While China is busy developing technology from the last decade, America is has leapfrogged everyone with the social media revolution. We've got things like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, 4Square and hundreds of other innovative services which connect people so they can share their stories and do social media stuff like upload their photos and blog right from their email clients! Location-aware twitter cloud blogging!...ok, we're fucked.
I think you're confusing background processes with the term multitasking. iPad and iPhone both do multitasking just fine. You could be operating an app or playing a game, take a call and get back to whatever you were doing since the bulk of the application have a clever way of pausing and resuming.
Background apps which aren't made by Apple (iPod, email, ical) are a terrible idea. Aside with the battery drain issues and bandwidth usage problems it eats into CPU cycles. As a developer I only test with stock devices and don't have the resources to test my application against 140,000 apps to see how they play together, especially when I'm pushing the CPU to its developer alloted limits.
Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device? It's bad enough there are unforeseen push notifications from different vendors fucking up the UX, now I have to bend over backwards and play nice with every resource hog on the app store? No thanks.
I think you'd be better off with a laptop. Background apps are bullshit, I don't care how well they are coded. They introduce uncertainty into the mix and I don't want to guess what my users are going to experience.
Someone should come up with an equivalent of Godwin's Law when it comes to branding some companies "Evil"
What does it mean? It's a non-argument that stifles debate. Why is X suing Y? Because they are EVIL! It's an infantile attack that does very little to explore the nuances of the complicated patent law landscape and goes for the intellectually lazy answer.
I guess all these companies on the chart are Evil and we should all invest in Lemote Yeelong and gaze at our navels out of principle.
If Apple wanted to shut down the competition they'd sue Android producing OEM's from day 1. Truth of the matter is, HTC is going out of its way along with help from Google to ape every feature of iPhone instead of actually coming up with novel ways of doing things. It's like ripping off the act of a successful comedian and calling it competition. Come up with your own damn material.
Variable screen size is not an issue. Or rather it shouldn't be a problem with any decent framework, that provides dynamic layouts which allow widgets to scale and reflow to fit. We've had that on the desktop for decades (e.g. all Linux UI frameworks use this model by default).
Not everything is composed out of scaleable UI elements. There are lots of apps that have logical layouts made specifically for the iPhone screen, especially games. Try telling a graphic artist to draw a background for 50 different screen sizes.
If you're worth your salt as a developer, you wouldn't code for the lowest common denominator. Similarly, you wouldn't want to put your company's name on a product that looks and functions like ass on a dinky old smartphone or a feature phone.
You should go check out some of the games and applications on the App Store. There are many instances where lots of polish went into the product and the experience wouldn't be the same when you crop or widen it beyond its intended aspect ratio.
Is it me, or has the press turned really critical of Microsoft in past couple of months? It sort of feels like the barbarians are at the gate, waiting to taste Balmer's bitter flesh. Yesterday it came to a crescendo with Joe Wilcox publishing a devastating piece on how middle manager culture is destroying innovation at the company.
I can't really peg this on one single thing, but if I were to guess, it's probably because Apple and Google are mapping out the future while Microsoft is still hung up chasing ghosts of yesteryear with me-too products with little or no tangible value.
Or perhaps it's just confirmation bias on my part because I don't particularly care for the company or majority of their products.
Currently Android platform is a balkanized mess and it's going to get much worse as every Asian device manufacturer gets onboard (wait for CES to see the Android flood). But try writing an app for the platform. Which OS do you target? 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.soon? Which handset do you target? Should it have both capacitive and resistive soft buttons? How many handsets will use multi-touch? What kind of artwork should I use to display a crisp image? Do I start off with a WVGA resolution and scale it down for every other resolution so it doesn't look like dogshit? Does it have an accelerometer? Et al.
Coding for an android platform is like shooting at a moving target that constantly changes it's shape. As a developer I can get behind the whole "open" aspect of Android, but open doesn't pay bills.
Also, as long as HTC and Motorola create their own phone UIs there is little chance of Android actually being something more than a glorified embedded linux kernel for powering vendor-specific mobile devices. I prefer iPhone's top-down approach where manufacturer control directly translates into 3rd party developer control. The idea of side-loading apps is really overrated because that model has been tried before and it didn't reach critical mass.
Wouldn't you rather YOU were in control of your own phone? That's what the Nexus One is intended to bring about, it seems.
I personally wouldn't because I don't have the time nor the energy to waste on customizing or hacking the phone to work as I see fit. There are actual professionals who do these kinds of things and I'd like to defer the user-experience part to them.
On a list of things in my life I'd like to control, mobile phone is probably the last thing.
It's always a plus when you're using an app or a game on your iPhone and if someone asks you can tell them to go and download it from iTunes. I don't have to worry about prefacing my suggestions with "Check compatibility with OS version x or suggested device list on developer website." Everyone is on the same page.
No one knows what's the true purpose of Nexus One at this given moment.
It's hard to believe that Google chose to go with what essentially is the open-source version of the broken WinMo model in a post-iPhone world. They got this thing all backwards.
Perhaps they should have came out with Nexus One from the outset and then set up some kind of a reference design for all other manufacturers, instead of letting various handset manufacturers to cook up their own custom distributions. That way you could have one unified experience for the developers to follow. It's starting to look like Linux on the desktop -- something that sounds amazing on paper but doesn't quite work in the real world when you put it in front of non-geeks.
After all these years, I still can't decide whether McCain is pure evil or just plain retarded. His RAH RAH Reagan bullshit and applications of some mythical Reagan principles to contemporary issues is akin to trying to reconcile modern justice system to levitical law.
McCain also came out recently as a "gang of 30" member of Pro-Rape Republicans who simply won't recognize a good legislation if it crawled up their ass.
Before anyone accuses me of being an Obamabot or a free-range coastal hippie, I dislike Democrats and their nanny-state horseshit equally, but they don't go out of their way to incite a gut-level "wtf" every time they set out to ratfuck the common sense.
Back in college I briefly took a creative writing course which was filled with snobs clutching their leatherbound Infinite Jest copies who used words like "perspectival" and "serendipitous."
During one of the meetings the lecture focused on poetic expression with an emphasis on sonnets. Homework consisted of writing an abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet and reading it outloud to the circle of douchebags who then offered their opinions about the piece. Being an industrious person, I applied my murky understanding of F/OSS principles to the fine craft of poetic expression and forked one of Shakespeare's obscure sonnets, changing some archaic words into more modern form.
I got a round of faint applause then dropped the class 2 weeks later.
Here I have a Dell Vostro and it's probably worth 10% of its original sticker price.
Any bidders? It was sold to me by Dell.com and I was one of the first people who watched Star.Trek.CAM.XviD-DEViSE on it. I promise, it's a collectible.
HD Radio stands for Hybrid-Definition. It's misleading marketing bullshit.
The guy who initially demoed Zune couple of months ago was scrolling the list of songs on the device and said (in reference to a 480-by-272 display) "Look at the gorgeous screen. You can really see the HD." I don't think people at Microsoft really understand the meaning of High Definition or lying through their teeth in their marketing materials.
Yeah, I agree. The developer is a grade-A moron. Initially, the App was rejected because of this and after lots of back and forth Apple approved it with a condition of removing the BASIC interpreter. Developer thought it would be cute to hide, and make it available as an easter egg. Guess that plan backfired.
Without a doubt, they needlessly burned a lot of money because of lost potential sales. Apple might even return the favor by dragging its feet and not approving the app for weeks or months.
Palm Pre is a relatively new phone. It uses the Palm webOS, not PalmOS. Apple dropped sync support for it through Itunes. Just coincidently, Apple also sells a smart phone.
iTunes never supported the Palm Pre. Check your facts.
Slashdot Mirror
Andy Ihnatko's Sun Times review + Unboxing
Xeni Jardin's Boing Boing review
Goatberg's WSJ review
Baig's USA Today review
and Pogue's awkward review for NYT
While China is busy developing technology from the last decade, America is has leapfrogged everyone with the social media revolution. We've got things like Twitter, Facebook, Gowalla, 4Square and hundreds of other innovative services which connect people so they can share their stories and do social media stuff like upload their photos and blog right from their email clients! Location-aware twitter cloud blogging! ...ok, we're fucked.
If the amount of sex in high school determined one's IQ level then I would have solved the remaining six Millennium Prize Problems.
I think you're confusing background processes with the term multitasking. iPad and iPhone both do multitasking just fine. You could be operating an app or playing a game, take a call and get back to whatever you were doing since the bulk of the application have a clever way of pausing and resuming.
Background apps which aren't made by Apple (iPod, email, ical) are a terrible idea. Aside with the battery drain issues and bandwidth usage problems it eats into CPU cycles. As a developer I only test with stock devices and don't have the resources to test my application against 140,000 apps to see how they play together, especially when I'm pushing the CPU to its developer alloted limits.
Why in the world would I want to share cycles with apps from other developers on a task oriented portable device? It's bad enough there are unforeseen push notifications from different vendors fucking up the UX, now I have to bend over backwards and play nice with every resource hog on the app store? No thanks.
I think you'd be better off with a laptop. Background apps are bullshit, I don't care how well they are coded. They introduce uncertainty into the mix and I don't want to guess what my users are going to experience.
Someone should come up with an equivalent of Godwin's Law when it comes to branding some companies "Evil"
What does it mean? It's a non-argument that stifles debate. Why is X suing Y? Because they are EVIL! It's an infantile attack that does very little to explore the nuances of the complicated patent law landscape and goes for the intellectually lazy answer.
I guess all these companies on the chart are Evil and we should all invest in Lemote Yeelong and gaze at our navels out of principle.
If Apple wanted to shut down the competition they'd sue Android producing OEM's from day 1. Truth of the matter is, HTC is going out of its way along with help from Google to ape every feature of iPhone instead of actually coming up with novel ways of doing things. It's like ripping off the act of a successful comedian and calling it competition. Come up with your own damn material.
What did you expect? This is Microsoft we're talking about here. They're always behind by a full year or five when it comes to internet memes.
Maybe they'll redirect people to Epic Bearded Man video during the 2014 TechED.
Remember this site? http://burnallgifs.org
We need a similar campaign for Adobe Flash. It's dinosaur technology built for the internet stone age. Time to get rid of it for good.
Not everything is composed out of scaleable UI elements. There are lots of apps that have logical layouts made specifically for the iPhone screen, especially games. Try telling a graphic artist to draw a background for 50 different screen sizes.
If you're worth your salt as a developer, you wouldn't code for the lowest common denominator. Similarly, you wouldn't want to put your company's name on a product that looks and functions like ass on a dinky old smartphone or a feature phone.
You should go check out some of the games and applications on the App Store. There are many instances where lots of polish went into the product and the experience wouldn't be the same when you crop or widen it beyond its intended aspect ratio.
Is it me, or has the press turned really critical of Microsoft in past couple of months? It sort of feels like the barbarians are at the gate, waiting to taste Balmer's bitter flesh. Yesterday it came to a crescendo with Joe Wilcox publishing a devastating piece on how middle manager culture is destroying innovation at the company.
I can't really peg this on one single thing, but if I were to guess, it's probably because Apple and Google are mapping out the future while Microsoft is still hung up chasing ghosts of yesteryear with me-too products with little or no tangible value.
Or perhaps it's just confirmation bias on my part because I don't particularly care for the company or majority of their products.
Currently Android platform is a balkanized mess and it's going to get much worse as every Asian device manufacturer gets onboard (wait for CES to see the Android flood). But try writing an app for the platform. Which OS do you target? 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.soon? Which handset do you target? Should it have both capacitive and resistive soft buttons? How many handsets will use multi-touch? What kind of artwork should I use to display a crisp image? Do I start off with a WVGA resolution and scale it down for every other resolution so it doesn't look like dogshit? Does it have an accelerometer? Et al.
Coding for an android platform is like shooting at a moving target that constantly changes it's shape. As a developer I can get behind the whole "open" aspect of Android, but open doesn't pay bills.
Also, as long as HTC and Motorola create their own phone UIs there is little chance of Android actually being something more than a glorified embedded linux kernel for powering vendor-specific mobile devices. I prefer iPhone's top-down approach where manufacturer control directly translates into 3rd party developer control. The idea of side-loading apps is really overrated because that model has been tried before and it didn't reach critical mass.
No iPhone for You!
I personally wouldn't because I don't have the time nor the energy to waste on customizing or hacking the phone to work as I see fit. There are actual professionals who do these kinds of things and I'd like to defer the user-experience part to them.
On a list of things in my life I'd like to control, mobile phone is probably the last thing.
It's always a plus when you're using an app or a game on your iPhone and if someone asks you can tell them to go and download it from iTunes. I don't have to worry about prefacing my suggestions with "Check compatibility with OS version x or suggested device list on developer website." Everyone is on the same page.
No one knows what's the true purpose of Nexus One at this given moment.
It's hard to believe that Google chose to go with what essentially is the open-source version of the broken WinMo model in a post-iPhone world. They got this thing all backwards.
Perhaps they should have came out with Nexus One from the outset and then set up some kind of a reference design for all other manufacturers, instead of letting various handset manufacturers to cook up their own custom distributions. That way you could have one unified experience for the developers to follow. It's starting to look like Linux on the desktop -- something that sounds amazing on paper but doesn't quite work in the real world when you put it in front of non-geeks.
RARE Collectible IDF SHOT MacBook Pro *** Limited Edition *** (Reserve Not Met)
Probably.
Folding@Home has an actual purpose.. SETI is pointless because they don't have any meaningful accomplishments outside of a random glitch 5 years ago.
It's some kind of a dinosaur that runs linux.
Steve Jobs commented on HAMMER FS inclusion in 10.7 during WWDC 2009. He said "due to legal and technical constraints we can't touch that"
After all these years, I still can't decide whether McCain is pure evil or just plain retarded. His RAH RAH Reagan bullshit and applications of some mythical Reagan principles to contemporary issues is akin to trying to reconcile modern justice system to levitical law.
McCain also came out recently as a "gang of 30" member of Pro-Rape Republicans who simply won't recognize a good legislation if it crawled up their ass.
Before anyone accuses me of being an Obamabot or a free-range coastal hippie, I dislike Democrats and their nanny-state horseshit equally, but they don't go out of their way to incite a gut-level "wtf" every time they set out to ratfuck the common sense.
Back in college I briefly took a creative writing course which was filled with snobs clutching their leatherbound Infinite Jest copies who used words like "perspectival" and "serendipitous."
During one of the meetings the lecture focused on poetic expression with an emphasis on sonnets. Homework consisted of writing an abab, cdcd, efef, gg sonnet and reading it outloud to the circle of douchebags who then offered their opinions about the piece. Being an industrious person, I applied my murky understanding of F/OSS principles to the fine craft of poetic expression and forked one of Shakespeare's obscure sonnets, changing some archaic words into more modern form.
I got a round of faint applause then dropped the class 2 weeks later.
Here I have a Dell Vostro and it's probably worth 10% of its original sticker price.
Any bidders? It was sold to me by Dell.com and I was one of the first people who watched Star.Trek.CAM.XviD-DEViSE on it. I promise, it's a collectible.
Gruber may be fanboi extraordinare, but come on! Saying "windows mobile strategy is a convoluted mess" is like saying "the Pope is a Catholic"
HD Radio stands for Hybrid-Definition. It's misleading marketing bullshit.
The guy who initially demoed Zune couple of months ago was scrolling the list of songs on the device and said (in reference to a 480-by-272 display) "Look at the gorgeous screen. You can really see the HD." I don't think people at Microsoft really understand the meaning of High Definition or lying through their teeth in their marketing materials.
Yeah, I agree. The developer is a grade-A moron. Initially, the App was rejected because of this and after lots of back and forth Apple approved it with a condition of removing the BASIC interpreter. Developer thought it would be cute to hide, and make it available as an easter egg. Guess that plan backfired.
Without a doubt, they needlessly burned a lot of money because of lost potential sales. Apple might even return the favor by dragging its feet and not approving the app for weeks or months.
iTunes never supported the Palm Pre. Check your facts.
This is terrible news for the upcoming Gangsta Skeleton: Democracy City MMORPG.