Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.
This bug only occurs when you launch a web app that contains a meta tag of name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"
If your 'web app' is just a shortcut to Safari on your homescreen then you won't see this bug.
Basically this web app meta tag launches the app fullscreen without any Safari chrome. To the user it looks like a separate app rather than it's running in the browser.
The slow behaviour is just using the iOS 4.2 JavaScript engine. It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on.
The article questions whether Macs in the Apple store will be configured in factory condition (without Flash) or would have flash installed causing possible confusion for buyers. They then go on to state that a Macbook Air they've seen in store did indeed not have Flash installed.
However, one of the benefits of the Apple store is you're generally free to play around with the machines. I've often installed Firefox on these machines, so what's to stop a customer installing flash on the demo machines too. Also some demo machines have MS Office installed on it but you don't hear about confusion from buyers when they find out they need to buy Office separately although I'm sure it happens sometimes.
I don't see the fuss on this issue. There's a plugin out there and it's easy to install, it makes sense for Apple to make Flash opt-in rather than opt-out.
Me, I've installed flash on my Mac and use Firefox and Safari Flash free and I open up Google Chrome (that has its own built in flash plugin) whenever I need flash.
Why don't I use a flash blocker? Because if you remove flash entirely then many sites will display alternative content where the flash used to be rather than an annoying click to play box.
I can't stand the WP7S UI, it just seems irritating. It's designed so nothing fits on the screen, even the date displayed on the pic in the article is truncated. To access anything you'll need to move horizontal and vertical.
It reminds me back in the days of 14" monitors. I remember that in Linux I could set up X to use a much higher resolution than the monitor supported and then you'd use the mouse to pan around the screen. I hated that then, I hate it now.
Make things fit on the screen where possible, scroll only when necessary.
Microsoft is just trying to look fancy with no thought on usability. You'd get tired of all this very quickly.
And I'll add "My Bad" if you actually do have TV licenses over there, and were being sarcastic.
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
I'm personally glad I don't have to run my own mail server anymore. Having to fight the constant battle against spam can seem like an uphill battle. I'm happy enough with Google Apps, very little spam gets through the filters and it's very rare to get a false positive.
Despite the fact that my mail email address is not published online anywhere and I'm very careful who I give it to (I use different addresses for completing forms online) the amount of spam that Google filters out is still amazing.
There must be a lot of stupid people out there that respond to this stuff, it wouldn't exist if it wasn't profitable.
Do not read slashdot for the 24-36 hours. Especially if the article has anything to do with your line of work.
Most of the slashdot April fool posts are totally unbelievable anyway. As for other times I know that slashdot is more for killing time than using as a reliable news source.
Now as there's still 2 hours to go before April 1st here I almost believed the headline. As I mentioned in another post plugins (e.g. Flash) are not extensions (e.g. Flashblock). All browsers except IE support the same plugin API, so if IE wanted to be seen to make developers lives easier they'd support it (they used to back when IE was the underdog). The API is the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) as it was first implemented in the Netscape browsers.
Extensions on the other hand are browser specific and serve a different purpose to plugins. Plugins are for displaying content that would otherwise be unsupported, whereas extensions add extra functionality to the browser.
Extensions are not plugins. Take a look in your Firefox addons menu if you don't believe me. Plugins are things like Flash, they're written to a specification (NPAPI) that originates in the Netscape days, it is supported by all major browser makers EXCEPT Microsoft. That's why on Windows there's two versions of Flash (not talking 32/64 bit issues here) one for IE and one for everyone else.
IE used to support the Netscape plugins API, but removed it around about IE5.5 if I remember, the idea was to force developers to write an IE version (ActiveX) if they wanted to support IE. They were probably hoping that plugin developers would have just developed for the more popular IE and ignore Netscape, finally killing browser competition off for good.
Fortunately the increase in popularity of alternative vouchers has kept the NPAPI alive, meaning that plugins written for one browser will work on them all.
Now the problem with plugins is they're written in compiled code and therefore a version needs to be written for each OS. Extensions on the other hand are usually written in XUL and JavaScript and so extensions will normally work on any platform, but extensions are specific to a particular browser. So plugins are OS specific, extensions are browser specific.
So when I read that IE8.1 supports Firefox plugins, my first thought was that IE was bringing back support for the NPAPI that they removed in IE5.5 making it easier for plugin developers. I knew that it was not possible that IE could support Firefox extensions. That would be almost impossible to implement for anything more than the most trivial extension.
At least it looks like they're happy to delay the 'release candidate' presumably to allow some more time for bugfixes, etc. Although calling it a release candidate is really innacurate. A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.
When I was at school in the UK on of the important aspects of history class was not just what happened in the past but we were supposed to think about the various sources of historical evidence and consider their reliability as a source.
The idea was to promote the fact that all sources would have some bias. You should look at evidence from all sources and consider what possible bias exists in each. e.g. look at both English and German newspaper articles published during the war, etc.
I think the critical thinking aspect of our history classes was more important than just teaching the events of the past.
The internet is probably the last place you'd want to use to teach someone the importance of good writing. The amount of people who think it's cool to type in text speak, deliberately spell certain words incorrectly and various forms of leet speak mean that kids will think that a good writing style doesn't matter.
Add to that the differences between US and UK English, also entries posted by non-native English speakers it's certainly possible that relying too much on the internet will affect a students writing skills.
Back in my GCSE days I got an A in English. I really do believe since then my English skills have suffered immensely from reading a lot of online forums. Of course, the many benefits of having Internet access outweigh this I can't imagine what my job would be without the internet being successful.
The reason for the rapid rise of Safari 4 Beta recently is that Apple have taken the frankly appalling decision to push a beta version of the browser as the default one to download when you go to http://www.apple.com/safari/ (and even deviously put the word "BETA" in a fainter, smaller font so you won't notice it).
Microsoft do the same with IE8 on their main download page.
iTouch is the name of a UK company that provides mobile content. They were around a long time before the iPod touch but lost top spot in Google to Apple despite the fact they don't make a product of that name.
I doubt it. I believe that in Steve's presentation yesterday, he said that the maximum price anywhere in the world would be $199... meaning that they aren't going to allow any unlocked iPhones. Not to mention, everywhere (that I'm aware of) that Apple is selling iPhones, they're doing it with exclusive agreements with one carrier in each market. Not quite true, in many of the new markets (Australia and Italy for example) they've signed multiple carriers.
For the contracts already negotiated such as AT&T for the US and O2 for UK, they had to remain exclusive, but I do get the feeling that Apple are learning as they go along here and if they'd had the opportunity they'd probably open it up to more carriers in their original markets.
I agree too, but it's hardly reason to ignore the fact that Firefox does have it's own problems. Look at FF's memory footprint and where Firefox came from and you'll see it's simply a very oversimplified and blunt statement about the ugliest bits that no one likes to focus on. A lot of the memory issues have been fixed in Firefox 3 as well as improving JavaScript performance.
They're actually officially called geniuses. I agree, sounds rather sad to me. Then again geek squad sounds just as bad.
The support area is called Genius Bar and at least in London you usually have to make an appointment unless you really like waiting. I've never seen if they live up to their name.
All cable in mainland UK is Virgin. Virgin was formed with the merger of NTL and Telewest. Both NTL and Telewest had previously taken over a number of rivals - one of the largest was NTL taking over the consumer cable division of Cable & Wireless.
Thanks for that, I'm on one of the Terminal trials next week so I will take a look to see how many sockets are around and I'll add that concern to my feedback. I'm not sure whether they'll pay attention to small items like that (they probably want you to have club access) but the more people on the trails pointing out things like this the better,
Why am I bothering with the trails? As I live in London Heathrow is very close to me, but because of the hassles of this airport I end up giving most of my travel to KLM and fly from London City and change at Amsterdam Schiphol. It'd be great to be able to have a decent Heathrow that I'd use out of choice.
I believe AIM is still the most popular in the US, in the UK it was never really that popular compared to ICQ at the beginning and then very quickly MSN took over the top slot. Unless AIM had some advantage over MSN then I'm sure they're slowly losing ground in the US too. So what better way to remain relevant than to switch to an open protocol. It suddenly makes AIM accessible to a larger number of users without the need to register a separate account.
I know at the moment the AIM jabber server does not support server to server federation, but neither did google until they'd gone through initial testing, hopefully AIM will see sense and turn this on, even if they don't it makes it easier for the developers of Pidgin, Trillian, etc.
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Why would it be about 30%, most web apps are free and 30% of zero is zero. Apple allow free apps in their store.
This bug only occurs when you launch a web app that contains a meta tag of name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"
If your 'web app' is just a shortcut to Safari on your homescreen then you won't see this bug.
Basically this web app meta tag launches the app fullscreen without any Safari chrome. To the user it looks like a separate app rather than it's running in the browser.
The slow behaviour is just using the iOS 4.2 JavaScript engine. It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on.
We'll see in the coming weeks I'm sure.
The article questions whether Macs in the Apple store will be configured in factory condition (without Flash) or would have flash installed causing possible confusion for buyers. They then go on to state that a Macbook Air they've seen in store did indeed not have Flash installed.
However, one of the benefits of the Apple store is you're generally free to play around with the machines. I've often installed Firefox on these machines, so what's to stop a customer installing flash on the demo machines too. Also some demo machines have MS Office installed on it but you don't hear about confusion from buyers when they find out they need to buy Office separately although I'm sure it happens sometimes.
I don't see the fuss on this issue. There's a plugin out there and it's easy to install, it makes sense for Apple to make Flash opt-in rather than opt-out.
Me, I've installed flash on my Mac and use Firefox and Safari Flash free and I open up Google Chrome (that has its own built in flash plugin) whenever I need flash.
Why don't I use a flash blocker? Because if you remove flash entirely then many sites will display alternative content where the flash used to be rather than an annoying click to play box.
I can't stand the WP7S UI, it just seems irritating. It's designed so nothing fits on the screen, even the date displayed on the pic in the article is truncated. To access anything you'll need to move horizontal and vertical.
It reminds me back in the days of 14" monitors. I remember that in Linux I could set up X to use a much higher resolution than the monitor supported and then you'd use the mouse to pan around the screen. I hated that then, I hate it now.
Make things fit on the screen where possible, scroll only when necessary.
Microsoft is just trying to look fancy with no thought on usability. You'd get tired of all this very quickly.
And I'll add "My Bad" if you actually do have TV licenses over there, and were being sarcastic.
We do, it's used to (mostly) fund the BBC. I think it provides decent value for what we get, but it does seem wrong that even those who don't watch the BBC or use any of there services still have to pay it if they want to own a TV in the UK.
Britain definitely does not have a Ministry of Defense and we also don't have a TV License either.
I'm personally glad I don't have to run my own mail server anymore. Having to fight the constant battle against spam can seem like an uphill battle. I'm happy enough with Google Apps, very little spam gets through the filters and it's very rare to get a false positive.
Despite the fact that my mail email address is not published online anywhere and I'm very careful who I give it to (I use different addresses for completing forms online) the amount of spam that Google filters out is still amazing.
There must be a lot of stupid people out there that respond to this stuff, it wouldn't exist if it wasn't profitable.
Do not read slashdot for the 24-36 hours. Especially if the article has anything to do with your line of work.
Most of the slashdot April fool posts are totally unbelievable anyway. As for other times I know that slashdot is more for killing time than using as a reliable news source.
Now as there's still 2 hours to go before April 1st here I almost believed the headline. As I mentioned in another post plugins (e.g. Flash) are not extensions (e.g. Flashblock). All browsers except IE support the same plugin API, so if IE wanted to be seen to make developers lives easier they'd support it (they used to back when IE was the underdog). The API is the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI) as it was first implemented in the Netscape browsers.
Extensions on the other hand are browser specific and serve a different purpose to plugins. Plugins are for displaying content that would otherwise be unsupported, whereas extensions add extra functionality to the browser.
Extensions are not plugins. Take a look in your Firefox addons menu if you don't believe me. Plugins are things like Flash, they're written to a specification (NPAPI) that originates in the Netscape days, it is supported by all major browser makers EXCEPT Microsoft. That's why on Windows there's two versions of Flash (not talking 32/64 bit issues here) one for IE and one for everyone else.
IE used to support the Netscape plugins API, but removed it around about IE5.5 if I remember, the idea was to force developers to write an IE version (ActiveX) if they wanted to support IE. They were probably hoping that plugin developers would have just developed for the more popular IE and ignore Netscape, finally killing browser competition off for good.
Fortunately the increase in popularity of alternative vouchers has kept the NPAPI alive, meaning that plugins written for one browser will work on them all.
Now the problem with plugins is they're written in compiled code and therefore a version needs to be written for each OS. Extensions on the other hand are usually written in XUL and JavaScript and so extensions will normally work on any platform, but extensions are specific to a particular browser. So plugins are OS specific, extensions are browser specific.
So when I read that IE8.1 supports Firefox plugins, my first thought was that IE was bringing back support for the NPAPI that they removed in IE5.5 making it easier for plugin developers. I knew that it was not possible that IE could support Firefox extensions. That would be almost impossible to implement for anything more than the most trivial extension.
At least it looks like they're happy to delay the 'release candidate' presumably to allow some more time for bugfixes, etc. Although calling it a release candidate is really innacurate. A proper release candidate should be something that could be signed off as the official release if testing goes ok, however, it's widely known that there's going to be multiple release candidates.
When I was at school in the UK on of the important aspects of history class was not just what happened in the past but we were supposed to think about the various sources of historical evidence and consider their reliability as a source.
The idea was to promote the fact that all sources would have some bias. You should look at evidence from all sources and consider what possible bias exists in each. e.g. look at both English and German newspaper articles published during the war, etc.
I think the critical thinking aspect of our history classes was more important than just teaching the events of the past.
The internet is probably the last place you'd want to use to teach someone the importance of good writing. The amount of people who think it's cool to type in text speak, deliberately spell certain words incorrectly and various forms of leet speak mean that kids will think that a good writing style doesn't matter.
Add to that the differences between US and UK English, also entries posted by non-native English speakers it's certainly possible that relying too much on the internet will affect a students writing skills.
Back in my GCSE days I got an A in English. I really do believe since then my English skills have suffered immensely from reading a lot of online forums. Of course, the many benefits of having Internet access outweigh this I can't imagine what my job would be without the internet being successful.
I guess Twitter the service and Twitter the Slashdot user have something in common. They're both pretty pointless.
There's a few people who can use Twitter well, but mostly it's just an overload of useless information. But some people seem lost without it.
The reason for the rapid rise of Safari 4 Beta recently is that Apple have taken the frankly appalling decision to push a beta version of the browser as the default one to download when you go to http://www.apple.com/safari/ (and even deviously put the word "BETA" in a fainter, smaller font so you won't notice it).
Microsoft do the same with IE8 on their main download page.
iTouch is the name of a UK company that provides mobile content. They were around a long time before the iPod touch but lost top spot in Google to Apple despite the fact they don't make a product of that name.
Or perhaps we just start drinking by the litre. Well it works in Oktoberfest :)
Umm, where did you see a salesman in Dixons? There ain't no Dixons stores no more except on-line ...
...and in airports. But as Dixons, Currys and PC World are all the same company anyway it doesn't really matter.
For the contracts already negotiated such as AT&T for the US and O2 for UK, they had to remain exclusive, but I do get the feeling that Apple are learning as they go along here and if they'd had the opportunity they'd probably open it up to more carriers in their original markets.
The 2.0 iPhone firmware will support Exchange connectivity, it's been licensed from Microsoft so no legal issues for Apple on this front.
They're actually officially called geniuses. I agree, sounds rather sad to me. Then again geek squad sounds just as bad.
The support area is called Genius Bar and at least in London you usually have to make an appointment unless you really like waiting. I've never seen if they live up to their name.
All cable in mainland UK is Virgin. Virgin was formed with the merger of NTL and Telewest. Both NTL and Telewest had previously taken over a number of rivals - one of the largest was NTL taking over the consumer cable division of Cable & Wireless.
That's why they said Mozilla in the article. jwz was one of the main drivers in the Mozilla project. He left after the AOL takeover
Thanks for that, I'm on one of the Terminal trials next week so I will take a look to see how many sockets are around and I'll add that concern to my feedback. I'm not sure whether they'll pay attention to small items like that (they probably want you to have club access) but the more people on the trails pointing out things like this the better,
Why am I bothering with the trails? As I live in London Heathrow is very close to me, but because of the hassles of this airport I end up giving most of my travel to KLM and fly from London City and change at Amsterdam Schiphol. It'd be great to be able to have a decent Heathrow that I'd use out of choice.
I believe AIM is still the most popular in the US, in the UK it was never really that popular compared to ICQ at the beginning and then very quickly MSN took over the top slot. Unless AIM had some advantage over MSN then I'm sure they're slowly losing ground in the US too. So what better way to remain relevant than to switch to an open protocol. It suddenly makes AIM accessible to a larger number of users without the need to register a separate account.
I know at the moment the AIM jabber server does not support server to server federation, but neither did google until they'd gone through initial testing, hopefully AIM will see sense and turn this on, even if they don't it makes it easier for the developers of Pidgin, Trillian, etc.