When installing Quicktime on the PC it always asks you about which files you want to associate with it. You are presented with two quick options, Quicktime media only or all media files. If you wish you can manually go through a tree of check boxes to select exactly which file types should open with it. Quicktime media only is the default. Now if you buggered around with this without actually reading the dialogue then it's your own fault that you fail. The default was sensible and you changed it.
Quicktime repeatedly checks its file associations and if it finds them different to how you originally set them it will ask you if you want to put them back. This is due to Microsoft's stealing media file associations, even those Quicktime ones it could not play away from Quicktime. This hampering of Quicktime was brought up in the anti-trust trial against MS.
If you want to run.Net applications you need the.Net framework installed. Quicktime is not just a media player but a media application framework. iTunes uses this framework for media playback, so without it iTunes can't work.
Everyone has the same problem? Me myself and I?
Seriously Apple has a lot to learn about writing software for Windows, like how to use standard system window chrome and menu bars. But your problems are down to borked file associations that you very likely caused yourself. I've installed Quicktime on every PC I've used for the past 5+ years, never had any of such problems. But perhaps that's because I'm in the minority who actually read the dialogue my computer has to tell me.
Did you know you can even open up the Quicktime Settings utility and change them all again?
While we are suggesting moderation for posts in this thread. Can I point out that being condescending is not an option, but being informative is:)
No you're not and you won't be the only one to take it the wrong way either. Apple has a well known public bug tracking system called the radar, stuff like this should be posted there. Not on Apple's discussion forums. If you want to discuss it else where then do so, but bitching about a problem without reporting it through proper channels is not going to help at all.
Rubbish "Web2", oh how I hate the term, sprang into existance as soon as we started dynamically loading new content into pages via frames/hidden iframes. The new XMLHttpRequest stuff is a great tool that takes the hack nature out of the technique but the principle and design is still the same. I bet every web dev encapsulates XMLHttpRequest into a Javascript library just the same as they did with iframe manipulation code. So what's the difference?
I was doing this shit 9 or 10 years ago, and now all of a sudden it's new? No, the number of respectable web developers has just been increasing so that now it's a blip on the radar. Some guy comes up with a buzzword for it. A month or so ago I had my boss ask me about this new Web2 stuff, and I had to explain to him it's just a new name for what we've been doing for years.
As for using IE for serious Javascript development. That's just not going to cut it. Show me the profiling tools in VS? Oh there aren't any. Not even in the hideously expensive MSDN subscribed version I have here, nevermind in the free version. Firebug is free and does more than VS does to aid Javascript development.
My work cycle simply put is: Create web app to comply with current standards. Debug in Firefox. Disable Firebug and test in Firefox - Firebug does mess with XMLHttpRequest so we need to do this. Test in Safari - oh it works, so far I've never encountered anything that works in FF and doesn't in Safari. Add hacks for the bits that don't work in IE - there is always something to fix.
My guess is that most web app devs do something very similar.
An aside, does anyone know if there's a reason for the bonkers capitalisation of XMLHttpRequest? Why isn't it XmlHttpRequest, or XMLHTTPRequest.. sigh
Yes. Tiger and now Leopard really don't offer your average Mac user their money's worth of new useful stuff. For developers however they have significant upgrades in both tools and APIs. So I think what will be the biggest driver for users to upgrade will be the new/updated apps they'll need to upgrade to the new OS to use.
Interesting thought. I believe the article as reported that the US fleet were surprised, but that's not so hard given that the Chinese sub was a diesel/electric. Those things are a bugger to detect. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened either. A submariner friend of mine was telling me how a UK sub managed to tail a US sub off the coast of South Africa, coming into weapons range without being spotted. What our sub didn't realise at the time was that it too was being tailed by a South African diesel electric. When the UK submarine surfaced and gave away it's position to the US, the South African one did likewise. The South African's believed they had been spotted, but if the story is true. The Brits hadn't actually seen them.
Diesel/electrics - old tech and short range but they have their advantages. It's not wise to get too cocky.
No.. that article just shows that you haven't completed your assignment for Steve and so can't hand it in yet. Check your friends list, LFG or just abandon the quest. Steve's almost impossible to please anyway and it's probably not worth the exp.
I think you're right. The classic system UI was designed, refined *and properly user tested* then refined again. It was consistent, it worked. But the whole design philosophy I think came with different assumptions of the market than are true today. When the Mac was first released most people had never used a computer before, those that had would have never used a proper GUI before. Apple's UI was designed to be as intuitive as possible, so that once the initial moment, of scariness about using such a new thing subsided, and the user experimented in an attempt to do something that often it would work. Then the user would think, oh, that's it. That's how it's supposed to work. That's the magic of it, any old time Mac user will fondly remember their first time using that machine.
The market today is that almost every potential Mac user has used a GUI before, almost all of them will have gained that experience using Windows. For their entire computer using lives so far they have been conditioned to think in a different way to that which the Macintosh fostered. Windows users subconsciously ignore dialogue boxes. They are used too frequently, their messages are often confusing and don't help the user to make a decision. Windows users think that Wizards are a good idea. They expect the user interface to be very complex (it's a computer after all) and for there to be modal Wizards to make it simple for them. Why isn't simple the default? Windows users are taught by experience that experimentation on your computer is harmful. You will loose data, you will trash your system, you will mess something up. Windows users expect their machine to be hacked, infected, controlled, they also expect to have to reinstall their system every 6 to 12 months. The list is much longer than this slashdot comment will allow.
Apple isn't starting off with fresh new customers who will learn how to use a computer in a constructive environment. All it's new customers are Microsoft abuse victims and they need to be treated in an entirely different way. I think the best way to deal with them is to operate in some ways similarly to Windows, but with less abuse. So we have a file browser instead of the old Finder. We have context menus and right mouse buttons. And uhh... file extensions. New Mac users will find some things familiar, and where it is different, hopefully it's because it's much better than the alternative.
The only problem is for all the original Macintosh users. Now we're being treated as if we've known nothing but Windows.
A long time ago I figured out that practically all software companies have really high concentrations of intelligent people engineers for them. The differentiating factor seems to be how badly management hold them back and fuck them over.
I don't think Microsoft ever out competed anyone on sheer engineering, only ever luck or monopoly abuse. There's been some really intelligent folks work for MS, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work for a company with their track record for management practice.
IBM, Sun, HP, Google and Apple are all firms with strong engineering and design principles. I think that happens when managers listen to and act upon the advice of their engineers.
Sadly has a certain amount of truth to it. I've been trying to convince my company to use PostgreSQL for years. Yet I'm still stuck having to use MSSQL. The it's free arguement doesn't work very well. MSSQL is free for developers when you already have the rather expensive MSDN subscription, and you can package MSDE with a runtime for free.
Sure it has a pile of restrictions and performance sucks but management doesn't see it that way. Nobody every got fired for buying IBM^W Microsoft...
The pound (GBP) passed the $2 mark in value recently, aside from small fluctuations our currency has been strengthening against the dollar for the last 10 years. The pound is stable and a far better currency in which to invest. We're a tiny country yet still an economic powerhouse. The long term stability of the pound is part reason for that. What's more is there is no indication that the current trend will reverse.
At this rate if it weren't for the US's strict immigration laws I could sell my property here, move across the atlantic, buy a house that is twice the size of the one I have here and live off the spare cash I have for years. It's almost like travelling to a second world country.
QA is QA, doesn't matter what they were due to be working on. Formal testing of a new product be it Leopard or iPhone does not require those people to be retrained for the swap. They read the new test spec that's relevant to the new product, follow it and record their observations. If they are anything like ours they could be doorstep sized tomes, but it's not difficult to transfer people on this. I doubt they are talking about coding standards QA, that tends to get done by peer review within teams (if it gets done at all).
As for shifting developers over. It depends on what Apple will get them working on. If the iPhone is feature complete and they are just fixing issues discovered in formal testing then adding engineers will not help. Those people aren't familiar with the code. That's the mythical man month.
If there is more substantial work left to do like entire software components, then getting extra engineers on to it makes sense. Since iPhone runs a form of Mac OS X, getting some Cocoa, or Javascript/Dashboard developers added on to the project would help. Being new code these new team members don't need to intimately familiarise themselves with existing project code.
A lot of design shops wouldn't switch because they have an investment in Apple scripts that streamline their workflow. That can't be easily ported. Quark and 3rd party plug-in makers are notorious for bad support and huge prices. Even if you can get a Windows version of the plug-in you use, they'll probably expect you to pay for it again. Some of those plug-ins cost as much as Quark does in the first place.
It's the counter part to those millions of shitty custom developed VB apps that keep businesses on Windows.
I can't imagine the designers themselves seriously considering switching to Windows. But if some manager type gets the idea of 'saving money' by switching to Windows they are very likely to hit that problem. There is lock-in on both sides of the fence.
I'd also point out that Photoshop on Windows works as well as it does because it ignores the usual Windows UI patterns and uses those from the Mac.
Document windows aren't constained by an MDI parent window. Every command is in a menu, has a shortcut, and isn't hidden and only available in a context menu. Mac based keyboard shortcuts.
I can move between Photoshop on the Mac and on Windows easily. The problem comes with using other software. As soon as I need to do something outside of Photoshop the user experience falls appart.
Palm didn't create the market, Apple did with the Newton. Palm produced something that was technologically inferior in comparison but was cheap. Maybe there's a lesson for Apple to learn in there somewhere. The whole term PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) came from the Newton's assist feature, notably absent on everything since. You could scribble in your own writing memos on it's screen Beat up Martin, tap the assist button and it would create a new task item and remind you to Eat up Martha.
The sad thing is by the time Apple sorted out the handwritting recognition on the thing, Palm had already taken the market.
As an interesting note is how Jobs described the OS the phone uses. He said "OS X." Normally Apple refers to their desktop operating system as "Mac OS X." That tells us a few things about what's really going on inside the phone.
Are you sure he didn't just refer to the OS as OS X instead of Mac OS X because this is the first time it's not actually running on a product with the Macintosh name?
This is the official thread for all those Apple fanboys who crashed any thread on new cellphones over the years with their "boohoo, a device should only do one thing" spiel.
In this thread I want to give you the opportunity to state whether your earlier trolling against cellphones with mp3 playback functionality was 100%-Apple-fanboyism or if you stand by it and think the iPhone should never have happened. Thx.
The only appropriate response to the opportunity you've given is: mu.
A mobile phone should be really good for making phone calls. Anything else is just a bonus. You might stretch phone to general communication device and ensure it's really good for sending SMS and email. If it does all that great.
I don't think anyone would be particularly bothered if the usual phone companies produced a Swiss army-knife of a phone, as long as the usability of the device for making phone calls wasn't impaired. And that's why every single smart phone I've used so far sucks. In adding all the extra crap they some how forgot that the damn thing is supposed to be a phone.
The iPod these days plays movies, shows calendar information, notes, has games. But it's still a good, simple to use music player.
So if Apple adds all this extra stuff in to the iPhone, I don't care. As long as it's got a good user interface for making phone calls and handling email.
Instant Search... BeOS, although to be fair to Apple they didn't just rip off the feature. They hired Dominic Giampaolo the engineer who created the technology behind it. Then released the Spotlight Feature in Mac OS X.
I don't consider GDS to be the same thing at all. They use an index file which is periodically updated.
It's worth pointing out that both Apple and Microsoft had existing search systems that used indexes of file contents. The difference with the BeOS system was that it was near instant and was supported by the file-system.
The Apple system still uses file based indexes, but file change notifications are dispatched by the kernel and a background metadata importer (mds) ensures Spotlight doesn't get out of sync like the older indexed search systems. It's an easier solution than changing the entire file system. As is evidenced by Microsoft's attempts to get WinFS out over the years.
Rubbish. The RAZR is the rebirth of a much older Motorola design, the Startac. This was the point where mobiles stopped being bricks and started being stylish. Even though the startac had to accommodate a credit-card sizes SIM card it was still only the same size as the RAZR. The Startac was a beautiful phone and easy to use. I paid over £300 for mine almost 10 years ago.
Some phones I guess are like clothes, they come in and go out of fashion. RAZR is just a remake of the classic older design. The design of the Startac and the RAZR are timeless.
Windows requires extraordinary effort to extract the path to, and the files and TCP/UDP ports opened by, running services, and to certify that they are valid: Granted the builtin stuff is weak, which is why every sane Windows user quickly downloads Process Explorer (recently bought by Microsoft actually, keep your fingers crossed that it becomes standard). At any rate, pretending that this is an inherent property of the operating system is plain wrong.
I can only hope you are right, but past experience with MS buying out other companies is that very few actually last. Most just wither and die from lack of maintainance. Process Explorer is comparable to Activity Monitor on OS X and is so much better than Window's default task manager. When we heard that MS bought it there was a collective "Oh no" from our office.
Yes. Virtualisation is the best solution to this problem. Remember Internet Exploder is tied to Windows so you can only have one version of it installed at a time. Being able to run multiple copies of Windows each with it's own version of IE is very useful.
If you want to run multiple versions of Safari on Mac OS look here: http://www.michelf.com/projects/multi-safari/ There is hosted self-contained builds of Safari using all the released variants of the rendering engine. Credit to Michel Fortin for doing this.
More bonkers moderation from the slashdot crowd. More primative command-line or menu driven interfaces can be more accessible to those with disabilities, whether visually impared or having severely impared motor function.
Voice Over however is an excellent piece of software. Right now it's definitely targeted at those with reduced vision rather than those with no sight.
Will have to wait for the ADC mailing of Leopard to see how it's been improved.
As far as I know the parent is correct. MS shipped this feature before Apple. Although many won't remember, Apple was suffering it's own OS crisis at the time. It was throwing vast amounts of resources trying to develop the lastest and greatest OS which collapsed under it's own weight. Apple's next generation OS program started with Pink in the early ninties. The project changed and became Coupland. Then they got involved with IBM on the Taligent project. Eventually NeXT bought Apple for -$400M and the combination of the OpenStep and MacOS was developed. However Rapsody didn't run old Mac apps very well and can also be considered a failure. It was close though.
Only with Mac OS X did Apple finally get out of the hole it got itself into. It took them almost 10 years.
Now I'm a long time Mac user and like bashing MS along with the rest of us, but when I do I make sure what I'm saying has some basis in fact, and I also remember that Apple isn't perfect. They've made some monumental fuck ups along the way. So while we're all feeling smug at the state of Vista development remember that MS weren't even the first to bugger up their OS development right royally either;)
You mean event-driven like VB6 or Delphi? Event-driven is not specifically OOP.
No, I was hinting at Smalltalk. An object orientated development environment first released in 1980. It has features that have only just been replicated with the likes of Ruby. Objective-C, Java borrowed heavily from it, but still in their way managed to miss things, sometimes by design.
It runs on a virtual machine. Everything is an object, even message passing. It's incredibly easy to learn, but it does look alien to people who have a skill base of C and languages with similar syntax. What it has is simplicity and elegance that was unmatched for decades. I believe that some of our modern languages especially Ruby come close and exceed in other areas.
Smalltalk was not the only OO environment around at the time, Simula came before it. But that was before I was even born so my knowledge of it is ~0.
The actual amount of new ideas/innovation in our recent software technologies are very small. A lot of research got done in the 70s and 80s, and we haven't made decent use of it. A lot of 'new' stuff is actually just mining that research work and doing something with it.
Maybe I'm just elitist, but why would you make all of your objects face eastward? Oh, you meant object oriented programming.
No, I meant orientated, which is totally valid and its use prevailent in England. Which incidentally is where I live.
The web hasn't changed. It's still a stateless, every-page-for-itself environment. PHP isn't a "page processor", it's a pre-response request processor.
The web is still stateless but if you don't have to reload your page each time you want to perform an action and redisplay new data then you can develop your entire web app UI in a single page. Then not holding state across page loads doesn't matter any more.
PHP is known as a page processor, scripts operate on a page by page basis, or as you say a request basis since these things don't have to be pages these days. Just because that's the state of things now, doesn't stop PHP being a page processor. It's only one step up from old style Perl (pre modperl) in that it doesn't need to launch a new process for each request. However PHP is still based around one script being run to handle each resource request. Worse my presentation layer is mingled in with my control and model implementation.
With Tomcat/Struts I can create an application that is running regardless of whether a request is made or not, it has state. I can build an app separated out in the MVC pattern. I don't care that it's still using the same HTTP transport mechanism, I have an app and it has state.
You have got to be kidding me. JavaScript is a prototyped language. You don't define objects so much as you lay out a template for one and implement a library that pretends to operate on this so-called "object". It's about as OO as old-school C. In C, you could define a struct and segregate off a header and implementation for it and call it an "object", but there was no enforcement other than internal constraints you imposed upon your own code. JavaScript is just about as strict.
Javascript is a prototyped language, but just because it doesn't implement OO concepts in the way you expect them doesn't mean it's not OO. Prototyping just means there is no such thing as classes, just other objects which can be used as templates for creating other object instances. It is just as expressive, but different to C++, Java, C#. It's well suited for shallow "class" hierarchies which use other objects rather than deep sub-classing. See Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks along with Objective-C as an example of just how powerful this methodology can be.
In Javascript almost everything is an object, the few native non-object types that are in the language are transformed into objects when you try to use them as such (evaluating: "moo".indexOf("o"); will result in 1).
One of the benefits of Javascript is that it is not strict. It's incredibly dynamic. It supports inheritance (through prototype chain) and reflection. Looks very object oriented to me.
Keep using JavaScript and you'll keep moving toward the 1980's. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will continue going forward.
I guess you think that Google maps and the like are not moving forward then?
I forgot, this is slashdot. It's got a vocal set of anal retentives/people who don't have a clue which make it difficult to separate signal from noise.
It's not elitist. Object orientated programming was a solution to help combat the problems with increasing complexity in applications. The web is growing up, and page processors like PHP will fall out of use. WebObjects showed the way forward arbeit at a cost of $50,000 when it was 1st released, and now we have free alternatives like Jakarta/Struts and Ruby on Rails.
PHP does have a concept of objects but they are constrained in the same way Javascript is, to a single page. Thanks to XmlHttpRequest we have an elegant way of doing RPC within a page without reloads which finally unshackles Javascript. It's a great OO language, highly dynamic. It falls short in that function calls are not objects and calls to methods not implemented on a receiver can't be with doesNotUnderstand: as is possible in smalltalk. It's possible to do some serious development in Javascript.
Sure page processors might still be used for small or simple web apps, but for serious apps I'm happy that the patterns for web development are finally moving closer to the 1980s.
Slashdot Mirror
When installing Quicktime on the PC it always asks you about which files you want to associate with it. You are presented with two quick options, Quicktime media only or all media files. If you wish you can manually go through a tree of check boxes to select exactly which file types should open with it. Quicktime media only is the default. Now if you buggered around with this without actually reading the dialogue then it's your own fault that you fail. The default was sensible and you changed it.
.Net applications you need the .Net framework installed. Quicktime is not just a media player but a media application framework. iTunes uses this framework for media playback, so without it iTunes can't work.
:)
Quicktime repeatedly checks its file associations and if it finds them different to how you originally set them it will ask you if you want to put them back. This is due to Microsoft's stealing media file associations, even those Quicktime ones it could not play away from Quicktime. This hampering of Quicktime was brought up in the anti-trust trial against MS.
If you want to run
Everyone has the same problem? Me myself and I?
Seriously Apple has a lot to learn about writing software for Windows, like how to use standard system window chrome and menu bars. But your problems are down to borked file associations that you very likely caused yourself. I've installed Quicktime on every PC I've used for the past 5+ years, never had any of such problems. But perhaps that's because I'm in the minority who actually read the dialogue my computer has to tell me.
Did you know you can even open up the Quicktime Settings utility and change them all again?
While we are suggesting moderation for posts in this thread. Can I point out that being condescending is not an option, but being informative is
No you're not and you won't be the only one to take it the wrong way either. Apple has a well known public bug tracking system called the radar, stuff like this should be posted there. Not on Apple's discussion forums. If you want to discuss it else where then do so, but bitching about a problem without reporting it through proper channels is not going to help at all.
Rubbish "Web2", oh how I hate the term, sprang into existance as soon as we started dynamically loading new content into pages via frames/hidden iframes. The new XMLHttpRequest stuff is a great tool that takes the hack nature out of the technique but the principle and design is still the same. I bet every web dev encapsulates XMLHttpRequest into a Javascript library just the same as they did with iframe manipulation code. So what's the difference?
I was doing this shit 9 or 10 years ago, and now all of a sudden it's new? No, the number of respectable web developers has just been increasing so that now it's a blip on the radar. Some guy comes up with a buzzword for it. A month or so ago I had my boss ask me about this new Web2 stuff, and I had to explain to him it's just a new name for what we've been doing for years.
As for using IE for serious Javascript development. That's just not going to cut it. Show me the profiling tools in VS? Oh there aren't any. Not even in the hideously expensive MSDN subscribed version I have here, nevermind in the free version. Firebug is free and does more than VS does to aid Javascript development.
My work cycle simply put is:
Create web app to comply with current standards.
Debug in Firefox.
Disable Firebug and test in Firefox - Firebug does mess with XMLHttpRequest so we need to do this.
Test in Safari - oh it works, so far I've never encountered anything that works in FF and doesn't in Safari.
Add hacks for the bits that don't work in IE - there is always something to fix.
My guess is that most web app devs do something very similar.
An aside, does anyone know if there's a reason for the bonkers capitalisation of XMLHttpRequest? Why isn't it XmlHttpRequest, or XMLHTTPRequest.. sigh
Yes. Tiger and now Leopard really don't offer your average Mac user their money's worth of new useful stuff. For developers however they have significant upgrades in both tools and APIs. So I think what will be the biggest driver for users to upgrade will be the new/updated apps they'll need to upgrade to the new OS to use.
Interesting thought. I believe the article as reported that the US fleet were surprised, but that's not so hard given that the Chinese sub was a diesel/electric. Those things are a bugger to detect. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened either. A submariner friend of mine was telling me how a UK sub managed to tail a US sub off the coast of South Africa, coming into weapons range without being spotted. What our sub didn't realise at the time was that it too was being tailed by a South African diesel electric. When the UK submarine surfaced and gave away it's position to the US, the South African one did likewise. The South African's believed they had been spotted, but if the story is true. The Brits hadn't actually seen them.
Diesel/electrics - old tech and short range but they have their advantages. It's not wise to get too cocky.
No.. that article just shows that you haven't completed your assignment for Steve and so can't hand it in yet. Check your friends list, LFG or just abandon the quest. Steve's almost impossible to please anyway and it's probably not worth the exp.
I think you're right. The classic system UI was designed, refined *and properly user tested* then refined again. It was consistent, it worked. But the whole design philosophy I think came with different assumptions of the market than are true today. When the Mac was first released most people had never used a computer before, those that had would have never used a proper GUI before. Apple's UI was designed to be as intuitive as possible, so that once the initial moment, of scariness about using such a new thing subsided, and the user experimented in an attempt to do something that often it would work. Then the user would think, oh, that's it. That's how it's supposed to work. That's the magic of it, any old time Mac user will fondly remember their first time using that machine.
The market today is that almost every potential Mac user has used a GUI before, almost all of them will have gained that experience using Windows. For their entire computer using lives so far they have been conditioned to think in a different way to that which the Macintosh fostered. Windows users subconsciously ignore dialogue boxes. They are used too frequently, their messages are often confusing and don't help the user to make a decision. Windows users think that Wizards are a good idea. They expect the user interface to be very complex (it's a computer after all) and for there to be modal Wizards to make it simple for them. Why isn't simple the default? Windows users are taught by experience that experimentation on your computer is harmful. You will loose data, you will trash your system, you will mess something up. Windows users expect their machine to be hacked, infected, controlled, they also expect to have to reinstall their system every 6 to 12 months. The list is much longer than this slashdot comment will allow.
Apple isn't starting off with fresh new customers who will learn how to use a computer in a constructive environment. All it's new customers are Microsoft abuse victims and they need to be treated in an entirely different way. I think the best way to deal with them is to operate in some ways similarly to Windows, but with less abuse. So we have a file browser instead of the old Finder. We have context menus and right mouse buttons. And uhh... file extensions. New Mac users will find some things familiar, and where it is different, hopefully it's because it's much better than the alternative.
The only problem is for all the original Macintosh users. Now we're being treated as if we've known nothing but Windows.
Parent is just flame bait.
A long time ago I figured out that practically all software companies have really high concentrations of intelligent people engineers for them. The differentiating factor seems to be how badly management hold them back and fuck them over.
I don't think Microsoft ever out competed anyone on sheer engineering, only ever luck or monopoly abuse. There's been some really intelligent folks work for MS, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work for a company with their track record for management practice.
IBM, Sun, HP, Google and Apple are all firms with strong engineering and design principles. I think that happens when managers listen to and act upon the advice of their engineers.
Sadly has a certain amount of truth to it. I've been trying to convince my company to use PostgreSQL for years. Yet I'm still stuck having to use MSSQL. The it's free arguement doesn't work very well. MSSQL is free for developers when you already have the rather expensive MSDN subscription, and you can package MSDE with a runtime for free.
Sure it has a pile of restrictions and performance sucks but management doesn't see it that way. Nobody every got fired for buying IBM^W Microsoft...
The pound (GBP) passed the $2 mark in value recently, aside from small fluctuations our currency has been strengthening against the dollar for the last 10 years. The pound is stable and a far better currency in which to invest. We're a tiny country yet still an economic powerhouse. The long term stability of the pound is part reason for that. What's more is there is no indication that the current trend will reverse.
At this rate if it weren't for the US's strict immigration laws I could sell my property here, move across the atlantic, buy a house that is twice the size of the one I have here and live off the spare cash I have for years. It's almost like travelling to a second world country.
QA is QA, doesn't matter what they were due to be working on. Formal testing of a new product be it Leopard or iPhone does not require those people to be retrained for the swap. They read the new test spec that's relevant to the new product, follow it and record their observations. If they are anything like ours they could be doorstep sized tomes, but it's not difficult to transfer people on this. I doubt they are talking about coding standards QA, that tends to get done by peer review within teams (if it gets done at all).
As for shifting developers over. It depends on what Apple will get them working on. If the iPhone is feature complete and they are just fixing issues discovered in formal testing then adding engineers will not help. Those people aren't familiar with the code. That's the mythical man month.
If there is more substantial work left to do like entire software components, then getting extra engineers on to it makes sense. Since iPhone runs a form of Mac OS X, getting some Cocoa, or Javascript/Dashboard developers added on to the project would help. Being new code these new team members don't need to intimately familiarise themselves with existing project code.
A lot of design shops wouldn't switch because they have an investment in Apple scripts that streamline their workflow. That can't be easily ported. Quark and 3rd party plug-in makers are notorious for bad support and huge prices. Even if you can get a Windows version of the plug-in you use, they'll probably expect you to pay for it again. Some of those plug-ins cost as much as Quark does in the first place.
It's the counter part to those millions of shitty custom developed VB apps that keep businesses on Windows.
I can't imagine the designers themselves seriously considering switching to Windows. But if some manager type gets the idea of 'saving money' by switching to Windows they are very likely to hit that problem. There is lock-in on both sides of the fence.
I'd also point out that Photoshop on Windows works as well as it does because it ignores the usual Windows UI patterns and uses those from the Mac.
Document windows aren't constained by an MDI parent window.
Every command is in a menu, has a shortcut, and isn't hidden and only available in a context menu.
Mac based keyboard shortcuts.
I can move between Photoshop on the Mac and on Windows easily. The problem comes with using other software. As soon as I need to do something outside of Photoshop the user experience falls appart.
Palm didn't create the market, Apple did with the Newton. Palm produced something that was technologically inferior in comparison but was cheap. Maybe there's a lesson for Apple to learn in there somewhere. The whole term PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) came from the Newton's assist feature, notably absent on everything since. You could scribble in your own writing memos on it's screen Beat up Martin, tap the assist button and it would create a new task item and remind you to Eat up Martha.
The sad thing is by the time Apple sorted out the handwritting recognition on the thing, Palm had already taken the market.
I don't agree with parent, but there's no way it should be modded -1. It's a valid opinion.
Are you sure he didn't just refer to the OS as OS X instead of Mac OS X because this is the first time it's not actually running on a product with the Macintosh name?
In this thread I want to give you the opportunity to state whether your earlier trolling against cellphones with mp3 playback functionality was 100%-Apple-fanboyism or if you stand by it and think the iPhone should never have happened. Thx.
The only appropriate response to the opportunity you've given is: mu.A mobile phone should be really good for making phone calls. Anything else is just a bonus. You might stretch phone to general communication device and ensure it's really good for sending SMS and email. If it does all that great.
I don't think anyone would be particularly bothered if the usual phone companies produced a Swiss army-knife of a phone, as long as the usability of the device for making phone calls wasn't impaired. And that's why every single smart phone I've used so far sucks. In adding all the extra crap they some how forgot that the damn thing is supposed to be a phone.
The iPod these days plays movies, shows calendar information, notes, has games. But it's still a good, simple to use music player.
So if Apple adds all this extra stuff in to the iPhone, I don't care. As long as it's got a good user interface for making phone calls and handling email.
Instant Search... BeOS, although to be fair to Apple they didn't just rip off the feature. They hired Dominic Giampaolo the engineer who created the technology behind it. Then released the Spotlight Feature in Mac OS X.
I don't consider GDS to be the same thing at all. They use an index file which is periodically updated.
It's worth pointing out that both Apple and Microsoft had existing search systems that used indexes of file contents. The difference with the BeOS system was that it was near instant and was supported by the file-system.
The Apple system still uses file based indexes, but file change notifications are dispatched by the kernel and a background metadata importer (mds) ensures Spotlight doesn't get out of sync like the older indexed search systems. It's an easier solution than changing the entire file system. As is evidenced by Microsoft's attempts to get WinFS out over the years.
Rubbish. The RAZR is the rebirth of a much older Motorola design, the Startac. This was the point where mobiles stopped being bricks and started being stylish. Even though the startac had to accommodate a credit-card sizes SIM card it was still only the same size as the RAZR. The Startac was a beautiful phone and easy to use. I paid over £300 for mine almost 10 years ago.
Some phones I guess are like clothes, they come in and go out of fashion. RAZR is just a remake of the classic older design. The design of the Startac and the RAZR are timeless.
I can only hope you are right, but past experience with MS buying out other companies is that very few actually last. Most just wither and die from lack of maintainance. Process Explorer is comparable to Activity Monitor on OS X and is so much better than Window's default task manager. When we heard that MS bought it there was a collective "Oh no" from our office.
Yes. Virtualisation is the best solution to this problem. Remember Internet Exploder is tied to Windows so you can only have one version of it installed at a time. Being able to run multiple copies of Windows each with it's own version of IE is very useful.
If you want to run multiple versions of Safari on Mac OS look here: http://www.michelf.com/projects/multi-safari/
There is hosted self-contained builds of Safari using all the released variants of the rendering engine. Credit to Michel Fortin for doing this.
More bonkers moderation from the slashdot crowd. More primative command-line or menu driven interfaces can be more accessible to those with disabilities, whether visually impared or having severely impared motor function.
Voice Over however is an excellent piece of software. Right now it's definitely targeted at those with reduced vision rather than those with no sight.
Will have to wait for the ADC mailing of Leopard to see how it's been improved.
As far as I know the parent is correct. MS shipped this feature before Apple. Although many won't remember, Apple was suffering it's own OS crisis at the time. It was throwing vast amounts of resources trying to develop the lastest and greatest OS which collapsed under it's own weight. Apple's next generation OS program started with Pink in the early ninties. The project changed and became Coupland. Then they got involved with IBM on the Taligent project. Eventually NeXT bought Apple for -$400M and the combination of the OpenStep and MacOS was developed. However Rapsody didn't run old Mac apps very well and can also be considered a failure. It was close though.
;)
Only with Mac OS X did Apple finally get out of the hole it got itself into. It took them almost 10 years.
Now I'm a long time Mac user and like bashing MS along with the rest of us, but when I do I make sure what I'm saying has some basis in fact, and I also remember that Apple isn't perfect. They've made some monumental fuck ups along the way. So while we're all feeling smug at the state of Vista development remember that MS weren't even the first to bugger up their OS development right royally either
You mean event-driven like VB6 or Delphi? Event-driven is not specifically OOP.
No, I was hinting at Smalltalk. An object orientated development environment first released in 1980. It has features that have only just been replicated with the likes of Ruby. Objective-C, Java borrowed heavily from it, but still in their way managed to miss things, sometimes by design.
It runs on a virtual machine. Everything is an object, even message passing. It's incredibly easy to learn, but it does look alien to people who have a skill base of C and languages with similar syntax. What it has is simplicity and elegance that was unmatched for decades. I believe that some of our modern languages especially Ruby come close and exceed in other areas.
Smalltalk was not the only OO environment around at the time, Simula came before it. But that was before I was even born so my knowledge of it is ~0.
The actual amount of new ideas/innovation in our recent software technologies are very small. A lot of research got done in the 70s and 80s, and we haven't made decent use of it. A lot of 'new' stuff is actually just mining that research work and doing something with it.
Maybe I'm just elitist, but why would you make all of your objects face eastward? Oh, you meant object oriented programming.
No, I meant orientated, which is totally valid and its use prevailent in England. Which incidentally is where I live.
The web hasn't changed. It's still a stateless, every-page-for-itself environment. PHP isn't a "page processor", it's a pre-response request processor.
The web is still stateless but if you don't have to reload your page each time you want to perform an action and redisplay new data then you can develop your entire web app UI in a single page. Then not holding state across page loads doesn't matter any more.
PHP is known as a page processor, scripts operate on a page by page basis, or as you say a request basis since these things don't have to be pages these days. Just because that's the state of things now, doesn't stop PHP being a page processor. It's only one step up from old style Perl (pre modperl) in that it doesn't need to launch a new process for each request. However PHP is still based around one script being run to handle each resource request. Worse my presentation layer is mingled in with my control and model implementation.
With Tomcat/Struts I can create an application that is running regardless of whether a request is made or not, it has state. I can build an app separated out in the MVC pattern. I don't care that it's still using the same HTTP transport mechanism, I have an app and it has state.
You have got to be kidding me. JavaScript is a prototyped language. You don't define objects so much as you lay out a template for one and implement a library that pretends to operate on this so-called "object". It's about as OO as old-school C. In C, you could define a struct and segregate off a header and implementation for it and call it an "object", but there was no enforcement other than internal constraints you imposed upon your own code. JavaScript is just about as strict.
Javascript is a prototyped language, but just because it doesn't implement OO concepts in the way you expect them doesn't mean it's not OO. Prototyping just means there is no such thing as classes, just other objects which can be used as templates for creating other object instances. It is just as expressive, but different to C++, Java, C#. It's well suited for shallow "class" hierarchies which use other objects rather than deep sub-classing. See Apple's Foundation and AppKit frameworks along with Objective-C as an example of just how powerful this methodology can be.
In Javascript almost everything is an object, the few native non-object types that are in the language are transformed into objects when you try to use them as such (evaluating: "moo".indexOf("o"); will result in 1).
One of the benefits of Javascript is that it is not strict. It's incredibly dynamic. It supports inheritance (through prototype chain) and reflection. Looks very object oriented to me.
Keep using JavaScript and you'll keep moving toward the 1980's. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will continue going forward.
I guess you think that Google maps and the like are not moving forward then?
I forgot, this is slashdot. It's got a vocal set of anal retentives/people who don't have a clue which make it difficult to separate signal from noise.
It's not elitist. Object orientated programming was a solution to help combat the problems with increasing complexity in applications. The web is growing up, and page processors like PHP will fall out of use. WebObjects showed the way forward arbeit at a cost of $50,000 when it was 1st released, and now we have free alternatives like Jakarta/Struts and Ruby on Rails.
PHP does have a concept of objects but they are constrained in the same way Javascript is, to a single page. Thanks to XmlHttpRequest we have an elegant way of doing RPC within a page without reloads which finally unshackles Javascript. It's a great OO language, highly dynamic. It falls short in that function calls are not objects and calls to methods not implemented on a receiver can't be with doesNotUnderstand: as is possible in smalltalk. It's possible to do some serious development in Javascript.
Sure page processors might still be used for small or simple web apps, but for serious apps I'm happy that the patterns for web development are finally moving closer to the 1980s.