Command+Shift+3, I just pressed it. PNG file dropped on desktop.
It's a png default in 10.5 and 10.6. In 10.4 I believe it was PDF briefly (since it just gave you whatever was in the Quartz Composer, since it all works via pdf behind the scenes), and early on in OS X's life it was tiff.
H.264 is an open standard. A patented one, but it is by its very definition, open. So is Flash by the way, and GSM, and mp3, and many other open formats.
Pretty much yes. But you know ahead of time how much is costs to get in. You're not paying for your drinks to be served in a glass you can only hold in that bar using a special glove, though. You're paying for the atmosphere of the bar.
If I go to a fancy bar where the drinks cost more than they do at the liquor store, I want a particular beer to taste the same as the $2 bottle I can buy on the store and drink at home.
The fact that Apple uses formats that allow interoperability is a *good* thing. It allows me to effortlessly maintain my mixed Apple/Linux environment.
God, it would be terrible if I paid for a Mac, only to be *unable* to share my data with anyone else! Of course I want there to be the same drinks that they serve everywhere else!
Why is the parent post modded troll? I'm sorry, but "troll" is not a substitute for "holds an opinion opposite to me".
The parent is entirely factually correct, and is talking about the very heart and idea of OSS: if you release something under the BSD licence, anyone can use it. If you release something under the GPL, anyone can use it as long as they follow the licence. So, when Apple uses BSD and GPL code, somehow it is "abuse"? Come on! You are either for the idea of OSS, or you are against it. You *cannot* be "oh, well, I love OSS, but Apple is not allowed to use any BSD code and get rich off it! That's just not allowed, but other companies can use BSD code since it is open source."
This also doesn't address the benefits the OSS community has seen from Apple. Far from being an "abuser" Apple has contributed an enormous amount to OSS - isn't that one of the benefits of a large entity getting involved in the community: provision of resources? Companies like IBM, Apple, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation are promoting open source. You can't turn around and say "I don't like Apple, so they are abusing OSS!"
If you really hate them that much, write your own OSS code and release it under a modified BSD licence that permits anyone except Apple to use it.
I make stuff on the Apple platform without using Apple tools, so by "anything" you mean "some things, like iPhone apps".
I make music on my Apple using non-Apple products, burn CDs using non-Apple products (open source even!), browse the web with non-Apple products, write documents with non-Apple products (sometimes even Microsoft products!), write HTML with non-Apple products.
So, unless you include the OS, I do the majority of my content creation on this Apple with non-Apple products. So, your "anything" really is.... nonsense.
(Oh, and even the OS on my other Apple is Ubuntu, so anything I create on there is.... you guessed it, using non-Apple products).
So, I assume that if that is the case, the EU will also force Ford to sell Chrysler's cars on their lots, and force Nike to sell Adidas in the Nike store.
You can get Xcode for free, including the GCC compiler.
You can get *all* the tools for free, and test on the iPhone simulator without paying a dime. You only need to pay the $99 if you want to deploy your code onto a physical iPhone (and from there, onto the app store).
Developing for OS X iteslf (using the same Xcode) is totally, completely, utterly free and always has been (since at least 10.1 - the dev tools have been distributed with the install CDs, or you can just get them for free off the Apple website).
Audio: AAC (open) Video: H.264 (open) Mail:.mbox (open) Address book: vcard (open) Calendar: ics (open) (and Apple provide open source calendar server and address book servers based on WebDAV) Office apps: documented XML, similar to Open Office's format (very easy and non-DMCA/non-illegal etc to write a converter, lots of documentation on how the format works, unlike.docx for example) Screenshot format: png (open) Networking protocols: NFS, SMB, AFP, Bonjour (Zeroconf), FTP, sFTP HTML engine: Webkit (open) Disk drive format: HFS+ (open) OS core: Darwin, default shell is bash (open). Printing system: CUPS, postscript, PDF
And while it't not open, Snow Leopard supports Exchange servers out of the box, if you want to play in a Windows environment.
While the Apple experience is very vertically integrated, if you really want to move your data in or out, you can do so very easily. For example, if you decided that you wanted to change all your documents to Open Office formats you could do so. If you no longer wanted to use Mail.app for your email all your messages are in.mbox format and are easily portable to any other system (unlike, for example, Outlook's.pst format).
I know it is heresy to even suggest it on slashdot, but as an Apple user you already enjoy a lot of openness and interoperability on the desktop. All the faff about the iPhone and iPad masks that, it seems.
How does having products that fail equate to crappy customer service?
I had a lemon PowerMac G5 (half working ethernet port - would not work on GigE switches), and Apple were enormously helpful and even after a logic board swap that did not cure it, determined that the problem was an incompatibility with the switch, so they shipped me a GigE expansion card (at no cost) to solve the issue. Not ideal, but it worked - the next refresh of the logic board cured the original problem.
My sister went through a few iBook power supplies - Apple replaced them under warranty.
After the old design-flaw iBook PSUs, my friend was given a new, redesigned one (for free) instead of the original part that came with the machine.
Apple's customer service has always been good in my experience, and I have seen it many times (such is the nature of having multiple machines over 10 years, and being the go-to person for support for friends and family). Their products are not perfect, and as with any mass produced consumer item you are going to have lemons in the mix. It is impossible to (economically) turn out a 100% perfect product line. When you have a problem, they are there to help.
No doubt they are redesigning the iPhone 4 as we speak to correct the issue, and trying numerous different methods (personally I would put a clear coat of varnish/epoxy on the surface of the antenna, but this may wear off over time and still have issues with signal attenuation due to the way the antenna is designed). I am sure whatever they do eventually, warranty-exchanged iPhones will be the new model - it has always been this way. For their computers, they will repair it three times under Apple care and if it still is not fixed after that, they will just give you a new machine of the same type. So, what you're suggesting they do as part of their warranty is actually already Apple policy.
So, a computer from 1980 and a 4th generation phone. Really digging deep there for a serious failure.
I'll give you a hint, this "fanboy cult" aura you are attempting to blame the design failures on did not exist in 1977 when the Apple III was conceived, so blaming its failure on that is just laughable.
The Apple III failed because it was expensive and was only a stopgap until the release of the Macintosh, and was fanless with a gigantic chassis to act as a heatsink (that didn't work effectively enough). The reason it had a huge, heavy metal frame was to be sure of passing the as-yet-unreleased FCC tests for EM. They hugely over-engineered it to ensure it would pass - it wasn't "form over function" it was literally "so much function, it will pass whatever FCC test eventually becomes law". Form had nothing to do with it. (It was also butt ugly).
Apple are well aware that their products are not perfect, otherwise we would all be buying Apple I machines with modern CPUs in them. They change, adapt and learn from their mistakes.
They still need to fix the Finder, but I hear that is coming, right after Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes you can. If your company is over 500 employees, you can have your own in house App Store, or rather, push apps down to your iOS devices and manage them all in house, with no need to go via the Apple App Store.
Test on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch See how your development application will perform in a real-world environment by installing and testing it directly on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
Xcode is free. Developing for OS X is free. The Xcode compiler is GCC - that is free. You are talking here about Flash on OS X, not on iOS (where a development licence is $99). Microsoft's.NET is equivalent to XCode - both are free, both can be used for mobile development, but that costs money.
Other third party apps that use flash (XBMC iPlayer plugin being the one I use) on OS X seem to do just fine. On2's flash decoder tat allowed you to test the little embedded flash players it made worked very well (and you could feed it any swf). Microsoft Silverlight actually runs pretty well on my system (I use it for Sky Player) - it's markedly better than Flash at what it does. Are you saying that Apple are preferentially helping Microsoft with their proprietary system while "refusing" to allow Adobe to develop Flash? I call nonsense.
Apple's developer documentation clearly describes the low level frameworks in OS X that flash needs - things like the graphics system, for example are well described, including example code. Adobe likes to claim that "needed APIs" are "hidden" but this is clearly not the case - why is it only Adobe that is having this issue?
No, the real issue seems to be that Flash just plain sucks on anything that is not Windows because the code is poor. The 10.1 beta of Flash was *much much* better (and this was before hardware accelerated h.264) on OS X, so whatever they did between 10.0 and 10.1 (and the access to the internals of OS X remained totally unchanged during that time) they improved it enormously. It's still terrible, but it's at least more useable now.
Of course Adobe is going to blame Apple. Are they going to blame Linus for "refusing to allow them to write the flash player properly" in Linux? It's not like that code is private. Why does the Linux flash player suck so much compared to the Windows one if that is the case? The conclusion you will likely reach is that they don;t care enough about it to make it decent - a situation that was true on OS X until recently when Apple said "ok, no flash on the iPhone, it sucks" and Adobe realised they had better pull their thumb out and improve the Mac version. Marketing can explain away all the sudden performance gains in the newer versions as "Apple coming to their senses and helping us out by exposing needed APIs".
Apple has done nothing of the sort - they are already "exposed", and have been for a very long time.
The simulator is part of the Xcode suite, and is provided by Apple - I assume that they ensure it is as close to an actual iPhone/Touch etc as possible.
I'm not saying it's easy or cheap, if you want all the hardware - ideally as a developer you'd have an iPhone 3G, a 3GS and an iPhone 4, and the three different generations of the iPod Touch, which is going to set you back a lot if you want to hardware test on all potential platforms for your apps.
In the grand scheme of things, the startup capital for the Mac, the phone and a developer contract is only part of it - rent, power, food etc are all going to add to it, unless it's not your primary income source. In which case, you will have to justify whether the expense of an actual phone for hardware testing is worth it.
You could just use the simulator, if you didn't want to shell out for an actual iPhone 4.
If you're not wealthy enough as an app developer to sink enough money into the hardware you are releasing on (and I'm sure there are a few who aren't, and it's not necessarily a bad thing) there are ways to test the app using a phone simulator. It's obviously not ideal, but if you are looking to make a living from your apps, then a $1000 business expense if your apps really take off is not all that huge. It's not pocket change, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
The HTC Desire does it too - there's even a page in the manual about not touching your fingers on the antenna section because it will attenuate the signal.
Yes, for the one quarter before the iPhone 4 launch, when everyone who wanted an iPhone was waiting for the new one to come out, while simultaneously Verizon was running a 2 for 1 sale on Android units.
No, we're obviously not reading the same slashdot. Negative Apple press on slashdot is overwhelmingly troll and fud-like, often with wilful ignorance and ludicrous non-sequiturs - much like Google's negative press.
Slashdot Mirror
Command+Shift+3, I just pressed it. PNG file dropped on desktop.
It's a png default in 10.5 and 10.6. In 10.4 I believe it was PDF briefly (since it just gave you whatever was in the Quartz Composer, since it all works via pdf behind the scenes), and early on in OS X's life it was tiff.
Draughty in the bathroom when you go in is it?
H.264 is an open standard. A patented one, but it is by its very definition, open. So is Flash by the way, and GSM, and mp3, and many other open formats.
Pretty much yes. But you know ahead of time how much is costs to get in. You're not paying for your drinks to be served in a glass you can only hold in that bar using a special glove, though. You're paying for the atmosphere of the bar.
If I go to a fancy bar where the drinks cost more than they do at the liquor store, I want a particular beer to taste the same as the $2 bottle I can buy on the store and drink at home.
The fact that Apple uses formats that allow interoperability is a *good* thing. It allows me to effortlessly maintain my mixed Apple/Linux environment.
God, it would be terrible if I paid for a Mac, only to be *unable* to share my data with anyone else! Of course I want there to be the same drinks that they serve everywhere else!
Why is the parent post modded troll? I'm sorry, but "troll" is not a substitute for "holds an opinion opposite to me".
The parent is entirely factually correct, and is talking about the very heart and idea of OSS: if you release something under the BSD licence, anyone can use it. If you release something under the GPL, anyone can use it as long as they follow the licence. So, when Apple uses BSD and GPL code, somehow it is "abuse"? Come on! You are either for the idea of OSS, or you are against it. You *cannot* be "oh, well, I love OSS, but Apple is not allowed to use any BSD code and get rich off it! That's just not allowed, but other companies can use BSD code since it is open source."
This also doesn't address the benefits the OSS community has seen from Apple. Far from being an "abuser" Apple has contributed an enormous amount to OSS - isn't that one of the benefits of a large entity getting involved in the community: provision of resources? Companies like IBM, Apple, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation are promoting open source. You can't turn around and say "I don't like Apple, so they are abusing OSS!"
If you really hate them that much, write your own OSS code and release it under a modified BSD licence that permits anyone except Apple to use it.
I make stuff on the Apple platform without using Apple tools, so by "anything" you mean "some things, like iPhone apps".
I make music on my Apple using non-Apple products, burn CDs using non-Apple products (open source even!), browse the web with non-Apple products, write documents with non-Apple products (sometimes even Microsoft products!), write HTML with non-Apple products.
So, unless you include the OS, I do the majority of my content creation on this Apple with non-Apple products. So, your "anything" really is.... nonsense.
(Oh, and even the OS on my other Apple is Ubuntu, so anything I create on there is.... you guessed it, using non-Apple products).
A basic ADC account is free. You can get Xcode with the basic account.
So, I assume that if that is the case, the EU will also force Ford to sell Chrysler's cars on their lots, and force Nike to sell Adidas in the Nike store.
You can get Xcode for free, including the GCC compiler.
You can get *all* the tools for free, and test on the iPhone simulator without paying a dime. You only need to pay the $99 if you want to deploy your code onto a physical iPhone (and from there, onto the app store).
Developing for OS X iteslf (using the same Xcode) is totally, completely, utterly free and always has been (since at least 10.1 - the dev tools have been distributed with the install CDs, or you can just get them for free off the Apple website).
Apple's customers already do.
Apple's formats:
Audio: AAC (open) .mbox (open) .docx for example)
Video: H.264 (open)
Mail:
Address book: vcard (open)
Calendar: ics (open) (and Apple provide open source calendar server and address book servers based on WebDAV)
Office apps: documented XML, similar to Open Office's format (very easy and non-DMCA/non-illegal etc to write a converter, lots of documentation on how the format works, unlike
Screenshot format: png (open)
Networking protocols: NFS, SMB, AFP, Bonjour (Zeroconf), FTP, sFTP
HTML engine: Webkit (open)
Disk drive format: HFS+ (open)
OS core: Darwin, default shell is bash (open).
Printing system: CUPS, postscript, PDF
And while it't not open, Snow Leopard supports Exchange servers out of the box, if you want to play in a Windows environment.
While the Apple experience is very vertically integrated, if you really want to move your data in or out, you can do so very easily. For example, if you decided that you wanted to change all your documents to Open Office formats you could do so. If you no longer wanted to use Mail.app for your email all your messages are in .mbox format and are easily portable to any other system (unlike, for example, Outlook's .pst format).
I know it is heresy to even suggest it on slashdot, but as an Apple user you already enjoy a lot of openness and interoperability on the desktop. All the faff about the iPhone and iPad masks that, it seems.
Indeed, look how many people stuck doggedly to Linux, despite the car crash that was Linux audio, until it was fixed.
How does having products that fail equate to crappy customer service?
I had a lemon PowerMac G5 (half working ethernet port - would not work on GigE switches), and Apple were enormously helpful and even after a logic board swap that did not cure it, determined that the problem was an incompatibility with the switch, so they shipped me a GigE expansion card (at no cost) to solve the issue. Not ideal, but it worked - the next refresh of the logic board cured the original problem.
My sister went through a few iBook power supplies - Apple replaced them under warranty.
After the old design-flaw iBook PSUs, my friend was given a new, redesigned one (for free) instead of the original part that came with the machine.
Apple's customer service has always been good in my experience, and I have seen it many times (such is the nature of having multiple machines over 10 years, and being the go-to person for support for friends and family). Their products are not perfect, and as with any mass produced consumer item you are going to have lemons in the mix. It is impossible to (economically) turn out a 100% perfect product line. When you have a problem, they are there to help.
No doubt they are redesigning the iPhone 4 as we speak to correct the issue, and trying numerous different methods (personally I would put a clear coat of varnish/epoxy on the surface of the antenna, but this may wear off over time and still have issues with signal attenuation due to the way the antenna is designed). I am sure whatever they do eventually, warranty-exchanged iPhones will be the new model - it has always been this way. For their computers, they will repair it three times under Apple care and if it still is not fixed after that, they will just give you a new machine of the same type. So, what you're suggesting they do as part of their warranty is actually already Apple policy.
AT&T's contracts have a 30 day return period, with no early termination fee.
Any time up to 30 days after purchase, take it back and your contract is cancelled with no fees.
So, a computer from 1980 and a 4th generation phone. Really digging deep there for a serious failure.
I'll give you a hint, this "fanboy cult" aura you are attempting to blame the design failures on did not exist in 1977 when the Apple III was conceived, so blaming its failure on that is just laughable.
The Apple III failed because it was expensive and was only a stopgap until the release of the Macintosh, and was fanless with a gigantic chassis to act as a heatsink (that didn't work effectively enough). The reason it had a huge, heavy metal frame was to be sure of passing the as-yet-unreleased FCC tests for EM. They hugely over-engineered it to ensure it would pass - it wasn't "form over function" it was literally "so much function, it will pass whatever FCC test eventually becomes law". Form had nothing to do with it. (It was also butt ugly).
Apple are well aware that their products are not perfect, otherwise we would all be buying Apple I machines with modern CPUs in them. They change, adapt and learn from their mistakes.
They still need to fix the Finder, but I hear that is coming, right after Duke Nukem Forever.
So the workers that assembled the Nexus were not paid?
So your argument is that it's impossible for a device to be functional if it is also beautiful?
Why are the two things mutually exclusive?
Yes you can. If your company is over 500 employees, you can have your own in house App Store, or rather, push apps down to your iOS devices and manage them all in house, with no need to go via the Apple App Store.
Less than 500 employees though, you are stuck.
http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone/enterprise/
What do you mean "nebulous"?
http://developer.apple.com/programs/iphone/enterprise/
Nothing "nebulous" about it.
Test on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch
See how your development application will perform in a real-world environment by installing and testing it directly on iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.
Yes, the dark forces are all the open source bits.
I mean, the BSD logo is a devil. Must be true right?
I run Ubuntu on a Mac, does that still make it a toy? What exactly defines the toyness? The OS? The hardware?
Xcode is free. Developing for OS X is free. The Xcode compiler is GCC - that is free. You are talking here about Flash on OS X, not on iOS (where a development licence is $99). Microsoft's .NET is equivalent to XCode - both are free, both can be used for mobile development, but that costs money.
Other third party apps that use flash (XBMC iPlayer plugin being the one I use) on OS X seem to do just fine. On2's flash decoder tat allowed you to test the little embedded flash players it made worked very well (and you could feed it any swf). Microsoft Silverlight actually runs pretty well on my system (I use it for Sky Player) - it's markedly better than Flash at what it does. Are you saying that Apple are preferentially helping Microsoft with their proprietary system while "refusing" to allow Adobe to develop Flash? I call nonsense.
Apple's developer documentation clearly describes the low level frameworks in OS X that flash needs - things like the graphics system, for example are well described, including example code. Adobe likes to claim that "needed APIs" are "hidden" but this is clearly not the case - why is it only Adobe that is having this issue?
No, the real issue seems to be that Flash just plain sucks on anything that is not Windows because the code is poor. The 10.1 beta of Flash was *much much* better (and this was before hardware accelerated h.264) on OS X, so whatever they did between 10.0 and 10.1 (and the access to the internals of OS X remained totally unchanged during that time) they improved it enormously. It's still terrible, but it's at least more useable now.
Of course Adobe is going to blame Apple. Are they going to blame Linus for "refusing to allow them to write the flash player properly" in Linux? It's not like that code is private. Why does the Linux flash player suck so much compared to the Windows one if that is the case? The conclusion you will likely reach is that they don;t care enough about it to make it decent - a situation that was true on OS X until recently when Apple said "ok, no flash on the iPhone, it sucks" and Adobe realised they had better pull their thumb out and improve the Mac version. Marketing can explain away all the sudden performance gains in the newer versions as "Apple coming to their senses and helping us out by exposing needed APIs".
Apple has done nothing of the sort - they are already "exposed", and have been for a very long time.
The simulator is part of the Xcode suite, and is provided by Apple - I assume that they ensure it is as close to an actual iPhone/Touch etc as possible.
I'm not saying it's easy or cheap, if you want all the hardware - ideally as a developer you'd have an iPhone 3G, a 3GS and an iPhone 4, and the three different generations of the iPod Touch, which is going to set you back a lot if you want to hardware test on all potential platforms for your apps.
In the grand scheme of things, the startup capital for the Mac, the phone and a developer contract is only part of it - rent, power, food etc are all going to add to it, unless it's not your primary income source. In which case, you will have to justify whether the expense of an actual phone for hardware testing is worth it.
You could just use the simulator, if you didn't want to shell out for an actual iPhone 4.
If you're not wealthy enough as an app developer to sink enough money into the hardware you are releasing on (and I'm sure there are a few who aren't, and it's not necessarily a bad thing) there are ways to test the app using a phone simulator. It's obviously not ideal, but if you are looking to make a living from your apps, then a $1000 business expense if your apps really take off is not all that huge. It's not pocket change, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
The HTC Desire does it too - there's even a page in the manual about not touching your fingers on the antenna section because it will attenuate the signal.
Yes, for the one quarter before the iPhone 4 launch, when everyone who wanted an iPhone was waiting for the new one to come out, while simultaneously Verizon was running a 2 for 1 sale on Android units.
What about all the other quarters?
No, we're obviously not reading the same slashdot. Negative Apple press on slashdot is overwhelmingly troll and fud-like, often with wilful ignorance and ludicrous non-sequiturs - much like Google's negative press.