There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains.
Er... we have multiple incompatible graphic formats on web pages, and nobody says much about it anymore. Once upon the time, people were concerned about GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG, and now it's apparently such a non-issue that you don't even realize that web pages aren't all using JPEG.
HTML5 doesn't necessarily need to standardize on a single format. You're confusing the issue. It's not about forcing everyone to use the same format, it's about having some selection of high-quality formats (or at least 1) that everyone can use everywhere, including devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones.
Out of curiosity, what are these better ways of storing photos than JPEG, and in which ways are they better?
First, I doubt that it will lock out competing codecs. At best, it will create a common interchange format. There's no reason why software wouldn't continue to support whatever codecs were useful to people. The only thing it might do is make it hard for patent holders on other codecs to get people to pay for licensing fees, if there's a superior royalty-free format available.
I also disagree that video codecs aren't "infrastructure". In my opinion, all file formats are infrastructure and are required for interoperability and compatibility. People can freely dream up new applications while still standardizing the formats those applications output to.
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
I read a comment to the same effect, but I'm left wondering how true it is. Are all the devices (phones, computers, set-top boxes) using reprogrammable DSPs, or just some? If just some, then what percentage?
Also, does it matter that these DSPs weren't designed with VP8 in mind, or are these DSPs just completely reprogrammable, or...? Or to ask it another way, would one of these DSPs that was intended to decode H264 be designed exactly the same if it were intended to decode VP8?
Well it's bad word choice in the article (and summary) to talk about "open source" when, you're right, the real issue is patents. However, every indication is that Google intends to release the codec under a royalty-free patent. From the Google press release regarding the acquisition of On2:
"Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google. "We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2's team and technology will help us further that goal."
Now that's certainly not definitive, but this happened right after browsers started implementing the video tag, with everyone arguing about H264 vs. Theora. I think the subtext was pretty clear: Google intended to resolve the situation.
What's more, the article says:
...with that release, Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.
Now Mozilla was the holdout with H264, so I can't imagine that they're on board if there will still be patent problems. I expect that when this is made official, you'll find that the patents have been licensed in a way that is irrevocably royalty-free. After all, Google doesn't need codec license money. The whole project might be worth it to them if it just makes it cheaper to run YouTube.
Re:Its all about the command line stupid....
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I've seen helpful responses from the Linux community, and I've seen hateful and petty responses. Like most communities, its membership isn't uniform.
Supporting resolutions of unknown displays: I'm not an expert there and I don't know. I know I've had Windows limit resolution and refesh rate combinations based on the displays that I've had, so it's detecting something. If the manufacturer made it difficult for Linux to detect that whatever-it-is, then they might not want to go outside of a safe range for fear of damaging your monitor.
Re:Its all about the command line stupid....
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So? I already acknowledged that Ubuntu might not support the hardware in your computer. This isn't unique to Linux. If Windows doesn't recognize your hardware, then it's not going to work right either. Your complaint shouldn't be, "Linux requires you to use the command line," but rather "Linux doesn't support all of my hardware."
Which... ok, that's a valid complaint. It's worth noting that it's largely the fault of manufacturers for failing to support Linux, but I know that's cold comfort if your computer isn't working.
On a side note, I really wish people wouldn't run around calling each other dumb-asses over things like this. It's completely unnecessary and counter-productive.
Re:Its all about the command line stupid....
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It's entirely possible that your hardware isn't well supported by Ubuntu, but I absolutely guarantee you that it's possible to install and run Ubuntu without going into the command line once. You can set the resolution through a GUI available under the user preferences. You can even configure multi-monitor support. I know this for a fact because I've done it on multiple computers.
Re:Its all about the command line stupid....
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I think the whole discussion is moot. You don't need to use the command line to use modern Linux operating systems.
Umm so can we all just agree there is a certain group of people that will buy whatever Steve tells them they need and hype it for him endlessly?
I think there is some truth to this, but it's more like "there is a certain group of people who have been so pleased with past/present Apple products that they'll be excited to try any new Apple products which are released."
That doesn't mean they're morons or sheep. I'm going to buy Portal 2 as soon as it comes out, but it's not because I'm mindlessly buying whatever Valve releases because I've been brainwashed. It's because I've loved all the Half Life games and think that Portal was one of the best things since sliced bread. I'm also going to try out Ubuntu 10.04 as soon as its released, but it's not because I have a cult mentality towards all of Canonical's products.
As far as tablets in general, I think that people have always been excited about the idea of tablets, but they just haven't proved themselves to be very useful. Part of the problem has been that the GUIs on tablets generally haven't been designed for the size of the device nor for the interaction of a touchscreen. Beyond that, the real world use-case of tablets has been unclear. Microsoft, for example, tried to position tablets as normal computers, with muddled results. They were big and heavy like laptops, and when you were doing normal desktop work, laptops and desktops still make more sense.
It's possible that Apple has found a sweet spot for tablets where they actually begin to make sense. I don't really know how using one works out in real life since I haven't even seen an iPad IRL yet.
I think I agree with you. The main thing that bothers me about Apple's approach to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is the restricted nature of the application distribution. It's bad enough that they force you to go through their App Store, but even worse when their approval process seems self-serving.
Even so, I could cut Apple some slack for wanting to exhibit some control over their platform in order to ensure a good experience; having the app store lets them filter out horrible applications and malware. Even though it would annoy me, I could understand Apple wanting a cut of applications' profits. What really annoys me is when they don't approve nice-looking applications from real developers. Why not approve Opera Mini? Why not approve Google Voice?
What's more, I think it's a bad idea for Apple to be doing this, for their own sake. I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that if Apple wants these platforms to be successful, they should be encouraging developers to invest in coming up with innovative new applications. By refusing to approve applications that stray too close to Apple's turf, they're essentially sending the message, "Don't invest too much in building applications. No matter how good they are, we might block them for completely arbitrary reasons."
WYSIWYG web editors have always been criticized by serious web developers, and for good reason: HTML isn't quite a WYSIWYG type of format. It's not only important that a set of pixels be positioned in a certain place, but that they be positioned there the right way. That requires someone to understand HTML, CSS, and other web languages and to make intelligent decisions on how to use them.
It might not be completely impossible for a WYSIWYG editor to be built with some really smart logic that allows it to make pretty smart decisions, based on context and everything, but I haven't seen it yet. Even in the best cases of relatively simple static pages, Dreamweaver doesn't necessarily come up with HTML that I'd be happy with.
On the other hand, Dreamweaver has a couple of things going for it. First, it allows people who don't know very much about what they're doing to make web pages anyway. Second, it allows those people to learn how to make web pages by comparing the preview version with the HTML code very quickly. Third, it does have some decent tools for keeping track of all your files for a given site, cleaning up code, validating code, etc. Finally, you can always deal with it as a text-only thing if you don't need the WYSIWYG editor.
But mostly, ultimately, I've never thought of Dreamweaver as a great tool for real, professional web developers to make their lives easier. It ends of being a fancy but bloated text editor. Maybe the new version is better (I haven't tried it yet), but I thought its main target audience was non-web-developers who want to make some web pages anyway.
I think there's a sort of problem with your idea in that it assumes the the market is being driven by a class of dedicated well-funded consumers. The idea is reinforced by the fact that people use the word "consumer" so often when talking about normal everyday people, but essentially there isn't much of a consumer class.
I know some people are scratching their heads right now and thinking that I'm spouting nonsense, so let me explain. You have a whole bunch of businesses out there trying to sell us all things. They employ researchers and scientists. Food manufacturers have chemists and biologists trying to figure out how to make you addicted to their food. Car companies have dedicated salesmen who practice all day convincing people that this year's model is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Verizon employs psychologists to craft their ad campaigns so that you get warm fuzzy feelings whenever you hear the phrase "can you hear me now?" Yeah, I know, it annoys the piss out of you, but it also breeds a sense of familiarity that makes you feel safe, even if you don't realize it.
So they have armies of people, spending all day trying to figure out how to get as much out of you as possible, while providing you with the least possible service. You? You've got nothing. You have no psychologists on staff, no market researchers. You don't have lawyers or lobbyists, no professional analysts. You don't even have time-- you're too busy going to work, trying to stay in shape, to clean the house, trying to live your life with your friends and family.
There are exceptions. If you're a professional IT guy than you know about buying computers. If you're a psychologist than maybe you catch some of the tricks that these companies use. If you're rich, maybe you can pay personal shoppers to find you all the good deals. But most of us, most of the time, are somewhat at the mercy of all the professionals looking to bilk us.
Yes, I'm exaggerating a little. It's not quite that bad. The free market works a little, but for the "free market" to work they way people tend to assume, you'd need for a lot of people to be "consumers" on equal footing with the businesses they're buying from. They'd need to be perfectly informed of all their choices, and they'd need to be able to have the expertise to understand all the relevant ramifications of their choices. They'd need to be able to spot all the psychological manipulation employed by psychologists and professional salesmen, plus a team of lawyers to counter the business's lawyers. Even then, we'd need to assume that businesses didn't have any extra-special dirty tricks up their sleeve.
Even Adam Smith, when proposing the whole damned thing, implied that it would require moral and wise businessmen doing business with well informed customers. You can't necessarily blame people for not having enough "backbone" when you have several large multinational organizations working day and night to manipulate them.
Well I don't remember all of that, but the writing has been on the wall regarding Carbon for several years now. Adobe doesn't really have any reason to be surprised that Apple is pushing people to Cocoa. I don't know that Apple has made official announcements, but it was clear they were looking to move away from carbon for at least the past... 5 years or so...?
Ultimately, you're talking about a technology company who promised they'd support an API for the foreseeable future, and then is dropping the API after 12 years. 12 years is quite a long time. 12 years ago, Microsoft hadn't yet released Windows 2000. The first iPod hadn't been released. Photoshop was at... like version 5. Adobe CS1 wouldn't be released for another 5 years, and we're now on CS5.
Well... I was joking a bit, but I do still see quite a bit of Apple bashing going on. I'd agree that the amount of Apple bashing has diminished over the past 10 years, but it's still a significant amount of the discussion in Apple-related topics.
Plus, I have to say that in almost Apple story or Google story on this site, there are a bunch of posts saying, "Why does everyone love [Apple|Google] so much? You all are drinking the Koolaid!" or "If Microsoft were doing this, everyone here would be pissed off. But because it's [Apple|Google], it's fine?"
And then in every Apple discussion, you always have at least a few instances where someone makes a really stupid complaint about Apple that misrepresents the facts or isn't even true. When that post gets downmodded, the author gets a big persecution complex about how the mods are out to destroy anyone who says anything negative about Apple. But then someone else says, "I know I'm going to get downmodded because everyone here loves Apple, but I think Apple sucks. It's for hipsters who don't understand anything and just want to show off!" and that guy gets modded +5 Insightful.
It's not one-sided. There are pro-Apple people here, and even some Apple-loons who can't take some criticism. But those loons aren't actually as common as some commenters imply.
Although if one is going to play the game of redefining the "market", you might as well just say that Apple have 100% market share of the Iphone market. Yes it's true, but it's not very useful information.
But that's not what I said, was it? My point is that if you're trying to build a business of making mobile applications, you'll probably want to target the iPhone. There may be a lot of other phones out there, but I don't think sales of 3rd party apps for those phones are very high. Maybe that's not true for the rest of the world, but I'm still not arbitrarily redefining "market".
The Iphone is not a single model
Well it pretty much is. It's a single form factor, single look and feel. It's the same model of device, just upgraded year to year. What I mean by saying it's a "single model" become blatantly clear when you consider the competition. Look at Blackberry, for example-- you have the Blackberry Curve 8500 and the Blackberry Curve 8900, arguably the same model. But then you also have the Blackberry Storm2 9550, which is kind of a totally different phone. Palm has both the Pre and the Pixi. Android phones are *tons* of different models produced by tons of different manufacturers. The iPhone, however, is just the iPhone.
And even if this was true, why should Apple be looked more highly for having one model, whilst other companies prefer to differentiate?
I'm not necessarily saying that they should be "looked at more highly". I just think it's worth noting that when you say "Blackberry has x%, Android phones have y%, and the iPhone has z%," you aren't *quite* comparing apples to apples.
I agree it might well be true that Apple have a larger share of the market of "app stores" - simply because no other platform is locked down to only be able to use one app store.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the US it's entirely true that "applications for smartphones" was a very niche market before the iPhone. You might have had a Windows phone and installed a couple of applications for it, but it's unlikely that those developers pulled in anywhere near the kind of money that the developers of popular iPhone applications are making now. And *that* is why it's worthwhile to talk about the influence that Apple has over the smartphone application market.
Well they're not using Firewire these days, but it's also not *just* USB. It also contains audio/video out. Granted, I don't know how often people use those capabilities, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of people using the audio line-out connection to connect to stereo equipment.
And what's more, the way Adobe wants to do it is "in Flash". They could just use Apple's decoder, but the whole point is to keep all web video playing in Flash so that developers need to keep buying new versions of Flash.
What's more, if you read Adobe's on statements on the issue, you eventually realize that a lot of their performance problems come down to this: Apple has two APIs, Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is basically a depreciated legacy API that exists in OSX to make it easier to allow developers to port OS9 applications to OSX, but Adobe didn't want to rewrite their applications so they kept using the depreciated API. Apple wasn't adding new features to Carbon and so it never got hardware acceleration support for video decoding, which meant that Adobe's applications didn't have access to hardware acceleration support.
Adobe is trying to blame Apple, but their real complaint against Apple is, "In the 10 years that OSX has been out, we never bothered to rewrite their plugin to stop using the depreciate OS9 APIs.
And people already complain that the approval process is too arbitrary and takes too long. You think it'll get better by flooding their inbox with applications written by Flash developers?
You seem to be implying that he's wrong, but when he says "the iPhone's market dominance", he doesn't say which market. If he means "American smartphones", then that's not really right there, either. I believe iPhones only account for something like 25% of the American smartphone market (which incidentally is quite a high number for a single phone model on a single carrier).
What he might be referring to is something like "the smartphone application market". Though the there are lots of different smartphones out there, I'm under the impression that iTunes makes up a large share of the sales of 3rd party applications.
Psshhh... learning the intricacies of Unix command lines and scripts is for n00bs. The geeks here at Slashdot rewrite the kernel whenever they want to do anything. When I had to write my term paper in college, I didn't use a word processor, I rewrote the kernel so it would print my term paper at boot.
No, of course they don't. The keyboards on Macs don't even work. They only have mice with one button. That's one collective button for all Macs anywhere, so Mac users always have to all being doing the same thing all the time. That thing: look like douchebag hipsters.
First, Flash sucks for me as a user so I am thrilled it's going to die. Sorry if a few developers love it, but that's not my problem nor do I care if they have to learn new things. Thank you Apple.
I didn't put it together until just now, but this is all starting to remind me of Apple refusing to support WMA on iPods. For anyone who has a short memory, a few years ago, every online music store except for Apple sold DRM-wrapped WMA files, but the iPod didn't play WMA files, let alone DRM-wrapped WMA files. Record labels were all mad, because it meant that a single company controlled all the music sales that went to the most popular media player. People on Slashdot were pissed, because how *dare* Apple refuse to support an open standard like WMA, instead only supporting Apple's proprietary AAC format (AAC apparently used to stand for "Apple Audio Codec").
Jobs offered a solution: drop DRM completely. Eventually the labels dropped DRM and everyone here gave Amazon the credit. I know some people still use WMA, but really it may as well be a dead format-- I can't think of any reason anyone would use it. Microsoft's plans to dominate media have been significantly damaged. Customers get to buy DRM-free music. Labels and customers get compatibility across stores, decreasing lock-in.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Jobs kill Flash the same way he killed WMA and audio DRM.
The plain truth is people have come to associate Flash and advertising and have put on emotional blinders to everything else.
Well it is reasonable to consider context. Everyone freaks out when Microsoft is anticompetitive, but I don't think you'd hear a big outcry if Microsoft were working to destroy SCO.
And I don't think the problem people have with Flash is just that they associate it with ads. They also associate it with poorly designed and inaccessible websites, and poorly performing embedded video players that constantly crash your browser.
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There are better ways of storing photos than JPG, but that's what browsers use and nobody complains.
Er... we have multiple incompatible graphic formats on web pages, and nobody says much about it anymore. Once upon the time, people were concerned about GIF vs. JPEG vs. PNG, and now it's apparently such a non-issue that you don't even realize that web pages aren't all using JPEG.
HTML5 doesn't necessarily need to standardize on a single format. You're confusing the issue. It's not about forcing everyone to use the same format, it's about having some selection of high-quality formats (or at least 1) that everyone can use everywhere, including devices like set-top boxes and mobile phones.
Out of curiosity, what are these better ways of storing photos than JPEG, and in which ways are they better?
First, I doubt that it will lock out competing codecs. At best, it will create a common interchange format. There's no reason why software wouldn't continue to support whatever codecs were useful to people. The only thing it might do is make it hard for patent holders on other codecs to get people to pay for licensing fees, if there's a superior royalty-free format available.
I also disagree that video codecs aren't "infrastructure". In my opinion, all file formats are infrastructure and are required for interoperability and compatibility. People can freely dream up new applications while still standardizing the formats those applications output to.
But finally, I disagree with the implication that your "second type of Free Software" should be considered a threat to a competitive ecosystem. Firefox hasn't locked out competing browsers and OpenOffice hasn't locked out existing office suites. MySQL hasn't locked out all other databases. Other FOSS can compete, and they can even start by forking the existing project. If proprietary software is superior enough that people are still willing to pay for it, then people will buy it. FOSS isn't a threat. to anyone doing a good job. It's only a threat to companies who want to rest on their laurels and rely on vendor lock-in to make a profit.
I read a comment to the same effect, but I'm left wondering how true it is. Are all the devices (phones, computers, set-top boxes) using reprogrammable DSPs, or just some? If just some, then what percentage?
Also, does it matter that these DSPs weren't designed with VP8 in mind, or are these DSPs just completely reprogrammable, or...? Or to ask it another way, would one of these DSPs that was intended to decode H264 be designed exactly the same if it were intended to decode VP8?
Well it's bad word choice in the article (and summary) to talk about "open source" when, you're right, the real issue is patents. However, every indication is that Google intends to release the codec under a royalty-free patent. From the Google press release regarding the acquisition of On2:
"Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform," said Sundar Pichai, Vice President, Product Management, Google. "We are committed to innovation in video quality on the web, and we believe that On2's team and technology will help us further that goal."
Now that's certainly not definitive, but this happened right after browsers started implementing the video tag, with everyone arguing about H264 vs. Theora. I think the subtext was pretty clear: Google intended to resolve the situation.
What's more, the article says:
...with that release, Mozilla — maker of the Firefox browser — and Google Chrome are expected to also announce support for HTML5 video playback using the new open codec.
Now Mozilla was the holdout with H264, so I can't imagine that they're on board if there will still be patent problems. I expect that when this is made official, you'll find that the patents have been licensed in a way that is irrevocably royalty-free. After all, Google doesn't need codec license money. The whole project might be worth it to them if it just makes it cheaper to run YouTube.
I've seen helpful responses from the Linux community, and I've seen hateful and petty responses. Like most communities, its membership isn't uniform.
Supporting resolutions of unknown displays: I'm not an expert there and I don't know. I know I've had Windows limit resolution and refesh rate combinations based on the displays that I've had, so it's detecting something. If the manufacturer made it difficult for Linux to detect that whatever-it-is, then they might not want to go outside of a safe range for fear of damaging your monitor.
So? I already acknowledged that Ubuntu might not support the hardware in your computer. This isn't unique to Linux. If Windows doesn't recognize your hardware, then it's not going to work right either. Your complaint shouldn't be, "Linux requires you to use the command line," but rather "Linux doesn't support all of my hardware."
Which... ok, that's a valid complaint. It's worth noting that it's largely the fault of manufacturers for failing to support Linux, but I know that's cold comfort if your computer isn't working.
On a side note, I really wish people wouldn't run around calling each other dumb-asses over things like this. It's completely unnecessary and counter-productive.
It's entirely possible that your hardware isn't well supported by Ubuntu, but I absolutely guarantee you that it's possible to install and run Ubuntu without going into the command line once. You can set the resolution through a GUI available under the user preferences. You can even configure multi-monitor support. I know this for a fact because I've done it on multiple computers.
I think the whole discussion is moot. You don't need to use the command line to use modern Linux operating systems.
Umm so can we all just agree there is a certain group of people that will buy whatever Steve tells them they need and hype it for him endlessly?
I think there is some truth to this, but it's more like "there is a certain group of people who have been so pleased with past/present Apple products that they'll be excited to try any new Apple products which are released."
That doesn't mean they're morons or sheep. I'm going to buy Portal 2 as soon as it comes out, but it's not because I'm mindlessly buying whatever Valve releases because I've been brainwashed. It's because I've loved all the Half Life games and think that Portal was one of the best things since sliced bread. I'm also going to try out Ubuntu 10.04 as soon as its released, but it's not because I have a cult mentality towards all of Canonical's products.
As far as tablets in general, I think that people have always been excited about the idea of tablets, but they just haven't proved themselves to be very useful. Part of the problem has been that the GUIs on tablets generally haven't been designed for the size of the device nor for the interaction of a touchscreen. Beyond that, the real world use-case of tablets has been unclear. Microsoft, for example, tried to position tablets as normal computers, with muddled results. They were big and heavy like laptops, and when you were doing normal desktop work, laptops and desktops still make more sense.
It's possible that Apple has found a sweet spot for tablets where they actually begin to make sense. I don't really know how using one works out in real life since I haven't even seen an iPad IRL yet.
I believe Gmail also supports ActiveSync. On my iPhone, I can set up my Gmail account as an Exchange server.
So yeah, Microsoft is in the mix.
I think I agree with you. The main thing that bothers me about Apple's approach to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad is the restricted nature of the application distribution. It's bad enough that they force you to go through their App Store, but even worse when their approval process seems self-serving.
Even so, I could cut Apple some slack for wanting to exhibit some control over their platform in order to ensure a good experience; having the app store lets them filter out horrible applications and malware. Even though it would annoy me, I could understand Apple wanting a cut of applications' profits. What really annoys me is when they don't approve nice-looking applications from real developers. Why not approve Opera Mini? Why not approve Google Voice?
What's more, I think it's a bad idea for Apple to be doing this, for their own sake. I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that if Apple wants these platforms to be successful, they should be encouraging developers to invest in coming up with innovative new applications. By refusing to approve applications that stray too close to Apple's turf, they're essentially sending the message, "Don't invest too much in building applications. No matter how good they are, we might block them for completely arbitrary reasons."
WYSIWYG web editors have always been criticized by serious web developers, and for good reason: HTML isn't quite a WYSIWYG type of format. It's not only important that a set of pixels be positioned in a certain place, but that they be positioned there the right way. That requires someone to understand HTML, CSS, and other web languages and to make intelligent decisions on how to use them.
It might not be completely impossible for a WYSIWYG editor to be built with some really smart logic that allows it to make pretty smart decisions, based on context and everything, but I haven't seen it yet. Even in the best cases of relatively simple static pages, Dreamweaver doesn't necessarily come up with HTML that I'd be happy with.
On the other hand, Dreamweaver has a couple of things going for it. First, it allows people who don't know very much about what they're doing to make web pages anyway. Second, it allows those people to learn how to make web pages by comparing the preview version with the HTML code very quickly. Third, it does have some decent tools for keeping track of all your files for a given site, cleaning up code, validating code, etc. Finally, you can always deal with it as a text-only thing if you don't need the WYSIWYG editor.
But mostly, ultimately, I've never thought of Dreamweaver as a great tool for real, professional web developers to make their lives easier. It ends of being a fancy but bloated text editor. Maybe the new version is better (I haven't tried it yet), but I thought its main target audience was non-web-developers who want to make some web pages anyway.
I think there's a sort of problem with your idea in that it assumes the the market is being driven by a class of dedicated well-funded consumers. The idea is reinforced by the fact that people use the word "consumer" so often when talking about normal everyday people, but essentially there isn't much of a consumer class.
I know some people are scratching their heads right now and thinking that I'm spouting nonsense, so let me explain. You have a whole bunch of businesses out there trying to sell us all things. They employ researchers and scientists. Food manufacturers have chemists and biologists trying to figure out how to make you addicted to their food. Car companies have dedicated salesmen who practice all day convincing people that this year's model is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Verizon employs psychologists to craft their ad campaigns so that you get warm fuzzy feelings whenever you hear the phrase "can you hear me now?" Yeah, I know, it annoys the piss out of you, but it also breeds a sense of familiarity that makes you feel safe, even if you don't realize it.
So they have armies of people, spending all day trying to figure out how to get as much out of you as possible, while providing you with the least possible service. You? You've got nothing. You have no psychologists on staff, no market researchers. You don't have lawyers or lobbyists, no professional analysts. You don't even have time-- you're too busy going to work, trying to stay in shape, to clean the house, trying to live your life with your friends and family.
There are exceptions. If you're a professional IT guy than you know about buying computers. If you're a psychologist than maybe you catch some of the tricks that these companies use. If you're rich, maybe you can pay personal shoppers to find you all the good deals. But most of us, most of the time, are somewhat at the mercy of all the professionals looking to bilk us.
Yes, I'm exaggerating a little. It's not quite that bad. The free market works a little, but for the "free market" to work they way people tend to assume, you'd need for a lot of people to be "consumers" on equal footing with the businesses they're buying from. They'd need to be perfectly informed of all their choices, and they'd need to be able to have the expertise to understand all the relevant ramifications of their choices. They'd need to be able to spot all the psychological manipulation employed by psychologists and professional salesmen, plus a team of lawyers to counter the business's lawyers. Even then, we'd need to assume that businesses didn't have any extra-special dirty tricks up their sleeve.
Even Adam Smith, when proposing the whole damned thing, implied that it would require moral and wise businessmen doing business with well informed customers. You can't necessarily blame people for not having enough "backbone" when you have several large multinational organizations working day and night to manipulate them.
Well I don't remember all of that, but the writing has been on the wall regarding Carbon for several years now. Adobe doesn't really have any reason to be surprised that Apple is pushing people to Cocoa. I don't know that Apple has made official announcements, but it was clear they were looking to move away from carbon for at least the past... 5 years or so...?
Ultimately, you're talking about a technology company who promised they'd support an API for the foreseeable future, and then is dropping the API after 12 years. 12 years is quite a long time. 12 years ago, Microsoft hadn't yet released Windows 2000. The first iPod hadn't been released. Photoshop was at... like version 5. Adobe CS1 wouldn't be released for another 5 years, and we're now on CS5.
Hey, I'll join in. I've been pissed that Comcast isn't supporting my attempts to record all my video to a wax cylinder.
Well... I was joking a bit, but I do still see quite a bit of Apple bashing going on. I'd agree that the amount of Apple bashing has diminished over the past 10 years, but it's still a significant amount of the discussion in Apple-related topics.
Plus, I have to say that in almost Apple story or Google story on this site, there are a bunch of posts saying, "Why does everyone love [Apple|Google] so much? You all are drinking the Koolaid!" or "If Microsoft were doing this, everyone here would be pissed off. But because it's [Apple|Google], it's fine?"
And then in every Apple discussion, you always have at least a few instances where someone makes a really stupid complaint about Apple that misrepresents the facts or isn't even true. When that post gets downmodded, the author gets a big persecution complex about how the mods are out to destroy anyone who says anything negative about Apple. But then someone else says, "I know I'm going to get downmodded because everyone here loves Apple, but I think Apple sucks. It's for hipsters who don't understand anything and just want to show off!" and that guy gets modded +5 Insightful.
It's not one-sided. There are pro-Apple people here, and even some Apple-loons who can't take some criticism. But those loons aren't actually as common as some commenters imply.
Although if one is going to play the game of redefining the "market", you might as well just say that Apple have 100% market share of the Iphone market. Yes it's true, but it's not very useful information.
But that's not what I said, was it? My point is that if you're trying to build a business of making mobile applications, you'll probably want to target the iPhone. There may be a lot of other phones out there, but I don't think sales of 3rd party apps for those phones are very high. Maybe that's not true for the rest of the world, but I'm still not arbitrarily redefining "market".
The Iphone is not a single model
Well it pretty much is. It's a single form factor, single look and feel. It's the same model of device, just upgraded year to year. What I mean by saying it's a "single model" become blatantly clear when you consider the competition. Look at Blackberry, for example-- you have the Blackberry Curve 8500 and the Blackberry Curve 8900, arguably the same model. But then you also have the Blackberry Storm2 9550, which is kind of a totally different phone. Palm has both the Pre and the Pixi. Android phones are *tons* of different models produced by tons of different manufacturers. The iPhone, however, is just the iPhone.
And even if this was true, why should Apple be looked more highly for having one model, whilst other companies prefer to differentiate?
I'm not necessarily saying that they should be "looked at more highly". I just think it's worth noting that when you say "Blackberry has x%, Android phones have y%, and the iPhone has z%," you aren't *quite* comparing apples to apples.
I agree it might well be true that Apple have a larger share of the market of "app stores" - simply because no other platform is locked down to only be able to use one app store.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in the US it's entirely true that "applications for smartphones" was a very niche market before the iPhone. You might have had a Windows phone and installed a couple of applications for it, but it's unlikely that those developers pulled in anywhere near the kind of money that the developers of popular iPhone applications are making now. And *that* is why it's worthwhile to talk about the influence that Apple has over the smartphone application market.
Well they're not using Firewire these days, but it's also not *just* USB. It also contains audio/video out. Granted, I don't know how often people use those capabilities, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lot of people using the audio line-out connection to connect to stereo equipment.
And what's more, the way Adobe wants to do it is "in Flash". They could just use Apple's decoder, but the whole point is to keep all web video playing in Flash so that developers need to keep buying new versions of Flash.
What's more, if you read Adobe's on statements on the issue, you eventually realize that a lot of their performance problems come down to this: Apple has two APIs, Carbon and Cocoa. Carbon is basically a depreciated legacy API that exists in OSX to make it easier to allow developers to port OS9 applications to OSX, but Adobe didn't want to rewrite their applications so they kept using the depreciated API. Apple wasn't adding new features to Carbon and so it never got hardware acceleration support for video decoding, which meant that Adobe's applications didn't have access to hardware acceleration support.
Adobe is trying to blame Apple, but their real complaint against Apple is, "In the 10 years that OSX has been out, we never bothered to rewrite their plugin to stop using the depreciate OS9 APIs.
And people already complain that the approval process is too arbitrary and takes too long. You think it'll get better by flooding their inbox with applications written by Flash developers?
You seem to be implying that he's wrong, but when he says "the iPhone's market dominance", he doesn't say which market. If he means "American smartphones", then that's not really right there, either. I believe iPhones only account for something like 25% of the American smartphone market (which incidentally is quite a high number for a single phone model on a single carrier).
What he might be referring to is something like "the smartphone application market". Though the there are lots of different smartphones out there, I'm under the impression that iTunes makes up a large share of the sales of 3rd party applications.
Psshhh... learning the intricacies of Unix command lines and scripts is for n00bs. The geeks here at Slashdot rewrite the kernel whenever they want to do anything. When I had to write my term paper in college, I didn't use a word processor, I rewrote the kernel so it would print my term paper at boot.
No, of course they don't. The keyboards on Macs don't even work. They only have mice with one button. That's one collective button for all Macs anywhere, so Mac users always have to all being doing the same thing all the time. That thing: look like douchebag hipsters.
At least, that's what the Internet tells me.
First, Flash sucks for me as a user so I am thrilled it's going to die. Sorry if a few developers love it, but that's not my problem nor do I care if they have to learn new things. Thank you Apple.
I didn't put it together until just now, but this is all starting to remind me of Apple refusing to support WMA on iPods. For anyone who has a short memory, a few years ago, every online music store except for Apple sold DRM-wrapped WMA files, but the iPod didn't play WMA files, let alone DRM-wrapped WMA files. Record labels were all mad, because it meant that a single company controlled all the music sales that went to the most popular media player. People on Slashdot were pissed, because how *dare* Apple refuse to support an open standard like WMA, instead only supporting Apple's proprietary AAC format (AAC apparently used to stand for "Apple Audio Codec").
Jobs offered a solution: drop DRM completely. Eventually the labels dropped DRM and everyone here gave Amazon the credit. I know some people still use WMA, but really it may as well be a dead format-- I can't think of any reason anyone would use it. Microsoft's plans to dominate media have been significantly damaged. Customers get to buy DRM-free music. Labels and customers get compatibility across stores, decreasing lock-in.
Maybe we'll get lucky and Jobs kill Flash the same way he killed WMA and audio DRM.
The plain truth is people have come to associate Flash and advertising and have put on emotional blinders to everything else.
Well it is reasonable to consider context. Everyone freaks out when Microsoft is anticompetitive, but I don't think you'd hear a big outcry if Microsoft were working to destroy SCO.
And I don't think the problem people have with Flash is just that they associate it with ads. They also associate it with poorly designed and inaccessible websites, and poorly performing embedded video players that constantly crash your browser.