That is great news. If you don't use a Mac, then we don't want your app running on iOS. If you're used to using Windows or X-Windows then, yes, Android has the level of quality that you'll feel comfortable with, and iOS would seem much too demanding. You wouldn't understand why either Apple or the user base rejects your app.
It's not some business strategy that iOS development requires a Mac. They simply did not port Xcode to Windows, because that would mean porting the whole of Mac OS. In the same way that programming Windows requires Windows, programming a Mac requires a Mac. And iOS is just a Mac with touch instead of mouse, so yes you need a Mac to program it. It's really basic.
It's often remembered that OS X ran on Intel the whole time. Jobs pointed that out when introducing the Intel Mac in 2005. He showed the overhead view of the building where they had been running Mac OS X on Intel since the Mac OS X launch. But people had suspected for years.
Every instance of the word "win" in your post is wrong. Windows NT never won anything. It is terrible, an embarrassment. The World Wide Web was built on NeXT, and so was the modern Mac, iPhone, and iPad. If current trends hold, OS X systems will outsell Windows systems in 2014 or 2015.
The NeXTSTEP API was about running on NeXT. It was used to create the World Wide Web. OpenStep was about portability across systems. But nobody used it, they just copied it into their own proprietary systems. So now the technology enables Apple to do things like jump OS X from PowerPC to Intel to ARM within the space of 2 years.
Today, Apple's WebKit browser engine, which is the most popular mobile open source project, brings the Web and the open HTML5 API to all mobiles except Microsoft's, plus to Chrome and AIR and various set-top boxes. So Apple is doing more for open application development than anyone else.
Kinect is almost twice the price of a set-top computer such as Apple TV or Roku. Even if it came with a free set-top, it is too expensive for the set-top market. And an Xbox and Kinect cost more than an Apple TV and iPod touch, which also gives the user a device for apps while they watch, like looking up things on the Web or tweeting or voting on American Idol. And more people know how to use an iPod than Kinect.
What would be needed is a $99 set-top that has a built-in cheapo Kinect. Maybe just a webcam. That is also needed because the people who don't want to get an Xbox also don't want to plug in accessories. Plugging AC and HDMI into the TV is already pushing it.
And finally, wouldn't the Kinect be triggered accidentally by people moving around as they watch TV? Like waving around as they watch a sporting event? It's the same problem as voice activated TV, where the main problem is that most of the words the TV hears are not for it. Most of the movements the Kinect sees would not be for it. It might receive a command only once every 1.5 hours. Who wants to have a movie stop because they clapped their hands?
So ultimately, Kinect is for games. Gesture control of a TV will likely require not just some Kinect software, but a new Kinect designed specifically for set-tops, not game consoles. It would have to be cheaper, easier to set-up, and smart enough to know when it is not being talked to.
The problem is, even if they could work all that out and do a Kinect TV for $99, Microsoft won't build it because they think of a giant noisy Xbox as their set-top and they don't want to cannibalize.
Ridiculous. Google TV is just a PC. It's obvious people don't want a PC in their living room. It's obvious Google can't design its way out of a paper bag. It's obvious Google has no idea how to make a consumer product. Google TV did not sell. More people buy an Apple TV every week than all the Google TV units that have been sold in its lifetime. For the price of a Google TV, you can get an Apple TV and an iPod touch to use as remote and for apps. Then you can look something up on the Web or tweet without taking over the TV screen and destroying the experience for the people you're watching TV with, which Google TV forgot all about since it is built for lonely nerds. Adding a Kinect only makes Google TV that much more expensive and makes the whole idea even crazier.
Apple takes over 50% of the profits from the entire mobile handset market. If you think of handset profits as 2 pies, Apple takes a whole pie, plus a piece of the second one, and then what is left of the second pie is split between everyone else, with most of it going to Nokia and RIM. All the Android handsets together are less than 5%. Profits are oxygen, so they determine a lot about who will be able to innovate further going forward, who will still be making phones in 2 years (hint: not Motorola) and so on.
Another interesting thing is it's the same in music players, tablets, and PC's. Apple takes the majority of the profits in those markets as well.
They didn't claim to invent the cloud or versioning. They claim to have an invention that uses the cloud and versioning in a new way, enabling even a non-technical consumer to apply it to all of their documents without training. No, nobody has done that before.
Steam engine also did not claim to have invented steam.
So what you're saying is we either have to train the 99.999% of humanity who can't do that to do that plus freeze the state of the world's technology in 1985, or we have to invent some new solutions that enable an Apple Store customer to do that with no training on their 2011 systems with every various kind of data they store? I like the latter.
In Apple's solution the user does not even have to Save a document, let alone check it in or out. They don't even have to Open it, the app makes it appear it is always Open and only Opens it when necessary, and they don't even have to launch the app, because the system makes it appear the app is always running, and only runs it when necessary. All the user has to do is work on the content, and the only meta control they use is a time slider that rolls the document back 1 minute or 2 days.
But then, your grandmother is not impressed by that, because she could do that over a leased line in 1985.
Apple is not a patent troll. They have sued over patents only a few times even though they've been widely copied. They obviously have to patent this before they ship to protect themselves against patent trolls.
In other countries, a quarter of their taxes goes to health care, but then they actually get health care for that! It's very sad that in the US, you can pay just as much, yet that only covers old people and poor people and politicians.
I've lived in 3 countries -- UK, Canada, and USA -- and the health care in UK and Canada is a billion times better than in the US. The doctors here in the US spend about half their energy finding funding for whatever care they want to provide, and people here routinely walk around sick and with untreated wounds and diseases. Even people who "have insurance." And people who live on the Canadian or Mexican border cross the border to get health care or buy pharmaceuticals routinely. It's just amazingly sad.
iOS has that kind of search as well. The search screen is the very left-most one, or you can push the home button twice in a row. Staying on an ancient phone to get search and run Web apps (which also run on iOS) is a little strange.
>> That's what Windows should do -- add powerusers to their marketshare (I mean real powerusers).
> Of course we all know that No true power user [wikipedia.org] would use Windows right now, right?
The average selling price of a Windows PC is $450, which is almost $200 less than an iPad ($625) and $200 less than an iPhone ($650). The Mac has 90% of high-end PC's. There is no market for a high-end Windows. What is needed by the Windows market is a $49 Windows that has the features of Windows XP but is immune to viruses and doesn't crash. Part of the problem with Vista was it was made for $1200 PC's and finally shipped into a market where almost all the $1200 PC's were Macs, so it ran really badly on $450 PC's.
You can get a 3rd party "snap to sides" for your Mac if you want it. Very few people do, so it is a perfect.
Very few people complained about Snow Leopard. The vast majority are just happy that their Macs work great, don't crash. Mac sales are way up again, as usual. And while Apple did Snow Leopard, they also did iOS 3 and 4, so they continue to make progress with OS X.
Microsoft, on the other hand, the big celebration is that Windows 7 now has more users than Windows XP, the 2001 version of their system. But only in the US.
> There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7
Yeah, but they didn't fix anything, so who gives a fuck? If it still has viruses and needs guys like you to make excuses for it, then what is the point?
> iOS apps can look like crap too when the developer doesn't do what you need to do there for screen independence.
iOS developers don't have to do anything for screen independence. There is still essentially only 1 screen size on iOS: 3.5 inch, 320x480. An app that size will look great on any device. You can optionally enhance your app for Retina iPhone, and you can optionally enhance your app for iPad. But that is totally optional.
The exception is a developer can specifically choose not to run on iPhone at all. In which case, they still have only 1 screen size, but it is 10 inch, 1024x768. Again, nothing to do for screen independence.
Resolution is not the only factor. These are not just screens, they are touch screens. There is also the fingers to consider, which means you have to size the buttons and other elements correctly.
> You've got some serious selection bias going on. The apps that someone has bothered to write > a separate version of are the ones that benefit from having a separate version.
His bias is towards apps that are actually running on iPads. They are almost exclusively iPad apps. Almost nobody is using the iPhone apps on their iPads. It's just not happening. This was probably the biggest surprise of the iPad with regards to apps. Even when a user had a large collection of iPhone apps, they were going to App Store and buying replacement apps with iPad layouts, whether they were the same app/developer or not. In some cases, they were preferring a very new, basic iPad app over a sophisticated and mature iPhone app.
The iPad has a PC screen and PC browser and email and other apps. When you're using it, you're in a PC context. It's a small Mac, not a big phone. When you switch to an iPhone app, you context switch to a phone, and users don't like it. You go from big views with menus on the side to tiny views that you have to go "back" out of to get to a menu. You go from 10 finger-sized buttons at a time to 3 huge buttons at a time.
A lot of the same people who at first criticized iPad for being "just a big iPod touch" are now saying it's totally fine to run scaled-up phone apps on a XOOM. Running scaled-up phone apps is "just a big iPod touch". Running PC apps on a tablet makes it a mobile PC. That is what users want, because the people who are buying tablets in many cases already have a touch phone or iPod touch, they already have the mini-apps right there next to the tablet. They want you to put their PC into the tablet and make a mobile PC to bring along with the mobile phone, not put another phone into their tablet so they have 2 phones.
A lot of people here are talking about this stuff like it's academic. It's not. There is a year of experience on this, with 25 million users now, and they are running the full-size apps, not the mini-apps.
> There also are lots of apps that don't benefit from changing the layout, and simply scaling the UI up to the larger > screen is exactly what you want. A lot of games, for example, are in this category.
No, that is not true. It is never true. We don't have to guess at this, we've already seen the iOS app platform transition from small devices only to a mix of small and large devices.
Why am I buying a PC size screen to run the same exact app from my phone just scaled up? I am not. That does not sell tablets. What sells you a tablet is you get to run scaled-down PC apps, not scaled-up phone apps. The benefit is you get a PC class app in a device that is half the size and weight and double the battery life of even the smallest PC. The browser in the iPad is not a scaled up mini-browser, it's a full-size browser. It's not the iPhone browser scaled-up a bunch, it's the Mac browser scaled-down a little bit. With games, it is the same. You want the game to be a slightly scaled-down version of the PC or console game, not a scaled-up version of the phone game. You want richer textures, wider open vistas, and you want the game to work like it's full-size version, not its mini-version.
Layouts have to change dramatically on the larger screen. A 3-4 inch app is a widget, while a 10 inch app is a PC app. Widgets do all kinds of tricks to get around being so small, showing you long scrolling menus that then disappear to show the chosen item in a small view. A full-size app can show you the menu in 1/4 of the screen and the items you're choosing in a large 3/4 view. A widget can show you just a few buttons, sized for fingers. A full-size app can show you many more buttons, still sized for fingers.
What you're missing is that iPad is not a big iPhone, it is a small Mac/PC. It doesn't seem that way because iOS and touch are coming from the phone, but the full-size 10 inch screen is the defining feature of iPad, and that is coming from the Mac. And the OS X underneath is a PC class OS, the app platform is PC class native C. People are buying iPad to be a small Mac/PC, not to be a big phone. The apps have to be actual full-size apps, that is what not only attracts the users, but that is just what users end up running. Even if you already have a large collection of iPhone apps, you end up using the ones that have iPad interfaces and buying new ones that have iPad interfaces, even when they are replacing the functionality of iPhone apps you already own, even when you continue to use the iPhone apps on an iPhone.
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That is great news. If you don't use a Mac, then we don't want your app running on iOS. If you're used to using Windows or X-Windows then, yes, Android has the level of quality that you'll feel comfortable with, and iOS would seem much too demanding. You wouldn't understand why either Apple or the user base rejects your app.
It's not some business strategy that iOS development requires a Mac. They simply did not port Xcode to Windows, because that would mean porting the whole of Mac OS. In the same way that programming Windows requires Windows, programming a Mac requires a Mac. And iOS is just a Mac with touch instead of mouse, so yes you need a Mac to program it. It's really basic.
It's often remembered that OS X ran on Intel the whole time. Jobs pointed that out when introducing the Intel Mac in 2005. He showed the overhead view of the building where they had been running Mac OS X on Intel since the Mac OS X launch. But people had suspected for years.
Every instance of the word "win" in your post is wrong. Windows NT never won anything. It is terrible, an embarrassment. The World Wide Web was built on NeXT, and so was the modern Mac, iPhone, and iPad. If current trends hold, OS X systems will outsell Windows systems in 2014 or 2015.
The NeXTSTEP API was about running on NeXT. It was used to create the World Wide Web. OpenStep was about portability across systems. But nobody used it, they just copied it into their own proprietary systems. So now the technology enables Apple to do things like jump OS X from PowerPC to Intel to ARM within the space of 2 years.
Today, Apple's WebKit browser engine, which is the most popular mobile open source project, brings the Web and the open HTML5 API to all mobiles except Microsoft's, plus to Chrome and AIR and various set-top boxes. So Apple is doing more for open application development than anyone else.
So your consternation is totally misplaced.
Kinect is almost twice the price of a set-top computer such as Apple TV or Roku. Even if it came with a free set-top, it is too expensive for the set-top market. And an Xbox and Kinect cost more than an Apple TV and iPod touch, which also gives the user a device for apps while they watch, like looking up things on the Web or tweeting or voting on American Idol. And more people know how to use an iPod than Kinect.
What would be needed is a $99 set-top that has a built-in cheapo Kinect. Maybe just a webcam. That is also needed because the people who don't want to get an Xbox also don't want to plug in accessories. Plugging AC and HDMI into the TV is already pushing it.
And finally, wouldn't the Kinect be triggered accidentally by people moving around as they watch TV? Like waving around as they watch a sporting event? It's the same problem as voice activated TV, where the main problem is that most of the words the TV hears are not for it. Most of the movements the Kinect sees would not be for it. It might receive a command only once every 1.5 hours. Who wants to have a movie stop because they clapped their hands?
So ultimately, Kinect is for games. Gesture control of a TV will likely require not just some Kinect software, but a new Kinect designed specifically for set-tops, not game consoles. It would have to be cheaper, easier to set-up, and smart enough to know when it is not being talked to.
The problem is, even if they could work all that out and do a Kinect TV for $99, Microsoft won't build it because they think of a giant noisy Xbox as their set-top and they don't want to cannibalize.
Ridiculous. Google TV is just a PC. It's obvious people don't want a PC in their living room. It's obvious Google can't design its way out of a paper bag. It's obvious Google has no idea how to make a consumer product. Google TV did not sell. More people buy an Apple TV every week than all the Google TV units that have been sold in its lifetime. For the price of a Google TV, you can get an Apple TV and an iPod touch to use as remote and for apps. Then you can look something up on the Web or tweet without taking over the TV screen and destroying the experience for the people you're watching TV with, which Google TV forgot all about since it is built for lonely nerds. Adding a Kinect only makes Google TV that much more expensive and makes the whole idea even crazier.
Carrier agreements just means paying for iPhones. They cost $640 on average, but the user pays $240 on average and the carrier pays the rest.
They have been the largest by profits and by market cap for a long while.
Apple takes over 50% of the profits from the entire mobile handset market. If you think of handset profits as 2 pies, Apple takes a whole pie, plus a piece of the second one, and then what is left of the second pie is split between everyone else, with most of it going to Nokia and RIM. All the Android handsets together are less than 5%. Profits are oxygen, so they determine a lot about who will be able to innovate further going forward, who will still be making phones in 2 years (hint: not Motorola) and so on.
Another interesting thing is it's the same in music players, tablets, and PC's. Apple takes the majority of the profits in those markets as well.
Apps are iTunes Store, which is a separate $1.4 billion (per quarter) business. Not part of the iPhone revenue.
Already faded.
Great to see Apple's architecture agnosticism is catching on.
They didn't claim to invent the cloud or versioning. They claim to have an invention that uses the cloud and versioning in a new way, enabling even a non-technical consumer to apply it to all of their documents without training. No, nobody has done that before.
Steam engine also did not claim to have invented steam.
So what you're saying is we either have to train the 99.999% of humanity who can't do that to do that plus freeze the state of the world's technology in 1985, or we have to invent some new solutions that enable an Apple Store customer to do that with no training on their 2011 systems with every various kind of data they store? I like the latter.
In Apple's solution the user does not even have to Save a document, let alone check it in or out. They don't even have to Open it, the app makes it appear it is always Open and only Opens it when necessary, and they don't even have to launch the app, because the system makes it appear the app is always running, and only runs it when necessary. All the user has to do is work on the content, and the only meta control they use is a time slider that rolls the document back 1 minute or 2 days.
But then, your grandmother is not impressed by that, because she could do that over a leased line in 1985.
Apple is not a patent troll. They have sued over patents only a few times even though they've been widely copied. They obviously have to patent this before they ship to protect themselves against patent trolls.
One issue is some networks block RTSP, but not HTTP.
In other countries, you would pay the same, but you would get health care. That is the worst part.
In other countries, a quarter of their taxes goes to health care, but then they actually get health care for that! It's very sad that in the US, you can pay just as much, yet that only covers old people and poor people and politicians.
I've lived in 3 countries -- UK, Canada, and USA -- and the health care in UK and Canada is a billion times better than in the US. The doctors here in the US spend about half their energy finding funding for whatever care they want to provide, and people here routinely walk around sick and with untreated wounds and diseases. Even people who "have insurance." And people who live on the Canadian or Mexican border cross the border to get health care or buy pharmaceuticals routinely. It's just amazingly sad.
iOS has that kind of search as well. The search screen is the very left-most one, or you can push the home button twice in a row. Staying on an ancient phone to get search and run Web apps (which also run on iOS) is a little strange.
>> That's what Windows should do -- add powerusers to their marketshare (I mean real powerusers).
> Of course we all know that No true power user [wikipedia.org] would use Windows right now, right?
The average selling price of a Windows PC is $450, which is almost $200 less than an iPad ($625) and $200 less than an iPhone ($650). The Mac has 90% of high-end PC's. There is no market for a high-end Windows. What is needed by the Windows market is a $49 Windows that has the features of Windows XP but is immune to viruses and doesn't crash. Part of the problem with Vista was it was made for $1200 PC's and finally shipped into a market where almost all the $1200 PC's were Macs, so it ran really badly on $450 PC's.
You can get a 3rd party "snap to sides" for your Mac if you want it. Very few people do, so it is a perfect.
Very few people complained about Snow Leopard. The vast majority are just happy that their Macs work great, don't crash. Mac sales are way up again, as usual. And while Apple did Snow Leopard, they also did iOS 3 and 4, so they continue to make progress with OS X.
Microsoft, on the other hand, the big celebration is that Windows 7 now has more users than Windows XP, the 2001 version of their system. But only in the US.
> There was actually a lot of under the covers changes in Windows 7
Yeah, but they didn't fix anything, so who gives a fuck? If it still has viruses and needs guys like you to make excuses for it, then what is the point?
> iOS apps can look like crap too when the developer doesn't do what you need to do there for screen independence.
iOS developers don't have to do anything for screen independence. There is still essentially only 1 screen size on iOS: 3.5 inch, 320x480. An app that size will look great on any device. You can optionally enhance your app for Retina iPhone, and you can optionally enhance your app for iPad. But that is totally optional.
The exception is a developer can specifically choose not to run on iPhone at all. In which case, they still have only 1 screen size, but it is 10 inch, 1024x768. Again, nothing to do for screen independence.
Resolution is not the only factor. These are not just screens, they are touch screens. There is also the fingers to consider, which means you have to size the buttons and other elements correctly.
> You've got some serious selection bias going on. The apps that someone has bothered to write
> a separate version of are the ones that benefit from having a separate version.
His bias is towards apps that are actually running on iPads. They are almost exclusively iPad apps. Almost nobody is using the iPhone apps on their iPads. It's just not happening. This was probably the biggest surprise of the iPad with regards to apps. Even when a user had a large collection of iPhone apps, they were going to App Store and buying replacement apps with iPad layouts, whether they were the same app/developer or not. In some cases, they were preferring a very new, basic iPad app over a sophisticated and mature iPhone app.
The iPad has a PC screen and PC browser and email and other apps. When you're using it, you're in a PC context. It's a small Mac, not a big phone. When you switch to an iPhone app, you context switch to a phone, and users don't like it. You go from big views with menus on the side to tiny views that you have to go "back" out of to get to a menu. You go from 10 finger-sized buttons at a time to 3 huge buttons at a time.
A lot of the same people who at first criticized iPad for being "just a big iPod touch" are now saying it's totally fine to run scaled-up phone apps on a XOOM. Running scaled-up phone apps is "just a big iPod touch". Running PC apps on a tablet makes it a mobile PC. That is what users want, because the people who are buying tablets in many cases already have a touch phone or iPod touch, they already have the mini-apps right there next to the tablet. They want you to put their PC into the tablet and make a mobile PC to bring along with the mobile phone, not put another phone into their tablet so they have 2 phones.
A lot of people here are talking about this stuff like it's academic. It's not. There is a year of experience on this, with 25 million users now, and they are running the full-size apps, not the mini-apps.
> There also are lots of apps that don't benefit from changing the layout, and simply scaling the UI up to the larger
> screen is exactly what you want. A lot of games, for example, are in this category.
No, that is not true. It is never true. We don't have to guess at this, we've already seen the iOS app platform transition from small devices only to a mix of small and large devices.
Why am I buying a PC size screen to run the same exact app from my phone just scaled up? I am not. That does not sell tablets. What sells you a tablet is you get to run scaled-down PC apps, not scaled-up phone apps. The benefit is you get a PC class app in a device that is half the size and weight and double the battery life of even the smallest PC. The browser in the iPad is not a scaled up mini-browser, it's a full-size browser. It's not the iPhone browser scaled-up a bunch, it's the Mac browser scaled-down a little bit. With games, it is the same. You want the game to be a slightly scaled-down version of the PC or console game, not a scaled-up version of the phone game. You want richer textures, wider open vistas, and you want the game to work like it's full-size version, not its mini-version.
Layouts have to change dramatically on the larger screen. A 3-4 inch app is a widget, while a 10 inch app is a PC app. Widgets do all kinds of tricks to get around being so small, showing you long scrolling menus that then disappear to show the chosen item in a small view. A full-size app can show you the menu in 1/4 of the screen and the items you're choosing in a large 3/4 view. A widget can show you just a few buttons, sized for fingers. A full-size app can show you many more buttons, still sized for fingers.
What you're missing is that iPad is not a big iPhone, it is a small Mac/PC. It doesn't seem that way because iOS and touch are coming from the phone, but the full-size 10 inch screen is the defining feature of iPad, and that is coming from the Mac. And the OS X underneath is a PC class OS, the app platform is PC class native C. People are buying iPad to be a small Mac/PC, not to be a big phone. The apps have to be actual full-size apps, that is what not only attracts the users, but that is just what users end up running. Even if you already have a large collection of iPhone apps, you end up using the ones that have iPad interfaces and buying new ones that have iPad interfaces, even when they are replacing the functionality of iPhone apps you already own, even when you continue to use the iPhone apps on an iPhone.