"The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE, including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees"
That is only a handy feature when the device is permanently attached to the car. Besides... iPad Environmental requirements: Operating temperature: 32 to 95 deg. F (0 to 35 deg C) Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 deg F (-20 to 45 deg C)
The iPod classic (disk-based) shows the same specs, and I've been leaving mine in the glovebox for years, and I live in Florida.
Anyway, this article is dumb. Is the an viable alternative to expensive built-in systems? Yes. Does it have some other advantages? Yes. Does it have some disadvantages too? Yes. Will the iPad kill the whole industry? No. Hell, it's been the case for decades that aftermarket stereos are better and cheaper than their ridiculously-overpriced dealer-installed counterparts. Did third-party stereos kill dealer-installed units? Of course not.
The thing about Flash is, even if Apple included it, what would it accomplish? Other than playing video, we'd get nothing but banner ads (woo hoo!) and unplayable games. Think about it: what do most games require? Fast and accurate mousing and keyboarding. And clicking and dragging, and mouseout/mouseover/mousedown/mouseup events. So even if the iPad and iPhone supported Flash tomorrow, most of the content out there STILL wouldn't work. Look at this Slate demo closely. Note how the guy was very careful to demonstrate exactly ONE Flash game (at the 2:35 mark)--a slow-paced castle defense game that only required clicking. I could give that tablet to my kid and in 10 minutes he'd have a list of games that don't work.
And even if Apple isn't doing it for altruistic reasons, denying Flash on popular devices is actually HELPING the Internet by pushing us towards OPEN standards for video and interactivity. Think of it this way: you're a parent. Do you let your kids eat whatever they want? No, because then they'd eat only junk food, and lots of it. So you buy them good food and make them eat it, which is better for them AND saves you money. The only people who suffer are the junk food salesmen (Adobe) and even then they won't completely go out of business, because once your kids are older and move out of the house (buy a more general-purpose computer) they can do whatever they want.
"Whem Microsoft "breaks" the internet with its intentionally wounded implementation of HTML and CSS support, most of us understand the harm it causes."
There's a big difference between Microsoft refusing to support an OPEN STANDARD that is at the very CORE of the WWW (and anything else that renders HTML--email, locally stored HTML/JS apps, Help systems, etc.) and Apple refusing to support a DE FACTO standard that is controlled by exactly one company.
Who said it was better, and how? Specs alone do not "better" make. Plus it cost $999 back then which is like $1300 now. If the iPad, as it is, cost $1300, it would not be selling that well. If the iPad had a flimsy folding keyboard AND had an OS that was even MORE limited than what it has now (WinCE is MUCH further away from Win98 than iPhone OS is from OS X) AND required a stylus it wouldn't sell as well.
Why can't people accept that Apple makes great products AND markets them well? If their products truly sucked, across the board, they wouldn't sell as well no matter WHAT the marketing. In fact, they HAVE had products that sucked AND tanked, like the G4 Cube. That thing was advertised just as much as anything else but it cost $200 more than a comparably-specced, more-expandable PowerMac G4. The Cube's failure is PROOF that Apple does not operate outside the laws of economics. They don't *actually* serve drugged Kool-Aid; their customers are NOT ad-absorbing, check-writing, brainless zombies. But geeks seem to resent their success because they make things that people want to use, not what kernel-compiling Slashdotters think is cool.
One thing I love about Opera is the "long click" that you can use to pop up a menu to, for example, open an link in a new tab. Unfortunately, new tabs open in the foreground, but if they ever make it so that new tabs open in the background I could see myself using it a lot just for that reason, ESPECIALLY if I get an iPad.* (At least switching among tabs is pretty easy.)
For short browsing sessions (like when I want to kill a few minutes when I'm in line somewhere) Mobile Safari is fine. For longer sessions (like what I think I'd use an iPad for) I think I'd miss easy use of tabs a lot. When I sit down to browse for a while, I'll open a site like Google Fast Flip or DF or TUAW or Slashdot, start reading, and middle-click on linked-to articles that I want to read; then, when I'm done with the starting page, I close it and start reading items. This is how I browse probably 80% of the time. The ability to quickly and easily consume lots of a certain type of content would be the one killer feature that would push it to my primary browser, using Safari mainly for sites that Opera doesn't render well. (Funny--that reminds me of the early days of using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.:-) ) OTOH, if Safari ever implements open-new-tabs-in-the-background, my Opera use will pretty much cease.
* assuming, of course, that they make it for iPad. That reminds me--why are they doing this at all? They're giving it away for free AND they've got to run the servers they use to prep content for it. Why? This is like giveing away the razor and the blades. Do they think it will drive people to use Desktop Opera?
It's only a small thing (no pun intended) but this form factor (1, 2) is, if nothing else, pretty different from everything else we've seen so far. I doubt it'll be enough to save the line, but at least someone, somewhere is trying new stuff.
We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.
The first thing I notice is you can't zoom to any arbitrary amount, it just jumps in and out to what it thinks it should, which isn't always right. However, I definitely like the "long click" (click and hold) to get the option to open in a new tab, although I wish they'd make them open in the background. Oh well. In any case, I really hope they make this for iPad. (Or Safari adds this feature.)
In other news, I'm really curious what's in this for Opera--not only are they developing a browser and giving it away, they've got to run the servers that process the content that feeds the browser. Why?
Step number zero: never set a soldering iron down on your desk.* Always put it back into that little springy holder thingie. Never burned myself. And since it lives in one spot on my desk, I don't need to look at it to safely grab it.
* You see, there's this thing called "gravity" (check out the "Where to start in DIY Physics?" thread at ask.slashdot.org for more info) and if you set an iron down, gravity will tug on the cord, and since soldering irons are usually wider in the middle than either end, the whole guy will spin around a little...
Wait, scratch that, I was wrong. I made my post based on how it looked but when I went ahead and tried to edit my WP site (even though I thought it would fail) through the web front-end it did work! I could select multiple words, click 'Done' on the keyboard, and click a styling button and it would apply the style to all the words I had selected, even though I could no longer see the selection. It's still in code mode but it does, in fact, work.
I just fiddled around a bit with my WordPress site and another that uses CKEeditor (formerly FCKEditor) with my iPhone (since I don't have an iPad... yet.) - With CKEditor, I can't even put the cursor into the box. Bummer. - With WordPress, You get the 'lite' editor, so if you press 'Bold' you see a <strong> appear, and then you type, and then you press the button again and a </strong> appears. The thing is, when you go back and forth from the text area to the buttons, the keyboard appears and disappears. That behavior also indicates a general problem with rich text HTML editors:With the iPhone (and I assume the iPad is the same) you can only select text with the keyboard showing. As soon as you try to click a button anywhere on the page, the keyboard disappears and your selection goes with it.So even if they could get all the CSS and JS magic working correctly, there would still be no good way to go back to text you've already typed and apply a style.
The only way around this is with blog-editing apps like this WordPress app (WARNING: iTunes link*) but even so that still only solves the problem on a per-platform basis. I, too, would LOVE to be able to use rich text editors ANYWHERE but I think it'll be tough to make that happen given what I've described.
* Dear Apple, thank you so much for creating web pages for all the apps in iTunes. But WHY OH FUCKING WHY do you STILL insist on launching iTunes when I look at one of these pages?!?!?!?
I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash's Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. Everything Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What's Adobe's excuse for Flash's performance on non-H.264 video?
Second, even Apple's own QuickTime on Snow Leopard only makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don't have that graphics card in your Mac, you don't get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use -- a majority I'd wager -- which don't have that card. It's also not present in current brand-new Mac Pros and most iMacs.
By the way, I love the way the Adobe guy says "Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video..." OK, great. Got any OTHER examples of how Flash sucking is Apple's fault? Anything? *crickets*
As far as I can tell you still can't listen to more than one song at a time--you've still got to navigate, click on a song, navigate more, click on another, etc. So you can't, say, easily listen to a whole album. (Correct me if I'm wrong but the two UPnP apps look very limited.) If that's all you're going to do, you may as well save your money and use this (share through Apache) or this (install a custom (but open-source) service.)
Finally, time to test Safari: I tested out Slashdot first, and it renders pretty well. There are a couple of minor layout glitches and a few trickier functionality problems... I'll probably get some tickets into the system this week to clean up these bugs.
Any plans to fix the Slashdot bugs that have been in desktop Safari since the 2.0 makeover over a year ago?
And "History" can be accessed (AFAIK) by going Bookmarks -> History. iPhone has had this since Day 1, I don't have an iPad but I'm pretty sure it's there.
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> The first iPods were lame.
No, they weren't. No wireless and less space than a Nomad, sure, but they were physically smaller than other HDD-based players, transferring songs over FireWire was MUCH faster than USB at the time, and having an awesome UI (the scroll wheel, making it easy to quickly navigate your giant collection) more than made up for those other shortcomings. The net result was "not lame."
A lot of it is personal taste and preference, but for me (and many other people), the iPod was the first NON-lame MP3 player out there. Taco dismissed it over two small points. (And might I point out that no other MP3 player (AFAIK) had wireless at the time? Many people were hoping for it, sure, but no one else had it--so why was Apple deemed "lame" for not having it either?)
Re:CmdrTaco drags big brass ones along the ground
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
> perhaps it's just me, but the qualifier "just" in "just a > bigger iphone/ipod touch" seems somewhat questionable.
I agree, and there's nothing questionable about it. Anyone who says "the iPad is just a big iPod touch" proves that they're unable to see past the end of their nose. It's like saying "a swimming pool is just a big bathtub"--it ignores the fact that having more real estate means totally different things become possible.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Cars.com article mentions some of the advantages of ICE, including being weather-tested to work from -5 to 160 degrees"
That is only a handy feature when the device is permanently attached to the car. Besides...
iPad Environmental requirements:
Operating temperature: 32 to 95 deg. F (0 to 35 deg C)
Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 deg F (-20 to 45 deg C)
The iPod classic (disk-based) shows the same specs, and I've been leaving mine in the glovebox for years, and I live in Florida.
Anyway, this article is dumb. Is the an viable alternative to expensive built-in systems? Yes. Does it have some other advantages? Yes. Does it have some disadvantages too? Yes. Will the iPad kill the whole industry? No. Hell, it's been the case for decades that aftermarket stereos are better and cheaper than their ridiculously-overpriced dealer-installed counterparts. Did third-party stereos kill dealer-installed units? Of course not.
Source
The thing about Flash is, even if Apple included it, what would it accomplish? Other than playing video, we'd get nothing but banner ads (woo hoo!) and unplayable games. Think about it: what do most games require? Fast and accurate mousing and keyboarding. And clicking and dragging, and mouseout/mouseover/mousedown/mouseup events. So even if the iPad and iPhone supported Flash tomorrow, most of the content out there STILL wouldn't work. Look at this Slate demo closely. Note how the guy was very careful to demonstrate exactly ONE Flash game (at the 2:35 mark)--a slow-paced castle defense game that only required clicking. I could give that tablet to my kid and in 10 minutes he'd have a list of games that don't work.
And even if Apple isn't doing it for altruistic reasons, denying Flash on popular devices is actually HELPING the Internet by pushing us towards OPEN standards for video and interactivity. Think of it this way: you're a parent. Do you let your kids eat whatever they want? No, because then they'd eat only junk food, and lots of it. So you buy them good food and make them eat it, which is better for them AND saves you money. The only people who suffer are the junk food salesmen (Adobe) and even then they won't completely go out of business, because once your kids are older and move out of the house (buy a more general-purpose computer) they can do whatever they want.
"Whem Microsoft "breaks" the internet with its intentionally wounded implementation of HTML and CSS support, most of us understand the harm it causes."
There's a big difference between Microsoft refusing to support an OPEN STANDARD that is at the very CORE of the WWW (and anything else that renders HTML--email, locally stored HTML/JS apps, Help systems, etc.) and Apple refusing to support a DE FACTO standard that is controlled by exactly one company.
Who said it was better, and how? Specs alone do not "better" make. Plus it cost $999 back then which is like $1300 now. If the iPad, as it is, cost $1300, it would not be selling that well. If the iPad had a flimsy folding keyboard AND had an OS that was even MORE limited than what it has now (WinCE is MUCH further away from Win98 than iPhone OS is from OS X) AND required a stylus it wouldn't sell as well.
Why can't people accept that Apple makes great products AND markets them well? If their products truly sucked, across the board, they wouldn't sell as well no matter WHAT the marketing. In fact, they HAVE had products that sucked AND tanked, like the G4 Cube. That thing was advertised just as much as anything else but it cost $200 more than a comparably-specced, more-expandable PowerMac G4. The Cube's failure is PROOF that Apple does not operate outside the laws of economics. They don't *actually* serve drugged Kool-Aid; their customers are NOT ad-absorbing, check-writing, brainless zombies. But geeks seem to resent their success because they make things that people want to use, not what kernel-compiling Slashdotters think is cool.
Gabe will be THRILLED.
One thing I love about Opera is the "long click" that you can use to pop up a menu to, for example, open an link in a new tab. Unfortunately, new tabs open in the foreground, but if they ever make it so that new tabs open in the background I could see myself using it a lot just for that reason, ESPECIALLY if I get an iPad.* (At least switching among tabs is pretty easy.)
For short browsing sessions (like when I want to kill a few minutes when I'm in line somewhere) Mobile Safari is fine. For longer sessions (like what I think I'd use an iPad for) I think I'd miss easy use of tabs a lot. When I sit down to browse for a while, I'll open a site like Google Fast Flip or DF or TUAW or Slashdot, start reading, and middle-click on linked-to articles that I want to read; then, when I'm done with the starting page, I close it and start reading items. This is how I browse probably 80% of the time. The ability to quickly and easily consume lots of a certain type of content would be the one killer feature that would push it to my primary browser, using Safari mainly for sites that Opera doesn't render well. (Funny--that reminds me of the early days of using Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. :-) ) OTOH, if Safari ever implements open-new-tabs-in-the-background, my Opera use will pretty much cease.
* assuming, of course, that they make it for iPad. That reminds me--why are they doing this at all? They're giving it away for free AND they've got to run the servers they use to prep content for it. Why? This is like giveing away the razor and the blades. Do they think it will drive people to use Desktop Opera?
It's only a small thing (no pun intended) but this form factor (1, 2) is, if nothing else, pretty different from everything else we've seen so far. I doubt it'll be enough to save the line, but at least someone, somewhere is trying new stuff.
There is one thing worse than a bad password, and that is one that needs to be written down on a post-it note.
Bruce Schneier* disagrees with you. (About writing down passwords in general, not post-it notes in particular.)
We're all good at securing small pieces of paper. I recommend that people write their passwords down on a small piece of paper, and keep it with their other valuable small pieces of paper: in their wallet.
Maybe they'll feel better when you pass along all your network cost savings to them.
LOLOLOLOL. You owe me a monitor cleaning. :-)
Great point. I think the concept of "pass the savings along to the consumer" died about a generation and a half ago.
The first thing I notice is you can't zoom to any arbitrary amount, it just jumps in and out to what it thinks it should, which isn't always right. However, I definitely like the "long click" (click and hold) to get the option to open in a new tab, although I wish they'd make them open in the background. Oh well. In any case, I really hope they make this for iPad. (Or Safari adds this feature.)
In other news, I'm really curious what's in this for Opera--not only are they developing a browser and giving it away, they've got to run the servers that process the content that feeds the browser. Why?
Don't take it any more seriously than graffiti on the bathroom wall.
Next on Slashdot: your mom is fat, you sister is easy, and Jeff is gay.
Step number zero: never set a soldering iron down on your desk.* Always put it back into that little springy holder thingie. Never burned myself. And since it lives in one spot on my desk, I don't need to look at it to safely grab it.
* You see, there's this thing called "gravity" (check out the "Where to start in DIY Physics?" thread at ask.slashdot.org for more info) and if you set an iron down, gravity will tug on the cord, and since soldering irons are usually wider in the middle than either end, the whole guy will spin around a little...
Yes and yes. WP also has a version for the iPad and it looks great.
How's that for timing? Opera approved.
Wait, scratch that, I was wrong. I made my post based on how it looked but when I went ahead and tried to edit my WP site (even though I thought it would fail) through the web front-end it did work! I could select multiple words, click 'Done' on the keyboard, and click a styling button and it would apply the style to all the words I had selected, even though I could no longer see the selection. It's still in code mode but it does, in fact, work.
Oh yeah, I can't wait to give my money to a company I've never heard of until just now who doesn't even list the product in question on their 'products' page. It's shown in the Flash video at the top of the page and says "Spring" but that's it. SIGN ME UP!!!!!111oneoneeleven
I just fiddled around a bit with my WordPress site and another that uses CKEeditor (formerly FCKEditor) with my iPhone (since I don't have an iPad... yet.)
- With CKEditor, I can't even put the cursor into the box. Bummer.
- With WordPress, You get the 'lite' editor, so if you press 'Bold' you see a <strong> appear, and then you type, and then you press the button again and a </strong> appears. The thing is, when you go back and forth from the text area to the buttons, the keyboard appears and disappears. That behavior also indicates a general problem with rich text HTML editors:With the iPhone (and I assume the iPad is the same) you can only select text with the keyboard showing. As soon as you try to click a button anywhere on the page, the keyboard disappears and your selection goes with it. So even if they could get all the CSS and JS magic working correctly, there would still be no good way to go back to text you've already typed and apply a style.
The only way around this is with blog-editing apps like this WordPress app (WARNING: iTunes link*) but even so that still only solves the problem on a per-platform basis. I, too, would LOVE to be able to use rich text editors ANYWHERE but I think it'll be tough to make that happen given what I've described.
* Dear Apple, thank you so much for creating web pages for all the apps in iTunes. But WHY OH FUCKING WHY do you STILL insist on launching iTunes when I look at one of these pages?!?!?!?
And again, from the almighty Gruber:
I think the issue is a red herring, spin from Adobe intended to share the blame for Flash's Mac OS X performance with Apple. First, Flash performance gripes are not limited to H.264 video playback. Everything Flash Player does is slower on Mac OS X than Windows. What's Adobe's excuse for Flash's performance on non-H.264 video?
Second, even Apple's own QuickTime on Snow Leopard only makes use of H.264 hardware acceleration with a single graphics card: the Nvidia 9400M. If you don't have that graphics card in your Mac, you don't get H.264 hardware acceleration, period. That card is used across the board in current MacBooks and Mac Minis, but there are an awful lot of older Macs in use -- a majority I'd wager -- which don't have that card. It's also not present in current brand-new Mac Pros and most iMacs.
By the way, I love the way the Adobe guy says "Let's take for example the question of hardware acceleration for H.264 video..." OK, great. Got any OTHER examples of how Flash sucking is Apple's fault? Anything? *crickets*
Apple made a business decision... just like Adobe did when they bought Macromedia (and with it, Flash) and gave up on SVG.
Do any of those videos show the Pre stuttering while playing music? 'Cause I *love* that.
As far as I can tell you still can't listen to more than one song at a time--you've still got to navigate, click on a song, navigate more, click on another, etc. So you can't, say, easily listen to a whole album. (Correct me if I'm wrong but the two UPnP apps look very limited.) If that's all you're going to do, you may as well save your money and use this (share through Apache) or this (install a custom (but open-source) service.)
Finally, time to test Safari: I tested out Slashdot first, and it renders pretty well. There are a couple of minor layout glitches and a few trickier functionality problems... I'll probably get some tickets into the system this week to clean up these bugs.
Any plans to fix the Slashdot bugs that have been in desktop Safari since the 2.0 makeover over a year ago?
I agree that out of the box, Safari has its limits, but FYI, a lot of what you want is actually achievable, though it requires some hacking.
To create a locally-stored home page (items 1 and 3) just write an HTML page and create a data: bookmarklet. Once you're looking at a DATA: page, you can add that to your homescreen and you can even access it with no network connection. By adding JavaScript and local storage you can make a pretty damn cool app with this. References:
http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/
http://www.iphonealley.com/things-we-like/glyphboard-reinvents-the-webapp-on-iphone
http://mrgan.tumblr.com/post/257187093/pie-guy
View Source is solved with a javascript bookmarklet. Check out the #1 Google match for "iphone view source"
Basically, bookmarklets kick all kinds of ass.
http://www.lifeclever.com/17-powerful-bookmarklets-for-your-iphone/
Google for more.
And "History" can be accessed (AFAIK) by going Bookmarks -> History. iPhone has had this since Day 1, I don't have an iPad but I'm pretty sure it's there.
> The first iPods were lame.
No, they weren't. No wireless and less space than a Nomad, sure, but they were physically smaller than other HDD-based players, transferring songs over FireWire was MUCH faster than USB at the time, and having an awesome UI (the scroll wheel, making it easy to quickly navigate your giant collection) more than made up for those other shortcomings. The net result was "not lame."
A lot of it is personal taste and preference, but for me (and many other people), the iPod was the first NON-lame MP3 player out there. Taco dismissed it over two small points. (And might I point out that no other MP3 player (AFAIK) had wireless at the time? Many people were hoping for it, sure, but no one else had it--so why was Apple deemed "lame" for not having it either?)
> perhaps it's just me, but the qualifier "just" in "just a
> bigger iphone/ipod touch" seems somewhat questionable.
I agree, and there's nothing questionable about it. Anyone who says "the iPad is just a big iPod touch" proves that they're unable to see past the end of their nose. It's like saying "a swimming pool is just a big bathtub"--it ignores the fact that having more real estate means totally different things become possible.