than Woz think it is!!! News at 11!!!!
Who said I was doing any of this for the love of money? I do have a day job.
You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do. Not sure if you actually have checked or just are basing yourself off all the/. noise, but Apple rarely rejects apps. The few that get rejected love to make a lot of noise.
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
Don't forget about the headaches that come with programming for the platform. Angry Birds developers also have come out to say, in many words and with a lot of cact, what a headache it is to develop for the fragmented hardware platform.
Well, if you read the actual article, you will see this quote:
Woz then moved on to the topic of Android saying that Android smartphones, not the iPhone, would become dominant, noting that the Google OS is likely to win the race similarly to the way that Windows ultimately dominated the PC world. Woz stressed that the iPhone, "Has very few weak points. There aren't any real complaints and problems. In terms of quality, the iPhone is leading."
He also makes notes to openness and other reasons, but those really hold little meaning to the average user. What will potentially make his note a reality is that Apple is not iOS vs Android, it's iPhone Vz myTouch, vz HTC HD, vz Droid, vz HTC Evo, vz Insert Android Phone Here.
Then there is ATT vz Verizon vz Sprint vz TMobile. The trend going forward is that users will be end up upgrading their phones to smartphones. Even if they don't want to. Go to a store and you will see every day they have less regular phones for display and more smartphones. Eventually it will only be smart-phones on the shelf. At that point, if Apple stays exclusive with ATT, there will be no way to keep the upper hand, because 75% of the market is in other carriers. It would be interesting to see how things change if Apple indeed launches an iPhone with Verizon. Speculation can run rampant, but the only true way to predict the future from that point is to look at the first 48 hours after the release and see how a Verizon iPhone moves.
As far as streaming services go, they expect you to have such DRM clients installed anyways. Flash? Silverlight? Whatever it is iOS or Windows Phone 7 use?
Other than this Android "fragmentation" issue (where some hardware makers have added their own DRM services, others have not) it does not sound like it's a big issue for Netflix to find consumers that already have the DRM platform they require.
When you talking about rentals or streaming only services, services where you did not buy the movie, can you tell me how you would expect people to, well, not just keep the stuff they downloaded without a DRM?
Call it what you want, but in the rental or pure streaming world, you are not buying the product and they are entitled to use DRM to keep it from becoming permanent in your system. Same way the video club would keep enough information on file to charge you for the movie and/or ruin your credit if you did not return the movie.
I can see people upset about DRM in purchased digital content, but in rented content?
This is a very good point. I happened to talk with a friend of my wife's last night about "what phone to buy". She went to TMobile and looked at some and had her mind set in 2 phones, either the myTouch 4G or the HTC HD7. She had no clue what Android was, or what Windows was. All she cared about was that the phone had a good camera. Both phones she wanted are about the same, as far as camera go so I recommended her to go with the myTouch as it also has a front camera and faster internet.
It does not help that most stores just have plastic shells of the phones for display and the user has to pick on looks and buttons and not able to actually test the experience.
The iPhone is a different matter. It is surfing the iPod popularity wave more than anything. The masses love their iPods and the iPhone is just an phone + iPhone. There are also people that seem to want phones to download apps, and these seem to be more inclined to go for an iPhone than any android device. I think that reflects in market statistics. Off course, these are as likely to just get an iPod Touch if their contract is not due to expire.
This aside, though, although the user may not know better, you can't say iOS and iPhone separately. Both are one. It's one product, even if the core OS is also powering the iPad and iPod. I don't think the masses would be as crazy as they are now for iPhones if they ran Android.
The computer world is different, though. Since i was in college I hear people specifically ask for Windows PCs, or Mac machines (very conscious they don't run Windows.) I never, in my life, heard of a casual user ask for Linux PCs, though. Sometimes I hear even more specifics, like "I want a PC with Microsoft Office."
So what is Blockbuster doing to appease the studio execs?
It was noted in the article that Blockbuster went through similar issues, and that it was only available in the Droid X at first. They did not noted who else can run Blockbuster's app, though.
There may be an argument when it comes to purchases. If I buy something, it's mine and the existence of a DRM is questionable (although we know it's there to avoid re-distribution.)
When it comes to renting the content, though, things are very different. Digital media must be protected to prevent trivial things like browser add-ons from just downloading a stream you paid for directly, via monthly fee, or by agreeing to endure ads.
I see no reason to complain about a streaming service relying on DRM to keep their data secure. It's almost as extreme as complaining because bank websites encrypt their data transfers.
Although we don’t have a common platform security mechanism and DRM, we are able to work with individual handset manufacturers to add content protection to their devices. Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t.
Let the Android Fragmentation wars resume! I do ponder, though, if Netflix approached Google on this topic before feeling "forced" to deal with individual handset manufacturers.
I keep a personal compilation of benchmark results from Peacekeeper's browser benchmark. I do not like their averaging of tests but I do like their individual tests. Due to this I keep the numbers in a Google Docs spreadsheet where I can easily look at them.
Here are my results, with Firefox 4b7 included. Beta 7 does not seem to be much faster than Beta 6, although in some tests it is a big leap from Firefox 3.6.8.
BTW, these are all ran on the same machine with no configuration changes and the same background processes running for all tests.
I'll see if i run SunSpider's benchmark later and add it to the versions I still have on my machine.
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Not a good analogy. The thing [if I understand right, that is], is that a retailer sells a game (digitally or in shelf) and once the user installs it it must create a Steam account to use some features. Once the user is logged into steam, he automatically sees Steam's store on login.
A modified analogy would be like buying a product at my store, but the product requires you to move in front of a Wal-Mart store and to visit their store every day to get, I don't know, the unique Battery refills that enhance the product usability. Once the user is in that Wal-Mart he will likely never bother visiting your store again, specially since he is visiting it every friging day while using the product you sold him.
To be honest, I thought steam features were exclusive to the versions you purchased in Steam's store. It sounds absurd that anyone would expect that any store should be happy about selling Steam in their stores.
Not only this, why the article insists on comparing day one sales to iPhone weekend 1 sales and then then to a 6 month window android sales? Heck, I know this stuff does not average well, but 6 months, selling 1.5 million G1s, thats an average of less than 8400 per day. Also, despite the article giving 1.5 million sales credit to android, the link he offers just says one million. Turning that to less than 5600 per day.
Also, 40,000 units sound like a lot, given the horrendously lame ad campaign Microsoft pushed. "A phone to save us from our phones?" Seriously? The ads make it sound like it's a phone you will not want to use and therefore spend more time not looking at it. That does not sell gadgets, that scares people away from any potential coolness of the gadget.
Despite my love for the iPhone, I actually hope Windows Phone 7 takes off, as more options are just good, and no matter how customizable Android may be, it still is just one option. BTW, do I hate that name... Windows Phone 7... why not give it a more appropiate name for a phone? No one works "windows" in a phone!!! And people already take negative conotations from the name Windows. Call it something a bit more related to more passionatedly loved MS products, like, I don't know, Microsoft X-Phone or Phone 360.
There are Tooltips in the Mac. I am posting this from Safari on my Mac right now and just double checked, every button in the interface has a tooltip. If an app does not have them it's developer laziness (big time since it's very easy to include them while in the UI designer.) I even found an article telling users how to set a much longer delay on their tooltips if they feel sick of seeing trivial tooltips every time they hover a control.
You got me curious and I digged a bit on the Help Search feature and I found out it does not even need programming. It automatically looks through the menu to help you find actions, every application naturally supports it (as long as it actually uses the standard Mac Menu bar and does not just work in X-11 compatibility mode.) Blender 3D is an example of an application that does not support it due to it using it's own in-window menu bar scheme. So, Mac OS help helps you [as best as it can] even when the App developer refused to provide you with help!:P
Anyways found a video you can look at to see the Help Search in action. Forgive the author for his over-enthusiasm, but I do have to say I was almost that impressed when I first found that feature while digging into the control panel for Firewall settings.
As for iTunes, my current stance in "defending it" is as a syncing tool (despite my opinions of it not being intuitive.) I never recommend it to anyone to use if they have no iPods, I just "defend" when people claim it takes tolerance to stand iTunes to sync their iPods (if they think so then why get an iPod that shares the iTunes navigation structure?)
I was going to do this one short, to avoid redundancy, but after finishing it I looked back and realized I still posted a brick-wall. Oh well. Here it is:
Security: I never tagged Flash holes on Windows, as I said at first, it's about the ratio off attacks against the platform that make it dangerous. Off course, same would happen to OSX if it became predominant platform, but I am sure that won't happen, and I doubt Apple wants that. They just want to sell their computers and make money off them just as Dell makes money off theirs.
Discovery: The reason you find it easy to find things in Windows and not mac is because you are used to Windows "rules" off design. Apple has it's own "rules", these are different. Any one that has used macs for years finds it very intuitive. The help allows for a very easy jump without having the background. Not to mention, even the most veteran user may find himself googling how to do something in Windows, in OSX you just use the help and get faster results without googling.
MP3: Although drag and drop is "easy", it makes syncing meta-data impossible. Changes to the metadata to things like play-count and rating just can't be synchronized, not to mention searching a directory by genre, artist, or combination is nigh impossible. Even my Samsung MP3 player allowed me to rate songs, and increase play-count. It was a useless feature because I was forced to either delete the computer MP3 to transfer the updates, or delete the device's updates to bring over the desktop playback ones. Syncing through a system like iTunes merges this type of metadata. Also, i even have a "smart" playlist as my only "sync" playlist. This playlist will remove recently skipped songs based on rating (no rating, 2 skips in the last week being enough to remove, 5 stars, forgive up to 10 skips, etc) and also to remove overly played songs.
Another thing I can do is tell the sync to downgrade the bit rate of any song to a cap of 128 kbps to save storage. This leaves the original version at whatever inflated bit rate it may have but allows me to squeeze more music in my iPod. I just wish I was given an option for even lower bit rates, as my ear is not refined enough to find difference between 128 and 96 kbps. This is another impossibility with plain file dumping.
It's not intuitive, and you may need to be a "power user" (or at least knowledgeable enough) to use it's full power, but once you get there, copying files will feel primitive and clumsy. PS: this has nothing to do with OS X itself, as I keep my music collection in my Windows 7 Desktop.
At the end of the day, the world can disagree with me on iTunes, I still enjoy it and my two complains on it are that the sync setup with iDevices does not feel as intuitive as I assume it could be and the lack of multi-artist metadata (if a song is a joint venture, like, I don't know, Eminem + Rihanna, I either am forced to pick one or enter both creating a new entry under artist. I would like having a semicolon generate separate artist entries.
Out off curiosity I checked for those iTunes, QuickTime and Safari vulnerabilities and find out they affected windows exclusively, not only this but seems most were WebKit issues in win32 environments, meaning for sure at least at some point chrome had the same issues. Other issues I found noted QuickTime ActiveX controls.
I have seen windows machines be infected in my face. Usually it's adobe software that is to blame, but it tends to carry windows specific attacks. These don't even need user stupidity, as the malicious code runs in flash ads or other embedded content.
On iLife software, the only way anyone can call it mediocre is because they have not used it, at least not for anything other than click on buttons at a display machine in BestBuy,and even there, long enough exposure would bring it's power to light. It's not software for professional power users, but it's powerful software none the less.
On usability, my wife hates computers and is far from disposed to learn new software under any environment. That is why I tend to use heras an example. As the owner of a Mac Mini, I also fail to seethe drastic UI differences between applications you note.
On discovery, macs have an amazing help system. As long as the app is designed properly (and all Apple software is, as well as all popular apps I have used) the OS will even drop down the needed menu and point out with an impossible to miss arrow the item you need to click. It may also darken the screen and spotlight buttons. Likely what helps my wife find her way without asking me for anything.
Oh and iTunes sync may not be very intuitive, but also had a Samsung MP3 player and rather deal with iTunes than ever be forced to drag and drop MP3s ever again.
And so the game publishers have convinced you that bugs are not an issue.
What I find odd is players behaving like bugs never happened before. We have seen bugs in video games for ever. You think Super Mario Bros for the NES was flawless? The more complex the game, the more likely bugs will sneak through. I, so far, have seen no bothersome bugs in the XBox (have not finished, though.) Only bugs I have experienced are the ones with very rare critters being half stuck in the world and the very messed up skeleton in very very rare critters (only seen it with scropions so far, i think 3 times.) I can't talk for the PC performance issues, but from an XBox perspective, I'm having a lot of fun.
I hate to break it to you, but there are bugs reported on almost every quest (checkout the quests on fallout.wikia.com and see).
I went to the page and looked at the list of quest bugs, didn't go too deep because I didnt' want spoilers (have not finished the game) but most (not all) of the quest bugs seem to be centered on un-conventional actions, things like killing an NPC or collecting some stuff before starting the quest and the like. These are things that are extremely unlikely to ever come up during Q&A. During any standard Q&A testers will test the quests in the most conventional ways. You can be sure, after testing a half-made quest 20 times, you wont be exploring areas around the quest giver and picking up random stuff the 21st time arround, you are likely to just run the quest as linealy as possible through the obvious paths provided to complet it, making it very easy and very realistic for slight bugs like this to roll out.
The worst is that every Bethesda game (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3) has had issues like this which shouldn't have made it past quality control.
Given the complexity and size of their games, Im shocked I never find these bugs to be as predominant. It's huge ammount of content, across 3 platforms. The size of the Q&A team has to be huge for them to test everything after every update.
This isn't a one time thing. I've played all of these games, they are great games, but I will not buy Bethedsa games anymore until they release the Gamne of the Year edition which has the final patch (and usually a community patch to fix what Bethesda hasn't)
That is your prerogrative and it's perfeclty fine. I actually do that with all DLC, as I'm certain they get less Q&A time than the full game release and means a much more unstable experience. Could they do better? Perhaps. But I don't think they did as bad as I seem to be reading online. From what I read online, it sounds as if people were playing (or not, since its touted nearly unplayable) a different game than I am enjoying.
I wont even jump into security (at the end of the day, a platform that has more attacks and is slightly more secure may still net to be more vulnerable than one that has less security and less attacks.)
I will say due to experience (that I posted in another point off this conversation) that macs seem to be extremely durable.
HP, Toshiba, Acer and Asus computers I have worked with have proven to be disapointingly breakable. I have not worked with a Sony laptop nor talked in person with anyone that has, so I can't comment on those. I had a Thinkpad Lenovo from work that was very durable. Overall that one was a worthwille machine, but also had a chasis that made it feel as if I was moving national secrets in the thing, it was bulky and square. Looking at it made me think the thing should had been bulletproof. But has been one of the few pc laptops that didn't overheat nor did it break by father time winking at it. Macs, so far, have been extremely durable.
I do hate the magnetic power cord in the mac-minis. It's too easy to unplug it while poping in a USB drive and unlike laptops, the thing has no battery.
iLife is not a thing I would buy a mac for, but it's a nice thing to have. I find Picasa has a better face recognition than iPhoto, but that's about it. iPhoto has a lot of cooler features. iWeb is amazingly easy to use, my wife has made cool looking webpages in the thing and she is the type that attempts to align text in Word by spamming spaces at the left of certain words! iMovie kicks Windows Movie Maker's ass all the way to the stratosphere. Window's offering is just an afterthought. iMovie is a blissful experience in video editing.
As for usability, well, my wife has not asked me once how to do anything on the Mac since she got it (well other than the few apps she think she can install but gets the windows version by accident, something she has slowly learned to avoid, can't wait for the Apple App Store for Mac.) Despite having used windows for much longer, she still constantly bugs me to help her with this or that when she works on a PC. So yea, I'd say Apple has managed to make Mac OS X very usable. Exception: iTunes syncing, although I find it easy she has a hard time trying to sync music into her iPod.
BTW, on the Unity thing, how come Ubuntu is jumping into Unity if it's considered alpha software? I am guessing it is not really as crude as you take it to be.
...and it sure as hell is not as nicely made or durable.
This is so true.
My wife has gone through a huge array of laptops since before I meet her. She had a Dell laptop (don't ask me the model) and that thing didn't last her 8 months.
Then I got her a cheap Acer one, at 300 bucks I figured "as long as she treats it carefully, it will work ok" but it got all messed up without any punishment. First the charging plug just fell off, then the monitor glitched up and started to look like a glitched NES game.
After this I got her an HP Netbook. She found it horibly inconvenient (although she thought it was cute at the store) and the WiFi antena suffered huge issues. It would rarely see networks and had to be in the same room as the wireless router to get any decent signal.
At this point she took over my personal Compaq Presario laptop, wich I got because my old Toshiba Tablet PC would burn holes into my pants after prolonged use.
Eventually, my Compaq laptop started having issues, after one too many overheating the battery got messed up and it stopped charging. Without dropping it, the battery holding clip broke and now the thing is stuck to a desk since it poops out the battery every time you lift it (not that it matters since the battery won't charge over 10 minutes worth of juice.)
After all this, she got sick and decided she would get a MacBook, as a coworker of her's had done. Even being an apple fan myself, I always though it was too expensive to go that route, since the cheapest model was 1000 dollars. 1 year and a half later the thing still works as if it was bought yesterday. That is amazing.
She spent 1500 on the dell before meeting me.
I spent 300 on the acer, then 400 in the netbook.
My compaq laptop was 500, and my Tablet PC was 1400, but I wont count it for this.
That's a total of $3000. 4400 if I counted the Tablet PC (but I wont.)
Had we (she) just gone with the "overly priced mac" from the start, it would had been just 1000 dollars. Her coworker has been using her MacBook for as long as I know her and even 4 years later it still performs as well as I'd want a non-gaming laptop to perform.
Say whatever you say about Apple, but unless it's a PC I build myself, I am now only buying Apple computers.
No, I think religion is the *prime* motive for a lot of shit people does, not a "mere justification".
If you believe someone can become a suicide terrorist without religion, then you really don't understand people... or religion.
The prime motif for a lot of shit people credit religion for, is actually just the results of power hungry men. I'm sure it's not religion motivating Osama Bin-Laden to plan these terrorist acts.
The blind faith in religion has been used for millennia by rulers to manipulate people into doing all sorts of things, from murder to suffer hunger instead of consuming plague-bringin pig meat.
That being told, for many, their belief in science borders in religion, as they just "believe" in it's factual nature without attempting to understand it, even when the answers are there. After all, not only can a blind religious fanatic be seduced to become a mad bomber, but a blind environmentalist may be convinced that starting forest fires is a good for their cause.
The true issue is ignorant passion, and it can be for anything, religion, science, enviroment, or even video games.
Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
Whereas the former seeks the better philosophy of "we've been unable to prove anything so far, but here's a story pulled out of the collective asses of village elders 3000 years ago; let's go on and pretend it's true, and let's ignore all of the horrible acts that have resulted from pretending that fiction is fact."
Oy.
Not a religious nut here, but trying to dismiss religion based on the bad things it has done, would be as idiotic as trying to dismiss science due to things like Hiroshima or Chernobyl. You can't have double standards, if you dismiss one due to the atrocities it inspired, you have to do the same for the other.
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That wasn't the way it came across to me. "You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do" Maybe there's an unintended ambiguity there.
Emphasis added. You would need to already be making money to not need a day job.
I do love my day job, why else would I do it?
People that love their "day job" usually call it a profession, not a "day job", but hey to each his own.
I have no plans to write any software for a mobile platform that is not FREE.
Your prerogative. Enjoy your profession.
On the other hand, it's the "making money" bit of that sentence that's problematical. I expect there are plenty of successful app developers who'll tell you they got that way by having fun and playing their cards right. The trouble is that the relationship rarely works in reverse. Having fun does not ensure success, any more than playing your cards right ensures winning the game.
I'm fairly confident that for every mobile app that makes a ton of money, there are a hundred that get maybe two or three sales. Not giving up the day job is a smart move.
On the other hand, there is not worse looser than he who does not even bother to try.
Besides, no one suggest you quit your day job first. You would first develop and should you meet moderate success, then you can quit the dayjob. Also, an app does not have to make huge success to support you. A huge amount off developers make moderate success that is still better paying than a regular dayjob, although it is, in the end, a day job as you are forced to keep making new software to make sure those founds don't run out.
In the worst case scenario, if you play your cards right, the potentially minimal income you get developing software and selling it 99c a pop can be an additional supplement to your salary. Perhaps manage to pay the electricity bill one month.
There are not very many words there (not much of a reader, are you?) and they do not say anything about a headache.
The article has 430 words, and it can be summarized in "we can't support all Android units.
Also, from the link:
With our latest update, we worked hard to bring Angry Birds to even more Android devices. Despite our efforts, we were unsuccessful in delivering optimal performance.
I don't know you, but with my basic knowledge of slang, I'd call a headache anything I worked hard to do and despite all my efforts I found myself unsuccessful at doing it.
They do whine about their game not running on older, slower devices. Guess what? You have precisely the same problem on iOS devices, where your app will behave differently on iPhone, iPhone 3GS, older iPod touch, newer iPod touch, and iPad.
You do realize that they list newer hardware in the article (like the TMobile G2) and that Angry Birds runs flawlessly smooth in first generation iPhones despite those units only having 412mhz chips? Same game. Slower hardware. Running smoother.
That is what comes with hardware fragmentation. Graphic chips, ram speed, all that changes on every unit, sometimes even units made by the same manufacturer. Chip changes specially are a huge deal, as not all handle OpenGl the same way, making it forceful to test your code on every single unit and somtimes optimize for each, regardless how new the hardware is. THAT is fragmentation, not in the OS but in the hardware.
Oh and yea, it happens in the PC world too. Big studios spend a lot of money in Q&A to test across many configurations and the most common variety off video cards. At the end of the day they tend to only support two of all the graphic chip brands out there, because it's just not viable to test for all. That seems to be the way of the Android, developers will have to test certain cellphones with certain chips and just tell their users they can only support those.
You are an Apple fanboy or shill. Go away.
You are an Android fanboy who cant read and accept the facts. I accept iPhones are closed and not everyone can develop completely freely for them, and the fact that they are locked up with the second worst carrier in the US. Why can't you accept Android's flaws too?
1) It works on first generation 412mhz iPhones.
2) Look at their site, the TMobile G2 (800mhz) running Android 2.2 is also in their problematic unsupported list.
Or perhaps the iOS is so amazing that it makes old hardware perform faster than new one?! That would make the iOS even better than Woz think it is!!! News at 11!!!!
Who said I was doing any of this for the love of money? I do have a day job.
You would not need that job if you were making money playing your cards right, while enjoying dong what you do. Not sure if you actually have checked or just are basing yourself off all the /. noise, but Apple rarely rejects apps. The few that get rejected love to make a lot of noise.
You know a lot of people have turned the price of a Mac and their $99 Developer Program expenses into a shit ton of cash.
Sure, you could try the same trick on Android, but even though there are more Android phones sold now, Apple's App Store accounts for 92% of the cell phone application store bucks spent. App Store coders like me certainly won't miss the competition, anyway, so yeah, stick to your plan of not developing for the iOS. That's the best advice I can give you.
Don't forget about the headaches that come with programming for the platform. Angry Birds developers also have come out to say, in many words and with a lot of cact, what a headache it is to develop for the fragmented hardware platform.
Well, if you read the actual article, you will see this quote:
Woz then moved on to the topic of Android saying that Android smartphones, not the iPhone, would become dominant, noting that the Google OS is likely to win the race similarly to the way that Windows ultimately dominated the PC world. Woz stressed that the iPhone, "Has very few weak points. There aren't any real complaints and problems. In terms of quality, the iPhone is leading."
He also makes notes to openness and other reasons, but those really hold little meaning to the average user. What will potentially make his note a reality is that Apple is not iOS vs Android, it's iPhone Vz myTouch, vz HTC HD, vz Droid, vz HTC Evo, vz Insert Android Phone Here.
Then there is ATT vz Verizon vz Sprint vz TMobile. The trend going forward is that users will be end up upgrading their phones to smartphones. Even if they don't want to. Go to a store and you will see every day they have less regular phones for display and more smartphones. Eventually it will only be smart-phones on the shelf. At that point, if Apple stays exclusive with ATT, there will be no way to keep the upper hand, because 75% of the market is in other carriers. It would be interesting to see how things change if Apple indeed launches an iPhone with Verizon. Speculation can run rampant, but the only true way to predict the future from that point is to look at the first 48 hours after the release and see how a Verizon iPhone moves.
As far as streaming services go, they expect you to have such DRM clients installed anyways. Flash? Silverlight? Whatever it is iOS or Windows Phone 7 use?
Other than this Android "fragmentation" issue (where some hardware makers have added their own DRM services, others have not) it does not sound like it's a big issue for Netflix to find consumers that already have the DRM platform they require.
When you talking about rentals or streaming only services, services where you did not buy the movie, can you tell me how you would expect people to, well, not just keep the stuff they downloaded without a DRM?
Call it what you want, but in the rental or pure streaming world, you are not buying the product and they are entitled to use DRM to keep it from becoming permanent in your system. Same way the video club would keep enough information on file to charge you for the movie and/or ruin your credit if you did not return the movie.
I can see people upset about DRM in purchased digital content, but in rented content?
This is a very good point. I happened to talk with a friend of my wife's last night about "what phone to buy". She went to TMobile and looked at some and had her mind set in 2 phones, either the myTouch 4G or the HTC HD7. She had no clue what Android was, or what Windows was. All she cared about was that the phone had a good camera. Both phones she wanted are about the same, as far as camera go so I recommended her to go with the myTouch as it also has a front camera and faster internet.
It does not help that most stores just have plastic shells of the phones for display and the user has to pick on looks and buttons and not able to actually test the experience.
The iPhone is a different matter. It is surfing the iPod popularity wave more than anything. The masses love their iPods and the iPhone is just an phone + iPhone. There are also people that seem to want phones to download apps, and these seem to be more inclined to go for an iPhone than any android device. I think that reflects in market statistics. Off course, these are as likely to just get an iPod Touch if their contract is not due to expire.
This aside, though, although the user may not know better, you can't say iOS and iPhone separately. Both are one. It's one product, even if the core OS is also powering the iPad and iPod. I don't think the masses would be as crazy as they are now for iPhones if they ran Android.
The computer world is different, though. Since i was in college I hear people specifically ask for Windows PCs, or Mac machines (very conscious they don't run Windows.) I never, in my life, heard of a casual user ask for Linux PCs, though. Sometimes I hear even more specifics, like "I want a PC with Microsoft Office."
So what is Blockbuster doing to appease the studio execs?
It was noted in the article that Blockbuster went through similar issues, and that it was only available in the Droid X at first. They did not noted who else can run Blockbuster's app, though.
There may be an argument when it comes to purchases. If I buy something, it's mine and the existence of a DRM is questionable (although we know it's there to avoid re-distribution.)
When it comes to renting the content, though, things are very different. Digital media must be protected to prevent trivial things like browser add-ons from just downloading a stream you paid for directly, via monthly fee, or by agreeing to endure ads.
I see no reason to complain about a streaming service relying on DRM to keep their data secure. It's almost as extreme as complaining because bank websites encrypt their data transfers.
From the article:
Although we don’t have a common platform security mechanism and DRM, we are able to work with individual handset manufacturers to add content protection to their devices. Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t.
Let the Android Fragmentation wars resume! I do ponder, though, if Netflix approached Google on this topic before feeling "forced" to deal with individual handset manufacturers.
I keep a personal compilation of benchmark results from Peacekeeper's browser benchmark. I do not like their averaging of tests but I do like their individual tests. Due to this I keep the numbers in a Google Docs spreadsheet where I can easily look at them.
Here are my results, with Firefox 4b7 included. Beta 7 does not seem to be much faster than Beta 6, although in some tests it is a big leap from Firefox 3.6.8.
BTW, these are all ran on the same machine with no configuration changes and the same background processes running for all tests.
I'll see if i run SunSpider's benchmark later and add it to the versions I still have on my machine.
They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
Not a good analogy. The thing [if I understand right, that is], is that a retailer sells a game (digitally or in shelf) and once the user installs it it must create a Steam account to use some features. Once the user is logged into steam, he automatically sees Steam's store on login.
A modified analogy would be like buying a product at my store, but the product requires you to move in front of a Wal-Mart store and to visit their store every day to get, I don't know, the unique Battery refills that enhance the product usability. Once the user is in that Wal-Mart he will likely never bother visiting your store again, specially since he is visiting it every friging day while using the product you sold him.
To be honest, I thought steam features were exclusive to the versions you purchased in Steam's store. It sounds absurd that anyone would expect that any store should be happy about selling Steam in their stores.
Not only this, why the article insists on comparing day one sales to iPhone weekend 1 sales and then then to a 6 month window android sales? Heck, I know this stuff does not average well, but 6 months, selling 1.5 million G1s, thats an average of less than 8400 per day. Also, despite the article giving 1.5 million sales credit to android, the link he offers just says one million. Turning that to less than 5600 per day.
Also, 40,000 units sound like a lot, given the horrendously lame ad campaign Microsoft pushed. "A phone to save us from our phones?" Seriously? The ads make it sound like it's a phone you will not want to use and therefore spend more time not looking at it. That does not sell gadgets, that scares people away from any potential coolness of the gadget.
Despite my love for the iPhone, I actually hope Windows Phone 7 takes off, as more options are just good, and no matter how customizable Android may be, it still is just one option. BTW, do I hate that name... Windows Phone 7... why not give it a more appropiate name for a phone? No one works "windows" in a phone!!! And people already take negative conotations from the name Windows. Call it something a bit more related to more passionatedly loved MS products, like, I don't know, Microsoft X-Phone or Phone 360.
There are Tooltips in the Mac. I am posting this from Safari on my Mac right now and just double checked, every button in the interface has a tooltip. If an app does not have them it's developer laziness (big time since it's very easy to include them while in the UI designer.) I even found an article telling users how to set a much longer delay on their tooltips if they feel sick of seeing trivial tooltips every time they hover a control.
You got me curious and I digged a bit on the Help Search feature and I found out it does not even need programming. It automatically looks through the menu to help you find actions, every application naturally supports it (as long as it actually uses the standard Mac Menu bar and does not just work in X-11 compatibility mode.) Blender 3D is an example of an application that does not support it due to it using it's own in-window menu bar scheme. So, Mac OS help helps you [as best as it can] even when the App developer refused to provide you with help! :P
Anyways found a video you can look at to see the Help Search in action. Forgive the author for his over-enthusiasm, but I do have to say I was almost that impressed when I first found that feature while digging into the control panel for Firewall settings.
As for iTunes, my current stance in "defending it" is as a syncing tool (despite my opinions of it not being intuitive.) I never recommend it to anyone to use if they have no iPods, I just "defend" when people claim it takes tolerance to stand iTunes to sync their iPods (if they think so then why get an iPod that shares the iTunes navigation structure?)
I was going to do this one short, to avoid redundancy, but after finishing it I looked back and realized I still posted a brick-wall. Oh well. Here it is:
Security: I never tagged Flash holes on Windows, as I said at first, it's about the ratio off attacks against the platform that make it dangerous. Off course, same would happen to OSX if it became predominant platform, but I am sure that won't happen, and I doubt Apple wants that. They just want to sell their computers and make money off them just as Dell makes money off theirs.
Discovery: The reason you find it easy to find things in Windows and not mac is because you are used to Windows "rules" off design. Apple has it's own "rules", these are different. Any one that has used macs for years finds it very intuitive. The help allows for a very easy jump without having the background. Not to mention, even the most veteran user may find himself googling how to do something in Windows, in OSX you just use the help and get faster results without googling.
MP3: Although drag and drop is "easy", it makes syncing meta-data impossible. Changes to the metadata to things like play-count and rating just can't be synchronized, not to mention searching a directory by genre, artist, or combination is nigh impossible. Even my Samsung MP3 player allowed me to rate songs, and increase play-count. It was a useless feature because I was forced to either delete the computer MP3 to transfer the updates, or delete the device's updates to bring over the desktop playback ones. Syncing through a system like iTunes merges this type of metadata. Also, i even have a "smart" playlist as my only "sync" playlist. This playlist will remove recently skipped songs based on rating (no rating, 2 skips in the last week being enough to remove, 5 stars, forgive up to 10 skips, etc) and also to remove overly played songs.
Another thing I can do is tell the sync to downgrade the bit rate of any song to a cap of 128 kbps to save storage. This leaves the original version at whatever inflated bit rate it may have but allows me to squeeze more music in my iPod. I just wish I was given an option for even lower bit rates, as my ear is not refined enough to find difference between 128 and 96 kbps. This is another impossibility with plain file dumping.
It's not intuitive, and you may need to be a "power user" (or at least knowledgeable enough) to use it's full power, but once you get there, copying files will feel primitive and clumsy. PS: this has nothing to do with OS X itself, as I keep my music collection in my Windows 7 Desktop.
At the end of the day, the world can disagree with me on iTunes, I still enjoy it and my two complains on it are that the sync setup with iDevices does not feel as intuitive as I assume it could be and the lack of multi-artist metadata (if a song is a joint venture, like, I don't know, Eminem + Rihanna, I either am forced to pick one or enter both creating a new entry under artist. I would like having a semicolon generate separate artist entries.
Out off curiosity I checked for those iTunes, QuickTime and Safari vulnerabilities and find out they affected windows exclusively, not only this but seems most were WebKit issues in win32 environments, meaning for sure at least at some point chrome had the same issues. Other issues I found noted QuickTime ActiveX controls.
I have seen windows machines be infected in my face. Usually it's adobe software that is to blame, but it tends to carry windows specific attacks. These don't even need user stupidity, as the malicious code runs in flash ads or other embedded content.
On iLife software, the only way anyone can call it mediocre is because they have not used it, at least not for anything other than click on buttons at a display machine in BestBuy,and even there, long enough exposure would bring it's power to light. It's not software for professional power users, but it's powerful software none the less.
On usability, my wife hates computers and is far from disposed to learn new software under any environment. That is why I tend to use heras an example. As the owner of a Mac Mini, I also fail to seethe drastic UI differences between applications you note.
On discovery, macs have an amazing help system. As long as the app is designed properly (and all Apple software is, as well as all popular apps I have used) the OS will even drop down the needed menu and point out with an impossible to miss arrow the item you need to click. It may also darken the screen and spotlight buttons. Likely what helps my wife find her way without asking me for anything.
Oh and iTunes sync may not be very intuitive, but also had a Samsung MP3 player and rather deal with iTunes than ever be forced to drag and drop MP3s ever again.
And so the game publishers have convinced you that bugs are not an issue.
What I find odd is players behaving like bugs never happened before. We have seen bugs in video games for ever. You think Super Mario Bros for the NES was flawless? The more complex the game, the more likely bugs will sneak through. I, so far, have seen no bothersome bugs in the XBox (have not finished, though.) Only bugs I have experienced are the ones with very rare critters being half stuck in the world and the very messed up skeleton in very very rare critters (only seen it with scropions so far, i think 3 times.) I can't talk for the PC performance issues, but from an XBox perspective, I'm having a lot of fun.
I hate to break it to you, but there are bugs reported on almost every quest (checkout the quests on fallout.wikia.com and see).
I went to the page and looked at the list of quest bugs, didn't go too deep because I didnt' want spoilers (have not finished the game) but most (not all) of the quest bugs seem to be centered on un-conventional actions, things like killing an NPC or collecting some stuff before starting the quest and the like. These are things that are extremely unlikely to ever come up during Q&A. During any standard Q&A testers will test the quests in the most conventional ways. You can be sure, after testing a half-made quest 20 times, you wont be exploring areas around the quest giver and picking up random stuff the 21st time arround, you are likely to just run the quest as linealy as possible through the obvious paths provided to complet it, making it very easy and very realistic for slight bugs like this to roll out.
The worst is that every Bethesda game (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3) has had issues like this which shouldn't have made it past quality control.
Given the complexity and size of their games, Im shocked I never find these bugs to be as predominant. It's huge ammount of content, across 3 platforms. The size of the Q&A team has to be huge for them to test everything after every update.
This isn't a one time thing. I've played all of these games, they are great games, but I will not buy Bethedsa games anymore until they release the Gamne of the Year edition which has the final patch (and usually a community patch to fix what Bethesda hasn't)
That is your prerogrative and it's perfeclty fine. I actually do that with all DLC, as I'm certain they get less Q&A time than the full game release and means a much more unstable experience. Could they do better? Perhaps. But I don't think they did as bad as I seem to be reading online. From what I read online, it sounds as if people were playing (or not, since its touted nearly unplayable) a different game than I am enjoying.
I wont even jump into security (at the end of the day, a platform that has more attacks and is slightly more secure may still net to be more vulnerable than one that has less security and less attacks.)
I will say due to experience (that I posted in another point off this conversation) that macs seem to be extremely durable.
HP, Toshiba, Acer and Asus computers I have worked with have proven to be disapointingly breakable. I have not worked with a Sony laptop nor talked in person with anyone that has, so I can't comment on those. I had a Thinkpad Lenovo from work that was very durable. Overall that one was a worthwille machine, but also had a chasis that made it feel as if I was moving national secrets in the thing, it was bulky and square. Looking at it made me think the thing should had been bulletproof. But has been one of the few pc laptops that didn't overheat nor did it break by father time winking at it. Macs, so far, have been extremely durable.
I do hate the magnetic power cord in the mac-minis. It's too easy to unplug it while poping in a USB drive and unlike laptops, the thing has no battery.
iLife is not a thing I would buy a mac for, but it's a nice thing to have. I find Picasa has a better face recognition than iPhoto, but that's about it. iPhoto has a lot of cooler features. iWeb is amazingly easy to use, my wife has made cool looking webpages in the thing and she is the type that attempts to align text in Word by spamming spaces at the left of certain words! iMovie kicks Windows Movie Maker's ass all the way to the stratosphere. Window's offering is just an afterthought. iMovie is a blissful experience in video editing.
As for usability, well, my wife has not asked me once how to do anything on the Mac since she got it (well other than the few apps she think she can install but gets the windows version by accident, something she has slowly learned to avoid, can't wait for the Apple App Store for Mac.) Despite having used windows for much longer, she still constantly bugs me to help her with this or that when she works on a PC. So yea, I'd say Apple has managed to make Mac OS X very usable. Exception: iTunes syncing, although I find it easy she has a hard time trying to sync music into her iPod.
BTW, on the Unity thing, how come Ubuntu is jumping into Unity if it's considered alpha software? I am guessing it is not really as crude as you take it to be.
...and it sure as hell is not as nicely made or durable.
This is so true.
My wife has gone through a huge array of laptops since before I meet her. She had a Dell laptop (don't ask me the model) and that thing didn't last her 8 months.
Then I got her a cheap Acer one, at 300 bucks I figured "as long as she treats it carefully, it will work ok" but it got all messed up without any punishment. First the charging plug just fell off, then the monitor glitched up and started to look like a glitched NES game.
After this I got her an HP Netbook. She found it horibly inconvenient (although she thought it was cute at the store) and the WiFi antena suffered huge issues. It would rarely see networks and had to be in the same room as the wireless router to get any decent signal.
At this point she took over my personal Compaq Presario laptop, wich I got because my old Toshiba Tablet PC would burn holes into my pants after prolonged use.
Eventually, my Compaq laptop started having issues, after one too many overheating the battery got messed up and it stopped charging. Without dropping it, the battery holding clip broke and now the thing is stuck to a desk since it poops out the battery every time you lift it (not that it matters since the battery won't charge over 10 minutes worth of juice.)
After all this, she got sick and decided she would get a MacBook, as a coworker of her's had done. Even being an apple fan myself, I always though it was too expensive to go that route, since the cheapest model was 1000 dollars. 1 year and a half later the thing still works as if it was bought yesterday. That is amazing.
She spent 1500 on the dell before meeting me.
I spent 300 on the acer, then 400 in the netbook.
My compaq laptop was 500, and my Tablet PC was 1400, but I wont count it for this.
That's a total of $3000. 4400 if I counted the Tablet PC (but I wont.)
Had we (she) just gone with the "overly priced mac" from the start, it would had been just 1000 dollars. Her coworker has been using her MacBook for as long as I know her and even 4 years later it still performs as well as I'd want a non-gaming laptop to perform.
Say whatever you say about Apple, but unless it's a PC I build myself, I am now only buying Apple computers.
No, I think religion is the *prime* motive for a lot of shit people does, not a "mere justification".
If you believe someone can become a suicide terrorist without religion, then you really don't understand people... or religion.
The prime motif for a lot of shit people credit religion for, is actually just the results of power hungry men. I'm sure it's not religion motivating Osama Bin-Laden to plan these terrorist acts.
The blind faith in religion has been used for millennia by rulers to manipulate people into doing all sorts of things, from murder to suffer hunger instead of consuming plague-bringin pig meat.
That being told, for many, their belief in science borders in religion, as they just "believe" in it's factual nature without attempting to understand it, even when the answers are there. After all, not only can a blind religious fanatic be seduced to become a mad bomber, but a blind environmentalist may be convinced that starting forest fires is a good for their cause.
The true issue is ignorant passion, and it can be for anything, religion, science, enviroment, or even video games.
Not necessarily. I am a religious fundamentalist, and science is all well and good in my book, to a point. And by to a point, I mean "this is what we've been able to prove thus far".
Whereas the former seeks the better philosophy of "we've been unable to prove anything so far, but here's a story pulled out of the collective asses of village elders 3000 years ago; let's go on and pretend it's true, and let's ignore all of the horrible acts that have resulted from pretending that fiction is fact."
Oy.
Not a religious nut here, but trying to dismiss religion based on the bad things it has done, would be as idiotic as trying to dismiss science due to things like Hiroshima or Chernobyl. You can't have double standards, if you dismiss one due to the atrocities it inspired, you have to do the same for the other.