Unless I'm being dense, none of the things you mention require multi-touch. They're just single-touch gesture detection routines. Looking at the author's website reveals that the only multi-touch support is two-finger or three-finger taps, and that this is not supported on all models.
It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y)
The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
pressing one finger onto the touchpad
*simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...
It looks as though the iPhone ain't for you (which is perfectly fine by me). My situation is a bit different...
I have WiFi at home, at work, in my local town (Mountain View) and up in San Francisco - all for free. The number of times I'll be using Edge is pretty minimal, so I'm expecting to get *far* and *away* faster net.access than the treo.
I have a 60G video-ipod, on which I have used ~6GB. I think the 8GB of space is plenty for my needs.
hard buttons are useful for some, I guess. I used to have them on a Palm device and I never used them - I always used the on-screen menu. Horses for courses
I'd be willing to bet the camera is a simple CCD device. Read from it at a faster rate and you have a video camera rather than a still one. You probably don't get to read all the pixels, but most of the hardware devices have a dual-function capability. The point is that this is then just software, and Apple have already said they intend to update the software on an ongoing basis. Another example: should they choose to add a (real) iChat client, there's not much to stop them...
Tactile sensations are another "hey, if it works for you" feature. Again, I always look at the phone when I'm dialling. Not a biggie for me.
As for applications, well it would be nice. It's not a deal-breaker though. In fact it's just pushing me to learn a bit more about Javascript - I've come to the conclusion that jquery rocks!
So, for me, it works out well. For you (apparently) not so much. The day someone invents something that appeals to all (wo)men equally, that day the world will end.
I wasn't trying to say "if you don't like the iPhone, you must hate Apple, begone foul fiend, back to the depths from which ye came". It was more that having spent some time reading up the blogs/articles/etc over the last 2 weeks, I think a man-eating monster made from dead baby seals (to misquote someone) would have been preferred...
Those I referred to as uninformed are such simply because they're commenting on a product they've not used. It's that simple.
They can choose to agree or disagree and for the record, I'm not infallible - I don't believe anyone is. My point is that you can't complain it's "easy to scratch" unless you've tried scratching it. You can't say "it's really hard to type on" unless you've tried typing on it. etc. etc. etc. (ad nauseum)
Note that I'm not attacking you. I'm not characterising "people like you" as being wrong. I'm saying you have to use the damn thing before you write endless diatribes about how crap it is. And that's been what has been going on this last week...
They get to say what they like or dislike about things. They don't have to trash 20% of all products, react favourably to another 20% and ignore the rest.
Look at what Apple's been releasing, and you can see why he reviews them well. I don't care if you don't like the company, their products have been outstanding over the last couple of years -
the portables increasing in market-share (I think I was told 13% recently, quite a bit up from 5%),
there's the iPod in all its incarnations 'nuff said
and now the iPhone, which actually looks pretty good as well.
As far as I can see, he's called all those pretty well.
So, it seems as though those people who have actually *used* it seem to *like* it. Unlike the majority of stories, posts, blogs, etc. etc. we've seen recently.
I've lost track of just how many uninformed iPhone-hater pieces I've seen over the last week. Of course, most of that is just blog-spam, and to get more clicks, you just say something controversial... As always, follow the money - then you can make a more-informed decision as to whether the opinion being espoused is worth anything.
Oh, and always ignore anything Dvorak or Enderle say...
At work, I have WiFi. At home, I have WiFi. In the city, I have WiFi (thanks to Google).
The number of times I'll be using Edge is vanishingly small, and during those times (eg: a breakdown on the freeway, or my Garmin GPS dies), I'll just have to, you know, put up with it. Oh noes.
I'm here on an H1-B. My company was bought by a large company over here on the West Coast - we used to do asset-management within the film industry and had (hardware) patents on our process - patents that I'll defend as completely justified, even though I loathe software patents. I know of precisely one other company in the world that did what we did (in a difference sphere - they did broadcast, we did film), and they've been bought by the same company that bought us.
One of our clients was ILM (Star Wars 4, or part-1 if you prefer). I engineered the distributed database that ingested 40 TB of data per day for a solid 6 months, shared video previews across the world to the godforsaken deserts where the directors were filming, overlaying rough-cuts of special-effects and cross-matching with the story-board. We tracked everything from (physical) props (so the model of the lights-saber in the spin-offf game matched the real prop used), through digital assets, camera frames (HD frames at that), intermediate results (motion-tracks for example), audio (sound effects and dialogue), etc. etc. etc.
Anyway, I reckon there are maybe a half-dozen people on this planet that have the relevant experience to do this. I know them all, and none of them are Americans. I've no intention of becoming a citizen, but I may go for a green-card. I quite like California and Californians, and I'm enjoying myself working here:-)
A little while back, Dvorak (the original, not the popular term for a retard) was claiming the iPhone would have 40 minutes talk-time [the link doesn't go to Dvorak's site].
So, where's the retraction, John - after all, any *responsible* journalist's priority is the truth, not just seeking attention for himself at the expense of others...
FF has that in 24 hours, yes. After a long and public development of the software, raising the awareness of the very people most likely to download it.
Safari was announced with virtually no-one even predicting a Win32/Safari combination, and 2 days later it had passed the 1M mark.
The two scenarios are so different, it doesn't even begin to compare. But what the hell, you got to call someone a fanboy....
Apple never does things by accident on their adverts, and it's noticeable that the "2 year contract required" small-print was on the first few adverts, but has since been removed. They might as well shine a spotlight as do that...
So, I think AT&T will be offering more than one way to buy it, or perhaps Apple will at their stores. Whatever.
Not directed at the parent, but in terms of 3G - I have to say I couldn't really care less. Pretty much everywhere I will be, I will be in a WiFi zone. My work has open-access WiFi, my house does, up in the city does (San Francisco), courtesy of Google, and so does Mountain View where I live (well, actually I more or less live on 'Castro':-) Now this won't apply to everyone [grin], but WiFi is becoming more and more popular - and I'm not sure the cell companies have really cottoned onto that yet...
So WiFi for me, all the way. Having been at WWDC (and seen the NDA'd presentations) I know a little bit more about the iPhone now. I'm definitely getting one.
... from a Mac user's perspective, looks about as appealing as old 80x25 terminal text. Text on a PC looks anaemic and blocky compared to properly-rendered text on a Mac.
Now this is just my opinion, and let's face it - it's all totally subjective anyway - but there's no way I'd be happy with that sort of text output.
Apple and MS have very different philosophical approaches for text rendering. Microsoft attempt to make the text as readable as possible on an LCD screen, to the detriment of the original font design. Apple preserve the font design to the detriment (for some people, I like it) of the readability.
The main reason MS fonts look lighter is that Cleartype renders to pixel boundaries - if the font would naturally go over a pixel boundary when anti-aliased, Cleartype does not render that. The fonts end up looking "lighter" on screen because of it. Apple don't do that. As far as I know, It has nothing to do with colour and black & white.
The upshot is that MS text appears lighter (they even designed fonts to match their rendering philosophy) than Apple text under most circumstances. It also means that the print output on a Mac looks very similar to the displayed output, whereas printing an MS document can make it look a lot "heavier" because the rendering on print is different from the rendering on display.
As for 'proprietary', both rendering engines are 'proprietary'. I don't see why you call one that, and not the other.
Let's not forget that it also has Microsoft's brand name on it.. and PC users are in love with Microsoft so they will go back to using IE even if they find something better.
I wrote a javascript video player, streaming at 25fps qvga-sized video on a 266MHz P2 several years ago. The video-server could serve frames as JPG images, and the machine was easily fast enough to keep up. You could run two on a good day (the server was only a 400 MHz P2)
The iPhone has more power than a 266MHz P2, especially when you consider it has a lot less to actually *do*
Riiight. Because if I wanted to put down ~$2500 for a Mac Pro, and I was interested in playing games on it, I wouldn't spend the extra $250 on the 'customise me before you buy' page for the X1900XT.
Let's see now, how to gain cash over the weekend - I know! The hottest topic in the computing sphere right now has to be Apple - with the keynote at their conference tomorrow. Let's do a hack-job on them...
Strike one - let's paint Apple as stupid - pretend that the company famous for 'rip, mix, burn' don't understand that the code *they* built into iTunes can remove the DRM. [ed - are you sure you're going somewhere here ?]
Strike two - we'll pretend that the bug in iTunes was put there maliciously. We'll claim that Apple were caught out by their users being too clever [ed - I thought Apple acknowledge [Roy B's post] this as a bug, they *are* human you know]
Strike three, they're out. They *embed* your email address into these "supposedly DRM-free" tracks! How are you supposed to upload and spread them around the net if they identify who did it ? That's it! Game over for Apple! [ed - but surely the people who *buy* iTunes music are the people who *don't* download free music from the 'net]
columnist: Trust me, ok, it'll make for loads of ad-hits. $$$ man! ed: ok, ok. You know the territory, I'm just the business guy
Quite apart from the fact that the personal metadata has *always* been embedded, it doesn't prevent the exact same method of protection-removal if you really want to upload your tracks - lay it down to CD as audio, rip it, "share" it.
Perhaps what we have is simply that Apple didn't *remove* a piece of metadata that was always there, they just delivered on their promise to allow you to migrate your music to wherever you want to play it. But that's not a story that'll deliver ad-revenue...
Y'all just oughta be glad it's not *me* in charge... I'd have embedded the email address as an easy thing to spot & remove, and *also* embedded the binary user-GUID, spread around in the metadata block. Once you *thought* you'd removed all trace of your name, I'd still be able to track who'd uploaded files - enough files... time to emulate a ton of bricks. Given the pay-for timestamp and the appearance-on-the-network time, I ought to be able to tell who's just "sharing" files as a policy after a while...
Yes, I did notice that all the Mac Pro's are dual processor (read, two dual core Xeons) *capable*. What you seem to have failed to notice is that they don't all come with dual processors, you jackass.
Yes. They. Do.
They're *all* either dual-dual-core (for a total of 4 processors), or dual-quad-core (for a total of 8 processors). I have a dual-dual at home (what I'm typing this on, in fact), and a dual-quad at work. The dual-quad smokes my home machine in my neural-network simulations, but it wasn't available when I bought this one.
When I bought it, I was speccing out alternatives. Dell was about $1500 more expensive than the Mac. The parts weren't available to build my own. I'd have been happy running linux on a high-end machine, but in retrospect I'm really happy I got the Mac - OSX is the nicest front-end anyone's ever put on Unix. Loving it.
I'd be interested in seeing this parts-list of yours, just to see where else you'd gone wrong in your pricing...
I think you could make a good case that if you're only using *public* API's to do something, then the software is by-definition *not* technically limited in order to prevent you from doing [whatever]. It could be easily argued as being *supported* in fact, just not *supplied* by MS.
What MS *wants* from its licence isn't necessarily how it ought to be interpreted...
I think he's just sticking to his most-deeply-held beliefs...
Before joining Visual Studio I spent 5 years as a lead in Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit. In the MacBU I worked on almost every Macintosh application that comes from Microsoft and helped drive the migration to Mac OS X and the Aqua User Interface. The Macintosh will always be close to my heart [snip]
Clearly (despite his later profession of undying love for.net), he's a Mac-fan at heart. This is just his way of getting more MS developers over to the Mac [grin]. After all, Steve said "Developers, Developers, [you know the rest]"
Any Mac fan ought to be happy that someone is so dedicated to Apple's success, he'll happily screw up his own employer's relations with the 'Developer, Developer, Developer'. Now *that* is brand-loyalty!
I don't know about you, but weather predictions in my area are rarely perfectly correct. The prediction that Chelsea would win the Premiership in the UK was, well, wrong. I could go on forever...
As the GP said, predictions are not supposed to be absolute certainties - they're a measured guesstimate of some currently-unknown parameter, usually based on the distribution of currently-known data. Given that in any sample-set of natural phenomena, the standard deviation is rarely 0, there will always be some measure of uncertainty, and I'd expect most people to understand that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not clear from his site which models *do* implement true multi-touch, or even whether what he has done requires it. It could be a timing-related kludge if all it supports is taps and not drags. (ie: if I get 2 or 3 clicks within 5 ms, I'll assume the user did those simultaneously and send event X not event Y)
The multi-touch touchpads on a Macbook(Pro) can scroll any window that has the mouse within its borders by:
- pressing one finger onto the touchpad
- *simultaneously* dragging a second finger up and down.
That's multi-touch. And there's no reason why window-resizing or other manipulation couldn't be done...Simon.
As for applications, well it would be nice. It's not a deal-breaker though. In fact it's just pushing me to learn a bit more about Javascript - I've come to the conclusion that jquery rocks!
So, for me, it works out well. For you (apparently) not so much. The day someone invents something that appeals to all (wo)men equally, that day the world will end.
I wasn't trying to say "if you don't like the iPhone, you must hate Apple, begone foul fiend, back to the depths from which ye came". It was more that having spent some time reading up the blogs/articles/etc over the last 2 weeks, I think a man-eating monster made from dead baby seals (to misquote someone) would have been preferred...
Simon.
Those I referred to as uninformed are such simply because they're commenting on a product they've not used. It's that simple.
They can choose to agree or disagree and for the record, I'm not infallible - I don't believe anyone is. My point is that you can't complain it's "easy to scratch" unless you've tried scratching it. You can't say "it's really hard to type on" unless you've tried typing on it. etc. etc. etc. (ad nauseum)
Note that I'm not attacking you. I'm not characterising "people like you" as being wrong. I'm saying you have to use the damn thing before you write endless diatribes about how crap it is. And that's been what has been going on this last week...
Simon.
Look at what Apple's been releasing, and you can see why he reviews them well. I don't care if you don't like the company, their products have been outstanding over the last couple of years -
As far as I can see, he's called all those pretty well.
Simon
So, it seems as though those people who have actually *used* it seem to *like* it. Unlike the majority of stories, posts, blogs, etc. etc. we've seen recently.
I've lost track of just how many uninformed iPhone-hater pieces I've seen over the last week. Of course, most of that is just blog-spam, and to get more clicks, you just say something controversial... As always, follow the money - then you can make a more-informed decision as to whether the opinion being espoused is worth anything.
Oh, and always ignore anything Dvorak or Enderle say...
Simon.
At work, I have WiFi.
At home, I have WiFi.
In the city, I have WiFi (thanks to Google).
The number of times I'll be using Edge is vanishingly small, and during those times (eg: a breakdown on the freeway, or my Garmin GPS dies), I'll just have to, you know, put up with it. Oh noes.
Simon.
If you drive about 450 miles up the '5' you get to me - I'm on the outskirts of San Jose. A bit far for a casual meet-up and a few beers :-)
Simon
I'm here on an H1-B. My company was bought by a large company over here on the West Coast - we used to do asset-management within the film industry and had (hardware) patents on our process - patents that I'll defend as completely justified, even though I loathe software patents. I know of precisely one other company in the world that did what we did (in a difference sphere - they did broadcast, we did film), and they've been bought by the same company that bought us.
:-)
One of our clients was ILM (Star Wars 4, or part-1 if you prefer). I engineered the distributed database that ingested 40 TB of data per day for a solid 6 months, shared video previews across the world to the godforsaken deserts where the directors were filming, overlaying rough-cuts of special-effects and cross-matching with the story-board. We tracked everything from (physical) props (so the model of the lights-saber in the spin-offf game matched the real prop used), through digital assets, camera frames (HD frames at that), intermediate results (motion-tracks for example), audio (sound effects and dialogue), etc. etc. etc.
Anyway, I reckon there are maybe a half-dozen people on this planet that have the relevant experience to do this. I know them all, and none of them are Americans. I've no intention of becoming a citizen, but I may go for a green-card. I quite like California and Californians, and I'm enjoying myself working here
Simon.
It's not an iPhone emulator. It's Webkit (ie: a Cocoa HTML view) in an iPhone-sized window. That's it.
Simon
You need to get laid. Or out, even; live a little, anyway.
Simon
A little while back, Dvorak (the original, not the popular term for a retard) was claiming the iPhone would have 40 minutes talk-time [the link doesn't go to Dvorak's site].
So, where's the retraction, John - after all, any *responsible* journalist's priority is the truth, not just seeking attention for himself at the expense of others...
Simon
FF has that in 24 hours, yes. After a long and public development of the software, raising the awareness of the very people most likely to download it.
Safari was announced with virtually no-one even predicting a Win32/Safari combination, and 2 days later it had passed the 1M mark.
The two scenarios are so different, it doesn't even begin to compare. But what the hell, you got to call someone a fanboy....
Simon.
My theory is that you're wrong. Apple have a proven track record in making consumer goods. Bank on the iPhone being a massive hit.
Simon.
Apple never does things by accident on their adverts, and it's noticeable that the "2 year contract required" small-print was on the first few adverts, but has since been removed. They might as well shine a spotlight as do that...
:-) Now this won't apply to everyone [grin], but WiFi is becoming more and more popular - and I'm not sure the cell companies have really cottoned onto that yet...
So, I think AT&T will be offering more than one way to buy it, or perhaps Apple will at their stores. Whatever.
Not directed at the parent, but in terms of 3G - I have to say I couldn't really care less. Pretty much everywhere I will be, I will be in a WiFi zone. My work has open-access WiFi, my house does, up in the city does (San Francisco), courtesy of Google, and so does Mountain View where I live (well, actually I more or less live on 'Castro'
So WiFi for me, all the way. Having been at WWDC (and seen the NDA'd presentations) I know a little bit more about the iPhone now. I'm definitely getting one.
Simon.
... from a Mac user's perspective, looks about as appealing as old 80x25 terminal text. Text on a PC looks anaemic and blocky compared to properly-rendered text on a Mac.
Now this is just my opinion, and let's face it - it's all totally subjective anyway - but there's no way I'd be happy with that sort of text output.
Simon.
Apple and MS have very different philosophical approaches for text rendering. Microsoft attempt to make the text as readable as possible on an LCD screen, to the detriment of the original font design. Apple preserve the font design to the detriment (for some people, I like it) of the readability.
The main reason MS fonts look lighter is that Cleartype renders to pixel boundaries - if the font would naturally go over a pixel boundary when anti-aliased, Cleartype does not render that. The fonts end up looking "lighter" on screen because of it. Apple don't do that. As far as I know, It has nothing to do with colour and black & white.
The upshot is that MS text appears lighter (they even designed fonts to match their rendering philosophy) than Apple text under most circumstances. It also means that the print output on a Mac looks very similar to the displayed output, whereas printing an MS document can make it look a lot "heavier" because the rendering on print is different from the rendering on display.
As for 'proprietary', both rendering engines are 'proprietary'. I don't see why you call one that, and not the other.
Simon
[About IE]
Let's not forget that it also has Microsoft's brand name on it.. and PC users are in love with Microsoft so they will go back to using IE even if they find something better.
See how stupid that sounds ?
Simon
I wrote a javascript video player, streaming at 25fps qvga-sized video on a 266MHz P2 several years ago. The video-server could serve frames as JPG images, and the machine was easily fast enough to keep up. You could run two on a good day (the server was only a 400 MHz P2)
The iPhone has more power than a 266MHz P2, especially when you consider it has a lot less to actually *do*
Simon
Riiight. Because if I wanted to put down ~$2500 for a Mac Pro, and I was interested in playing games on it, I wouldn't spend the extra $250 on the 'customise me before you buy' page for the X1900XT.
[sigh]
Simon.
FYI, a "hack" is slang (in the UK) for a crappy journalist. Hatchet would have fitted too, though...
Simon
Let's see now, how to gain cash over the weekend - I know! The hottest topic in the computing sphere right now has to be Apple - with the keynote at their conference tomorrow. Let's do a hack-job on them...
Strike one - let's paint Apple as stupid - pretend that the company famous for 'rip, mix, burn' don't understand that the code *they* built into iTunes can remove the DRM. [ed - are you sure you're going somewhere here ?]
Strike two - we'll pretend that the bug in iTunes was put there maliciously. We'll claim that Apple were caught out by their users being too clever [ed - I thought Apple acknowledge [Roy B's post] this as a bug, they *are* human you know]
Strike three, they're out. They *embed* your email address into these "supposedly DRM-free" tracks! How are you supposed to upload and spread them around the net if they identify who did it ? That's it! Game over for Apple! [ed - but surely the people who *buy* iTunes music are the people who *don't* download free music from the 'net]
columnist: Trust me, ok, it'll make for loads of ad-hits. $$$ man!
ed: ok, ok. You know the territory, I'm just the business guy
Quite apart from the fact that the personal metadata has *always* been embedded, it doesn't prevent the exact same method of protection-removal if you really want to upload your tracks - lay it down to CD as audio, rip it, "share" it.
Perhaps what we have is simply that Apple didn't *remove* a piece of metadata that was always there, they just delivered on their promise to allow you to migrate your music to wherever you want to play it. But that's not a story that'll deliver ad-revenue...
Y'all just oughta be glad it's not *me* in charge... I'd have embedded the email address as an easy thing to spot & remove, and *also* embedded the binary user-GUID, spread around in the metadata block. Once you *thought* you'd removed all trace of your name, I'd still be able to track who'd uploaded files - enough files... time to emulate a ton of bricks. Given the pay-for timestamp and the appearance-on-the-network time, I ought to be able to tell who's just "sharing" files as a policy after a while...
Simon
Yes. They. Do.
They're *all* either dual-dual-core (for a total of 4 processors), or dual-quad-core (for a total of 8 processors). I have a dual-dual at home (what I'm typing this on, in fact), and a dual-quad at work. The dual-quad smokes my home machine in my neural-network simulations, but it wasn't available when I bought this one.
When I bought it, I was speccing out alternatives. Dell was about $1500 more expensive than the Mac. The parts weren't available to build my own. I'd have been happy running linux on a high-end machine, but in retrospect I'm really happy I got the Mac - OSX is the nicest front-end anyone's ever put on Unix. Loving it.
I'd be interested in seeing this parts-list of yours, just to see where else you'd gone wrong in your pricing...
Simon
Hmm. Perhaps.
I think you could make a good case that if you're only using *public* API's to do something, then the software is by-definition *not* technically limited in order to prevent you from doing [whatever]. It could be easily argued as being *supported* in fact, just not *supplied* by MS.
What MS *wants* from its licence isn't necessarily how it ought to be interpreted...
Simon.
Clearly (despite his later profession of undying love for
Any Mac fan ought to be happy that someone is so dedicated to Apple's success, he'll happily screw up his own employer's relations with the 'Developer, Developer, Developer'. Now *that* is brand-loyalty!
Simon.
I don't know about you, but weather predictions in my area are rarely perfectly correct. The prediction that Chelsea would win the Premiership in the UK was, well, wrong. I could go on forever...
As the GP said, predictions are not supposed to be absolute certainties - they're a measured guesstimate of some currently-unknown parameter, usually based on the distribution of currently-known data. Given that in any sample-set of natural phenomena, the standard deviation is rarely 0, there will always be some measure of uncertainty, and I'd expect most people to understand that.
Simon.