If this is the case then why is storage relevant? It's the bandwidth necessary to get the data out;
Well even if you're storing the data on the Internet, you still have to store it someplace. Like you could store it on Amazon's S3, but you'll want to know how much it will cost you.
Well the claim is that these were probably supposed to be camouflaged a bit to look like normal iPhones, and that the casing probably isn't what the final thing will look like.
Most people assume that Apple's iPhone lockdown is entirely in order to get their cut of application sales. That is probably part of it, but I think there are additional forces at work.
First, as you bring up, there's the AT&T issue. Most likely, Apple has some contractual obligation to AT&T to prevent specific kinds of applications and features from being available on the iPhone. Early on, there were signs that Apple was trying to prevent IM clients and VoIP clients, both of which cut into AT&T's service fees. Some of those restrictions have have been eased, but tethering, for example, is still something that AT&T doesn't want Apple to provide. Apple can't prevent these applications unless they control distribution.
Second and slightly less obvious: for better or worse, Steve Jobs is a control freak who wants to change how you think of your computer. When the iPhone first came out, lots of people were pissed off because it didn't support JVM and so they couldn't simply port over all the existing applications for existing phones without rewriting them. They really wanted to take these horrible little Java apps designed for tiny screens and keypads and just stick them on the iPhone. People thought touchscreen interfaces were garbage and a touchscreen keyboard would never be usable. By requiring people to pass their applications through Apple's store, Apple set itself up to be the arbiter of what makes a "good application" for these devices, and therefore gained control over making sure they didn't suffer the same fate as Windows tablets: same old desktop apps put on a touchscreen.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs wants to control distribution, at least early on in the development of these devices, in order to nudge developers toward his vision of what these devices should be. Even if Apple doesn't reject bad applications outright, they'd still have some control over which apps they promoted. Users have to go through iTunes to get their applications, and so when Apple puts an application right on the front page, it has the effect of shaping expectations. It says, "This is what an application should be." They'd have far less control in shaping the future of their devices if they didn't control application distribution.
And relatedly, these devices still aren't quite capable general-purpose computers. The hardware isn't that powerful, and the OS is somewhat limited. I think Apple started with everything being limited, and they're trying to grow conventions slowly and deliberately. The early lack of multitasking, for example-- I don't think that it was an oversight. I think they knew they'd eventually want some kind of multitasking, but they wanted to control how it would work, and they didn't have a great solution starting out. If they left the system open, then lots of developers would hack together various versions. If they had allowed that, then when they decided to release their own implementation, they'd be competing with a bunch of other implementations. Since they've prevented other solutions from growing organically, it's much easier for them to release something and say, "This is how everyone should do things," and expect that developers will fall into line.
Now I want to point out that I'm not defending Apple here or saying that their way is the best way. I'm just pointing out that there are multiple possible motives for Apple wanting to control distribution. And I think it's worth noting that, looking at all of these motives, they're likely to trend more toward openness as time goes on. Cell phone carriers are moving more and more towards being "dumb pipes" to the internet whether they like it or not. As Apple feels that their vision for these devices is coming to fruition, they'll probably easy up on the reigns. And also as the hardware becomes more powerful and iPhone OS becomes more capable, Apple shouldn't feel as much need to restrain developers from misusing system resources.
Well it's not as flashy, but there are some possible reasons to ask him to resubmit. First, their system might not really be build for retrieving rejected apps. It is possible that rejected apps are discarded, and they don't have easy access to a copy.
Also, it could specifically be about the PR. If they simply say, "Oh, yes, we changed our mind and we'll put this application on the store," then it's unclear what that means. It could be a specific instance of bending the rules for a Pulitzer Prize winner. By instead saying, "Please resubmit your app and it won't be disqualified for the reason stated earlier," they're actually signaling a change in policy: apps will not be discarded for this reason.
And having used computers and touchscreen things with and without stylus, I'm sure that I'm most accurate with mouse, and more accurate with stylus than with plain touchscreen.
I think you probably mean that you're more precise with a mouse or stylus, which is to say that you can exercise finer control than you can with your fingers. That was one of my points in an earlier post-- the mouse cursor is precise down to about a pixel, whereas a finger is only price to about 1cm^2 (smaller than that, I guess....25cm^2?).
So yes, a mouse or stylus will definitely beat a touchscreen in terms of precision. However, in terms of being able to hit various buttons at various places on the screen quickly and accurately, a touchscreen is probably best, followed by a stylus. But talking about it that way has brought up a different issue in my mind that we haven't even talked about: which interface is going to be best for allow you to hit multiple buttons at the same time? A multi-touch screen is the only option there. A mouse or stylus simply can't do it.
I doubt that it's a case of stripping away computer conventions and more of a case of prettifying the applications.
Well Apple specifically asked developers to not port the interface from existing desktop apps, but to model the look and interaction on real objects. Have you seen how you flip a page in Apple's ebook application? They're definitely thinking in terms of mimicking the interaction you have with real books, paper calendars, and pocket address books. It may not be explicitly thought out as "stripping away computer conventions", but I doubt that it's accidental. Apple's "prettiness" is usually not just about being pretty, but about creating a refined interface that's intuitive.
Thank you. I think the problem is that it's a meme that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. are pushing. Their lobbyists go to congress and claim that if they don't get bailed out and propped up, then no music or movies or art of any kind will be created anymore and the entire economy will implode.
Then again, the movement you will be making with the mouse will be smaller (with the acceleration and all) than the one required to touch a spot on the touchscreen.
Similarly, operating a touchscreen puts more strain on your arms since you're not resting your arms on your desk. Touchscreen operations might need to be shorter or more discrete. You might suppose that a person's hand will linger on the mouse, ready to respond to new input, but that touchscreen interactions should include a few gestures made all at once, and then rest.
These are all good examples of why touchscreen UIs might need to be significantly different than mouse-driven UIs.
And similarly to the difficulty of moving the cursor (which you've learned to do with 'hardware'), co-ordinating where your finger goes is more complicated than you probably recognize.
Right, but my point is that you are *considerably* more coordinated in controlling your arms than you in are in controlling a mouse curor. I don't care how much of a badass you are or how many years you've been playing FPS games, you're still more coordinated with your arms and fingers. You pretty well need to control all the same joints, but you then also have to adjust for cursor speed and cursor position. You probably overshoot your target all the time on your computer, though you might not realize it because it's so common. Unless you have some kind of disease or you're drunk, you probably don't overshoot with your fingers.
What you have to keep in mind is that you even subconsciously know the position of your fingers in space at all times. You can close your eyes and touch your nose. You can probably close your eyes and type a sentence. sitting with an iPad in your hands, I bet you could close your eyes and find the approximate center of the screen with your finger with a single poke. However, if you closed your eyes right now, without preparing or figuring out a clever strategy, I doubt you could move the mouse cursor to the center of your screen.
I just tried it myself: not even close. I might have been able to do it if I had at least figured out the starting point of my cursor before closing my eyes. As it was, I made a bad guess about my cursor's starting position and ended up in the top-right corner of my screen.
I wonder how far can you can go without losing the already existing frame of reference to computers that helps people to use such devises.
Maybe you lose the frame of reference that people have built up around "computers", but you potentially gain the frame of reference that people have built up around "touching things". I think that's why Apple encouraged developers to make their apps look like real physical things. Like the note-taking application looks like a notebook and the calendar app kind of looks like a date book. I think Apple is actively trying to strip away some of the computing conventions and replace them with real-world conventions.
It takes far less power than the CPU would take to do the same task, but that doesn't mean it takes no power. It doesn't even mean that it doesn't take a lot of power. It's just *less* power than the CPU.
Even with hardware support, decoding 720p H264 video will use up the battery about as much as anything. Maybe playing games would drain the power a little more, I don't know-- but then, there's hardware acceleration for the 3D rendering too.
I think that's pretty insightful. In trying to understand what Apple was doing with the iPad I had come to the conclusion that it wasn't meant to be used as a full computer any more than Microsoft intended the XBox to be a full computer. I hadn't drawn the connection between wanting to use it as a computer and geeks trying to hack everything. I mean, there are people who are seriously upset that Sony isn't supporting Linux on the PS3 anymore.
I'm not making fun of geeks for wanting to do that sort of thing. I understand it, and think it's a good impulse to want to take things apart, see what makes them tick, and repurpose them to make them more useful. However, it is a different mindset. Most people who buy game consoles buy them so they *don't* have to screw around with a computer. It's like, "I don't want to built and maintain a gaming rig, figure out all the compatibility issues, and then figure out how to connect it to my TV. I'll buy a console and I'll just use it to play games and maybe watch movies and a couple other things, and things will be simpler." Meanwhile there are geeks out there who are deciding which game console to buy on the basis of which allows them to screw around with it the most. Setting up a gaming rig is too simple, so they want some crazy custom hardware that they can poke around in.
That's not my concern with the iPad though. I've come to recognize that it's supposed to be a device, and not a computer. Still, I'm left with the uneasy question: if we start down this road, how many devices do I end up with? You know, like am I supposed to get a phone and an MP3 player and a camera and a game console and a internet streaming set-top box and a word processor and a home server and a... what? I don't know. The nice thing about computers is that you get one device that can do all sorts of things. If we're going to start supplanting computers with devices that only do a few things, than how many devices do I need?
How many devices need to have their own storage? How many need their own individual data plans? How many need their own GPS? How many should i be carrying at any one time? And when those questions are answered, you have to keep all your data in sync, or else decide what goes where and devise a backup strategy for all of it. I know, nobody is forcing you to buy all of these devices, but all still strikes me as poorly thought out, especially since we're talking about Apple. Like if I have an iPhone and an iPad then I have 2 devices that do most of the same things and have most of the same hardware, but not quite. A Mac mini hooked up to a TV will more or less do what an Apple TV does, but not quite as well, but on the other hand it can support Flash and Silverlight content whereas the AppleTV can't.
I mean, Apple is clearly heading in the direction of selling appliances/devices, but I just don't think the division is thought out terrifically well. There are big overlaps and big holes. I feel like Apple should select a random set of their target audience and do a study on how these devices are actually used, as well as how many things their customers want to do but can't.
Sorry, it's a bit of a rant and I might not be making sense at this point.
I repeat this over and over again a Tablet is not a desktop OS
One example I've been thinking about: pressing a button with a mouse vs. touchscreen. Mice are much more precise. It's a little arrow and the point is only 1 pixel wide. If the arrow's point is over something when you click on it, it can have accuracy down to the pixel. That's impossible with a finger. Instead of being able to hit a target the size of a pixel, you need the target to be at least... 1cm^2? Something in that neighborhood.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to seek the button out with your mouse cursor. I mean, it's not really hard, we're all used to it, but it's more complicated that you probably recognize. Just the first step, which you probably took for granted: you have to find the mouse cursor's current location. Then you have to guide the cursor to the desired location, which means calibrating the motion of your hand to the motion of the cursor. It used to be that if the location was far away, you'd have to move to the edge of your pad, reset the mouse to the other side of the pad, and then move it again. So that was annoying. They've overcome that by putting some kind of acceleration variable in the mouse's motion-- the faster you move it, the more your cursor moves for moving the mouse the same distance. (If that last sentence doesn't make sense, this might help.)
So in both cases, before acceleration and after, it means that it's harder to hit a precise point with your mouse that is far away from your current mouse position than to hit a button that's close. That's part of the reason we have toolbars that cluster all the controls into a tight area, because seeking around for buttons that are spaced far apart is relatively hard.
On a touchscreen, however, the situation is much easier. Touchscreens aren't precise, but they're as easy as pointing, and you're much more coordinated with your finger than with your mouse. This means that while the buttons need to be bigger, you can exercise much more freedom in their positioning.
The difference in pressing buttons alone is enough reason why touchscreen application UIs should be designed rom scratch, and not just pulled over from desktop applications.
the older product actually has 12-16 hour life compared to iPad's 8 hour life
For the record, the iPad has a *minimum* battery life of ~10 hours. So if you play 720p video all day long, your battery is supposed to last about 10 hours, and reviewers have said that it stands up to the claim. Standby time is supposed to be 1 month.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
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Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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I'd be wary of suggesting that we ever will or should have an official desktop. Some competition and cross-pollination helps us share interface ideas that work after having separate communities really find out what doesn't.
Yeah, also not everyone wants the same interface. What a programmer wants on his 24" screen is not necessarily the same as what my grandmother wants on her netbook. Diversity is good. There are some good places to standardize, e.g. file formats, networking protocols, and even filesystems, but the UI doesn't really need standardization across all computers.
Interesting point. Still, I think those are two totally different modes of attack, and they have to be evaluated differently. It might be possible, for example, that Opera is very careful to check their source code for vulnerabilities and malicious alterations, but to be less thorough in checking their proxy servers for vulnerabilities or protecting their proxies from employee snooping. That's not an accusation, by the way. I'm not saying Opera isn't guarding their proxies, just pointing out that securing their browser and securing their proxies are two different things.
There's also the issue of convenience, and the likelihood of being caught. To give a more concrete example, imagine you ran a small business. You might trust your employees to not break into your petty cash lock-box, even if the employees know where it is and it's effectively unguarded. However, you might still not want to leave a couple thousand dollars in uncounted small bills loose on your desk. Trust isn't a binary thing. It's not "either you do or you don't."
If Opera included spyware in their browser, it would be a pretty bold move. If they were sending private data out, there's a decent chance someone would catch them. It's not a lot to trust that they wouldn't do something that stupid. It takes a higher level of trust IMO to purposefully send your unencrypted banking information to Opera's servers and assume that no one will bother to look.
I think this is the first time I'll be agreeing with you, commodore64_love. Now personally, I tried out Opera Mini on the iPhone and still like Safari better, but who cares what I like? Preferences vary. Which features you use varies. If it's your phone, the important thing shouldn't be what I like or what Apple likes, but what you like.
Well I'm just responding to the complaint that this is a "data grab" by Microsoft by saying that I *like* the idea of all the data from my phone being automatically synced to online accounts. I even like the idea of all of my data being synced to the same online account.
I'm thinking about getting a Nexus One, and one of the reasons is that it's supposed to have good support for Google Voice. I already use Gmail and Google Talk, so my IMs and emails essentially go to the same inbox (IMs don't actually go to the inbox, but they're managed in the same system). With Google Voice, I could have my SMS messages and voicemails go to that same inbox. That's *really* appealing in my mind. I hate having my communications spread all over different services on different devices.
Does the Nexus One have an option so that whenever you take a picture, it's automatically synced to Picasa? That's another feature I'd like to see. I don't want to have to plug my camera into my computer, download the pictures through USB, sort the pictures, and then upload them to the Internet. I want it so my camera to sync pictures to the internet immediately by default. I'm sure someone here would think that's a dumb idea, but it's what I'd like.
Yeah, I actually kind of like this, coming from Microsoft.
Here's the thing: for the past decade or so, I haven't been a huge fan of Microsoft. They're big and lumbering and sloppy. One of the things I've commented on here before is how Microsoft's design philosophy is different from Apple's, and how Apple's is basically better. The short version: Apple's first release of a device is relatively simple, but very well put together and targeted toward specific uses and maybe even a specific audience, and then they add new features and evolve the device over time, giving an excellent user experience. Microsoft, on the other hand, tends to try to cram every possible thing into the first generation of their device, and it's such a big mess that it has to be redesigned, have bad features stripped out, etc. As a result, Microsoft earned a reputation for having their products be completely unusable until v.4, and even then you want to wait for SP1.
So to me, it's refreshing to see some discipline and restraint in the design for a Microsoft product. I want to say, "Yes, don't put in every single feature you can think of and the kitchen sink. Start by making sure that whatever the device does, it does it well. Build from there."
I don't know, after reading about these phones, one of the most appealing features sounds like the ability to have all your data available online.
One of the things I really want out of a phone is to not have my data stuck on my phone. Like I love the idea of Google Voice-- being able to have all my SMS and voicemail messages getting forwarded/stored in my email. I also like the idea that, when you take a picture with your camera, it automatically gets uploaded to a Flickr/Picasa sort of service.
I want my data to be available to me. Yes, I also want privacy controls so I can decide whether I want to share it or keep it to myself. Ideally it would also be portable-- that I could choose whether I wanted to use Microsoft's servers, Google's servers, or Yahoo's servers. Still, I think the idea is good.
Well to clarify, I was just saying it will make it harder for the patent holders to collect money on patents in *other* codecs, by which I mean, why would I pay for H264 if VP8 is just as good but free? I don't think that opens them to lawsuits any more than releasing a new version of Ubuntu opens Canonical to lawsuits from Microsoft.
And that's a pretty good example, because if Ubuntu were successful enough and they agitated Microsoft enough, Microsoft might very well go looking for grounds to sue Canonical, but it couldn't be for something like, "depriving Microsoft of market share."
So similarly, someone might go looking to sue Google, but someone could also go looking to sue Xiph, or anyone distributing H264 encoders. It's possible that VP8 has some patent issues, but I would guess that Google has calculated those risks and is willing to deal with the fallout in order to improve web standards.
Yeah, sure. I didn't know that coaxial cable with BNC connectors was still considered "ethernet cable". When I was relatively new to IT, one of my early jobs involved yanking old network infrastructure and replacing it with new, and the language used by the boss and other guys on the job was, "we're replacing this old BNC stuff with Ethernet." I was also yanking some other kind of cable with different connectors for terminals, but I don't think anyone there knew what it was called. We were all pretty new to the stuff, and everyone got where they were by figuring stuff out more than any formal training.
Ah, memories.
So as a result, I guess my terminology was always confused. I always thought (until just now) that "Ethernet cable" referenced the combination of twisted pair copper and RJ45 connectors, whether it was cat3, cat5, or whatever, and that BNC was the combination of coaxial cable with a BNC connector.
I think my point still stands, though. Standards =/= lock-in. Settling on a standard doesn't need to prevent you from using something else when it's appropriate, it shouldn't stop others from trying to come up with better standards, and it doesn't need to keep you from upgrading to better standards when the time comes.
Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV.
There are a lot of misunderstandings about this stuff, but Flash didn't really solve the problem you think it solved. The fact is, back in those days, almost everyone had Real Media Player and Windows Media Player and Quicktime installed anyway. The bigger problem was, even if you could assume people had a decoder, you couldn't embed the video in the page very well. You couldn't control how the player worked, and you couldn't necessarily control whether the movie started to download and play immediately on page load. It was just a messy system and HTML didn't have controls do deal with it.
The pro-Flash people in this debate seem to think it's an issue of media formats, and the choice is Theora, H264, or Flash, and Flash is somehow magically supported by all browsers everywhere. That's not it. "Flash" isn't a format in this discussion, it's a media player that plays H264 files. So the choice is, do you want to play Theora in the player of your choice, play H264 in the player of your choice, or be forced to play the same H264 in the media player of someone else's choice. It's not much different than if you had MPEG files that could play anywhere, but the convention was to force people to only let them play in Quicktime. As far as media players go, Flash has good market penetration but it performs poorly and crashes a lot.
And for the record, Flash doesn't just work on everything. You generally have to install it.
For a start, GIF and PNG are used quite differently to JPEG
Well... there are reasons why you might use one rather than the others, but I'm not sure I'd say that they're "used quite differently". It certainly isn't necessary to support both GIF and PNG, but browsers do it anyway.
All videos are pretty much the same, unless someone comes up with a codec for low-colour animation or something.
Not quite true. Some video codecs perform better at lower bitrates while others perform better at higher bitrates. Some look worse but require less processing power. Some compression techniques are better than others at compressing cartoons, as a matter of fact.
It is a bit of a nightmare and is holding back HTML5 media adoption.
Well, it's more like a hiccup. HTML is going to take some time no matter what, and some other issues with the "video" tag are still being worked out. The "video" tag has only been supported at all in any browsers for a few months. Everyone who supports the "video" tag already supports H264 except for Firefox. Firefox probably would have found some method of supporting H264 anyway, but they might not have to if Google is throwing their weight behind VP8.
IE plays nothing currently. It is a mess.
Well IE is a mess and it's late to the party, but IE9 is coming out soon, it will have support for the "video" tag, and it will support H264.
I was thinking of jpeg2000 [wikipedia.org], but other formats exist.
Does JPEG2000 actually make much of a difference for most use cases? I thought it was a niche product with patent issues.
I think you misunderstood my point. By entering what is essentially a competitive software product (VP8 codec) into the infrastructure, you lose all the benefits that competition provides.
Not entirely. The availability of VP8 won't prevent people from using other codecs if they want to. If someone comes up with a better codec, people will still be free to use it. If there's no competition, it will be because VP8 is the best thing out there, not because people are locked in.
Ethernet won out over BNC years ago, but that doesn't stop people from using coax when it's appropriate, and it hasn't stopped people from upgrading to fiber.
This is where the market should decide which technology they like better.
It seems like the market is free to decide, and you're worrying (for reasons I can't quite make out) that they might decide on VP8.
Take two competing plugin runtimes: Flash vs Java. Neither is part of any standard, but one became the de facto standard applet implementation technology on the web.
Which one is that? I hardly see applets on the web. I see Java pop up for things now and then, and Flash gets used for videos and games. But as I said, I don't see a lot of applets these days. Most of the good stuff on the web is done with HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases like MySQL, languages like PHP, etc.
If the standards committee decided at the outset that Java should be part of the web browsing technology standard, we'd never have seen something as good as Flash (YMMV) and Java itself would have stagnated.
Not sure what to make of that claim. Both Java and Flash have been fairly stagnant as platforms as far as I can tell (granted, I'm not a developer). Meanwhile, the inclusion of Javascript support in browsers hasn't ruined all other programming languages. The standard support for HTML hasn't killed off all other markup languages. I think you need some better examples to make your point. (or maybe at least some bad analogies)
If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264.
Right. If Google can cut the energy/resource costs of converting all those Youtube videos, along with the storage costs and bandwidth costs if the file sizes are smaller, then the investment might be very worthwhile for them on that basis alone. Knowing they don't have to deal with licensing issues could be icing on the cake.
Beyond that, Google has made it clear that they believe improving the Internet is good for their business. They don't need to get money from you directly or even need you to visit their sites. It's not a perfect metaphor, but Google:the Internet:: "The House":A casino. Even when you're playing with other players, the house still gets a cut. The house always makes its money. They can comp some players their drinks, lose a few hands, and it doesn't matter. They're still making money.
Google makes money from Youtube, but they also make money from ad revenue on other video sites. They also make money from Firefox, which is the only major browser affected by the H264 patent problems. I don't imagine that Google really has any interest in running around suing people for something this petty anyway.
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If this is the case then why is storage relevant? It's the bandwidth necessary to get the data out;
Well even if you're storing the data on the Internet, you still have to store it someplace. Like you could store it on Amazon's S3, but you'll want to know how much it will cost you.
Well the claim is that these were probably supposed to be camouflaged a bit to look like normal iPhones, and that the casing probably isn't what the final thing will look like.
Bah, who knows.
Even if legitimate, wouldn't it be a little iffy? You say:
"Linux desktop compatible" should support Qt as well as gtk.
But according to who? You could have a Linux desktop distribution that didn't support Qt.
Most people assume that Apple's iPhone lockdown is entirely in order to get their cut of application sales. That is probably part of it, but I think there are additional forces at work.
First, as you bring up, there's the AT&T issue. Most likely, Apple has some contractual obligation to AT&T to prevent specific kinds of applications and features from being available on the iPhone. Early on, there were signs that Apple was trying to prevent IM clients and VoIP clients, both of which cut into AT&T's service fees. Some of those restrictions have have been eased, but tethering, for example, is still something that AT&T doesn't want Apple to provide. Apple can't prevent these applications unless they control distribution.
Second and slightly less obvious: for better or worse, Steve Jobs is a control freak who wants to change how you think of your computer. When the iPhone first came out, lots of people were pissed off because it didn't support JVM and so they couldn't simply port over all the existing applications for existing phones without rewriting them. They really wanted to take these horrible little Java apps designed for tiny screens and keypads and just stick them on the iPhone. People thought touchscreen interfaces were garbage and a touchscreen keyboard would never be usable. By requiring people to pass their applications through Apple's store, Apple set itself up to be the arbiter of what makes a "good application" for these devices, and therefore gained control over making sure they didn't suffer the same fate as Windows tablets: same old desktop apps put on a touchscreen.
I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs wants to control distribution, at least early on in the development of these devices, in order to nudge developers toward his vision of what these devices should be. Even if Apple doesn't reject bad applications outright, they'd still have some control over which apps they promoted. Users have to go through iTunes to get their applications, and so when Apple puts an application right on the front page, it has the effect of shaping expectations. It says, "This is what an application should be." They'd have far less control in shaping the future of their devices if they didn't control application distribution.
And relatedly, these devices still aren't quite capable general-purpose computers. The hardware isn't that powerful, and the OS is somewhat limited. I think Apple started with everything being limited, and they're trying to grow conventions slowly and deliberately. The early lack of multitasking, for example-- I don't think that it was an oversight. I think they knew they'd eventually want some kind of multitasking, but they wanted to control how it would work, and they didn't have a great solution starting out. If they left the system open, then lots of developers would hack together various versions. If they had allowed that, then when they decided to release their own implementation, they'd be competing with a bunch of other implementations. Since they've prevented other solutions from growing organically, it's much easier for them to release something and say, "This is how everyone should do things," and expect that developers will fall into line.
Now I want to point out that I'm not defending Apple here or saying that their way is the best way. I'm just pointing out that there are multiple possible motives for Apple wanting to control distribution. And I think it's worth noting that, looking at all of these motives, they're likely to trend more toward openness as time goes on. Cell phone carriers are moving more and more towards being "dumb pipes" to the internet whether they like it or not. As Apple feels that their vision for these devices is coming to fruition, they'll probably easy up on the reigns. And also as the hardware becomes more powerful and iPhone OS becomes more capable, Apple shouldn't feel as much need to restrain developers from misusing system resources.
Well it's not as flashy, but there are some possible reasons to ask him to resubmit. First, their system might not really be build for retrieving rejected apps. It is possible that rejected apps are discarded, and they don't have easy access to a copy.
Also, it could specifically be about the PR. If they simply say, "Oh, yes, we changed our mind and we'll put this application on the store," then it's unclear what that means. It could be a specific instance of bending the rules for a Pulitzer Prize winner. By instead saying, "Please resubmit your app and it won't be disqualified for the reason stated earlier," they're actually signaling a change in policy: apps will not be discarded for this reason.
And having used computers and touchscreen things with and without stylus, I'm sure that I'm most accurate with mouse, and more accurate with stylus than with plain touchscreen.
I think you probably mean that you're more precise with a mouse or stylus, which is to say that you can exercise finer control than you can with your fingers. That was one of my points in an earlier post-- the mouse cursor is precise down to about a pixel, whereas a finger is only price to about 1cm^2 (smaller than that, I guess... .25cm^2?).
So yes, a mouse or stylus will definitely beat a touchscreen in terms of precision. However, in terms of being able to hit various buttons at various places on the screen quickly and accurately, a touchscreen is probably best, followed by a stylus. But talking about it that way has brought up a different issue in my mind that we haven't even talked about: which interface is going to be best for allow you to hit multiple buttons at the same time? A multi-touch screen is the only option there. A mouse or stylus simply can't do it.
I doubt that it's a case of stripping away computer conventions and more of a case of prettifying the applications.
Well Apple specifically asked developers to not port the interface from existing desktop apps, but to model the look and interaction on real objects. Have you seen how you flip a page in Apple's ebook application? They're definitely thinking in terms of mimicking the interaction you have with real books, paper calendars, and pocket address books. It may not be explicitly thought out as "stripping away computer conventions", but I doubt that it's accidental. Apple's "prettiness" is usually not just about being pretty, but about creating a refined interface that's intuitive.
Thank you. I think the problem is that it's a meme that the RIAA, MPAA, etc. are pushing. Their lobbyists go to congress and claim that if they don't get bailed out and propped up, then no music or movies or art of any kind will be created anymore and the entire economy will implode.
Then again, the movement you will be making with the mouse will be smaller (with the acceleration and all) than the one required to touch a spot on the touchscreen.
Similarly, operating a touchscreen puts more strain on your arms since you're not resting your arms on your desk. Touchscreen operations might need to be shorter or more discrete. You might suppose that a person's hand will linger on the mouse, ready to respond to new input, but that touchscreen interactions should include a few gestures made all at once, and then rest.
These are all good examples of why touchscreen UIs might need to be significantly different than mouse-driven UIs.
And similarly to the difficulty of moving the cursor (which you've learned to do with 'hardware'), co-ordinating where your finger goes is more complicated than you probably recognize.
Right, but my point is that you are *considerably* more coordinated in controlling your arms than you in are in controlling a mouse curor. I don't care how much of a badass you are or how many years you've been playing FPS games, you're still more coordinated with your arms and fingers. You pretty well need to control all the same joints, but you then also have to adjust for cursor speed and cursor position. You probably overshoot your target all the time on your computer, though you might not realize it because it's so common. Unless you have some kind of disease or you're drunk, you probably don't overshoot with your fingers.
What you have to keep in mind is that you even subconsciously know the position of your fingers in space at all times. You can close your eyes and touch your nose. You can probably close your eyes and type a sentence. sitting with an iPad in your hands, I bet you could close your eyes and find the approximate center of the screen with your finger with a single poke. However, if you closed your eyes right now, without preparing or figuring out a clever strategy, I doubt you could move the mouse cursor to the center of your screen.
I just tried it myself: not even close. I might have been able to do it if I had at least figured out the starting point of my cursor before closing my eyes. As it was, I made a bad guess about my cursor's starting position and ended up in the top-right corner of my screen.
I wonder how far can you can go without losing the already existing frame of reference to computers that helps people to use such devises.
Maybe you lose the frame of reference that people have built up around "computers", but you potentially gain the frame of reference that people have built up around "touching things". I think that's why Apple encouraged developers to make their apps look like real physical things. Like the note-taking application looks like a notebook and the calendar app kind of looks like a date book. I think Apple is actively trying to strip away some of the computing conventions and replace them with real-world conventions.
It takes far less power than the CPU would take to do the same task, but that doesn't mean it takes no power. It doesn't even mean that it doesn't take a lot of power. It's just *less* power than the CPU.
Even with hardware support, decoding 720p H264 video will use up the battery about as much as anything. Maybe playing games would drain the power a little more, I don't know-- but then, there's hardware acceleration for the 3D rendering too.
Playing video all day long doesn't use much CPU, if any, since it's all offloaded to dedicated hardware.
And the dedicated hardware is powered by pixie dust?
I think that's pretty insightful. In trying to understand what Apple was doing with the iPad I had come to the conclusion that it wasn't meant to be used as a full computer any more than Microsoft intended the XBox to be a full computer. I hadn't drawn the connection between wanting to use it as a computer and geeks trying to hack everything. I mean, there are people who are seriously upset that Sony isn't supporting Linux on the PS3 anymore.
I'm not making fun of geeks for wanting to do that sort of thing. I understand it, and think it's a good impulse to want to take things apart, see what makes them tick, and repurpose them to make them more useful. However, it is a different mindset. Most people who buy game consoles buy them so they *don't* have to screw around with a computer. It's like, "I don't want to built and maintain a gaming rig, figure out all the compatibility issues, and then figure out how to connect it to my TV. I'll buy a console and I'll just use it to play games and maybe watch movies and a couple other things, and things will be simpler." Meanwhile there are geeks out there who are deciding which game console to buy on the basis of which allows them to screw around with it the most. Setting up a gaming rig is too simple, so they want some crazy custom hardware that they can poke around in.
That's not my concern with the iPad though. I've come to recognize that it's supposed to be a device, and not a computer. Still, I'm left with the uneasy question: if we start down this road, how many devices do I end up with? You know, like am I supposed to get a phone and an MP3 player and a camera and a game console and a internet streaming set-top box and a word processor and a home server and a... what? I don't know. The nice thing about computers is that you get one device that can do all sorts of things. If we're going to start supplanting computers with devices that only do a few things, than how many devices do I need?
How many devices need to have their own storage? How many need their own individual data plans? How many need their own GPS? How many should i be carrying at any one time? And when those questions are answered, you have to keep all your data in sync, or else decide what goes where and devise a backup strategy for all of it. I know, nobody is forcing you to buy all of these devices, but all still strikes me as poorly thought out, especially since we're talking about Apple. Like if I have an iPhone and an iPad then I have 2 devices that do most of the same things and have most of the same hardware, but not quite. A Mac mini hooked up to a TV will more or less do what an Apple TV does, but not quite as well, but on the other hand it can support Flash and Silverlight content whereas the AppleTV can't.
I mean, Apple is clearly heading in the direction of selling appliances/devices, but I just don't think the division is thought out terrifically well. There are big overlaps and big holes. I feel like Apple should select a random set of their target audience and do a study on how these devices are actually used, as well as how many things their customers want to do but can't.
Sorry, it's a bit of a rant and I might not be making sense at this point.
I repeat this over and over again a Tablet is not a desktop OS
One example I've been thinking about: pressing a button with a mouse vs. touchscreen. Mice are much more precise. It's a little arrow and the point is only 1 pixel wide. If the arrow's point is over something when you click on it, it can have accuracy down to the pixel. That's impossible with a finger. Instead of being able to hit a target the size of a pixel, you need the target to be at least... 1cm^2? Something in that neighborhood.
On the other hand, it's pretty hard to seek the button out with your mouse cursor. I mean, it's not really hard, we're all used to it, but it's more complicated that you probably recognize. Just the first step, which you probably took for granted: you have to find the mouse cursor's current location. Then you have to guide the cursor to the desired location, which means calibrating the motion of your hand to the motion of the cursor. It used to be that if the location was far away, you'd have to move to the edge of your pad, reset the mouse to the other side of the pad, and then move it again. So that was annoying. They've overcome that by putting some kind of acceleration variable in the mouse's motion-- the faster you move it, the more your cursor moves for moving the mouse the same distance. (If that last sentence doesn't make sense, this might help.)
So in both cases, before acceleration and after, it means that it's harder to hit a precise point with your mouse that is far away from your current mouse position than to hit a button that's close. That's part of the reason we have toolbars that cluster all the controls into a tight area, because seeking around for buttons that are spaced far apart is relatively hard.
On a touchscreen, however, the situation is much easier. Touchscreens aren't precise, but they're as easy as pointing, and you're much more coordinated with your finger than with your mouse. This means that while the buttons need to be bigger, you can exercise much more freedom in their positioning.
The difference in pressing buttons alone is enough reason why touchscreen application UIs should be designed rom scratch, and not just pulled over from desktop applications.
the older product actually has 12-16 hour life compared to iPad's 8 hour life
For the record, the iPad has a *minimum* battery life of ~10 hours. So if you play 720p video all day long, your battery is supposed to last about 10 hours, and reviewers have said that it stands up to the claim. Standby time is supposed to be 1 month.
I'd be wary of suggesting that we ever will or should have an official desktop. Some competition and cross-pollination helps us share interface ideas that work after having separate communities really find out what doesn't.
Yeah, also not everyone wants the same interface. What a programmer wants on his 24" screen is not necessarily the same as what my grandmother wants on her netbook. Diversity is good. There are some good places to standardize, e.g. file formats, networking protocols, and even filesystems, but the UI doesn't really need standardization across all computers.
Interesting point. Still, I think those are two totally different modes of attack, and they have to be evaluated differently. It might be possible, for example, that Opera is very careful to check their source code for vulnerabilities and malicious alterations, but to be less thorough in checking their proxy servers for vulnerabilities or protecting their proxies from employee snooping. That's not an accusation, by the way. I'm not saying Opera isn't guarding their proxies, just pointing out that securing their browser and securing their proxies are two different things.
There's also the issue of convenience, and the likelihood of being caught. To give a more concrete example, imagine you ran a small business. You might trust your employees to not break into your petty cash lock-box, even if the employees know where it is and it's effectively unguarded. However, you might still not want to leave a couple thousand dollars in uncounted small bills loose on your desk. Trust isn't a binary thing. It's not "either you do or you don't."
If Opera included spyware in their browser, it would be a pretty bold move. If they were sending private data out, there's a decent chance someone would catch them. It's not a lot to trust that they wouldn't do something that stupid. It takes a higher level of trust IMO to purposefully send your unencrypted banking information to Opera's servers and assume that no one will bother to look.
I think this is the first time I'll be agreeing with you, commodore64_love. Now personally, I tried out Opera Mini on the iPhone and still like Safari better, but who cares what I like? Preferences vary. Which features you use varies. If it's your phone, the important thing shouldn't be what I like or what Apple likes, but what you like.
Well I'm just responding to the complaint that this is a "data grab" by Microsoft by saying that I *like* the idea of all the data from my phone being automatically synced to online accounts. I even like the idea of all of my data being synced to the same online account.
I'm thinking about getting a Nexus One, and one of the reasons is that it's supposed to have good support for Google Voice. I already use Gmail and Google Talk, so my IMs and emails essentially go to the same inbox (IMs don't actually go to the inbox, but they're managed in the same system). With Google Voice, I could have my SMS messages and voicemails go to that same inbox. That's *really* appealing in my mind. I hate having my communications spread all over different services on different devices.
Does the Nexus One have an option so that whenever you take a picture, it's automatically synced to Picasa? That's another feature I'd like to see. I don't want to have to plug my camera into my computer, download the pictures through USB, sort the pictures, and then upload them to the Internet. I want it so my camera to sync pictures to the internet immediately by default. I'm sure someone here would think that's a dumb idea, but it's what I'd like.
Yeah, I actually kind of like this, coming from Microsoft.
Here's the thing: for the past decade or so, I haven't been a huge fan of Microsoft. They're big and lumbering and sloppy. One of the things I've commented on here before is how Microsoft's design philosophy is different from Apple's, and how Apple's is basically better. The short version: Apple's first release of a device is relatively simple, but very well put together and targeted toward specific uses and maybe even a specific audience, and then they add new features and evolve the device over time, giving an excellent user experience. Microsoft, on the other hand, tends to try to cram every possible thing into the first generation of their device, and it's such a big mess that it has to be redesigned, have bad features stripped out, etc. As a result, Microsoft earned a reputation for having their products be completely unusable until v.4, and even then you want to wait for SP1.
So to me, it's refreshing to see some discipline and restraint in the design for a Microsoft product. I want to say, "Yes, don't put in every single feature you can think of and the kitchen sink. Start by making sure that whatever the device does, it does it well. Build from there."
I don't know, after reading about these phones, one of the most appealing features sounds like the ability to have all your data available online.
One of the things I really want out of a phone is to not have my data stuck on my phone. Like I love the idea of Google Voice-- being able to have all my SMS and voicemail messages getting forwarded/stored in my email. I also like the idea that, when you take a picture with your camera, it automatically gets uploaded to a Flickr/Picasa sort of service.
I want my data to be available to me. Yes, I also want privacy controls so I can decide whether I want to share it or keep it to myself. Ideally it would also be portable-- that I could choose whether I wanted to use Microsoft's servers, Google's servers, or Yahoo's servers. Still, I think the idea is good.
Well to clarify, I was just saying it will make it harder for the patent holders to collect money on patents in *other* codecs, by which I mean, why would I pay for H264 if VP8 is just as good but free? I don't think that opens them to lawsuits any more than releasing a new version of Ubuntu opens Canonical to lawsuits from Microsoft.
And that's a pretty good example, because if Ubuntu were successful enough and they agitated Microsoft enough, Microsoft might very well go looking for grounds to sue Canonical, but it couldn't be for something like, "depriving Microsoft of market share."
So similarly, someone might go looking to sue Google, but someone could also go looking to sue Xiph, or anyone distributing H264 encoders. It's possible that VP8 has some patent issues, but I would guess that Google has calculated those risks and is willing to deal with the fallout in order to improve web standards.
Yeah, sure. I didn't know that coaxial cable with BNC connectors was still considered "ethernet cable". When I was relatively new to IT, one of my early jobs involved yanking old network infrastructure and replacing it with new, and the language used by the boss and other guys on the job was, "we're replacing this old BNC stuff with Ethernet." I was also yanking some other kind of cable with different connectors for terminals, but I don't think anyone there knew what it was called. We were all pretty new to the stuff, and everyone got where they were by figuring stuff out more than any formal training.
Ah, memories.
So as a result, I guess my terminology was always confused. I always thought (until just now) that "Ethernet cable" referenced the combination of twisted pair copper and RJ45 connectors, whether it was cat3, cat5, or whatever, and that BNC was the combination of coaxial cable with a BNC connector.
I think my point still stands, though. Standards =/= lock-in. Settling on a standard doesn't need to prevent you from using something else when it's appropriate, it shouldn't stop others from trying to come up with better standards, and it doesn't need to keep you from upgrading to better standards when the time comes.
Put it this way: back in the day before Flash video became popular some sites used Quicktime for video, some used Real, and some used WMV.
There are a lot of misunderstandings about this stuff, but Flash didn't really solve the problem you think it solved. The fact is, back in those days, almost everyone had Real Media Player and Windows Media Player and Quicktime installed anyway. The bigger problem was, even if you could assume people had a decoder, you couldn't embed the video in the page very well. You couldn't control how the player worked, and you couldn't necessarily control whether the movie started to download and play immediately on page load. It was just a messy system and HTML didn't have controls do deal with it.
The pro-Flash people in this debate seem to think it's an issue of media formats, and the choice is Theora, H264, or Flash, and Flash is somehow magically supported by all browsers everywhere. That's not it. "Flash" isn't a format in this discussion, it's a media player that plays H264 files. So the choice is, do you want to play Theora in the player of your choice, play H264 in the player of your choice, or be forced to play the same H264 in the media player of someone else's choice. It's not much different than if you had MPEG files that could play anywhere, but the convention was to force people to only let them play in Quicktime. As far as media players go, Flash has good market penetration but it performs poorly and crashes a lot.
And for the record, Flash doesn't just work on everything. You generally have to install it.
For a start, GIF and PNG are used quite differently to JPEG
Well... there are reasons why you might use one rather than the others, but I'm not sure I'd say that they're "used quite differently". It certainly isn't necessary to support both GIF and PNG, but browsers do it anyway.
All videos are pretty much the same, unless someone comes up with a codec for low-colour animation or something.
Not quite true. Some video codecs perform better at lower bitrates while others perform better at higher bitrates. Some look worse but require less processing power. Some compression techniques are better than others at compressing cartoons, as a matter of fact.
It is a bit of a nightmare and is holding back HTML5 media adoption.
Well, it's more like a hiccup. HTML is going to take some time no matter what, and some other issues with the "video" tag are still being worked out. The "video" tag has only been supported at all in any browsers for a few months. Everyone who supports the "video" tag already supports H264 except for Firefox. Firefox probably would have found some method of supporting H264 anyway, but they might not have to if Google is throwing their weight behind VP8.
IE plays nothing currently. It is a mess.
Well IE is a mess and it's late to the party, but IE9 is coming out soon, it will have support for the "video" tag, and it will support H264.
I was thinking of jpeg2000 [wikipedia.org], but other formats exist.
Does JPEG2000 actually make much of a difference for most use cases? I thought it was a niche product with patent issues.
I think you misunderstood my point. By entering what is essentially a competitive software product (VP8 codec) into the infrastructure, you lose all the benefits that competition provides.
Not entirely. The availability of VP8 won't prevent people from using other codecs if they want to. If someone comes up with a better codec, people will still be free to use it. If there's no competition, it will be because VP8 is the best thing out there, not because people are locked in.
Ethernet won out over BNC years ago, but that doesn't stop people from using coax when it's appropriate, and it hasn't stopped people from upgrading to fiber.
This is where the market should decide which technology they like better.
It seems like the market is free to decide, and you're worrying (for reasons I can't quite make out) that they might decide on VP8.
Take two competing plugin runtimes: Flash vs Java. Neither is part of any standard, but one became the de facto standard applet implementation technology on the web.
Which one is that? I hardly see applets on the web. I see Java pop up for things now and then, and Flash gets used for videos and games. But as I said, I don't see a lot of applets these days. Most of the good stuff on the web is done with HTML, CSS, Javascript, databases like MySQL, languages like PHP, etc.
If the standards committee decided at the outset that Java should be part of the web browsing technology standard, we'd never have seen something as good as Flash (YMMV) and Java itself would have stagnated.
Not sure what to make of that claim. Both Java and Flash have been fairly stagnant as platforms as far as I can tell (granted, I'm not a developer). Meanwhile, the inclusion of Javascript support in browsers hasn't ruined all other programming languages. The standard support for HTML hasn't killed off all other markup languages. I think you need some better examples to make your point. (or maybe at least some bad analogies)
If VP8 really is as good as On2 claimed, Google could save some pretty good money by serving up YouTube videos in VP8 format instead of H264.
Right. If Google can cut the energy/resource costs of converting all those Youtube videos, along with the storage costs and bandwidth costs if the file sizes are smaller, then the investment might be very worthwhile for them on that basis alone. Knowing they don't have to deal with licensing issues could be icing on the cake.
Beyond that, Google has made it clear that they believe improving the Internet is good for their business. They don't need to get money from you directly or even need you to visit their sites. It's not a perfect metaphor, but Google:the Internet :: "The House":A casino. Even when you're playing with other players, the house still gets a cut. The house always makes its money. They can comp some players their drinks, lose a few hands, and it doesn't matter. They're still making money.
Google makes money from Youtube, but they also make money from ad revenue on other video sites. They also make money from Firefox, which is the only major browser affected by the H264 patent problems. I don't imagine that Google really has any interest in running around suing people for something this petty anyway.