I am not grocking your complaint here. Apple has added support for delta software updates, so security and other releases will be much smaller. The old need for updating the whole OS is no longer a problem.
What you are saying about a sharing API doesn't make any sense to me in context. I assume you are complaining about how Apple implemented twitter integration as a task specific class instead of some more general purpose tool. That might be true, I haven't used either API, but isn't really the point of my post that the OS has a lot of new functionality and that claiming iOS 5 was mainly about twitter and Facebook integration into the Photos app was wildly inaccurate. The under the hood stuff is huge.
Apple is constantly adding major updates to their application frameworks. As an example, they've moved to using their "block" APIs to allow for comparatively easy use of multiple cores without the pain of managing one's own threading. If you were an iOS developer you could look at the change log for the iOS 5 SDK headers and you would find it runs nearly 7000 lines of symbols and methods added like "Added +[NSLinguisticTagger availableTagSchemesForLanguage:]" whatever that means. Twitter integration was described in just 31 of those 7000 lines.
So here we have the argument that the developer isn't actually losing any sales. All of those pirated copies don't actually hurt him. And this might be nearly true, financially. Piracy in this scenario, is more a crime of insult. The pirate is telling the developer who put a good deal of who he is as a person and an engineer into a product that the developer and the product are worth nothing; and that the pirate can do as he pleases with the intellectual property of the developer.
I'm seeing a connection, if only by analogy, with the ferocity by which GPL advocates protect GPL'd software from being used for profit by closed source projects.
Let's say I used a GPL'd library in a closed sourced iPhone app. First, I would be unlikely to be caught, because I mean, who would notice? Second, I wouldn't actually be harming whomever wrote it. I'm not taking bread from their table; and unlike the case of the pirated iPhone app, the original author is very explicitly not wanting to profit from the code. But if informed of my treachery, I'm pretty sure that the author and the entire GPL community would be furious that I was using their property for commercial gain (without releasing the source). I have not done this, and would not do this, but it would be really convenient for me if the ATSC liba52 decoder was under BSD or MIT license.
In both cases, the major wrong would appear to be getting value from someone else's labor without respecting or acknowledging that person and his right to dispose of his work product as he sees fit. But I would think the case of the app piracy is worse because the enabling of piracy is causing non-zero harm to the developer in addition to the insult.
And I would think that anyone who thinks piracy is OK or a victimless crime should also promote the MIT licenses over the GPL.
I went and bought Downhill Bowling which uses the unity 3D flavor of Mono, and the launch time is reasonably peppy at launch, taking 12 seconds on my iPhone 3G to the point at which I could press a button, which is about the same for the non-Mono Madden 2010..
Well that may well be, but if you don't maintain a star rating at or above 3.5, you can pretty much forget profit. (Speaking as someone who gets absolutely massacred star-wise by the "rate on delete" method for my free app.)
The 40 games listed on the above link have an average rating of 2.6, and range from a rating of 1 star to 4 stars, which is not bad, but not particularly good either. But at least it is possible to get as high as 4 stars with Mono; I'm actually surprised by that.
Well, I'd hope it were true that Hollywood only made movies people wanted to see, but given the huge amount of money spent on anti-War movies: Rendition, Stop Loss, etc, that were certain to be complete flops (as they were) this does not appear to be the case. People in Hollywood make movies that people in Hollywood want to make. If they wanted to make money, they'd be making G-rated animated movies about spunky dogs. The fact that some movies make huge amounts of money is practically incidental.
And I guess that begs the question, what is the physical object in this metaphor you are speaking of. In what I'm describing, the window as a whole is a folder with tabs, which is laying on the virtual desktop of my computer's screen. If I choose "Hide Others" in Safari 4's File menu here on my MacBook, that's what it looks like. Sort of; assuming my desktop had a big poster of the aurora borealis as a blotter. If you look at it from the perspective of the original desktop metaphor that makes visual sense.
I guess what you are saying is that the area under the bookmarks bar in Safari 3 is like its own little desktop, and on that desktop, I can have nothing but a single tabbed folder. That doesn't seem like much to hang a metaphor on.
As it happens, I'm helping design a refit to an older desktop application; and we are looking at a tabbed model for keeping documents organized. Not being a cutting edge visual design firm, we will probably gravitate towards the interior tabs of Safari 3, but I do like the physicality and back to first principles nature of Safari 4. I know people have complained about the heavy shadowing on the tabs, but it really does look like a tabbed folder (made out of aluminum) laying on the desktop.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
Well the original visual metaphor is that of tabbed folders on a desktop. It seems as though the tabs in tabbed folders are on the very top of the folder, which seems consistent with how Safari 4 does things.
To be more consistent, I guess, the tabs could be protruding into empty space like BeOS did things, but it's nice to have Safari's very wide tabs for showing the whole title of a page if you have only a handful of tabs open.
Imagine you were seeing a computer GUI for the first time. And were comparing two programs one of which had tabs like Safari 3 and one of which had tabs like Safari 4. Which would you prefer?
Safari 4 devotes half the screen area to window dragging + tabs.
It's easier to drag tabs around in Safari 3
Because Safari 4's tabs fill the width of a window: longer titles
It's easy to pop a tab off into it's own window in Safari 4
It makes logical sense that the URL field is part of the web page, thus below the tab
So, since I very rarely re-order tabs, I can't see that the new tabs are anything but a big win. Putting them on top is both logical and gives me an extra 20,000+ pixels worth of useable browsing area.
I am not saying it isn't possible to have a computer or a gadget capable of managing a USB bus in a car, or even that you can't buy them. Clearly you can. But they are an added expense, especially when retrofitted into an existing vehicle. My 2003 Civic is paid off, it gets 38 mpg highway, it has a reliable factory stereo, to which I've already added an auxiliary input. This system perfectly fits my needs. It would be unreasonable to mandate that future audio devices use either a non-line level headphone jack or a USB port. The line level + charging capability of the current iPhone dock meets my needs perfectly (well I'd prefer if the charging was via the Firewire pins, but that is another story.) I would gain nothing from USB audio other than the loss of reliability and some impossible to detect in a moving vehicle audio clarity.
And don't get me started on the unreliable mess which is Bluetooth.
Unfortunately, the iPhone has dropped support for Firewire charging, which is a shame as it provides much more power and faster charging to devices (not to mention the ease of making converters from 12V car ports to 12V Firewire ports). I know this as I has to go through a lot of hoops shortly after the iPhone 3G release to replace my cabling rig in my car. I found out a lot about the inferiority/unreliability of USB as a charger, having gone through 5 lighter to USB adaptors before I found one of the appropriate capacity and reliability.
Most car and home stereos with USB ports will do that.
And what fraction of cars without USB ports can do that?
And what fraction of cars have USB ports?
I just bought my wife a 2009 Civic EX-VP which did not have USB ports. I'd have had to pay an extra $1200 for the package with a USB port. It did come with an analog auxiliary input port right next to the lighter port making it very convenient to connect a single iPhone charging/audio out cable.
So, I'm taking it that you would want me to spend $1200 in order to pay less for a $30 cable. How much would less would the cable have to be in order for me to come out ahead? -$1170 Where can I get these cables that cost -$1170 because I'll take as many as I can.
but properly authenticated devices can get digital output of DRM content.
Also, why would I want to make it easier for the RIAA to lock down the connection between my iPhone and my car's stereo? I get all my music DRM free from Amazon, I have zero interest in audio content which is so locked down it won't come out a line-out connection.
I guess in 10 years the majority of cars on the road will have satisfied your dream of having locked down RIAA compliant USB ports.
USB can supply everything and the sooner a giant like Apple is pushing it, the sooner we all get these ridiculous cables out of our living rooms and offices.
There's no need for video-out, there's no need for line-level audio out.
This is just not very well thought out. USB is only useful when connected to a master computational device, almost always a Mac, PC or Linux box. It's ridiculous to expect it as a means to connect to the stereo system of a car. It's also ridiculous to force people to use a non-line level output to connect into a stereo. What would you have me do in my 2003 Civic? Install an onboard computer which somehow knows about some non-existent protocol to get a digital stream of music out of my iPhone. Use the headphone jack so I have the joys of balancing the audio every time I plug in?
Or maybe I can use good old analog line level out of my iPhone's dock connector. Plug it in to a single cable which charges the phone and gives me a line out. I can even keep the headphones plugged in and in one ear so I can handle incoming calls or conveniently controlling the audio with the clicker button.
Honestly, where do these memes come from? USB is a horrible hack of a connection protocol (spoken as someone who's written the occasional USB driver), which does a slow, shoddy job as a charging connection, and who's only benefit is ubiquity. I'm still unhappy Apple dropped Firewire charging mode, at least that was a decent power connection, not this pathetic 500mA USB mode.
I do not see the point in learning C++ first. It will take a long time, and you'll just have to unlearn it anyway. Why would you learn the more complicated language first?
I've coded a fair amount in both languages: in fact I coded in both languages before breakfast this morning, and I cannot imagine thinking that it was easier to learn C++. I've been paid to write C++ for 12 years and template notation still confuses me.
A colleague called me to his office the other day. His PowerMac was "locking up" not responsive to clicks. And when he'd reboot the optical drive would eject. Turns out his Logitech USB mouse was stuck in the left click position. (Macs eject their optical disk on restart if the mouse button is clicked.)
I have a MythTV in my basement. I've occasionally patched minor bugs in MythTV. I've even written a semi-popular iPhone remote control for MythTV. But the thing about this kind of do it yourself project is the amazing amount of time it wastes.
Think about it. If MythTV has (completely bogus numbers to follow) 100,000 users--and being MythTV users they are technically skillful--and it takes them an average of a 40 hour work week of tweaking to dial things in, then that is 4 Million hours which could be spent elsewhere. Like for instance doing something good for society like improving Linux's power management system; or writing a DVR which just works.
I did learn an awful lot about installing Linux packages.
And open source is supposed to compete with packages like EyeTV where the user is watching TV and scheduling shows in under an hour. I don't know about other people, but I would sell 40 hours of my time for somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000 for short term projects. It's like saying recycling cardboard is cost effective if you don't value the labor of the homeowner sorting it.
Next year, we will be seeing how much the extreme emphasis Apple is placing on performance will affect comparisons like these. Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them when it comes to fully using all the cores--whether they be in a CPU or a GPU--in a computer, and making full use of the 64-bit instruction set. GPGPU programming can give a huge performance boost to certain algorithms and the cleaner, more register rich, 64-bit instruction set is intrinsically faster in addition to allowing larger data sets.
That's why they stopped selling non 64-bit capable computers a couple years ago, and why the new MacBooks have much improved integrated graphics. That's why they are moving their developers to include 64-bit compiles as part of newly shipped universal binaries. Next year is when all this latent potential gets switched on.
Linux has the opportunity to do the same; perhaps more opportunity as it has less of a legacy binary issue, although Linux has to deal with a multitude of graphics chips, Apple only has to optimize for a handful.
At least on the Mac, there are a variety of remotes implemented as web apps running on small web servers on the host computer, e.g. Remote Buddy. Then all you need is an iPod Touch or iPhone, or other handheld capable of running a browser connected via Wi-Fi.
Mossberg brings up the position of the USB ports. He prefers their placement on the side of the Dell, versus the back of the iMac. I have a Dell widescreen monitor with side mounted USB ports, and plugging cables into them is messy, asymmetric and ugly. If I were to spend the extra money for the show piece Dell, I would not want to ruin the lines, or create clutter by using those ports.
Slashdot Mirror
There will be tablets in all shapes...
Circular?
They did that with Xcode 4
I am not grocking your complaint here. Apple has added support for delta software updates, so security and other releases will be much smaller. The old need for updating the whole OS is no longer a problem. What you are saying about a sharing API doesn't make any sense to me in context. I assume you are complaining about how Apple implemented twitter integration as a task specific class instead of some more general purpose tool. That might be true, I haven't used either API, but isn't really the point of my post that the OS has a lot of new functionality and that claiming iOS 5 was mainly about twitter and Facebook integration into the Photos app was wildly inaccurate. The under the hood stuff is huge.
Apple is constantly adding major updates to their application frameworks. As an example, they've moved to using their "block" APIs to allow for comparatively easy use of multiple cores without the pain of managing one's own threading. If you were an iOS developer you could look at the change log for the iOS 5 SDK headers and you would find it runs nearly 7000 lines of symbols and methods added like "Added +[NSLinguisticTagger availableTagSchemesForLanguage:]" whatever that means. Twitter integration was described in just 31 of those 7000 lines.
How would making Bill Gates move his official residence to Texas close your budget gap?
So here we have the argument that the developer isn't actually losing any sales. All of those pirated copies don't actually hurt him. And this might be nearly true, financially. Piracy in this scenario, is more a crime of insult. The pirate is telling the developer who put a good deal of who he is as a person and an engineer into a product that the developer and the product are worth nothing; and that the pirate can do as he pleases with the intellectual property of the developer.
I'm seeing a connection, if only by analogy, with the ferocity by which GPL advocates protect GPL'd software from being used for profit by closed source projects.
Let's say I used a GPL'd library in a closed sourced iPhone app. First, I would be unlikely to be caught, because I mean, who would notice? Second, I wouldn't actually be harming whomever wrote it. I'm not taking bread from their table; and unlike the case of the pirated iPhone app, the original author is very explicitly not wanting to profit from the code. But if informed of my treachery, I'm pretty sure that the author and the entire GPL community would be furious that I was using their property for commercial gain (without releasing the source). I have not done this, and would not do this, but it would be really convenient for me if the ATSC liba52 decoder was under BSD or MIT license.
In both cases, the major wrong would appear to be getting value from someone else's labor without respecting or acknowledging that person and his right to dispose of his work product as he sees fit. But I would think the case of the app piracy is worse because the enabling of piracy is causing non-zero harm to the developer in addition to the insult.
And I would think that anyone who thinks piracy is OK or a victimless crime should also promote the MIT licenses over the GPL.
I went and bought Downhill Bowling which uses the unity 3D flavor of Mono, and the launch time is reasonably peppy at launch, taking 12 seconds on my iPhone 3G to the point at which I could press a button, which is about the same for the non-Mono Madden 2010..
Well that may well be, but if you don't maintain a star rating at or above 3.5, you can pretty much forget profit. (Speaking as someone who gets absolutely massacred star-wise by the "rate on delete" method for my free app.)
Well how long does it take to load the whole Mono framework runtime because every second counts on the iPhone?
A quick google indicates that bears are not color blind, what in the world would make you think that carnivores were generally color blind? http://www.wildlifenews.alaska.gov/index.cfm?adfg=wildlife_news.view_article&articles_id=136 And according to the straight dope even dogs are not completely color blind. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/366/are-cats-and-dogs-really-color-blind-how-do-they-know
Well, I'd hope it were true that Hollywood only made movies people wanted to see, but given the huge amount of money spent on anti-War movies: Rendition, Stop Loss, etc, that were certain to be complete flops (as they were) this does not appear to be the case. People in Hollywood make movies that people in Hollywood want to make. If they wanted to make money, they'd be making G-rated animated movies about spunky dogs. The fact that some movies make huge amounts of money is practically incidental.
And I guess that begs the question, what is the physical object in this metaphor you are speaking of. In what I'm describing, the window as a whole is a folder with tabs, which is laying on the virtual desktop of my computer's screen. If I choose "Hide Others" in Safari 4's File menu here on my MacBook, that's what it looks like. Sort of; assuming my desktop had a big poster of the aurora borealis as a blotter. If you look at it from the perspective of the original desktop metaphor that makes visual sense.
I guess what you are saying is that the area under the bookmarks bar in Safari 3 is like its own little desktop, and on that desktop, I can have nothing but a single tabbed folder. That doesn't seem like much to hang a metaphor on.
As it happens, I'm helping design a refit to an older desktop application; and we are looking at a tabbed model for keeping documents organized. Not being a cutting edge visual design firm, we will probably gravitate towards the interior tabs of Safari 3, but I do like the physicality and back to first principles nature of Safari 4. I know people have complained about the heavy shadowing on the tabs, but it really does look like a tabbed folder (made out of aluminum) laying on the desktop.
Why is it a usability flaw to put the tabs above the toolbar if it removes unused whitespace and gives the user more real estate for viewing pages?
Because it breaks the visual metaphor that makes tabs so effective and easy to understand and use.
Well the original visual metaphor is that of tabbed folders on a desktop. It seems as though the tabs in tabbed folders are on the very top of the folder, which seems consistent with how Safari 4 does things.
To be more consistent, I guess, the tabs could be protruding into empty space like BeOS did things, but it's nice to have Safari's very wide tabs for showing the whole title of a page if you have only a handful of tabs open.
Imagine you were seeing a computer GUI for the first time. And were comparing two programs one of which had tabs like Safari 3 and one of which had tabs like Safari 4. Which would you prefer?
So, since I very rarely re-order tabs, I can't see that the new tabs are anything but a big win. Putting them on top is both logical and gives me an extra 20,000+ pixels worth of useable browsing area.
I am not saying it isn't possible to have a computer or a gadget capable of managing a USB bus in a car, or even that you can't buy them. Clearly you can. But they are an added expense, especially when retrofitted into an existing vehicle. My 2003 Civic is paid off, it gets 38 mpg highway, it has a reliable factory stereo, to which I've already added an auxiliary input. This system perfectly fits my needs. It would be unreasonable to mandate that future audio devices use either a non-line level headphone jack or a USB port. The line level + charging capability of the current iPhone dock meets my needs perfectly (well I'd prefer if the charging was via the Firewire pins, but that is another story.) I would gain nothing from USB audio other than the loss of reliability and some impossible to detect in a moving vehicle audio clarity.
And don't get me started on the unreliable mess which is Bluetooth.
Unfortunately, the iPhone has dropped support for Firewire charging, which is a shame as it provides much more power and faster charging to devices (not to mention the ease of making converters from 12V car ports to 12V Firewire ports). I know this as I has to go through a lot of hoops shortly after the iPhone 3G release to replace my cabling rig in my car. I found out a lot about the inferiority/unreliability of USB as a charger, having gone through 5 lighter to USB adaptors before I found one of the appropriate capacity and reliability.
Most car and home stereos with USB ports will do that.
And what fraction of cars without USB ports can do that?
And what fraction of cars have USB ports?
I just bought my wife a 2009 Civic EX-VP which did not have USB ports. I'd have had to pay an extra $1200 for the package with a USB port. It did come with an analog auxiliary input port right next to the lighter port making it very convenient to connect a single iPhone charging/audio out cable.
So, I'm taking it that you would want me to spend $1200 in order to pay less for a $30 cable. How much would less would the cable have to be in order for me to come out ahead? -$1170 Where can I get these cables that cost -$1170 because I'll take as many as I can.
but properly authenticated devices can get digital output of DRM content.
Also, why would I want to make it easier for the RIAA to lock down the connection between my iPhone and my car's stereo? I get all my music DRM free from Amazon, I have zero interest in audio content which is so locked down it won't come out a line-out connection. I guess in 10 years the majority of cars on the road will have satisfied your dream of having locked down RIAA compliant USB ports.
USB can supply everything and the sooner a giant like Apple is pushing it, the sooner we all get these ridiculous cables out of our living rooms and offices.
There's no need for video-out, there's no need for line-level audio out.
This is just not very well thought out. USB is only useful when connected to a master computational device, almost always a Mac, PC or Linux box. It's ridiculous to expect it as a means to connect to the stereo system of a car. It's also ridiculous to force people to use a non-line level output to connect into a stereo. What would you have me do in my 2003 Civic? Install an onboard computer which somehow knows about some non-existent protocol to get a digital stream of music out of my iPhone. Use the headphone jack so I have the joys of balancing the audio every time I plug in?
Or maybe I can use good old analog line level out of my iPhone's dock connector. Plug it in to a single cable which charges the phone and gives me a line out. I can even keep the headphones plugged in and in one ear so I can handle incoming calls or conveniently controlling the audio with the clicker button.
Honestly, where do these memes come from? USB is a horrible hack of a connection protocol (spoken as someone who's written the occasional USB driver), which does a slow, shoddy job as a charging connection, and who's only benefit is ubiquity. I'm still unhappy Apple dropped Firewire charging mode, at least that was a decent power connection, not this pathetic 500mA USB mode.
I do not see the point in learning C++ first. It will take a long time, and you'll just have to unlearn it anyway. Why would you learn the more complicated language first?
I've coded a fair amount in both languages: in fact I coded in both languages before breakfast this morning, and I cannot imagine thinking that it was easier to learn C++. I've been paid to write C++ for 12 years and template notation still confuses me.
A colleague called me to his office the other day. His PowerMac was "locking up" not responsive to clicks. And when he'd reboot the optical drive would eject. Turns out his Logitech USB mouse was stuck in the left click position. (Macs eject their optical disk on restart if the mouse button is clicked.)
I have a MythTV in my basement. I've occasionally patched minor bugs in MythTV. I've even written a semi-popular iPhone remote control for MythTV. But the thing about this kind of do it yourself project is the amazing amount of time it wastes.
Think about it. If MythTV has (completely bogus numbers to follow) 100,000 users--and being MythTV users they are technically skillful--and it takes them an average of a 40 hour work week of tweaking to dial things in, then that is 4 Million hours which could be spent elsewhere. Like for instance doing something good for society like improving Linux's power management system; or writing a DVR which just works.
I did learn an awful lot about installing Linux packages.
And open source is supposed to compete with packages like EyeTV where the user is watching TV and scheduling shows in under an hour. I don't know about other people, but I would sell 40 hours of my time for somewhere in the neighborhood of $3000 for short term projects. It's like saying recycling cardboard is cost effective if you don't value the labor of the homeowner sorting it.
Next year, we will be seeing how much the extreme emphasis Apple is placing on performance will affect comparisons like these. Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them when it comes to fully using all the cores--whether they be in a CPU or a GPU--in a computer, and making full use of the 64-bit instruction set. GPGPU programming can give a huge performance boost to certain algorithms and the cleaner, more register rich, 64-bit instruction set is intrinsically faster in addition to allowing larger data sets.
That's why they stopped selling non 64-bit capable computers a couple years ago, and why the new MacBooks have much improved integrated graphics. That's why they are moving their developers to include 64-bit compiles as part of newly shipped universal binaries. Next year is when all this latent potential gets switched on.
Linux has the opportunity to do the same; perhaps more opportunity as it has less of a legacy binary issue, although Linux has to deal with a multitude of graphics chips, Apple only has to optimize for a handful.
At least on the Mac, there are a variety of remotes implemented as web apps running on small web servers on the host computer, e.g. Remote Buddy. Then all you need is an iPod Touch or iPhone, or other handheld capable of running a browser connected via Wi-Fi.
Mossberg brings up the position of the USB ports. He prefers their placement on the side of the Dell, versus the back of the iMac. I have a Dell widescreen monitor with side mounted USB ports, and plugging cables into them is messy, asymmetric and ugly. If I were to spend the extra money for the show piece Dell, I would not want to ruin the lines, or create clutter by using those ports.