I have been watching video without any issues from several sites, plus flash is not only video.
Its the OPTION of having flash that makes it so great. If you don't like it, don't use it. But you cannot negate the fact that many users actually enjoy it. Period.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""
You make it sound as if both were mutually exclusive. Maybe that was what Steve wanted you to believe and you bought into it? Wake up, Android DOES support HTML5 as well as the iphone, while having much better javascript performance - crucial for HTML5 stuff.
I am surprised such a gross simplified statement made it into slashdot. Yeah, I must be new here...
Well, for one it's not an option when every site out there defaults (and gives no option) to Flash if it is detected.
Also, find it funny you criticize gross simplification yet state something as grossly simplified as "But you cannot negate the fact that many users actually enjoy it. Period."
Most people don't even know what is Flash. They just enjoy what Flash brings into their desktops. If they realized Flash is the responsible for half the virus and the money they waste in getting their computers cleaned/fixed at some shop, they would surely tell you that not only do they hate it, but they may even consider forwarding their bills to Adobe.
I think the only group of people you can say actually enjoy and love flash are lazy web content developers that can't bring themselves to write a few lines of java script but insist call themselves developers.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad."
Or perhaps this just means this is the first iteration of the Android OS to attempt Flash compatibility and it obviously needs more time to mature?
Up to you if you want to believe him, but Steve Jobs has said time and time again that the reason there is no Flash on the iPhone is because Adobe has failed to deliver something that performs remotely acceptably. Again, up to you to believe it but the fact that after all the years they had to make a "light mobile friendly" flash version, you can't really claim this is a first gen and forgive it. They supposedly have been working on mobile versions of Flash since before they started whining publicly about Apple not letting them put whatever they had ready out there.
I hate flash as much as the next guy, but with as much content as there is out there that is based on Flash, if Android gets it working properly, it will be a big advantage over the iPhone OS.
There are few things that make me want to run Flash in my iPad/iPhone. TV shows in YouTube are one (right now you get user uploads but not actual tv shows.) Blip.tv is another one I hope eventually adapts to the iOS so I can watch Nostalgia Critic on my iPad.
There are a lot of Flash games out there but all require PC input and will never work on a touch device.
I already got Netflix so that no longer is an issue. Hulu is there too.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that makes me miss Flash on my iPad. Ads are missing in many sites but that's not really a negative.
Most people have not converted many media playback sites to HTML5 because, for all purposes, they have to reinvent the wheel. Make a new HTML5 based player that can pause movies and insert ads without the viewer skipping them. Many of these are people that just grabbed a stock flash template and embedded it on their sites to play back their media. That kind of thing will eventually be made in HTML5, very likely as open source. At that point I will see the adoption of HTML5 playback to start taking off big time.
You mean my friends will be able to find out I bought Starland Vocal Band's Greatest Hits, a Billy Squire's "The Stroke", and Taco's cover of "Putting on the Ritz"?
Fuck that noise!
They will also know you got those Lady Gaga and Katy Parry CDs:P
Seriously though, you can set it to not show what you like/buy.
Wait a second, if I don't have a Facebook account I have to opt-out of it?
I guess they finally went and OCR every telephone book ever printed and made Facebook pages for every person that ever had their phones or business listed there! Now you have to go there, find that and opt out:P
Noted this in another point above but yea, that disappointed me. I was expecting them to opt-in all artists and at minimum automatically post new releases.
As it stands Apple may require the artist, manager or studios to handle the artist page completely. If they get lazy or give up on the artist, we stop getting updates.
Because when I look for a portal to Ping it seems they want me to download and install iTunes. Unless they intend to eventually make it accessible through a browser, I could see this being a bit of a problem for more than a few people. Great, you've got my credit card number if I bought something through iTMS but do you really think I'm going to wake up that memory and resource hog on my Windows partition just to get to a social networking site when I can hit Facebook through Linux or (nearly) any mobile device? I might be a small minority but that's not for me.
Looks to be just more bloat on an already bloated piece of software. The least they could do is modularize iTunes so that if I click a box on install I can make it so that the application is just a way to put music onto an iPod. I am sick and tired of the video and TV stuff forcing me to put Quicktime on my machine!
You miss the point of this, well the entire article did. Ping is not there primarily to become a Facebook competitor or alternative. It's there to help highlight music sales. It's there to tell you what music your friends like, and what music your favorite artists like. Artists may treat it as a social page only to advertise their products, just as they do now in Facebook.
As far as Apple's goals are concerned, they don't care you using the tool if you are not going to be buying music. Note it does not only require you to have iTunes installed, it also requires you to have an iTunes Store account (even if it has no credit card attached.) It's all about selling.
In a way i sort of wish they extended it's functionality for app developers and book authors too.
Sounds like at least someone has learned through the idiotic privacy practices of Facebook.
Sounds like at least someone has applied the slashdot idiotic pattern of bashing without even looking at it. The entire thing is inactive, you have no ping account even if you have an iTunes store account. You have to activate ping and create an account for it to start invading your privacy in any way.
I'm just waiting to hear borked adoption rate numbers...it is integrated into iTunes 10, after all. Internet Explorer & Windows, anyone?
I "subscribed" last night. You still have to go through a sign-up process. Unlike certain company out there that automatically turned every email user into an "active" member of their social network.
So, unless Apple starts noting they have exactly as many Ping users as iTunes 10 users, they will be telling the truth about how many of iTunes 10 users did subscribe.
I don't care much for the total social networking thing, but am disappointed not every artist in their catalog gets a simple Ping page. I would had liked to subscribe to some artists that don't have Ping pages yet, if only to be notified of when new songs get uploaded to iTunes.
How dare Microsoft charge for hosting all those servers... they should do it for free!!! Profit? Expenses? Who care, they should make it free for me!!! If they don't make it free I wont give them my moneyz!!! **although if they make it free i sort of wont give them my money either**
A lot of people still have a working mouse and keyboard for PS/2. Mostly I see those things sold with USB to PS/2 adapters, so they still work, anyway. Wikipedia tells me that non-Windows systems under KVM behave better under PS/2. and also that we're starting to see it dropped from motherboards. Personally, I use them to free up two USB slots without buying a hub. They'll go away eventually.
That's not a valid excuse. A lot of people still have programs that require floppy drives too. It's all legacy stuff that never adapted to the times. PC/2 is just a very valid example of how PCs cling to unnecessary technologies. It's also interesting that Apple never used it so never dropped it. Proof that the industry wont do something unless apple does it? No, but definitively does not help the counter-situation.
Are you serious? It really isn't difficult to see the difference. In 1998, a floppy drive wasn't worthless yet. It existed in an age when broadband penetration was very, very low; and even Internet connections were not ubiquitous (my home was first connected to the Internet in 1999, I believe), and yet a network or Internet connection was the only reasonable way to get digital data off of the iMac.
And that was what the iMac was about. The name was short for Internet Macintosh and it was advertised as such. It sold like crazy too, revitalizing Apple and saving them from certain doom. It was so popular that almost all USB devices produced during the next couple of years had iMac Candy Color Syndrome. It was so popular, even PCs started to imitate it (although still not bold enough to remove the Floppy Disk).
Also, even in the 56k era of dial-up internet, the content of a floppy was not hard to send through email. Professionally no one accepted them anymore either. Printers and publishers required Zip Disks and others required CDs or DVDs. Even when the data was small Zip Disks were still required by the Printers.
At that point in time I had only 2 uses for Floppies: Start-up Recovery disks on my PC and installing AOL trials. OK, I never did the second one, but there was nothing else for me to do.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB.
Funny... why the hell every almost every PC and Motherboard still comes with PS/2 connectors? I have not seen a PS/2 mouse or keyboard for sale in stores for years now, yet all PCs seem to keep the unnecessary ports there.
No computer uses floppies any more because they don't have enough capacity. Heck, most computers have a DVD burner rather than CD-only for the same reason. If you really need to use a floppy, you can get a USB floppy drive for $5.
Yet everyone called Apple crazy, and bashed the hell out of them, when they removed Floppies from their machines all the way back in 1998. It was not until 5 years later that Dell decided to stop making fun of Apple and just also remove the floppy disks from their machines.
Apple doesn't "lead" the market. They produce a proprietary, closed-scale system that has a small enough market share that virus writers don't give a crap about infecting it and then claim it's "secure." And they sell it to people who have too much money and not enough common sense to compare prices on similar hardware.
They don't "lead the market" in the way you interpret it. They lead the market by showing everyone else that a company wont go bankrupt by adopting the new standard or dropping the aging ones. It's true, no one says "hey, apple did this, we should do it to they just say "oh, they didn't go bankrupt as we thought, perhaps its not crazy to save money removing that aging garbage."
...unless we talking about Tablets and Phones, in case you didnt realize, Android would not exist if the iPhone didn't exist.
Disclaimer: I am referring to the post-Steve Jobs return Apple. Before his return, Apple really was a horrible company that was lucky to survive.
Can someone explain to me why Apple behaves this way? I fail to understand. What even bugles my mind is the fact that Apple as a company is [still] a darling in many people's hearts. No bad publicity sticks.
I for one, will not touch an iPhone even with a 10 foot pole for my HTC Incredible does all that want it to and even more. The trouble is Oracle that is threatening to cut off Android's air supply with patent suits against Google.
At least you admit you [sort off] have no clue what's going here by noting you wont touch an iPhone. I'm an iOS developer and I went to that Briefs site to take a gaze at what's going on there. It seems what they are doing is not too far from Adobe's middle-ware to make applications in a different language. Apple has clearly stated they wont support that for many reasons, and most of them are valid.
If you want to program for the iOS, learn to program for the iOS. It's not rocket science, albeit it's not VB.net either.
Just for the record, there are 3 languages you can code with to push an iOS app: Objective C, Plain Old C and C++. You can make your app in either exclusively or in a combination of all 3. On top of this you can make HTML5 apps (and HTML5 is robust enough to call those apps) without Apple's intrusion or "nit-picky behavior". You can do those any way you want and "install" them to the desktop via Safari. The only issue are you won't get the marketing advantage of the App Store nor offline applications (you need internet to load up these apps.) I do sort of hope eventually Apple provides a way to sort of install locally HTML5 apps.
All that aside, Oracle cant kill Android although their lawsuit has valid basis. Google is modifying the java name-space, removing a lot of standardize code, rendering it incompatible. Either they stop calling it java or they properly support it all, that's Oracle's point. That aside, I'd love it if Google entirely dropped Java and just went for C++. Better performance and easier to port apps. With non-standard Java, it's not like I can count on java apps to always run on the thing anyways.
At the end of the day, win or loose, the Android platform will move on, future versions may just have full Java support or move to a new language for development. So if you want that HTC Incredible, I'd say go get it. My brother has one and he loves it.
Did you flunk Geomotry? Three dots are three dots. They CAN represent a triangle as long as you properly define them as 3 line segments, but by themselves, the 3 dots, a triangle are not.
In the end, the title is a lie because not only there is no mention of such technology in the article, but also because the iPad can't detect shapes. Put a square material that the iPad can recognize on it's surface and the OS just will notify one XY feedback, not the covered area (reason why people without enough foresight are puzzled at how can this be.)
BTW, that blob in your toast is not Elvis either, even if you can say it looks like him with enough imagination. Same holds true for the Summer Triangle.
It's not impossible, and like always, this slashdot title is the one lying. The hard pieces could have multiple spots (not just a shape) the screen would recognize as multi touches and then it's up to the app to recognize the pattern.
You see, the article does not use the word "shape" anywhere, they just say "object recognition" and that's a world of difference.
It is very likely they have come up with some sort of sticker with pre-defined touchspots and either pre-programmed these patterns on their app code or they made some settup screen to make the program learn the objects.
But why do you think that netbooks succeeded, when years of small/portable PCs failed?
I can give you my opinion based on my study of two non-computer lovers I know that got them. One being my wife (allowing for extremely close monitoring.)
They both saw it in the store, thought it was cute, and cheap to boot. A computer they could carry in their purse and would not break the bank.
I have never seen the other person I note carry hers out of the house (perhaps she realized battery life is not good enough and charger cables in her purse was what she had in mind. She does not seem to leave home without her new iPad, but got to admit that has only been 2 weeks.
My wife's is collecting dust in a corner as she has found it to be horribly uncomfortable and restrictive due to the low resolution. I also lost my main laptop, she needed a computer and refused to use the Netbook anymore. She only uses the Netbook rarely due to it having a buit-in webcam while the laptop she confiscated from me does not.
My point is: I'd like to see how many of the people that buy Netbooks use them when they have an alternative. I certainly doubt my 2 out of 2 can represent the full market and I have no means nor time to do a more in-depth research.
And the Ipad didn't change anything - despite vast amounts of media coverage, it's turned out to be a bit of a wet blanket. Sure, they will sell some, just as there are all kinds of PMPs, phones, tablets and handheld games consoles. Sure, in these markets having a cutdown OS is useful, but these are not being used as mobile computers. Moreover, Apple is far from market leader, and there are many other companies in this space, not just the ones you list (most notably, you forgot Nokia).
From my shoes, it's not about what they use it for and if they try to replace a computer with it or not. From my shoes is: what platform am I more likely to sell software on. I have sold more software in the App Store in a year than I have in the PC in my entire career. In fact, most my money making PC software has only been due to contract projects.
Given the share and growth of Apple compared with Nokia and Android, I hope that you're not an economical advisory.
Split those by version, tell me what Android to target. I already seen enough stuff stop working (not personal projects) in newer versions so I can't even target the lowest-version expecting it to run smoothly on higher versions. And Nokia? You listing them as a platform? In the smartphone category?
I got to admit I'm not sure what market-share chart to refer to, one that looks pessimistic for apple lists it at 14% while listing Android (all versions) at 17%, yet it does not include the huge amount of iPod Touch and iPads that are also moving and part of the true market I end up developing for.
Whether you like it or not, the iOS devices are a huge phenomena
A billion dollar company is a huge phenomena - so? Lots of big companies are huge phenomena. Whether you like it or not, Nokia, RIM and now Android are even bigger phenomena. Lots of other products are huge phenomena. Why do Apple alone deserve praise for this? They're not some small startup.
The only one you list I could actually develop decent software for and make money off (that I could dream to profit from) is the Android. Despite it's size, though, their marketplace is much slower than Apple's very busy App Store. That's why I should care (you don't have to, unless you want to make money developing smartphone software.)
Yet developers seem happy to ignore all but 3% of the market when writing only for the Iphone. *shrugs* When I write with Nokia's Qt, I get near 100% of the desktop market (Windows, Linux, OS X) and ~50% of the smartphone market (Symbian, Maemo).
I do hope those java games you making [or whatever else you are writing] are selling well and yielding enough money to keep you happy.
However, I don't go around throwing playground insults on people, just because they develop for a different platform.
You consider what I said insults? Since when did/. lowered the bar that low...
I have tried it. Over and over. AS I have responded to others (but this is/., no one bothers to read too deep in the tree before replying.)
There are still too many elements in the Android that look desktop-like. From the icons to menus while navigating. Main example being the file browser. It's horrendous.
Can you be more specific about what Android is missing that iOS, PS3, Wii, and XBox all have? And I mean the latest version of Android, 2.2. You just say "mmm kay Android is bad" without backing up your case.
LS
I have not played with 2.2 (have not seen a single device with it yet) nor do I know what is new in it. But as to what it's missing? Well, for one their dashbord/springboard/whatevertheycall it still looks like my computer's desktop full of icons and widgets. The widgets can look nice here or there, but the icon navigation feels horribly desktop-like. That's a huge turn-off for anyone that does not see a smart-phone as a computer (ie: the people that have made the iPhone popular)
The platforms I mentioned have a very sleek, multimedia, interface that feels as far from a desktop as you can get. The casual user that could care less about computers on his pocket wants that.
You bring an interesting other point with the versioning, though. There is way too much version fragmentation out there. Even Apple realized charging for the iPod Touch upgrades was leading to fragmentation and changed to free updates for the platform with iOS 4. After all, they make more money from commissions by selling games than by selling the OS. I read Google came up with a modular way to deal with versioning, but I still have to see that in work.
I keep hearing this stuff and have wondered if people have actually used Vista or 7 tablet edition or more to the point the tablet PCs.
I have to turn the question back at you. I personally am owner of a Toshiba tablet PC. I have used all windows OS upgrades in it since XP Tablet Edition (vista and 7.)
Although I love my Tablet for some stuff, it's just not flexible to really be "on the go". It's not a device I can carry turned on. I need to, at best, put it on sleep mode and carry on a laptop case. An iPad is a thin device that is always on, always ready to be pulled out and unlocked.
Usability is another big one. Although I love my stylus for drawing and coloring (right now that's the main use I give my tablet, at least until I can buy a Cintiq) even if I happen to have my tablet ready to use, navigating menus with the stylus is clumsy and slow. For a tablet device to be successful it needs to follow a different set of GUI design rules, specifically: no pop-down menu trees.
Tablets COULD evolve via dedicated tablet software, but sharing an OS makes it hard to separate the software apart. Even if it's the same underlying OS (iOS is really just another build of OSX, with special features) the entire navigation system must be streamlined and require applications to be designed for the device itself so the device can feel as a viable alternative to pulling out a book, notepad or newspaper from your briefcase.
Although you can get away with making an Android tablet, that will just get you half the way there (admittedly an important half way.) You wont get the mass appeal without an extremely easy to access marketplace and gimmicky interface (reasons why I note the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms to be ideal, they have the two necessary corners covered, they just need to make them at minimum as open as Apple's App Store.)
Anyways, I love my tablet and will miss it once I'm done with it (poor thing is getting old) but they are not aimed at the same uses as the iPad or even iPhone or iPod Touch (lately i taken to call that one iPad Nano.)
I'll translate:
"I've made my bed with Apple. I've looked at an Andriod phone, once on the internet and whilst I pay some random tribute to make me seem like I'm not a fanboy but I'll praise Apple immediately after because my ego will never permit me to conceive that anything could ever be better".
I think the shoe is in the other foot. Both my brothers happen to have android phones (because neither can tolerate ATT, younger one almost cried when he had to give up his iPhone.) Truth is that Android feels more like a Windows Mobile killer than an iPhone competitor.
See my above statement. Apple is a non-competitor to Sony, MS and Nintendo. So much of a non competitor it's not even worth mentioning.
Mobile gaming is nothing in the west. It's something in Asia (Japan and China specifically)
That's funny. I guess then that the fact that the combined software sales of DS and PSP software sales in America outselling Japan's by 62.5% is just an optical illusion or result of some one's random number generators... http://www.vgchartz.com/hardware_totals.php?type=Software&sort=Total
The iGaming fad will be over in a year or so.
I said that 2 years ago (who on earth would play with just on-screen controls, I said.) I lost a lot of money [due to not pursuing opportunity] for thinking that way.
As soon as enough Andorid, Symbian and Meego phones support Flash 10 a copy of a flash game will no longer sell for US$5.99.
You would be shocked what people pay money for. And it's not only iPhone owners, people buy games for Android, XBox Live Arcade, PSN, WiiWare and DSWare that make Facebook games look like next gen killers.
Oh and not sure why you say 5.99, the average iPhone game is between $0.99 to $2.99, only big studios like EA or SquareEnix seem to try to sell titles for higher amounts (and their games are FAR from "flash games".)
You don't like the iPhone? Well, there are alternatives out there for you (provided you are in an actual position to afford any) but I hope you are not the economical advisory for any kind of software company. You may loose your job soon if anyone realizes how much money you made your company loose by convincing them iOS is a fad (either that or they will send you to sell refrigerators to Eskimos.)
Whether you like it or not, the iOS devices are a huge phenomena, and most of the reason behind it is precisely the "restrictive" app store that happens to do most of it's movement in the games and entertainment categories. If you ignore them as a developer, you are a fool.
I'm a iPhone/iPad owner and developer. I have toyed around with Android, and although competitive in the smartphone market, it honestly is no iPhone alternative, not for my business nor for my confort and am not confident of it's potential for a tablet without some huge facelift and heavy hardware requirements.
At this point I'd say there are 3 companies that can honestly compete with Apple and none seem to be interested in doing so:
Sony, making a tablet driven by the same OS that powers the PS3, complete with PSN and it's own online store.
Nintendo, making a tablet driven by the same OS that powers the Wii, same as above: with access to it's own online shop.
Microsoft, but not with Windows Mobile or any windows based product, instead with the XBox version of their OS. XBox's newest dashboard is even PERFECT to compete with both, the iPhone and iPad if used properly.
All these things have a very obvious thing in common, one thing that all that jump to compete with Apple don't realize: the iOS is not designed on desktop principles, it's design, intentional or not, is much closer to a video game hand-held who's success is purely due to it's open yet controlled online marketplace.
I'm a bit skeptic about the entire "antenna problem"
You call the veracity of the claims into question, and then deny you did. It seems to me that your the one who is full of it.
Skeptic:
1.One who instinctively or habitually doubts , questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.
If you read, you read the full thing instead of attempting to find the one line that, in isolation, makes it looks like you are not full of it, you would notice that my note is that the issues only happen nearing the borders of signal reach. That on itself was an acknowledgment of the issue, that only denies claims that the signal plainly dies whenever your finger bridges both antennas.
Now go and try to hunt through this for one word that will make it once more look like I am saying anyone that claims there are issues is full of it as an attempt try to show you are not full of it when accusing me of this redundant loop.
So because you havn't found an issue, everyone else is full of it?
No, others are not full of it. You are though, specially since I never denied the issues. But I assure you, its a very vocal minority having the antenna issues, people that have been living in the edge of ATT's sucky service. Those edges are rare on any service, since, well, they are near the end of coverage area.
If you live in an area with good AT&T coverage you wont notice a problem. Go out into the boonies.
I see your anecdotal evidence and match with my own. Out here in the midwest ive seen it happen on every iphone4 ive had the opportunity of trying it on. Including the display model at the AT&T store.
My issue, though, is I have not found an area that does not jump from good to so-bad-i-just-need-to-stare-at-it-for-the-iphone-to-fail. There does not seem to be any in-betweens around where I live. Either ATT just plainly sucks, or they work great.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been watching video without any issues from several sites, plus flash is not only video.
Its the OPTION of having flash that makes it so great. If you don't like it, don't use it. But you cannot negate the fact that many users actually enjoy it. Period.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad.""
You make it sound as if both were mutually exclusive. Maybe that was what Steve wanted you to believe and you bought into it? Wake up, Android DOES support HTML5 as well as the iphone, while having much better javascript performance - crucial for HTML5 stuff.
I am surprised such a gross simplified statement made it into slashdot. Yeah, I must be new here...
Well, for one it's not an option when every site out there defaults (and gives no option) to Flash if it is detected.
Also, find it funny you criticize gross simplification yet state something as grossly simplified as "But you cannot negate the fact that many users actually enjoy it. Period."
Most people don't even know what is Flash. They just enjoy what Flash brings into their desktops. If they realized Flash is the responsible for half the virus and the money they waste in getting their computers cleaned/fixed at some shop, they would surely tell you that not only do they hate it, but they may even consider forwarding their bills to Adobe.
I think the only group of people you can say actually enjoy and love flash are lazy web content developers that can't bring themselves to write a few lines of java script but insist call themselves developers.
"All of which makes one believe that maybe Steve Jobs was right to eschew Flash in lieu of HTML5 on the iPhone and iPad." Or perhaps this just means this is the first iteration of the Android OS to attempt Flash compatibility and it obviously needs more time to mature?
Up to you if you want to believe him, but Steve Jobs has said time and time again that the reason there is no Flash on the iPhone is because Adobe has failed to deliver something that performs remotely acceptably. Again, up to you to believe it but the fact that after all the years they had to make a "light mobile friendly" flash version, you can't really claim this is a first gen and forgive it. They supposedly have been working on mobile versions of Flash since before they started whining publicly about Apple not letting them put whatever they had ready out there.
I hate flash as much as the next guy, but with as much content as there is out there that is based on Flash, if Android gets it working properly, it will be a big advantage over the iPhone OS.
There are few things that make me want to run Flash in my iPad/iPhone. TV shows in YouTube are one (right now you get user uploads but not actual tv shows.) Blip.tv is another one I hope eventually adapts to the iOS so I can watch Nostalgia Critic on my iPad.
There are a lot of Flash games out there but all require PC input and will never work on a touch device.
I already got Netflix so that no longer is an issue. Hulu is there too.
Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything else that makes me miss Flash on my iPad. Ads are missing in many sites but that's not really a negative.
Most people have not converted many media playback sites to HTML5 because, for all purposes, they have to reinvent the wheel. Make a new HTML5 based player that can pause movies and insert ads without the viewer skipping them. Many of these are people that just grabbed a stock flash template and embedded it on their sites to play back their media. That kind of thing will eventually be made in HTML5, very likely as open source. At that point I will see the adoption of HTML5 playback to start taking off big time.
You mean my friends will be able to find out I bought Starland Vocal Band's Greatest Hits, a Billy Squire's "The Stroke", and Taco's cover of "Putting on the Ritz"?
Fuck that noise!
They will also know you got those Lady Gaga and Katy Parry CDs :P
Seriously though, you can set it to not show what you like/buy.
Wait a second, if I don't have a Facebook account I have to opt-out of it?
I guess they finally went and OCR every telephone book ever printed and made Facebook pages for every person that ever had their phones or business listed there! Now you have to go there, find that and opt out :P
Noted this in another point above but yea, that disappointed me. I was expecting them to opt-in all artists and at minimum automatically post new releases.
As it stands Apple may require the artist, manager or studios to handle the artist page completely. If they get lazy or give up on the artist, we stop getting updates.
Because when I look for a portal to Ping it seems they want me to download and install iTunes. Unless they intend to eventually make it accessible through a browser, I could see this being a bit of a problem for more than a few people. Great, you've got my credit card number if I bought something through iTMS but do you really think I'm going to wake up that memory and resource hog on my Windows partition just to get to a social networking site when I can hit Facebook through Linux or (nearly) any mobile device? I might be a small minority but that's not for me. Looks to be just more bloat on an already bloated piece of software. The least they could do is modularize iTunes so that if I click a box on install I can make it so that the application is just a way to put music onto an iPod. I am sick and tired of the video and TV stuff forcing me to put Quicktime on my machine!
You miss the point of this, well the entire article did. Ping is not there primarily to become a Facebook competitor or alternative. It's there to help highlight music sales. It's there to tell you what music your friends like, and what music your favorite artists like. Artists may treat it as a social page only to advertise their products, just as they do now in Facebook.
As far as Apple's goals are concerned, they don't care you using the tool if you are not going to be buying music. Note it does not only require you to have iTunes installed, it also requires you to have an iTunes Store account (even if it has no credit card attached.) It's all about selling.
In a way i sort of wish they extended it's functionality for app developers and book authors too.
Sounds like at least someone has learned through the idiotic privacy practices of Facebook.
Sounds like at least someone has applied the slashdot idiotic pattern of bashing without even looking at it. The entire thing is inactive, you have no ping account even if you have an iTunes store account. You have to activate ping and create an account for it to start invading your privacy in any way.
I'm just waiting to hear borked adoption rate numbers...it is integrated into iTunes 10, after all. Internet Explorer & Windows, anyone?
I "subscribed" last night. You still have to go through a sign-up process. Unlike certain company out there that automatically turned every email user into an "active" member of their social network.
So, unless Apple starts noting they have exactly as many Ping users as iTunes 10 users, they will be telling the truth about how many of iTunes 10 users did subscribe.
I don't care much for the total social networking thing, but am disappointed not every artist in their catalog gets a simple Ping page. I would had liked to subscribe to some artists that don't have Ping pages yet, if only to be notified of when new songs get uploaded to iTunes.
How dare Microsoft charge for hosting all those servers... they should do it for free!!! Profit? Expenses? Who care, they should make it free for me!!! If they don't make it free I wont give them my moneyz!!! **although if they make it free i sort of wont give them my money either**
A lot of people still have a working mouse and keyboard for PS/2. Mostly I see those things sold with USB to PS/2 adapters, so they still work, anyway. Wikipedia tells me that non-Windows systems under KVM behave better under PS/2. and also that we're starting to see it dropped from motherboards. Personally, I use them to free up two USB slots without buying a hub. They'll go away eventually.
That's not a valid excuse. A lot of people still have programs that require floppy drives too. It's all legacy stuff that never adapted to the times. PC/2 is just a very valid example of how PCs cling to unnecessary technologies. It's also interesting that Apple never used it so never dropped it. Proof that the industry wont do something unless apple does it? No, but definitively does not help the counter-situation.
Are you serious? It really isn't difficult to see the difference. In 1998, a floppy drive wasn't worthless yet. It existed in an age when broadband penetration was very, very low; and even Internet connections were not ubiquitous (my home was first connected to the Internet in 1999, I believe), and yet a network or Internet connection was the only reasonable way to get digital data off of the iMac.
And that was what the iMac was about. The name was short for Internet Macintosh and it was advertised as such. It sold like crazy too, revitalizing Apple and saving them from certain doom. It was so popular that almost all USB devices produced during the next couple of years had iMac Candy Color Syndrome. It was so popular, even PCs started to imitate it (although still not bold enough to remove the Floppy Disk).
Also, even in the 56k era of dial-up internet, the content of a floppy was not hard to send through email. Professionally no one accepted them anymore either. Printers and publishers required Zip Disks and others required CDs or DVDs. Even when the data was small Zip Disks were still required by the Printers.
At that point in time I had only 2 uses for Floppies: Start-up Recovery disks on my PC and installing AOL trials. OK, I never did the second one, but there was nothing else for me to do.
Oh please, pull the other one.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB.
Funny... why the hell every almost every PC and Motherboard still comes with PS/2 connectors? I have not seen a PS/2 mouse or keyboard for sale in stores for years now, yet all PCs seem to keep the unnecessary ports there.
No computer uses floppies any more because they don't have enough capacity. Heck, most computers have a DVD burner rather than CD-only for the same reason. If you really need to use a floppy, you can get a USB floppy drive for $5.
Yet everyone called Apple crazy, and bashed the hell out of them, when they removed Floppies from their machines all the way back in 1998. It was not until 5 years later that Dell decided to stop making fun of Apple and just also remove the floppy disks from their machines.
Apple doesn't "lead" the market. They produce a proprietary, closed-scale system that has a small enough market share that virus writers don't give a crap about infecting it and then claim it's "secure." And they sell it to people who have too much money and not enough common sense to compare prices on similar hardware.
They don't "lead the market" in the way you interpret it. They lead the market by showing everyone else that a company wont go bankrupt by adopting the new standard or dropping the aging ones. It's true, no one says "hey, apple did this, we should do it to they just say "oh, they didn't go bankrupt as we thought, perhaps its not crazy to save money removing that aging garbage."
...unless we talking about Tablets and Phones, in case you didnt realize, Android would not exist if the iPhone didn't exist.
Disclaimer: I am referring to the post-Steve Jobs return Apple. Before his return, Apple really was a horrible company that was lucky to survive.
Can someone explain to me why Apple behaves this way? I fail to understand. What even bugles my mind is the fact that Apple as a company is [still] a darling in many people's hearts. No bad publicity sticks.
I for one, will not touch an iPhone even with a 10 foot pole for my HTC Incredible does all that want it to and even more. The trouble is Oracle that is threatening to cut off Android's air supply with patent suits against Google.
At least you admit you [sort off] have no clue what's going here by noting you wont touch an iPhone. I'm an iOS developer and I went to that Briefs site to take a gaze at what's going on there. It seems what they are doing is not too far from Adobe's middle-ware to make applications in a different language. Apple has clearly stated they wont support that for many reasons, and most of them are valid.
If you want to program for the iOS, learn to program for the iOS. It's not rocket science, albeit it's not VB.net either.
Just for the record, there are 3 languages you can code with to push an iOS app: Objective C, Plain Old C and C++. You can make your app in either exclusively or in a combination of all 3. On top of this you can make HTML5 apps (and HTML5 is robust enough to call those apps) without Apple's intrusion or "nit-picky behavior". You can do those any way you want and "install" them to the desktop via Safari. The only issue are you won't get the marketing advantage of the App Store nor offline applications (you need internet to load up these apps.) I do sort of hope eventually Apple provides a way to sort of install locally HTML5 apps.
All that aside, Oracle cant kill Android although their lawsuit has valid basis. Google is modifying the java name-space, removing a lot of standardize code, rendering it incompatible. Either they stop calling it java or they properly support it all, that's Oracle's point. That aside, I'd love it if Google entirely dropped Java and just went for C++. Better performance and easier to port apps. With non-standard Java, it's not like I can count on java apps to always run on the thing anyways.
At the end of the day, win or loose, the Android platform will move on, future versions may just have full Java support or move to a new language for development. So if you want that HTC Incredible, I'd say go get it. My brother has one and he loves it.
Did you flunk Geomotry? Three dots are three dots. They CAN represent a triangle as long as you properly define them as 3 line segments, but by themselves, the 3 dots, a triangle are not.
In the end, the title is a lie because not only there is no mention of such technology in the article, but also because the iPad can't detect shapes. Put a square material that the iPad can recognize on it's surface and the OS just will notify one XY feedback, not the covered area (reason why people without enough foresight are puzzled at how can this be.)
BTW, that blob in your toast is not Elvis either, even if you can say it looks like him with enough imagination. Same holds true for the Summer Triangle.
It's not impossible, and like always, this slashdot title is the one lying. The hard pieces could have multiple spots (not just a shape) the screen would recognize as multi touches and then it's up to the app to recognize the pattern.
You see, the article does not use the word "shape" anywhere, they just say "object recognition" and that's a world of difference.
It is very likely they have come up with some sort of sticker with pre-defined touchspots and either pre-programmed these patterns on their app code or they made some settup screen to make the program learn the objects.
If you read TFA...
It would be even more useful if the /. article posters actually RTFA before posting.
But why do you think that netbooks succeeded, when years of small/portable PCs failed?
I can give you my opinion based on my study of two non-computer lovers I know that got them. One being my wife (allowing for extremely close monitoring.)
They both saw it in the store, thought it was cute, and cheap to boot. A computer they could carry in their purse and would not break the bank.
I have never seen the other person I note carry hers out of the house (perhaps she realized battery life is not good enough and charger cables in her purse was what she had in mind. She does not seem to leave home without her new iPad, but got to admit that has only been 2 weeks.
My wife's is collecting dust in a corner as she has found it to be horribly uncomfortable and restrictive due to the low resolution. I also lost my main laptop, she needed a computer and refused to use the Netbook anymore. She only uses the Netbook rarely due to it having a buit-in webcam while the laptop she confiscated from me does not.
My point is: I'd like to see how many of the people that buy Netbooks use them when they have an alternative. I certainly doubt my 2 out of 2 can represent the full market and I have no means nor time to do a more in-depth research.
And the Ipad didn't change anything - despite vast amounts of media coverage, it's turned out to be a bit of a wet blanket. Sure, they will sell some, just as there are all kinds of PMPs, phones, tablets and handheld games consoles. Sure, in these markets having a cutdown OS is useful, but these are not being used as mobile computers. Moreover, Apple is far from market leader, and there are many other companies in this space, not just the ones you list (most notably, you forgot Nokia).
From my shoes, it's not about what they use it for and if they try to replace a computer with it or not. From my shoes is: what platform am I more likely to sell software on. I have sold more software in the App Store in a year than I have in the PC in my entire career. In fact, most my money making PC software has only been due to contract projects.
Given the share and growth of Apple compared with Nokia and Android, I hope that you're not an economical advisory.
Split those by version, tell me what Android to target. I already seen enough stuff stop working (not personal projects) in newer versions so I can't even target the lowest-version expecting it to run smoothly on higher versions. And Nokia? You listing them as a platform? In the smartphone category?
I got to admit I'm not sure what market-share chart to refer to, one that looks pessimistic for apple lists it at 14% while listing Android (all versions) at 17%, yet it does not include the huge amount of iPod Touch and iPads that are also moving and part of the true market I end up developing for.
Whether you like it or not, the iOS devices are a huge phenomena
A billion dollar company is a huge phenomena - so? Lots of big companies are huge phenomena. Whether you like it or not, Nokia, RIM and now Android are even bigger phenomena. Lots of other products are huge phenomena. Why do Apple alone deserve praise for this? They're not some small startup.
The only one you list I could actually develop decent software for and make money off (that I could dream to profit from) is the Android. Despite it's size, though, their marketplace is much slower than Apple's very busy App Store. That's why I should care (you don't have to, unless you want to make money developing smartphone software.)
Yet developers seem happy to ignore all but 3% of the market when writing only for the Iphone. *shrugs* When I write with Nokia's Qt, I get near 100% of the desktop market (Windows, Linux, OS X) and ~50% of the smartphone market (Symbian, Maemo).
I do hope those java games you making [or whatever else you are writing] are selling well and yielding enough money to keep you happy.
However, I don't go around throwing playground insults on people, just because they develop for a different platform.
You consider what I said insults? Since when did /. lowered the bar that low...
I have tried it. Over and over. AS I have responded to others (but this is /., no one bothers to read too deep in the tree before replying.)
There are still too many elements in the Android that look desktop-like. From the icons to menus while navigating. Main example being the file browser. It's horrendous.
Can you be more specific about what Android is missing that iOS, PS3, Wii, and XBox all have? And I mean the latest version of Android, 2.2. You just say "mmm kay Android is bad" without backing up your case.
LS
I have not played with 2.2 (have not seen a single device with it yet) nor do I know what is new in it. But as to what it's missing? Well, for one their dashbord/springboard/whatevertheycall it still looks like my computer's desktop full of icons and widgets. The widgets can look nice here or there, but the icon navigation feels horribly desktop-like. That's a huge turn-off for anyone that does not see a smart-phone as a computer (ie: the people that have made the iPhone popular)
The platforms I mentioned have a very sleek, multimedia, interface that feels as far from a desktop as you can get. The casual user that could care less about computers on his pocket wants that.
You bring an interesting other point with the versioning, though. There is way too much version fragmentation out there. Even Apple realized charging for the iPod Touch upgrades was leading to fragmentation and changed to free updates for the platform with iOS 4. After all, they make more money from commissions by selling games than by selling the OS. I read Google came up with a modular way to deal with versioning, but I still have to see that in work.
I keep hearing this stuff and have wondered if people have actually used Vista or 7 tablet edition or more to the point the tablet PCs.
I have to turn the question back at you. I personally am owner of a Toshiba tablet PC. I have used all windows OS upgrades in it since XP Tablet Edition (vista and 7.)
Although I love my Tablet for some stuff, it's just not flexible to really be "on the go". It's not a device I can carry turned on. I need to, at best, put it on sleep mode and carry on a laptop case. An iPad is a thin device that is always on, always ready to be pulled out and unlocked.
Usability is another big one. Although I love my stylus for drawing and coloring (right now that's the main use I give my tablet, at least until I can buy a Cintiq) even if I happen to have my tablet ready to use, navigating menus with the stylus is clumsy and slow. For a tablet device to be successful it needs to follow a different set of GUI design rules, specifically: no pop-down menu trees.
Tablets COULD evolve via dedicated tablet software, but sharing an OS makes it hard to separate the software apart. Even if it's the same underlying OS (iOS is really just another build of OSX, with special features) the entire navigation system must be streamlined and require applications to be designed for the device itself so the device can feel as a viable alternative to pulling out a book, notepad or newspaper from your briefcase.
Although you can get away with making an Android tablet, that will just get you half the way there (admittedly an important half way.) You wont get the mass appeal without an extremely easy to access marketplace and gimmicky interface (reasons why I note the PS3/Wii/XBox platforms to be ideal, they have the two necessary corners covered, they just need to make them at minimum as open as Apple's App Store.)
Anyways, I love my tablet and will miss it once I'm done with it (poor thing is getting old) but they are not aimed at the same uses as the iPad or even iPhone or iPod Touch (lately i taken to call that one iPad Nano.)
I'll translate: "I've made my bed with Apple. I've looked at an Andriod phone, once on the internet and whilst I pay some random tribute to make me seem like I'm not a fanboy but I'll praise Apple immediately after because my ego will never permit me to conceive that anything could ever be better".
I think the shoe is in the other foot. Both my brothers happen to have android phones (because neither can tolerate ATT, younger one almost cried when he had to give up his iPhone.) Truth is that Android feels more like a Windows Mobile killer than an iPhone competitor.
See my above statement. Apple is a non-competitor to Sony, MS and Nintendo. So much of a non competitor it's not even worth mentioning.
Really, I think you definitively are very biased... http://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2010/08/09/daily32.html
Mobile gaming is nothing in the west. It's something in Asia (Japan and China specifically)
That's funny. I guess then that the fact that the combined software sales of DS and PSP software sales in America outselling Japan's by 62.5% is just an optical illusion or result of some one's random number generators... http://www.vgchartz.com/hardware_totals.php?type=Software&sort=Total
The iGaming fad will be over in a year or so.
I said that 2 years ago (who on earth would play with just on-screen controls, I said.) I lost a lot of money [due to not pursuing opportunity] for thinking that way.
As soon as enough Andorid, Symbian and Meego phones support Flash 10 a copy of a flash game will no longer sell for US$5.99.
You would be shocked what people pay money for. And it's not only iPhone owners, people buy games for Android, XBox Live Arcade, PSN, WiiWare and DSWare that make Facebook games look like next gen killers.
Oh and not sure why you say 5.99, the average iPhone game is between $0.99 to $2.99, only big studios like EA or SquareEnix seem to try to sell titles for higher amounts (and their games are FAR from "flash games".)
You don't like the iPhone? Well, there are alternatives out there for you (provided you are in an actual position to afford any) but I hope you are not the economical advisory for any kind of software company. You may loose your job soon if anyone realizes how much money you made your company loose by convincing them iOS is a fad (either that or they will send you to sell refrigerators to Eskimos.)
Whether you like it or not, the iOS devices are a huge phenomena, and most of the reason behind it is precisely the "restrictive" app store that happens to do most of it's movement in the games and entertainment categories. If you ignore them as a developer, you are a fool.
PS: pardon my English, not my first language.
Very likely.
I'm a iPhone/iPad owner and developer. I have toyed around with Android, and although competitive in the smartphone market, it honestly is no iPhone alternative, not for my business nor for my confort and am not confident of it's potential for a tablet without some huge facelift and heavy hardware requirements.
At this point I'd say there are 3 companies that can honestly compete with Apple and none seem to be interested in doing so:
All these things have a very obvious thing in common, one thing that all that jump to compete with Apple don't realize: the iOS is not designed on desktop principles, it's design, intentional or not, is much closer to a video game hand-held who's success is purely due to it's open yet controlled online marketplace.
You denied the issue right here...
I'm a bit skeptic about the entire "antenna problem"
You call the veracity of the claims into question, and then deny you did. It seems to me that your the one who is full of it.
Skeptic:
1.One who instinctively or habitually doubts , questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.
If you read, you read the full thing instead of attempting to find the one line that, in isolation, makes it looks like you are not full of it, you would notice that my note is that the issues only happen nearing the borders of signal reach. That on itself was an acknowledgment of the issue, that only denies claims that the signal plainly dies whenever your finger bridges both antennas.
Now go and try to hunt through this for one word that will make it once more look like I am saying anyone that claims there are issues is full of it as an attempt try to show you are not full of it when accusing me of this redundant loop.
My issue, though, is I have not found an area
So because you havn't found an issue, everyone else is full of it?
No, others are not full of it. You are though, specially since I never denied the issues. But I assure you, its a very vocal minority having the antenna issues, people that have been living in the edge of ATT's sucky service. Those edges are rare on any service, since, well, they are near the end of coverage area.
If you live in an area with good AT&T coverage you wont notice a problem. Go out into the boonies.
I see your anecdotal evidence and match with my own. Out here in the midwest ive seen it happen on every iphone4 ive had the opportunity of trying it on. Including the display model at the AT&T store.
My issue, though, is I have not found an area that does not jump from good to so-bad-i-just-need-to-stare-at-it-for-the-iphone-to-fail. There does not seem to be any in-betweens around where I live. Either ATT just plainly sucks, or they work great.