The core of the OS is open source. The graphics subsystems that OS X uses are well documented. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation and examples on developing for OS X.
Many companies and developers make superb software that performs great on OS X that require access to the graphics system and display technology (the XBMC team is one of them, Microsoft is another). The graphics system is well documented and understood, and parts of it *heavily* use display postscript and PDF, which Adobe really should know something about. It also heavily relies on OpenGL.
In that environment for Flash to be the stand-out poor performer, you have to look somewhere else other than the OS.
What could possibly be difficult or hidden about open source technologies like OpenGL? Or about a window drawing system based on technology *that Adobe developed in the first place*
Even if we concede that somehow the OS is hard to program for (like the original Playstation 2 was for game developers), or its performance sucks or some other such hypothetical; if that is so, why is it only Flash that sucks so badly on it?
Apple also aren't "hiding their head in the sand", they have simply stated that Flash is no good on iOS devices and thus do not include it. If Adobe come back with some actual working code, maybe they will reconsider. They have to get the version running on OS X to work better first (which they have made big strides with in the 10.1 version, although it is still an order of magnitude worse than XBMC playing the same content on the same OS).
Why does it need to be an exclusive thing? A company is quite capable of having different products and areas, some of which are open, some of which are not.
The iPod and iTunes are open in the sense that the formats they support as standard are so - AAC audio files (as well as mp3, obviously) so you can take your music anywhere that you have a player that supports AAC, which anyone can do as an open format (although licensing issues may arise, yes it has patents, etc etc).
You're not forced to use the iTunes store either - you can buy your music from any store that supplies it in a format the iPod will play.
Insurance should pay for your digital media too - or it should, if it covers your physical media (you may have to shop around for a policy).
I don't do offsite backup, but all of my digital media is backed up - a fact I was thankful for after a drive crash. I was back up and running again a couple of hours after dropping in the new HD.
No, but it is the same as the negative point about the iTunes store being "Apple won't let you redownload songs you previously bought", thus negating it somewhat.
iTunes music purchases have no magic "bit switched off" switch, btw, although I am sure some games do. What was that Ubisoft trainwreck DRM?
Indeed, if you're shooting in HDCam or Beta you're nowhere near firewire, but it is still king below that - XDCAM is about as high as you go before you are properly away from it (the decks I was using had both SDI and Firewire).
It's really nice for the self contained systems that include the smaller portable cameras based around prosumer HD, on shows where the polish just isn't the main focus. Lots of the BBC's daytime exterior shot stuff like the antique hunting shows, home makeover stuff etc is shot that way, for example. It's easy to keep a firewire-based workflow on specific edit suites for that sort of thing. The big productions are all on HDcam and so on.
It's not just a hardware decode vs software decode here - I'm talking software decoding on Windows too here, for comparison.
The hardware acceleration features weren't even in Quicktime until very recently either, and even then it was only on certain chipsets. The sucky performance is not entirely Apple working against Adobe - Adobe just don't seem to care about the platform (long before any of this iOS debacle and Apple actually biting the bullet and saying "well screw you then, no flash on iPhone" which did more to get the 10.1 flash release out on the Mac than anything else (they were pushing the beta pretty hard in an effort to not look like they were ignoring the "one swf file, anywhere" mantra).
From what I understand of the Flash situation on Android, it's not up to much in the performance stakes which is starting to validate the whole reason it was left off the iPhone in the first place - it's just too resource hungry, even with acceleration.
Even today, with the hardware-accelerated 10.1 flash, I can easily use 60-70% CPU watching a HD stream in flash on OS X. I can watch that same stream using XBMC running on OS X for considerably less CPU power, so whatever they've done in XBMC is what Adobe should have done. On2 did it too - their flash implementation was excellent. I used to use it all the time after cranking out.flv videos for clients at my old job, testing the player software and features etc before handing it off. That was much better than Adobe's actual flash client.
Adobe can't lay all the blame at Apple's door when other plugin makers are doing just fine on OS X - even silverlight, and the XBMC developers who have nowhere near the resources, and don't even have OS X as a primary target platform.
Given your sig, I should think you would have a backup solution in place.
You do back up, I assume?
If your house burns down and destroys all your DVDs the store you bought them from isn;t going to let you replace them all for free - how is that different to an online store only allowing a download once? Once you have it, you should back it up (as Apple strongly suggests you do) so you don't lose it if your machine dies. Some places might let you redownload (steam does, for example), but bandwidth is not free so unless it's in the cost of the product it's not guaranteed.
True, but the ebook reader just wouldn't be as nice on a netbook - there is something to be said for the tablet form factor with touch screen for that task, and it would make it easier to then sit at an actual computer when you wanted to use office software.
The price of a decent netbook (with a good screen) and the wifi-only iPad is not that great if it gets you a better form factor. I appreciate that the netbook will do more for you, but they really just want something that excels at a single task.
It doesn't have to be an iPad - it could be any tablet, it's just that the iPad has the most mature delivery system and setup of any of the offerings out there at the moment. I think I would prefer your idea if it was a netbook style device but in tablet form factor that you could wirelessly dock to a keyboard/mouse/stand as needed if you wanted that office software, but for the bulk of the time was just like the iPad.
I was using both as an counterpoint to "based around a propitiatory closed dome" - which can't be true when they push open source and base many of their formats on open standards like mbox and aac, etc.
Whether you agree with patents or not, plenty of people pay to use open standards - for example, Nokia's patents on the open GSM standard, or the Mpeg LA's aac, h.264 etc. Just because it's an open standard doesn't mean it can't have a licencing fee attached to recoup R&D costs - which is why we have the cellular market as it is, due to huge investment now being recouped via licencing.
It may be broken and in need of change, but you can't cut it both ways - if it's fine for Nokia to do it, expect Apple (and MS, and Sony and [$company] to do so.
Although, the segue from the W3C (which Apple does not control) into patent issues over multitouch was a bit of a non-sequitur.
That falsehood has been spun as an excuse for poor performance and it might hold water if On2's version of the flash player that runs inside their own software was also terrible, but it's really not - it is way better than the actual flash client provided by Adobe.
This isn't even an H.264 thing. Even with non-h.264 content (so ignoring the whole hardware acceleration issue, not to mention that the windows version of flash that is being compared also lacked hardware accel at the time) the performance is terrible.
It has *nothing* to do with hidden APIs - the core of OS X is well documented, with extensive information about the necessary graphics subsystems. Hell, the core of OS X's window drawing system is based on PDF which Adobe should know a little bit about!
If this is about "hidden APIs" then why is the Silverlight player much better than the flash player? You think Steve is "holding back" from Adobe but not from Microsoft? What about On2's flash implementation - did they not "hold back" from them?
Your paranoid rants about Quicktime are just silly.
No, you are missing the point - the iPod is a product sold by Apple and they can set it up however they want. It's not like it's a secret or they changed the rules on you after purchase.
It's no different to an obligatory car analogy - Ford will sell you a car, and sell you parts to fit it, and if you choose to buy third party parts and fit them (and no one is stopping you) then Ford don't care, but don;t expect them to support you. (read: installing a different firmware on your iPod).
It doesn't matter that it's an artificial limitation, and that it would take less effort to make it as a generic USB mass storage device - that's just how Apple chooses to do it, and you are free not to purchase it. Just because they went out of their way to do it that way and tie it to iTunes doesn't mean that it's wrong for them to run their business model that way. It may deter some people, but the same could be said for Xbox 360 games. It's an arbitrary restriction that you can't play your 360 games on your computer - early 360 dev machines were actually Apple PowerMac G5s - why can't they play Xbox 360 games? They have the PPC hardware, and the GPU and plenty of RAM, and USB ports that would support the controllers... then you could just play using the developer tools. Clearly MS wrote software to allow the games to run on those machines, so why can't I do that? Because that's not the business model - if I want the game, buy a 360 and be exposed to the Live system, and the online store etc. It doesn't make it wrong, even though the limitations are arbitrary.
Yes, everyone says that. "They were *forced* to keep them open" - why can't their motives be "we like open"?
If it was purely a forced thing then it doesn't explain things like libdispatch, or LLVM, or other projects that they have open sourced without being forced to do so.
They didn;t have to pick a GPL project for their HTML engine either - they could have written one from scratch, or adapted one with a more favourable (to closed source) licence, but they went with KHTML deliberately, and have been a major force (among others) in turning it into a serious competitor to Gecko and Trident.
Apple has a very positive view on open source and is one of the large companies that really "gets it" - their position is one of mutual benefit for all concerned. As much as people like to bitch about their closed source, walled garden, evil empire stuff; Apple contributes an enormous amount to open source projects, including projects they have started themselves.
Surely this is an argument that has been levelled against Linux in the past - why learn it if everyone uses Windows?
Surely the goal should be to avoid teaching a monoculture, so the more types of computer you are exposed to while learning the better. I know I would have much preferred to learn on Apple or Linux machines when I was at school - I already knew everything being "taught" in the IT classes on Windows because I had a Windows box at home. It would have been less wasted time if I had been exposed to something other than Windows.
No, the iPad is not equivalent to a netbook. It may do some of the same tasks that a netbook is designed to do, in much the same way that a netbook does some of the same tasks as a desktop machine, but the two things are just as disparate and the iPad and netbook.
A netbook would make a terrible electronic textbook compared to the iPad - the form factor of the tablet suits that use better. However, the netbook makes a better email machine if you use it more than casually for that purpose.
The software support he is talking about is how Apple is actually paying attention and developing its ecosystem (love it or hate it), so they have an infrastructure for distributing textbooks, and a platform for delivery. It's almost turnkey, which you won't get "out of the box" from a netbook, but that's not what it's for - they don;t care that you can do x, y and z on the netbook - they want something that is good at being an electronic textbook, and the iPad fits that role in this case.
Take it to an Apple store, pay the price of a new battery, Apple hands you a new iPad.
The battery exchange program has ben running since the iPod came out. If you don't have an Apple store nearby, you can send it away and have another one delivered.
It used to be the case that you could specify that you got back exactly the one you sent in (if you didn;t want a new one, if you had the engraving or some other specific reason) - I am not sure if this applies to iPads.
Go and look at the history of the iMac - the first iMac released was the first computer to *only* ship with USB ports for its low speed peripherals like keyboard and mouse. This was 1 year before the second gen iMac, which introduced a pair of firewire ports alongside the USB ports.
Indeed, if that's your opinion you are free to not purchase an iPod. No one is forcing you.
I find it an affront that I need to purchase an Xbox 360 to play the new Halo game. It should work on my PC or Mac, since they are both computers, right? The Xbox 360 should be optional - I already have a computer with enough horsepower to run it!
Sony still has it on their laptops, so does Fujitsu and a few others.
Just because you personally haven't run across it doesn't make it "dead" - much like the floppy, or the MO disk.
There are still many firewire peripherals out there that are indispensable to their various users, the video industry being just one of them.
You are correct though - eSATA will be the port that finally kills it off, since it is an actual replacement for the role it fills in external communications, unlike the very sub-par USB2 in the same role.
Repeat after me: Firewire and USB were never designed to be exclusive technologies; on Apple's computers (to this day) they work side by side.
Apple never wanted to replace USB with Firewire. They introduced firewire a year after USB on the iMac, and kept USB (funny that) for all the things it was good at, and had firewire for all the things USB sucked at (external hard drives, etc) that it still sucks at today.
USB and Firewire were introduced at practically same time on the iMac - 1 year apart (1998 and 1999) and Firewire was not included as an attempt to replace USB; it was a complementary technology.
Apple also never used PS/2 ports - they used ADB, and ADB was never used on PCs, so that comparison is just meaningless. It might have been more accurate to talk about how 9 pin serial hasn't died, despite USB coming along.
The mid 90s would be 1995 onwards - USB itself didn't properly come to market until 98. The limited form that came out in 1996 was not widely adopted at all by anyone. (Not to mention that to use USB with Win 95 you needed a download from MS to enable it, so you wouldn't do that unless you actually had one of these new devices. Windows didn;t ship with support until Win98).
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Like a man in orthopaedic shoes, I stand corrected, I think I have compacted the Bondi and 5 colour iMacs into a single generation.
The core of the OS is open source. The graphics subsystems that OS X uses are well documented. There are hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation and examples on developing for OS X.
Perhaps they could start here: http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#referencelibrary/GettingStarted/GS_GraphicsImaging/ which features documentation, examples and a good overview of the core of OS X's graphics system.
Many companies and developers make superb software that performs great on OS X that require access to the graphics system and display technology (the XBMC team is one of them, Microsoft is another). The graphics system is well documented and understood, and parts of it *heavily* use display postscript and PDF, which Adobe really should know something about. It also heavily relies on OpenGL.
In that environment for Flash to be the stand-out poor performer, you have to look somewhere else other than the OS.
What could possibly be difficult or hidden about open source technologies like OpenGL? Or about a window drawing system based on technology *that Adobe developed in the first place*
Even if we concede that somehow the OS is hard to program for (like the original Playstation 2 was for game developers), or its performance sucks or some other such hypothetical; if that is so, why is it only Flash that sucks so badly on it?
Apple also aren't "hiding their head in the sand", they have simply stated that Flash is no good on iOS devices and thus do not include it. If Adobe come back with some actual working code, maybe they will reconsider. They have to get the version running on OS X to work better first (which they have made big strides with in the 10.1 version, although it is still an order of magnitude worse than XBMC playing the same content on the same OS).
Why does it need to be an exclusive thing? A company is quite capable of having different products and areas, some of which are open, some of which are not.
The iPod and iTunes are open in the sense that the formats they support as standard are so - AAC audio files (as well as mp3, obviously) so you can take your music anywhere that you have a player that supports AAC, which anyone can do as an open format (although licensing issues may arise, yes it has patents, etc etc).
You're not forced to use the iTunes store either - you can buy your music from any store that supplies it in a format the iPod will play.
That's all gone now though - all iTunes store music is just regular AAC. No DRM left, and more's the better. Good riddance to it.
Insurance should pay for your digital media too - or it should, if it covers your physical media (you may have to shop around for a policy).
I don't do offsite backup, but all of my digital media is backed up - a fact I was thankful for after a drive crash. I was back up and running again a couple of hours after dropping in the new HD.
No, but it is the same as the negative point about the iTunes store being "Apple won't let you redownload songs you previously bought", thus negating it somewhat.
iTunes music purchases have no magic "bit switched off" switch, btw, although I am sure some games do. What was that Ubisoft trainwreck DRM?
Indeed, if you're shooting in HDCam or Beta you're nowhere near firewire, but it is still king below that - XDCAM is about as high as you go before you are properly away from it (the decks I was using had both SDI and Firewire).
It's really nice for the self contained systems that include the smaller portable cameras based around prosumer HD, on shows where the polish just isn't the main focus. Lots of the BBC's daytime exterior shot stuff like the antique hunting shows, home makeover stuff etc is shot that way, for example. It's easy to keep a firewire-based workflow on specific edit suites for that sort of thing. The big productions are all on HDcam and so on.
That's like saying passenger air travel is so ubiquitous because people rejected cargo ships - the two are related but non-competing technologies.
It's not just a hardware decode vs software decode here - I'm talking software decoding on Windows too here, for comparison.
The hardware acceleration features weren't even in Quicktime until very recently either, and even then it was only on certain chipsets. The sucky performance is not entirely Apple working against Adobe - Adobe just don't seem to care about the platform (long before any of this iOS debacle and Apple actually biting the bullet and saying "well screw you then, no flash on iPhone" which did more to get the 10.1 flash release out on the Mac than anything else (they were pushing the beta pretty hard in an effort to not look like they were ignoring the "one swf file, anywhere" mantra).
From what I understand of the Flash situation on Android, it's not up to much in the performance stakes which is starting to validate the whole reason it was left off the iPhone in the first place - it's just too resource hungry, even with acceleration.
Even today, with the hardware-accelerated 10.1 flash, I can easily use 60-70% CPU watching a HD stream in flash on OS X. I can watch that same stream using XBMC running on OS X for considerably less CPU power, so whatever they've done in XBMC is what Adobe should have done. On2 did it too - their flash implementation was excellent. I used to use it all the time after cranking out .flv videos for clients at my old job, testing the player software and features etc before handing it off. That was much better than Adobe's actual flash client.
Adobe can't lay all the blame at Apple's door when other plugin makers are doing just fine on OS X - even silverlight, and the XBMC developers who have nowhere near the resources, and don't even have OS X as a primary target platform.
Given your sig, I should think you would have a backup solution in place.
You do back up, I assume?
If your house burns down and destroys all your DVDs the store you bought them from isn;t going to let you replace them all for free - how is that different to an online store only allowing a download once? Once you have it, you should back it up (as Apple strongly suggests you do) so you don't lose it if your machine dies. Some places might let you redownload (steam does, for example), but bandwidth is not free so unless it's in the cost of the product it's not guaranteed.
That is exactly why they had single button mice for so long (yet still supported context menus and right clicks).
I don't use them often - I am a keyboard guy for a lot of stuff, but they are occasionally useful.
That would be "Dysprosium" - just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Get it? Ring?! I'm here all week, please try the fish.
True, but the ebook reader just wouldn't be as nice on a netbook - there is something to be said for the tablet form factor with touch screen for that task, and it would make it easier to then sit at an actual computer when you wanted to use office software.
The price of a decent netbook (with a good screen) and the wifi-only iPad is not that great if it gets you a better form factor. I appreciate that the netbook will do more for you, but they really just want something that excels at a single task.
It doesn't have to be an iPad - it could be any tablet, it's just that the iPad has the most mature delivery system and setup of any of the offerings out there at the moment. I think I would prefer your idea if it was a netbook style device but in tablet form factor that you could wirelessly dock to a keyboard/mouse/stand as needed if you wanted that office software, but for the bulk of the time was just like the iPad.
I was using both as an counterpoint to "based around a propitiatory closed dome" - which can't be true when they push open source and base many of their formats on open standards like mbox and aac, etc.
Whether you agree with patents or not, plenty of people pay to use open standards - for example, Nokia's patents on the open GSM standard, or the Mpeg LA's aac, h.264 etc. Just because it's an open standard doesn't mean it can't have a licencing fee attached to recoup R&D costs - which is why we have the cellular market as it is, due to huge investment now being recouped via licencing.
It may be broken and in need of change, but you can't cut it both ways - if it's fine for Nokia to do it, expect Apple (and MS, and Sony and [$company] to do so.
Although, the segue from the W3C (which Apple does not control) into patent issues over multitouch was a bit of a non-sequitur.
Total rubbish.
That falsehood has been spun as an excuse for poor performance and it might hold water if On2's version of the flash player that runs inside their own software was also terrible, but it's really not - it is way better than the actual flash client provided by Adobe.
This isn't even an H.264 thing. Even with non-h.264 content (so ignoring the whole hardware acceleration issue, not to mention that the windows version of flash that is being compared also lacked hardware accel at the time) the performance is terrible.
It has *nothing* to do with hidden APIs - the core of OS X is well documented, with extensive information about the necessary graphics subsystems. Hell, the core of OS X's window drawing system is based on PDF which Adobe should know a little bit about!
If this is about "hidden APIs" then why is the Silverlight player much better than the flash player? You think Steve is "holding back" from Adobe but not from Microsoft? What about On2's flash implementation - did they not "hold back" from them?
Your paranoid rants about Quicktime are just silly.
No, you are missing the point - the iPod is a product sold by Apple and they can set it up however they want. It's not like it's a secret or they changed the rules on you after purchase.
It's no different to an obligatory car analogy - Ford will sell you a car, and sell you parts to fit it, and if you choose to buy third party parts and fit them (and no one is stopping you) then Ford don't care, but don;t expect them to support you. (read: installing a different firmware on your iPod).
It doesn't matter that it's an artificial limitation, and that it would take less effort to make it as a generic USB mass storage device - that's just how Apple chooses to do it, and you are free not to purchase it. Just because they went out of their way to do it that way and tie it to iTunes doesn't mean that it's wrong for them to run their business model that way. It may deter some people, but the same could be said for Xbox 360 games. It's an arbitrary restriction that you can't play your 360 games on your computer - early 360 dev machines were actually Apple PowerMac G5s - why can't they play Xbox 360 games? They have the PPC hardware, and the GPU and plenty of RAM, and USB ports that would support the controllers... then you could just play using the developer tools. Clearly MS wrote software to allow the games to run on those machines, so why can't I do that? Because that's not the business model - if I want the game, buy a 360 and be exposed to the Live system, and the online store etc. It doesn't make it wrong, even though the limitations are arbitrary.
Yes, everyone says that. "They were *forced* to keep them open" - why can't their motives be "we like open"?
If it was purely a forced thing then it doesn't explain things like libdispatch, or LLVM, or other projects that they have open sourced without being forced to do so.
They didn;t have to pick a GPL project for their HTML engine either - they could have written one from scratch, or adapted one with a more favourable (to closed source) licence, but they went with KHTML deliberately, and have been a major force (among others) in turning it into a serious competitor to Gecko and Trident.
Apple has a very positive view on open source and is one of the large companies that really "gets it" - their position is one of mutual benefit for all concerned. As much as people like to bitch about their closed source, walled garden, evil empire stuff; Apple contributes an enormous amount to open source projects, including projects they have started themselves.
Surely this is an argument that has been levelled against Linux in the past - why learn it if everyone uses Windows?
Surely the goal should be to avoid teaching a monoculture, so the more types of computer you are exposed to while learning the better. I know I would have much preferred to learn on Apple or Linux machines when I was at school - I already knew everything being "taught" in the IT classes on Windows because I had a Windows box at home. It would have been less wasted time if I had been exposed to something other than Windows.
No, the iPad is not equivalent to a netbook. It may do some of the same tasks that a netbook is designed to do, in much the same way that a netbook does some of the same tasks as a desktop machine, but the two things are just as disparate and the iPad and netbook.
A netbook would make a terrible electronic textbook compared to the iPad - the form factor of the tablet suits that use better. However, the netbook makes a better email machine if you use it more than casually for that purpose.
The software support he is talking about is how Apple is actually paying attention and developing its ecosystem (love it or hate it), so they have an infrastructure for distributing textbooks, and a platform for delivery. It's almost turnkey, which you won't get "out of the box" from a netbook, but that's not what it's for - they don;t care that you can do x, y and z on the netbook - they want something that is good at being an electronic textbook, and the iPad fits that role in this case.
Take it to an Apple store, pay the price of a new battery, Apple hands you a new iPad.
The battery exchange program has ben running since the iPod came out. If you don't have an Apple store nearby, you can send it away and have another one delivered.
It used to be the case that you could specify that you got back exactly the one you sent in (if you didn;t want a new one, if you had the engraving or some other specific reason) - I am not sure if this applies to iPads.
Go and look at the history of the iMac - the first iMac released was the first computer to *only* ship with USB ports for its low speed peripherals like keyboard and mouse. This was 1 year before the second gen iMac, which introduced a pair of firewire ports alongside the USB ports.
Indeed, if that's your opinion you are free to not purchase an iPod. No one is forcing you.
I find it an affront that I need to purchase an Xbox 360 to play the new Halo game. It should work on my PC or Mac, since they are both computers, right? The Xbox 360 should be optional - I already have a computer with enough horsepower to run it!
Sony still has it on their laptops, so does Fujitsu and a few others.
Just because you personally haven't run across it doesn't make it "dead" - much like the floppy, or the MO disk.
There are still many firewire peripherals out there that are indispensable to their various users, the video industry being just one of them.
You are correct though - eSATA will be the port that finally kills it off, since it is an actual replacement for the role it fills in external communications, unlike the very sub-par USB2 in the same role.
Repeat after me: Firewire and USB were never designed to be exclusive technologies; on Apple's computers (to this day) they work side by side.
Apple never wanted to replace USB with Firewire. They introduced firewire a year after USB on the iMac, and kept USB (funny that) for all the things it was good at, and had firewire for all the things USB sucked at (external hard drives, etc) that it still sucks at today.
USB and Firewire were introduced at practically same time on the iMac - 1 year apart (1998 and 1999) and Firewire was not included as an attempt to replace USB; it was a complementary technology.
Apple also never used PS/2 ports - they used ADB, and ADB was never used on PCs, so that comparison is just meaningless. It might have been more accurate to talk about how 9 pin serial hasn't died, despite USB coming along.
The mid 90s would be 1995 onwards - USB itself didn't properly come to market until 98. The limited form that came out in 1996 was not widely adopted at all by anyone. (Not to mention that to use USB with Win 95 you needed a download from MS to enable it, so you wouldn't do that unless you actually had one of these new devices. Windows didn;t ship with support until Win98).