The NeoGeo never saw a price cut and died a horrible death.
Maybe you're thinking of the 3DO? The Neo Geo was never supposed to compete with the other home consoles. It was always targeted at rich, high-end gamers, and it was a success at that. If that is Sony's intent, too, they may be succeeding. But it would be the most stupid thing I've ever seen.
Also, stop the inflation argument. Technology does not get more expensive. It gets cheaper. Computers get cheaper all the time. Even other gaming hardware does. For example, despite inflation, the Gameboy line has become cheaper with each version. There's no reason why home consoles should become more expensive, and obviously, most consumers are not willing to pay even 400 US$ for a toy.
As someone who owns both a PSP and a PS3, I can't see any practical use for the media streaming feature. I tried it once. In the local network, it's rather impressive, you barely see the compression artefacts. However, there is simply no reason why I would want to stream a movie to my PSP if I'm at home. Why not watch the movie on the beamer? That leaves the streaming using the Internet. I haven't tried that, but I guess it requires that the PS3 is in PSP connection mode, which means I have to leave it on just in case I wanted to stream a movie. Why not just copy the movie on the PSP instead of leaving the PS3 running all the time?
I honestly can't see when I would possibly want to use this feature.
Even if 600 bucks is chump change, it's too much for the PS3 until some decent, exclusive games are available. I bought one purely because I love tech porn, and the PS3 is tech porn, but I can't see how anyone can justify buying a PS3 based on what it actually offers. Unless you really, really, really love Blu-Ray movies and Motorstorm.
At this point, in Europe at least, all three are overpriced for what they offer. The only one that is debatable is the Wii - it seems to be selling just fine, even though it is definitely on the expensive side for what it offers. The other two are definitely overpriced; the PS3 obviously more so than the 360. Neither the PS3 nor the 360 are selling particularly well, either, which is most likely do to the high price of both.
Sure, you could, but why would Apple want to do that?
Given the enormous price tag on the iPhone, I think that third-party software is pretty much the only way Apple is going to be able to sell iPhones.
I think you think wrong:-)
Apple will sell a shitload of these, with third-party apps or without. Java apps on the iPhone won't make a difference to most people.
Personally, I agree that Java apps on the iPhone would be great. I just don't think there's any incentive for Apple to do one. They'll sell as many iPhones as they can make for at least half a year, SDK be damned.
Oh, I think it will. First of all, the point-and-click paradigm used by virtually all GUI's today is a SUBSET of the multitouch paradigm. You can just set it to ignore simultaneous input to two different parts of the screen and the vast majority of Java apps should work just fine.
Sure, you could, but why would Apple want to do that?
Besides, if the iPhone's web browser is going to work as well as Safari on the full version of Mac OS X, it needs to have Java support.
Apple already announced that there will be no Java support in iPhone Safari.
I also own both a PSP and a DS, and on a basic level, you're right. I use them for different things, too. However, I think Sony's excuse that "we're in a different market, and our market just happens to be smaller" is pretty cheap either way.
Of course, my launch-day Gamecube, which has gotten heavy use (Mario Kart, Super Monkey Ball, Beach Strikers in a student flat), still works perfectly fine. On the other hand, my actual DVD players seem to die about once a year... Hopefully, my PS3 and Wii will stay alive longer than 5 years.
I think he just said that he owned a GP2X, right? There'll soon be an open cell phone, and you can install Linux on an iPod, so I think he has covered all the bases.
God, I hate Field Commander. It's like Advance Wars with all the stuff that makes it fun taken away. Instead we have choppy 3D graphics that makes it hard to discern between units and has severe framerate issues. Also, after playing GTA on the PC, the gamepad versions seem unplayable, and the PSP versions - with only one analog stick - doubly so. But I have to admit, I'm also still mainly using my PSP for Lumines if I play games on it.
Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only. I don't think that you understand the technical implications of making an ObjC-Java-Bridge-Cocoa application behave the same as a ObjC-Cocoa application.
Okay, maybe it is me who does not understand. I think I kind of fail to see how this is connected to my argument.
I said that Apple has an incentive to make easily portable apps feel un-Mac-like, and thus for Mac developers to use non-portable frameworks. They could make X11 adhere to the Mac Interface Guidelines (support keyboard commands, read settings the user made, change button styles and so on), but they don't. They could automatically install X11, but they don't.
I frankly do not know where your hypothetical Mac-like Objective-C-Java-Bridge appliation comes in. Are you saying that Apple is not making X11 more Mac-like because that is too hard? I find that hard to believe, there are way too many low-hanging fruits for this to be true.
You're right, SDKs are damn hard, especially since you pay hugely for any mistakes. It took several years for the Mac OS X SDK to stabilize, and they had to keep supporting mistakes for a long time, all while still breaking third-party apps with new releases.
In our own product, we have the luxury of being able to break the SDK with new releases, because our customers don't just update when new versions are out. Apple does not have this luxury, and getting the SDK right is a hard job. Getting the iPhone out was probably their first priority - it even meant a delay for Mac OS X. Creating a proper SDK would have delayed the iPhone, no question about it.
Great reasoning. Let me sum up. I'm not a Mac fanatic because Apple is intentionally doing what M$ does.
Your summing up skills are severely lacking. In case you missed it, I did not defend Apple. I pointed out their reasoning. I do not know how that makes me a "Mac fanatic," but it seems to me you have some kind of grudge against people who buy Apple hardware. This is your problem, not mine, so please keep it yours and don't try to make it mine. Have a nice evening.
I mean wouldn't it be more "for geeks than regular use" to must compile your own X11?:) Following your argumentation that X11 in OSX is broken since it is for geeks so it should be hard to use decently (?).
I don't think you need to compile your own apps to qualify for geekdom, but point taken.
You sugest that it is OK that it is broken since it is for geeks which is mac fanatism of your side
No, I did not say it was OK that it was broken. I said that it was intentional.
Your inflated theories do not change anything here. X11 in OSX is old nearly unusable. This is why OOo needs to be ported to Aqua.
Thanks, you just gave me a perfect example validating my "inflated theories." What you're saying is: would X11 be more functional, Mac OS X would not get an Aqua port of OOo.
Thus, it makes sense for Apple to keep X11 broken.
How microsoftish of them. Maybe if they discourage the use they shouldn't bundle X11 with OSX in the first place?
It's not installed by default, as far as I remember.
> And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users. Yeah so maybe just throw out some source code of X11 that barely compiles and you need to fix it yourself. No binary release - then it would be even geekier.:)
Not sure what you're trying to say here.
> The existing issues with X11 are intentional. Yeah.:) That is what I love Mac fanatics - if something is broken in OSX it must be intentional. LoL.
Labelling people "mac fanatics" because you don't understand their reasoning is pretty cheap. In your defense, I admit that I was unclear in my original post. Let me explain what I meant.
Apple depends on Mac OS X having applications which do not exist on other operating systems. It's a competitive advantage. Remember NeXT? They had a nice cross-platform development library which allowed NeXT apps to run on Windows. Initially, Apple planned to keep this in OS X. It was called "yellow box" ("blue box" was for old Mac apps).
Interestingly, the idea didn't survive. Eventually, Cocoa became Mac only. Why? Because Apple wants Mac-only applications.
Another example is Java. Making Java apps look good on a Mac is hard. Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only.
And this brings us to X11. X11 is awesome if you want to run all kinds of apps on the Mac, but these apps don't behave like Mac apps. Why? Because if they did, it would be trivial to write Mac apps using X11 and then port them to other operating systems. Apple would rather keep these apps on the Mac, thus they are discouraging the use of X11 for Mac apps.
Do you now understand the reasoning, or are you still LOLing at me?
This was probably not your intention, but your post comes off as a bit of a flamebait. Carbon is here to stay, and large parts of Cocoa rely on it. Carbon does allow you to take full advantage of OS X, and in fact, you can even mix Cocoa and Carbon. Nobody (maybe except NeXT fanboys) frowns upon using Carbon.
Of course I am a bit skeptic after buying Super Mario Bros for the VC as it runs faster than normal (PAL issue)*, its flickery and has other general playability issues...
I did not notice any flickering or "playability issues," but actually, I think the speed issue is a bugfix rather than a bug. The NES PAL version ran too slow compared to the Japanese and US versions, right? Nintendo fixed that for the Wii release.
Some motorola interfaces aren't bad, and then there is Windows Mobile 5 and 6 that offer a comfortable level of usability.
You offer the insufferable Motorola UI and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 as examples of good cell phone UI? I think you just made my point:-)
Now, I will agree that there are cell phones with better UI than others. I like the Nokia phones. Nokia put a lot of thought into what the user needs at any given time, and it shows. The important options are always there.
Palm is one of the few companies that gets smartphone stuff like the Calendar quite right.
But none of these companies are competing on UI. And people have resigned. A friend of mine recently bought a new cell phone, a SonyEricsson. He told me that while he didn't like it too much, at least it wasn't a Samsung or an LG. I asked what was wrong with Samsung and LG - both make pretty cell phones and seem to have a rather good reputation quality-wise. He told me that the LG and Samsung UI sucks. He then proceeded to explain that he thought the SonyEricsson UI sucked, as well, but since he had had a SonyEricsson phone before, he at least already knew how it worked.
Another example: I own a P990i. Entering a new entry into the calendar takes over 14 taps with the stylus (provided that you don't need any of the "advanced" features like a reminder or a timespan not equal to an hour). SonyEricsson recognized that this was an issue, so they created a shortcut for creating new entries, which is unintuitive to use and also takes about 10 stylus taps.
In fact, the P990i is much more complicated and less usable than the P800, an earlier Symbian based SonyEricsson smartphone.
The simple fact is that SonyEricsson does not care about the UI on its cell phones. They care about making it look good and making it cheap, and cramming as many features into it as possible, because that's what everyone is doing, and that's what seems to be selling.
As you can see, I'm deeply unhappy with the current state of the cell phone industry:-)
I'm really hoping Apple changes this trend.
I still do wish that Apple would not have dismissed some of the technical features people like myself have come to expect in phones, like 3G speeds.
I have no doubt that this is coming shortly. Otherwise, the iPhone won't stand a chance in Europe.
Slashdot Mirror
The NeoGeo never saw a price cut and died a horrible death.
Maybe you're thinking of the 3DO? The Neo Geo was never supposed to compete with the other home consoles. It was always targeted at rich, high-end gamers, and it was a success at that. If that is Sony's intent, too, they may be succeeding. But it would be the most stupid thing I've ever seen.
Also, stop the inflation argument. Technology does not get more expensive. It gets cheaper. Computers get cheaper all the time. Even other gaming hardware does. For example, despite inflation, the Gameboy line has become cheaper with each version. There's no reason why home consoles should become more expensive, and obviously, most consumers are not willing to pay even 400 US$ for a toy.
As someone who owns both a PSP and a PS3, I can't see any practical use for the media streaming feature. I tried it once. In the local network, it's rather impressive, you barely see the compression artefacts. However, there is simply no reason why I would want to stream a movie to my PSP if I'm at home. Why not watch the movie on the beamer? That leaves the streaming using the Internet. I haven't tried that, but I guess it requires that the PS3 is in PSP connection mode, which means I have to leave it on just in case I wanted to stream a movie. Why not just copy the movie on the PSP instead of leaving the PS3 running all the time?
I honestly can't see when I would possibly want to use this feature.
Even if 600 bucks is chump change, it's too much for the PS3 until some decent, exclusive games are available. I bought one purely because I love tech porn, and the PS3 is tech porn, but I can't see how anyone can justify buying a PS3 based on what it actually offers. Unless you really, really, really love Blu-Ray movies and Motorstorm.
At this point, in Europe at least, all three are overpriced for what they offer. The only one that is debatable is the Wii - it seems to be selling just fine, even though it is definitely on the expensive side for what it offers. The other two are definitely overpriced; the PS3 obviously more so than the 360. Neither the PS3 nor the 360 are selling particularly well, either, which is most likely do to the high price of both.
(I do own a Wii and a PS3, by the way)
Given the enormous price tag on the iPhone, I think that third-party software is pretty much the only way Apple is going to be able to sell iPhones.
I think you think wrong :-)
Apple will sell a shitload of these, with third-party apps or without. Java apps on the iPhone won't make a difference to most people.
Personally, I agree that Java apps on the iPhone would be great. I just don't think there's any incentive for Apple to do one. They'll sell as many iPhones as they can make for at least half a year, SDK be damned.
Except the same could be said about the DS, and Nintendo does nothing against it. So I'll continue to blame Sony for screwing up homebrew.
Sure, you could, but why would Apple want to do that?
Besides, if the iPhone's web browser is going to work as well as Safari on the full version of Mac OS X, it needs to have Java support.Apple already announced that there will be no Java support in iPhone Safari.
I also own both a PSP and a DS, and on a basic level, you're right. I use them for different things, too. However, I think Sony's excuse that "we're in a different market, and our market just happens to be smaller" is pretty cheap either way.
Of course, my launch-day Gamecube, which has gotten heavy use (Mario Kart, Super Monkey Ball, Beach Strikers in a student flat), still works perfectly fine. On the other hand, my actual DVD players seem to die about once a year... Hopefully, my PS3 and Wii will stay alive longer than 5 years.
I think he just said that he owned a GP2X, right? There'll soon be an open cell phone, and you can install Linux on an iPod, so I think he has covered all the bases.
He's talking about homebrew. Sony screws that up with each Firmware upgrade.
God, I hate Field Commander. It's like Advance Wars with all the stuff that makes it fun taken away. Instead we have choppy 3D graphics that makes it hard to discern between units and has severe framerate issues. Also, after playing GTA on the PC, the gamepad versions seem unplayable, and the PSP versions - with only one analog stick - doubly so. But I have to admit, I'm also still mainly using my PSP for Lumines if I play games on it.
Okay, maybe it is me who does not understand. I think I kind of fail to see how this is connected to my argument.
I said that Apple has an incentive to make easily portable apps feel un-Mac-like, and thus for Mac developers to use non-portable frameworks. They could make X11 adhere to the Mac Interface Guidelines (support keyboard commands, read settings the user made, change button styles and so on), but they don't. They could automatically install X11, but they don't.
I frankly do not know where your hypothetical Mac-like Objective-C-Java-Bridge appliation comes in. Are you saying that Apple is not making X11 more Mac-like because that is too hard? I find that hard to believe, there are way too many low-hanging fruits for this to be true.
I don't think you understood what I wrote.
It takes guts to publicly admit that you neither have a clue about Mac users, nor about Islam.
Multitouch support? UI Guidelines? Java on the iPhone is not going to happen.
You're right, SDKs are damn hard, especially since you pay hugely for any mistakes. It took several years for the Mac OS X SDK to stabilize, and they had to keep supporting mistakes for a long time, all while still breaking third-party apps with new releases.
In our own product, we have the luxury of being able to break the SDK with new releases, because our customers don't just update when new versions are out. Apple does not have this luxury, and getting the SDK right is a hard job. Getting the iPhone out was probably their first priority - it even meant a delay for Mac OS X. Creating a proper SDK would have delayed the iPhone, no question about it.
_ S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl
_ Tomb Raider 10th anniversary edition
_ hex09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0 Wow, that "hex" game sounds intriguing!
Your summing up skills are severely lacking. In case you missed it, I did not defend Apple. I pointed out their reasoning. I do not know how that makes me a "Mac fanatic," but it seems to me you have some kind of grudge against people who buy Apple hardware. This is your problem, not mine, so please keep it yours and don't try to make it mine. Have a nice evening.
I don't think you need to compile your own apps to qualify for geekdom, but point taken.
You sugest that it is OK that it is broken since it is for geeks which is mac fanatism of your sideNo, I did not say it was OK that it was broken. I said that it was intentional.
Your inflated theories do not change anything here. X11 in OSX is old nearly unusable. This is why OOo needs to be ported to Aqua.Thanks, you just gave me a perfect example validating my "inflated theories." What you're saying is: would X11 be more functional, Mac OS X would not get an Aqua port of OOo.
Thus, it makes sense for Apple to keep X11 broken.
How microsoftish of them. Maybe if they discourage the use they shouldn't bundle X11 with OSX in the first place?It's not installed by default, as far as I remember.
Not sure what you're trying to say here.
> The existing issues with X11 are intentional. Yeah.Labelling people "mac fanatics" because you don't understand their reasoning is pretty cheap. In your defense, I admit that I was unclear in my original post. Let me explain what I meant.
Apple depends on Mac OS X having applications which do not exist on other operating systems. It's a competitive advantage. Remember NeXT? They had a nice cross-platform development library which allowed NeXT apps to run on Windows. Initially, Apple planned to keep this in OS X. It was called "yellow box" ("blue box" was for old Mac apps).
Interestingly, the idea didn't survive. Eventually, Cocoa became Mac only. Why? Because Apple wants Mac-only applications.
Another example is Java. Making Java apps look good on a Mac is hard. Apple wants to discourage Mac developers from using Java to create cross-platform apps. They would rather keep apps Mac only.
And this brings us to X11. X11 is awesome if you want to run all kinds of apps on the Mac, but these apps don't behave like Mac apps. Why? Because if they did, it would be trivial to write Mac apps using X11 and then port them to other operating systems. Apple would rather keep these apps on the Mac, thus they are discouraging the use of X11 for Mac apps.
Do you now understand the reasoning, or are you still LOLing at me?
This was probably not your intention, but your post comes off as a bit of a flamebait. Carbon is here to stay, and large parts of Cocoa rely on it. Carbon does allow you to take full advantage of OS X, and in fact, you can even mix Cocoa and Carbon. Nobody (maybe except NeXT fanboys) frowns upon using Carbon.
And this is precisely what Apple wants. X11 on the Mac is for Geeks, not for "regular" users. The existing issues with X11 are intentional.
I did not notice any flickering or "playability issues," but actually, I think the speed issue is a bugfix rather than a bug. The NES PAL version ran too slow compared to the Japanese and US versions, right? Nintendo fixed that for the Wii release.
You offer the insufferable Motorola UI and Windows Mobile 5 and 6 as examples of good cell phone UI? I think you just made my point :-)
Now, I will agree that there are cell phones with better UI than others. I like the Nokia phones. Nokia put a lot of thought into what the user needs at any given time, and it shows. The important options are always there.
Palm is one of the few companies that gets smartphone stuff like the Calendar quite right.
But none of these companies are competing on UI. And people have resigned. A friend of mine recently bought a new cell phone, a SonyEricsson. He told me that while he didn't like it too much, at least it wasn't a Samsung or an LG. I asked what was wrong with Samsung and LG - both make pretty cell phones and seem to have a rather good reputation quality-wise. He told me that the LG and Samsung UI sucks. He then proceeded to explain that he thought the SonyEricsson UI sucked, as well, but since he had had a SonyEricsson phone before, he at least already knew how it worked.
Another example: I own a P990i. Entering a new entry into the calendar takes over 14 taps with the stylus (provided that you don't need any of the "advanced" features like a reminder or a timespan not equal to an hour). SonyEricsson recognized that this was an issue, so they created a shortcut for creating new entries, which is unintuitive to use and also takes about 10 stylus taps.
In fact, the P990i is much more complicated and less usable than the P800, an earlier Symbian based SonyEricsson smartphone.
The simple fact is that SonyEricsson does not care about the UI on its cell phones. They care about making it look good and making it cheap, and cramming as many features into it as possible, because that's what everyone is doing, and that's what seems to be selling.
As you can see, I'm deeply unhappy with the current state of the cell phone industry :-)
I'm really hoping Apple changes this trend.
I still do wish that Apple would not have dismissed some of the technical features people like myself have come to expect in phones, like 3G speeds.I have no doubt that this is coming shortly. Otherwise, the iPhone won't stand a chance in Europe.