Like them or loathe them, I don't think you can classify the Mac platform as "commercially insignificant". I assume you mean "anything not on Windows doesn't matter", which is especially strange since Google's core business is totally platform independent, so classing one operating system as commercially insignificant is just ignoring a non-trivial percentage of your customer base for no reason at all. OS X has approximately 5% of the OS market, which is a small percentage but a very large literal number of users, given the number of people on the internet. Don't mistake Google's support of its apps on OS X (eg, gmail, google earth, Orkut, google docs etc) as altruism; they are in it for the money first and foremost (and the user base).
And tell me, on what are you basing the "good chance" of turning down the turn-by-turn app from Google? The fact that there are already five or six other turn by turn apps from several different companies on the iPhone? What specifically would mean there was a "good chance" Apple would specifically turn down Google's app, were they to submit one.
I'm also not sure how they are "attempting to monopolise the smartphone market" by their developer agreements - I don;t think that specifying what code you use for your app restricts the rest of the market. It certainly doesn't affect the availability of other platforms, and if your iPhone app was created by translation *from* a codebase they they are restricting, then they are not "locking developers into writing for iPhone only" since the app clearly already exists in Android/WM form already, and the extra effort that needs to go into coding is to produce the iPhone version, thus making it harder to write the iPhone app, only potentially hurting Apple. If you are starting with your iPhone app and translating it into code for other platforms then you can always start in C or C++
Also, why should Google care about Flash and Air? Those are Adobe's babies, and Google are no fans of either thing.
It depends which side is "evil" this week. Last week it was Apple - where Apple is "evil" for not accepting Mark Fiore's cartoon app. They are somehow obliged to sell his cartoons via their store or they're censoring him (somehow).
This week it's Google, who are (somehow) obliged to offer their turn-by-turn on all platforms, and are breaking their "do no evil" promise by not guaranteeing it on the iPhone.
What are you smoking? The iPhone platform is a *goldmine* if you can build an app that sells. Any "sane" developer that cuts off a potential revenue stream like that really should get their head examined.
You try not to base your income stream on a single point of failure (so you develop your app for multiple smartphone platforms), but you absolutely do not ignore the iPhone platform because of a "risk of app not being approved". "Reckless with the company's resources". Goodness me. What are you smoking and can I have some?
Google can do what they want - it's not like they need the money, and they obviously have a major stake in the outcome of a competing platform, but for any other developer? Writing for iPhone is a no brainer. A success on the app store can net you a serious amount of cash, purely by nature of the size of the userbase. The vast majority of apps *are* approved. There are a very small number that are rejected, and it doesn't preclude the developer from addressing any concerns and resubmitting if possible. If your app is something clearly outside the relam of possibility, then you may be out of luck (like an Xbox 360 emulator on the PSN, or a PS3 emulator on the Xbox Live network, or the equivalent iPhone app).
I cannot believe you seriously believe that a company that develops for the iPhone is somehow "reckless". You must be trolling; it's the only logical explanation.
You don't even need that - Apple ships a specialised Google Maps app by default with the iPhone. It doesn't do turn by turn, but you can use the direction finding and route planning, and the phone's GPS hardware.
And since this submission is from mdsolar, I think we must take issue with the number of people who have died as a result of exposure to the sun between the years 1905 and 2009.
Or the number of people dying while digging coal and oil out of the ground.
My monitor is the giant loom from "Wanted". I have to employ Morgan Freeman (at great expense, I might add) to decode it for me. I can't go on the internet when he's doing voice over work, or there's a film out that needs a wizened old block guy with a calming voice.
I'm sorry, if you wander anywhere near a point, please spit it out.
What are you saying? That somehow I'm a fanboy because there's the possibility that (for free) I can add a turn-by-turn app to a phone I already own, using an unlimited data service that I already pay for?
I do the vast majority of my driving in the UK, covered by the 3G service I already pay for. On the offchance I go to the Dominican Republic, I'll print off a map. "Anywhere I actually need to use it" is "anywhere in the UK wider than about 40 miles from my house". In that case, my data charges are free (as in, already paid for by my phone contract).
Shock horror, sometimes people have different circumstances to you!
If I was going to buy a turn-by-turn with the maps already on it, I would just buy a standalone TomTom device - they cost about £50 here now, and come with charger, car mount and carry case. So for less than the price of the iPhone app, I get an actual touch screen sat nav with car mount and charger cable.
Incidentally, my iPhone wasn't "ridiculously priced" it was free on my contract, which I was paying anyway at the same rate as the old phone I was using. So, my contract didn't go up in price and I got a free iPhone. I know that technically it was not free and it was subsidised by the contract, but it was money I was paying anyway for phone service.
Hang on, what are you accusing me of being a fanboy of again? Google or Apple?
I just tried to parse your post again and... it's not really all that clear.
My "perspective" is that a turn by turn app is a luxury I can get by without, but if I can get a chance to test one out for nothing, then why not. Useful, but not essential.
Right, I made all those points, and I agree. I should be able to play my movie in any player I own.
You can choose many vendors for your DVD or BluRay but you are facing the same lock in - both of those formats feature the same sort of lock as iTunes content, there are just more players available. There's no legal way in the US to play DVDs on Linux, or BluRay. The number of choices you have for playback may be wider, but they are still just as locked from full consumer choice.
Both that, and the iTunes movie DRM is wrong, and should be removed.
They took the DRM off the music, as they stated from the start they wanted (they didn't want it on there in the first place), so music from the store is now platform independent, and device independent (although encoded in AAC, but that is an open format that Apple doesn't control, patented but capable of being implemented by anyone who wants to make a player).
As content vendors Apple are limited by what the content owners will allow - they can't sell DRM-free movies because they would lose the right to sell them, just as they would have initially with the music.
Books and Audio-books would be next. Of course Steve is in it to line his pockets, and Apple is in business to make money. I would be concerned if they weren't worried about that. It makes sense to build products that people want though, and DRM-free music was one of those things that people wanted.
As it stands now, you are limited to Windows or Mac OS on the desktop and iPod/iPhone/iPad in the mobile space for movies. With the DRM gone though, they will just be plain H.264 videos.
I'm not trying to apologise for a company out to make a profit, but in the end they will do what gives them the best profit - lack of DRM is a large part of that. Convincing the content owners of that, however, is a tougher job.
I like the look of those, although the tell tale mount would have to live on display in the car permanently, so even if I always take my phone with me (which I would) the fact that the holder is on display invites someone to break in and look in the glove box. Even without losing anything that would be annoying!
I think a suction mount would be a better option, with a cloth to wipe off the screen marks!
The CoPilot app for the UK is £27.99 ($43), which is much cheaper than TomTom's app (£60 - $92), but I still need an in-car mount, specifically for keeping the battery topped up and TomTom's one is the best but is a further £90 which is just crazy.
I think I may end up just finding a TomTom satnav separately, which comes with a mount and a touch screen, and a case, and a while set of hardware for less than the iPhone mount on its own. It's fucking stupid!
... then it may just be the next step when my contract is up with O2 in a couple of months. I want the free google turn-by-turn app, and if I don't have to buy new hardware to get it, it might just make the difference.
Apple only licensing OS X to run on its own hardware is not a monopoly condition - they are doing the opposite of a monopoly in fact, by limiting the exposure of OS X. It's not anticompetitive to sell your software *only* for your own hardware - many companies do it.
The fact they they *aren't* the major player has everything to do with how they are able to act. If the only type of computer you could buy was an Apple computer, and then Psystar came along with a generic PC that could also run OS X and Apple stopped them as they did then *that* would be an antitrust violation. As it is, there is nothing at all stopping you from using different PCs and different operating systems, so the fact that Apple's OS is limited (legally but not technically) from anything but Apple hardware is annoying but not illegal.
I also doubt that either Apple or MS is behind this move against Google, even with MS's attempts with Bing. Apple is not interested in search or becoming Google-like (despite some analyst saying that Apple "has a 70% chance" of "buying a search engine" - I just don;t buy it), and MS is already doing remarkably well against Google without the need for legal action.
Your iTunes example is a little skewed - while you need to use quicktime to watch a DRM iTunes movie, you can do so on either Windows or Mac OS X (although being tied to Quicktime is accurate). When the DRM is gone from the movies (which I have no doubt they are working on), this last blot will be gone - but the movie studios are clearly not as ready to make that sort of deal as their music-peddling counterparts. When that is the case, there will no longer be any lock to the store via your purchases. Where I would have had an issue is if, despite the removal of DRM on the music, you were still stuck using iTunes, which fortunately is not the case.
I don't think that Google, MS or Apple are an abusive monopoly any longer - the biggest offences of MS are now in the past - preventing OEMs from bundling alternative OSes by threatening to increase the cost of windows licences, and the whole IE mess, which is largely over now, among other things but nowhere near as bad as they were.
It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Adobe stuck two fingers up at Apple long before Apple started getting pissy about what language you use to write iPhone apps. The creative suite has been a second class citizen for a long time on OS X now, and even with the increase in users of InDesign on OS X, that only happened because Quark was even more shitty about the departure from OS 9.
Adobe have been treating Apple as a red headed stepchild for a long time now - Flash on OS X *sucks balls*, and their headline Creative Suite is poor, but functional. Premiere was pretty lousy, and was soon abandoned with the release of Final Cut Pro. Perhaps Apple were a little bit cheeky bringing out Aperture just before Adobe brought out Lightroom, but a little bit of competition shouldn't have hurt them, especially with the price of Aperture back then.
Now, 10.1 beta of the Flash plugin for OS X is a fair bit better - noticeably better than the 10.0 version, so maybe they really were starting to pay a little more attention to Apple, but I fear it will be too little too late. Don;t kid yourself that Adobe was altruistic towards Apple, even in the early days , and especially after the switch to OS X.
HTML5 does what Flash does, and yet Apple are promoting it strongly. It's not about competition to the app store as much as it's about lousy performance of flash - it really is awful on OS X-based software.
Flash doesn't compete with anything on the Mac (or Mac-based devices) except "biggest CPU hog of the century". Maybe if it actually worked a little bit on the desktop it might be suitable for iPhone use, but looking at the performance of the OS X version (which is a good indication of the iPhone version given the similarities of the underlying OSes), Flash on the iPhone would be absurdly slow and power hungry.
There are other ways to produce apps for the iPhone, in a similar manner to the way flash web apps would work, that don;t involve the store - HTML5, which Apple is promoting.
Lack of flash on the iPhone is almost entirely a performance thing.
Although this particular story is about using Flash dev tools to make native apps for the App Store, and giving up on that because the app store rules have changed rather than end user use of flash on the iPhone.
The iPad is not available for sale in my country yet. So, even if I wanted to buy one I can't do so at the moment.
I can't afford it at any rate, even if I did want to buy one.
Again, I think your blind hate is causing you to make assumptions about me that just aren't true. So much anger from you, and such nerd rage. You should really work on calming that down. If you want to beat someone up just because they use an iPad then I would try some calming exercises or something.
It uses up about 70% cpu on OS X playing back SD content. Any MacBook Pro user will tell you that using flash heavy websites very quickly hurts your battery.
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The google maps app on the iPhone is by Apple. It is part of the default installed set of apps that comes with the iPhone. Google did not write it.
"commercially insignificant"? I'm sorry, what?
Like them or loathe them, I don't think you can classify the Mac platform as "commercially insignificant". I assume you mean "anything not on Windows doesn't matter", which is especially strange since Google's core business is totally platform independent, so classing one operating system as commercially insignificant is just ignoring a non-trivial percentage of your customer base for no reason at all. OS X has approximately 5% of the OS market, which is a small percentage but a very large literal number of users, given the number of people on the internet. Don't mistake Google's support of its apps on OS X (eg, gmail, google earth, Orkut, google docs etc) as altruism; they are in it for the money first and foremost (and the user base).
And tell me, on what are you basing the "good chance" of turning down the turn-by-turn app from Google? The fact that there are already five or six other turn by turn apps from several different companies on the iPhone? What specifically would mean there was a "good chance" Apple would specifically turn down Google's app, were they to submit one.
I'm also not sure how they are "attempting to monopolise the smartphone market" by their developer agreements - I don;t think that specifying what code you use for your app restricts the rest of the market. It certainly doesn't affect the availability of other platforms, and if your iPhone app was created by translation *from* a codebase they they are restricting, then they are not "locking developers into writing for iPhone only" since the app clearly already exists in Android/WM form already, and the extra effort that needs to go into coding is to produce the iPhone version, thus making it harder to write the iPhone app, only potentially hurting Apple. If you are starting with your iPhone app and translating it into code for other platforms then you can always start in C or C++
Also, why should Google care about Flash and Air? Those are Adobe's babies, and Google are no fans of either thing.
It depends which side is "evil" this week. Last week it was Apple - where Apple is "evil" for not accepting Mark Fiore's cartoon app. They are somehow obliged to sell his cartoons via their store or they're censoring him (somehow).
This week it's Google, who are (somehow) obliged to offer their turn-by-turn on all platforms, and are breaking their "do no evil" promise by not guaranteeing it on the iPhone.
It's hard to keep track of who to hate each week!
What are you smoking? The iPhone platform is a *goldmine* if you can build an app that sells. Any "sane" developer that cuts off a potential revenue stream like that really should get their head examined.
You try not to base your income stream on a single point of failure (so you develop your app for multiple smartphone platforms), but you absolutely do not ignore the iPhone platform because of a "risk of app not being approved". "Reckless with the company's resources". Goodness me. What are you smoking and can I have some?
Google can do what they want - it's not like they need the money, and they obviously have a major stake in the outcome of a competing platform, but for any other developer? Writing for iPhone is a no brainer. A success on the app store can net you a serious amount of cash, purely by nature of the size of the userbase. The vast majority of apps *are* approved. There are a very small number that are rejected, and it doesn't preclude the developer from addressing any concerns and resubmitting if possible. If your app is something clearly outside the relam of possibility, then you may be out of luck (like an Xbox 360 emulator on the PSN, or a PS3 emulator on the Xbox Live network, or the equivalent iPhone app).
I cannot believe you seriously believe that a company that develops for the iPhone is somehow "reckless". You must be trolling; it's the only logical explanation.
You don't even need that - Apple ships a specialised Google Maps app by default with the iPhone. It doesn't do turn by turn, but you can use the direction finding and route planning, and the phone's GPS hardware.
No, the attempt by Giz was to drive clicks to their site, and thus push up their ad revenue.
This was never about altruism, not even as a side effect.
And since this submission is from mdsolar, I think we must take issue with the number of people who have died as a result of exposure to the sun between the years 1905 and 2009.
Or the number of people dying while digging coal and oil out of the ground.
You've got it easy!
My monitor is the giant loom from "Wanted". I have to employ Morgan Freeman (at great expense, I might add) to decode it for me. I can't go on the internet when he's doing voice over work, or there's a film out that needs a wizened old block guy with a calming voice.
I'm sorry, if you wander anywhere near a point, please spit it out.
What are you saying? That somehow I'm a fanboy because there's the possibility that (for free) I can add a turn-by-turn app to a phone I already own, using an unlimited data service that I already pay for?
I do the vast majority of my driving in the UK, covered by the 3G service I already pay for. On the offchance I go to the Dominican Republic, I'll print off a map. "Anywhere I actually need to use it" is "anywhere in the UK wider than about 40 miles from my house". In that case, my data charges are free (as in, already paid for by my phone contract).
Shock horror, sometimes people have different circumstances to you!
If I was going to buy a turn-by-turn with the maps already on it, I would just buy a standalone TomTom device - they cost about £50 here now, and come with charger, car mount and carry case. So for less than the price of the iPhone app, I get an actual touch screen sat nav with car mount and charger cable.
Incidentally, my iPhone wasn't "ridiculously priced" it was free on my contract, which I was paying anyway at the same rate as the old phone I was using. So, my contract didn't go up in price and I got a free iPhone. I know that technically it was not free and it was subsidised by the contract, but it was money I was paying anyway for phone service.
Hang on, what are you accusing me of being a fanboy of again? Google or Apple?
I just tried to parse your post again and... it's not really all that clear.
My "perspective" is that a turn by turn app is a luxury I can get by without, but if I can get a chance to test one out for nothing, then why not. Useful, but not essential.
Right, I made all those points, and I agree. I should be able to play my movie in any player I own.
You can choose many vendors for your DVD or BluRay but you are facing the same lock in - both of those formats feature the same sort of lock as iTunes content, there are just more players available. There's no legal way in the US to play DVDs on Linux, or BluRay. The number of choices you have for playback may be wider, but they are still just as locked from full consumer choice.
Both that, and the iTunes movie DRM is wrong, and should be removed.
They took the DRM off the music, as they stated from the start they wanted (they didn't want it on there in the first place), so music from the store is now platform independent, and device independent (although encoded in AAC, but that is an open format that Apple doesn't control, patented but capable of being implemented by anyone who wants to make a player).
As content vendors Apple are limited by what the content owners will allow - they can't sell DRM-free movies because they would lose the right to sell them, just as they would have initially with the music.
Books and Audio-books would be next. Of course Steve is in it to line his pockets, and Apple is in business to make money. I would be concerned if they weren't worried about that. It makes sense to build products that people want though, and DRM-free music was one of those things that people wanted.
As it stands now, you are limited to Windows or Mac OS on the desktop and iPod/iPhone/iPad in the mobile space for movies. With the DRM gone though, they will just be plain H.264 videos.
I'm not trying to apologise for a company out to make a profit, but in the end they will do what gives them the best profit - lack of DRM is a large part of that. Convincing the content owners of that, however, is a tougher job.
I like the look of those, although the tell tale mount would have to live on display in the car permanently, so even if I always take my phone with me (which I would) the fact that the holder is on display invites someone to break in and look in the glove box. Even without losing anything that would be annoying!
I think a suction mount would be a better option, with a cloth to wipe off the screen marks!
The CoPilot app for the UK is £27.99 ($43), which is much cheaper than TomTom's app (£60 - $92), but I still need an in-car mount, specifically for keeping the battery topped up and TomTom's one is the best but is a further £90 which is just crazy.
I think I may end up just finding a TomTom satnav separately, which comes with a mount and a touch screen, and a case, and a while set of hardware for less than the iPhone mount on its own. It's fucking stupid!
The 3GS has 256Mb, but the 2G and 3G do only have 128Mb.
This will be nice even if only for google's turn by turn app. I love my iPhone, but I don;t love TomTom's ludicrous price for their app.
... then it may just be the next step when my contract is up with O2 in a couple of months. I want the free google turn-by-turn app, and if I don't have to buy new hardware to get it, it might just make the difference.
So, don't install it.
There's always nethack.
That's what people said about Mac gaming, and Steam is currently in closed beta - all is not lost.
Apple only licensing OS X to run on its own hardware is not a monopoly condition - they are doing the opposite of a monopoly in fact, by limiting the exposure of OS X. It's not anticompetitive to sell your software *only* for your own hardware - many companies do it.
The fact they they *aren't* the major player has everything to do with how they are able to act. If the only type of computer you could buy was an Apple computer, and then Psystar came along with a generic PC that could also run OS X and Apple stopped them as they did then *that* would be an antitrust violation. As it is, there is nothing at all stopping you from using different PCs and different operating systems, so the fact that Apple's OS is limited (legally but not technically) from anything but Apple hardware is annoying but not illegal.
I also doubt that either Apple or MS is behind this move against Google, even with MS's attempts with Bing. Apple is not interested in search or becoming Google-like (despite some analyst saying that Apple "has a 70% chance" of "buying a search engine" - I just don;t buy it), and MS is already doing remarkably well against Google without the need for legal action.
Your iTunes example is a little skewed - while you need to use quicktime to watch a DRM iTunes movie, you can do so on either Windows or Mac OS X (although being tied to Quicktime is accurate). When the DRM is gone from the movies (which I have no doubt they are working on), this last blot will be gone - but the movie studios are clearly not as ready to make that sort of deal as their music-peddling counterparts. When that is the case, there will no longer be any lock to the store via your purchases. Where I would have had an issue is if, despite the removal of DRM on the music, you were still stuck using iTunes, which fortunately is not the case.
I don't think that Google, MS or Apple are an abusive monopoly any longer - the biggest offences of MS are now in the past - preventing OEMs from bundling alternative OSes by threatening to increase the cost of windows licences, and the whole IE mess, which is largely over now, among other things but nowhere near as bad as they were.
It's six of one, half a dozen of the other. Adobe stuck two fingers up at Apple long before Apple started getting pissy about what language you use to write iPhone apps. The creative suite has been a second class citizen for a long time on OS X now, and even with the increase in users of InDesign on OS X, that only happened because Quark was even more shitty about the departure from OS 9.
Adobe have been treating Apple as a red headed stepchild for a long time now - Flash on OS X *sucks balls*, and their headline Creative Suite is poor, but functional. Premiere was pretty lousy, and was soon abandoned with the release of Final Cut Pro. Perhaps Apple were a little bit cheeky bringing out Aperture just before Adobe brought out Lightroom, but a little bit of competition shouldn't have hurt them, especially with the price of Aperture back then.
Now, 10.1 beta of the Flash plugin for OS X is a fair bit better - noticeably better than the 10.0 version, so maybe they really were starting to pay a little more attention to Apple, but I fear it will be too little too late. Don;t kid yourself that Adobe was altruistic towards Apple, even in the early days , and especially after the switch to OS X.
No Firefox? This is news to me. I'd better uninstall it right away!
HTML5 does what Flash does, and yet Apple are promoting it strongly. It's not about competition to the app store as much as it's about lousy performance of flash - it really is awful on OS X-based software.
Flash doesn't compete with anything on the Mac (or Mac-based devices) except "biggest CPU hog of the century". Maybe if it actually worked a little bit on the desktop it might be suitable for iPhone use, but looking at the performance of the OS X version (which is a good indication of the iPhone version given the similarities of the underlying OSes), Flash on the iPhone would be absurdly slow and power hungry.
There are other ways to produce apps for the iPhone, in a similar manner to the way flash web apps would work, that don;t involve the store - HTML5, which Apple is promoting.
Lack of flash on the iPhone is almost entirely a performance thing.
Although this particular story is about using Flash dev tools to make native apps for the App Store, and giving up on that because the app store rules have changed rather than end user use of flash on the iPhone.
Why?
The iPad is not available for sale in my country yet. So, even if I wanted to buy one I can't do so at the moment.
I can't afford it at any rate, even if I did want to buy one.
Again, I think your blind hate is causing you to make assumptions about me that just aren't true. So much anger from you, and such nerd rage. You should really work on calming that down. If you want to beat someone up just because they use an iPad then I would try some calming exercises or something.
It's a joke about poor flash performance.
It uses up about 70% cpu on OS X playing back SD content. Any MacBook Pro user will tell you that using flash heavy websites very quickly hurts your battery.