Keyboards are cheap. Find one you like, then buy 2, and use 1 with each hand. They will be much cheaper than 1 "ergonomic" keyboard. Position them wherever is appropriate for each hand. Move them around regularly if you like. You can hit the spacebar with the thumb that works. Having 1 keyboard for each hand lets you open your arms as wide as you want and open up the body and shoulders, which can give great relief to the nerves. If you put your hands in front of you comfortably, you will probably find that they are too far apart to use the same keyboard.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard is small (no number pad) and thin and is easily positioned low, e.g. in your lap. And of course it is wireless, so positioning 1 for each hand may be easier with it. They are lightweight and extremely rigid (1 piece of aluminum) so you could attach them vertically to the sides of a chair or almost anywhere. You can also use 1 of them and 1 MacBook at the same time and that is 2 identical keyboards in a very portable setup.
I find the position of the modifier keys on the Mac to be more ergonomic than with a PC and Windows. Using Command for common shortcuts instead of Control encourages you to hit Command with your thumb, not pinkie, as with Control. So even if you are using Windows, you can swap the Control/Windows key keycodes and your shortcuts for New, Open, Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. all become the original Mac shortcuts and hand positions, so you can do them with left thumb and forefinger.
I also prefer the huge Mac trackpad to a mouse in every way. The large trackpad lets you open your hand up, not scrunch it up as with a mouse. The gestures are very natural. Scrolling with 2 fingers is especially natural. You change hand positions naturally as you work, you don't have one clenched hand position the whole time.
Mac App Store is part of the Cocoa platform. Why you would expect apps from other platforms to be supported is beyond me. Apt-get does not install Cocoa apps. HTML5 app caching does not install Cocoa apps. If you want a Java app store ask Oracle.
Mac OS X is a certified Unix. If you're having trouble running whatever you like on it you need to go to school.
Apple switched to Intel and provide an emulated BIOS and drivers for MS Windows. It may be that every currently shipping application in the world can be run on current Apple hardware.
In addition to deprecating Adobe's Flash and Oracle's Java recently, Apple also deprecated their own Carbon. That is progress, not politics. They also have done more to advance W3C HTML5 than any other vendor, and more to advance ISO MPEG-4 than any other vendor (in spite of their own QuickTime platform), and they are the largest Unix vendor by volume. So that is progress again, not proprietization.
There is already negligible demand for consumer Java on the Mac. Has nothing to do with Mac App Store, which is part of the Cocoa platform, and has not launched yet.
Apple's integrated approach is what sells their products. It's what users pay for. Users don't care about Java, they care about 1-click installs that always just work with great user interfaces and full performance and the best battery life on their hardware. They care about being required to do zero configuration, zero I-T work. They absolutely do not want to have an app fail because they need to install or update a Java or Flash runtime. Cocoa and HTML5 do not require that and that is why they are the technologies that Apple supports. For all the complaints that iPhone is closed or locked down, it is by far the best open HTML5 platform and the Mac is the only name-brand PC that ships with an HTML5 browser, and Apple has been doing that since 2003, since before HTML5 was even called HTML5.
So it's not about open or closed, because HTML5 is more open than Java. As always with Apple, it's about a better user experience. That is what sells their products. People can get a shitty user experience from any other vendor.
If there is no business case for Oracle to develop Java for the Mac, then there will be no Java for the Mac. Why should Apple build a JVM when there is no business case for them to do it?
You're making the mistake of thinking Apple cares about selling boxes to people who develop or run Java apps. They don't. They are interested in selling to users who develop or run either Apple's Cocoa or open HTML5 or open MPEG-4 or open Unix. They are not interested in doing a ton of work to support Oracle's alternative to Cocoa or Adobe's alternative to HTML5/MPEG-4. Java and Flash runtimes shift I-T work from developer to user, that is the opposite of how things are done on the Mac because most systems do not have I-T support, and most users are consumers and producers, not I-T. If you care about Apple users then you make Cocoa or HTML5 for them (your choice) and interact with anything else on a server (Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Flash, Windows, whatever you like). If you don't care about Apple users then there is no need for you to have an opinion.
Apple announced that their JVM will be supported throughout the rest of it's life cycle. There is no uncertainty from Apple. And in fact, you can rely on them as usual to move forward aggressively and not dwell on old tech like client runtimes. We have HTML5 now, you can run locally in HTML5 and interact with Java on a server.
If you have questions about the future of Java, ask Oracle for answers. If you built your business on Java, ask Oracle for answers. Java is owned by Oracle.
Mac OS is a standard Unix. Your warning label is bullshit. There is absolutely nothing preventing Oracle or any Mac user from running anything they want on Mac OS. If Microsoft wanted to port Win32 to Mac OS they could do it. And in fact, Windows itself is supported on Apple hardware.
I love how tech nerds want to have it both ways with the Mac. On one hand they will tell you the Mac is insignificant and has minimal market share, yet on the other, everything Apple does that they don't like is a cause for anti-trust monopoly remedies.
Java is a second class citizen on Mac OS. This is simply about recognizing that.
The first class citizens on Mac OS are Cocoa and HTML5. That is it. Both platforms have automatic installs and automatic updates and zero configuration, which is what Apple's users demand and pay for. Together they offer a developer a yin yang of options. Proprietary or open, native or Web, Mac-only or cross-platform, App Store or your own server.
Java is Oracle's in the same way Flash is Adobe's. If you have a complaint about either, take it up with them. Apple has no responsibility to work for those guys for free. Apple's users have no responsibility to do I-T work to enable you to develop with either of those platforms. HTML5 is the standard common platform. Cocoa, Java, Flash are all entirely optional.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
You have no idea what you are blathering about. Apple is in no way getting out of computers. As always, they simply do not sell computers to I-T, they sell them to consumers and creatives. Nobody else fills that need.
The apps that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. iOS itself is made on Macs. The music and movies that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. Apple is the leading provider of pro video editing tools by volume, and the leading provider of consumer video editing tools by volume. They are the leading provider of music and audio editing tools by volume. All of this stuff runs only on the Mac. They are the leading provider of graphics workstations. They sell 90% of the high-end Intel PC's sold every year. They sell 20% of the Intel PC's sold at US retail every year, in spite of having no low end model. Their Mac business by itself would be 110 in the Fortune 500 if it were a standalone company. It is not only not going away, it is growing and it is more important than ever.
Java doesn't have anything to do with any of this. The concerns of I-T and Slashdot nerds don't have anything to do with all of this. Get it through your head that there are computer users that are not part of the I-T market and the Mac is the computer for those users. Not because it is trendy (you moron) but because it satisfies the needs of those users. It has a pro video subsystem, a pro audio subsystem, a pro graphics subsystem, a pro Web development subsystem, it can be maintained without I-T support. None of those things are true of any other computer.
It is absolutely wonderful if your computing needs are satisfied with a generic box running Ubuntu, but grow up enough to realize that other users needs are only satisfied with a Mac.
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Keep ranting. Nobody gives a shit.
Users want to be able to install apps with one click and have them just work, whether they are native apps or Web apps. Apple has done a ton of work to enable that on both their own Cocoa platform and the common HTML5 platform, which they have done at least as much as anybody else to realize. Apps that depend on Flash or Java don't fit this model. Not only are there various versions of the runtimes which may or may not run the app you're trying to use, and not only are there various security issues that come up regularly, the user is expected to play I-T guy and sort that all out.
If you are a Java developer, you can run Java on your own server and provide an HTML5 interface on the client, or a Cocoa interface on Apple platforms. That is how Apple themselves use Java. Cocoa and HTML5 both have auto installs and auto updates built-in, and are therefore consistent with consumer use. Whatever is on the server can be as nerdy as you like, but what is on the client has to be consumer grade. Flash and Java are not consumer grade.
Understand that Apple makes consumer products. Would you expect a TV or DVD Player to have Flash and Java and expect the user to update them regularly? That is insanity. So you're not going to have those runtimes on iPads and MacBooks either. These devices don't have I-T support people. The users don't know what Flash or Java is.
So you missed the point entirely. Apple's App Stores are not about being closed, they are about working for consumers 100% of the time with absolutely zero I-T work. Apple makes very, very little money from App Store. The incentive is not to close it, but rather to make it work perfectly. Same with Apple's Web app platform, which is 100% open it's pure W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 media so that it works 100% of the time for consumers with zero I-T work. You don't need various browsers you switch to for some sites, you don't need to update your Flash or Java, you don't need to download codecs, the one in your GPU is the only one you need. Flash and Java don't make the cut in consumer computing. Blaming Apple for that is just denialism, a way to put your nerd head in the sand and wish the clock would turn back.
I have a lot of friends who have 50 3rd party apps on their iPhone, and zero 3rd party apps on their Mac, because they don't know how to install them. That is the main reason for Mac App Store.
So you're saying that in 5 years you want to be using the largest, heaviest system possible with a bunch of moving parts?
If MacBook Air is not for you, that is fine. But it works really well for an awful lot of people who never miss what is left out and who benefit many times per day from carrying a 1 kilo system. It isn't like the other notebooks were end-of-lifed, and MacBook Air is not even new. I have one that is 18 months old and it is a 2nd gen. I also have a MacBook Pro that is a few months old and has all the ports and an optical drive, so it isn't even an either or situation.
Finally, as we all know, Slashdot readers are not typical consumers. If you can't understand that Jobs talking to the other 95%, then don't watch him. I have a friend who is going to buy one of these new MacBook Airs and her only concern was does it have a place to plug-in "USB's" because she has "a bunch of USB's". She's a little tiny thing, the 1 kilo weight will be a killer feature for her.
Cocoa development is so easy that it is literally child's play. There are kids with apps in Apple's App Store. If you want to sell in iPhone/iPad/Mac App Store and keep 70%, make a Cocoa app. EASY.
Apple is prioritizing the user, not the developer. That is very unnatural to most developers, who expect to have their toes sucked at every turn. If you require us to waste battery power or play I-T guy so you can play with your favorite technology instead of making a native app like a professional then we're not interested. We don't want that kind of developer on Apple platforms. It's not some scheme, we're just not interested.
There are a lot of platforms right now that don't even support C. Not supporting Java is no big deal when you have Objective-C and Cocoa and OpenGL.
QuickTime is not required to watch videos on Apple's website. Their videos are HTTP live streams of MPEG4, all open standard. Your system is simply behind the curve.
Windows is too expensive in support costs and training costs. Building-your-own just means more support costs and training costs. Again and again I have seen companies and individuals save money by buying Macs and now iPads because the users take them and go off and do productive work with them without I-T support, without training. And a ton of money is saved by reduced need for I-T consultants. I've seen places where 1 I-T guy manages hundreds and hundreds of Macs because AppleCare is cheap and Apple Stores are nearby when components fail. A $999 MacBook and $149 AppleCare is 3 years of guaranteed computing, day-in, day-out, for $380 per year. Then you sell the MacBook for $400, reducing your cost to $250 per year, and go again with another MacBook and AppleCare for the next 3 years. No viruses, self-patching, automatic backup, reliable Unix, and world class software all built-in and ready to run.
Rewrite this article about phones... would you save money by building your own BlackBerry? It's an archaic mindset. It would be great if more than one PC maker knew what the fuck they were doing, but that is not so. Only Apple is shipping 21st century systems right now. And users go more easily from XP to Mac OS than they do from XP to Windows 7.
For corporate users, just having Keynote alone is an improvement for them. Their presentations will be a hundred times better, more like Steve Jobs or Al Gore, they will communicate better, sell more. And Keynote is a fraction of the price of PowerPoint.
But I'm wasting my breath because I-T people are very, very rarely involved in doing what's best for their clients. Instead, you will take advantage of their naiveté and keep them as powerless as possible and that means Microsoft.
3.5 million LP's is less than some single artist's numbers 30 years ago. So not really new peaks for vinyl. And it's less than a month's worth of iPods.
Going forward, expect there to be only one physical media version of everything for collecting. So we will likely see hard cover books and even leather bound books as well as LP's for collecting, but people will read the digital book on an iPad or listen to the digital music on an iPod most of the time.
If you know C, then iOS, which is C. Android is Java. With Xcode you can make apps for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac, and potentially AppleTV. They are desktop class native apps, not applets that run in a virtual machine.
As far as the market, Apple's App Store has 50 times the revenue of Android Market, operates in many more countries, and has a much larger installed base of users. iOS users specifically buy iOS devices and like to buy apps and accessories for them.
It is also cheaper to develop for iOS, because you can buy an iPod touch for $229 with no contract and have the latest handheld hardware. That combined with the simulators in the dev tools is all you need because there is little hardware variation. The SoC in the iPod touch is also in iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. With Android, you are talking about $500 devices and you'll need a few of them at least.
Android's Dalvik engine is also under a patent suit from Oracle, and HTC is under a patent suit from Apple. On the Apple side you are working with an app platform with 20 year heritage back to NeXT and hardware platform with 10 year heritage back to iPod and 20 years back to Newton. It wasn't just cloned yesterday.
Yes, iPod is standardized. It only plays ISO standard media. Same audio and video you find in every single consumer electronics device in the entire fucking world.
It's Microsoft and the Windows PC that are famous for their lack of support for standards.
Apple makes 50% of the profits, Nokia makes 25%, RIM makes 15%, and all the rest divvy up the other 10%. All of Android combined makes 3%. Motorola has not made any money on Android at all, and will likely be out of the business in 2014.
So who is going to be making all those 2014 Android phones? Or will users just make their own on a breadboard by 2014?
iTunes is just the media player from Mac OS. It runs great on a Mac. It's fast, it never crashes. It's happy to download many 1-2GB movie files while transcoding and syncing hundreds of music files to multiple mobile devices.
When you're running iTunes on Windows, you're essentially running a chunk of Mac OS to get that done, because Windows doesn't have the corresponding systems like open media playback. But you're running it on the creaky Windows core, which can't multitask to save its own life and which falls over if you blow on it.
It's like running PHP on Mac or Windows. On a Mac, you have actual PHP on actual Unix and you just turn on PHP and you go. On Windows, you install something like EasyPHP that has to put a hunk of Unix into a creaky Windows application.
Maybe if 90% of the Windows platform was on the latest OS version like Apple's users, then Windows users would have a right to complain about how iTunes performs on Windows 7. But you are mostly on the 2001 version of Windows, which predates the iPod by a few months. So Windows apps are XP apps, even if you're running Vista or 7.
If you want good performance from your PC, get a Mac. This has been true for the entire 21st century. If you haven't caught on to that yet, then STFU. Nobody gives a damn about how bad your Windows works anymore. We all know it's broken, we all know it's not being fixed, we all know there is an alternative that has thousands of advantages as well as much cheaper TCO. You're working harder and paying more to run Windows. Stop complaining that it sucks. Your destiny is in your own hands.
> Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of > their own (patented) TrueType technology
Apple developed TrueType in the 1980's because Adobe's licensing fees for PostScript typefaces were out of control. Microsoft licensed TrueType from Apple in the early 1990's and it appeared first on Windows in v3.1.
TrueType is not central to typography in OS X, which is font-format agnostic and renders true WYSIWYG. Everything on the screen of an OS X device is a PDF that displays the same on low or hi -res screens or print. TrueType compatibility in OS X is done via FreeType as far as I know, not via the original Apple implementation from before OS X. So that is why Microsoft is using it for TrueType compatibility on OS X as well.
This article just suffers from lack of Mac knowledge. It would also sound strange to a Windows user to know that PowerPoint features MPEG-4 playback, but not to a Mac user, because on the Mac, PowerPoint has been able to do that for years. And it would sound strange to a Windows user to know that Microsoft Word can run bash shell scripts, which it can do on the Mac via AppleScript. It might be strange to consider that MS Office Mac has been running on a Unix core for 10 years. It's all very mundane to Mac users.
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Keyboards are cheap. Find one you like, then buy 2, and use 1 with each hand. They will be much cheaper than 1 "ergonomic" keyboard. Position them wherever is appropriate for each hand. Move them around regularly if you like. You can hit the spacebar with the thumb that works. Having 1 keyboard for each hand lets you open your arms as wide as you want and open up the body and shoulders, which can give great relief to the nerves. If you put your hands in front of you comfortably, you will probably find that they are too far apart to use the same keyboard.
The Apple Wireless Keyboard is small (no number pad) and thin and is easily positioned low, e.g. in your lap. And of course it is wireless, so positioning 1 for each hand may be easier with it. They are lightweight and extremely rigid (1 piece of aluminum) so you could attach them vertically to the sides of a chair or almost anywhere. You can also use 1 of them and 1 MacBook at the same time and that is 2 identical keyboards in a very portable setup.
I find the position of the modifier keys on the Mac to be more ergonomic than with a PC and Windows. Using Command for common shortcuts instead of Control encourages you to hit Command with your thumb, not pinkie, as with Control. So even if you are using Windows, you can swap the Control/Windows key keycodes and your shortcuts for New, Open, Save, Cut, Copy, Paste, etc. all become the original Mac shortcuts and hand positions, so you can do them with left thumb and forefinger.
I also prefer the huge Mac trackpad to a mouse in every way. The large trackpad lets you open your hand up, not scrunch it up as with a mouse. The gestures are very natural. Scrolling with 2 fingers is especially natural. You change hand positions naturally as you work, you don't have one clenched hand position the whole time.
Mac App Store is part of the Cocoa platform. Why you would expect apps from other platforms to be supported is beyond me. Apt-get does not install Cocoa apps. HTML5 app caching does not install Cocoa apps. If you want a Java app store ask Oracle.
Mac OS X is a certified Unix. If you're having trouble running whatever you like on it you need to go to school.
Apple switched to Intel and provide an emulated BIOS and drivers for MS Windows. It may be that every currently shipping application in the world can be run on current Apple hardware.
In addition to deprecating Adobe's Flash and Oracle's Java recently, Apple also deprecated their own Carbon. That is progress, not politics. They also have done more to advance W3C HTML5 than any other vendor, and more to advance ISO MPEG-4 than any other vendor (in spite of their own QuickTime platform), and they are the largest Unix vendor by volume. So that is progress again, not proprietization.
There is already negligible demand for consumer Java on the Mac. Has nothing to do with Mac App Store, which is part of the Cocoa platform, and has not launched yet.
Apple's integrated approach is what sells their products. It's what users pay for. Users don't care about Java, they care about 1-click installs that always just work with great user interfaces and full performance and the best battery life on their hardware. They care about being required to do zero configuration, zero I-T work. They absolutely do not want to have an app fail because they need to install or update a Java or Flash runtime. Cocoa and HTML5 do not require that and that is why they are the technologies that Apple supports. For all the complaints that iPhone is closed or locked down, it is by far the best open HTML5 platform and the Mac is the only name-brand PC that ships with an HTML5 browser, and Apple has been doing that since 2003, since before HTML5 was even called HTML5.
So it's not about open or closed, because HTML5 is more open than Java. As always with Apple, it's about a better user experience. That is what sells their products. People can get a shitty user experience from any other vendor.
If there is no business case for Oracle to develop Java for the Mac, then there will be no Java for the Mac. Why should Apple build a JVM when there is no business case for them to do it?
You're making the mistake of thinking Apple cares about selling boxes to people who develop or run Java apps. They don't. They are interested in selling to users who develop or run either Apple's Cocoa or open HTML5 or open MPEG-4 or open Unix. They are not interested in doing a ton of work to support Oracle's alternative to Cocoa or Adobe's alternative to HTML5/MPEG-4. Java and Flash runtimes shift I-T work from developer to user, that is the opposite of how things are done on the Mac because most systems do not have I-T support, and most users are consumers and producers, not I-T. If you care about Apple users then you make Cocoa or HTML5 for them (your choice) and interact with anything else on a server (Java, Ruby, PHP, Python, Flash, Windows, whatever you like). If you don't care about Apple users then there is no need for you to have an opinion.
Apple announced that their JVM will be supported throughout the rest of it's life cycle. There is no uncertainty from Apple. And in fact, you can rely on them as usual to move forward aggressively and not dwell on old tech like client runtimes. We have HTML5 now, you can run locally in HTML5 and interact with Java on a server.
If you have questions about the future of Java, ask Oracle for answers. If you built your business on Java, ask Oracle for answers. Java is owned by Oracle.
Mac OS is a standard Unix. Your warning label is bullshit. There is absolutely nothing preventing Oracle or any Mac user from running anything they want on Mac OS. If Microsoft wanted to port Win32 to Mac OS they could do it. And in fact, Windows itself is supported on Apple hardware.
I love how tech nerds want to have it both ways with the Mac. On one hand they will tell you the Mac is insignificant and has minimal market share, yet on the other, everything Apple does that they don't like is a cause for anti-trust monopoly remedies.
Java is a second class citizen on Mac OS. This is simply about recognizing that.
The first class citizens on Mac OS are Cocoa and HTML5. That is it. Both platforms have automatic installs and automatic updates and zero configuration, which is what Apple's users demand and pay for. Together they offer a developer a yin yang of options. Proprietary or open, native or Web, Mac-only or cross-platform, App Store or your own server.
Java is Oracle's in the same way Flash is Adobe's. If you have a complaint about either, take it up with them. Apple has no responsibility to work for those guys for free. Apple's users have no responsibility to do I-T work to enable you to develop with either of those platforms. HTML5 is the standard common platform. Cocoa, Java, Flash are all entirely optional.
This is not a big deal really.
Software developers aren't really all that important to Apple market share anymore as they have been moving toward becoming more of a source for trendy tech gadgets rather than a major force in computer driven software for some time now. They intend to phase out of computers completely as there is more money to be made with iPhones, toy tablets and other trendy gizmos. They see no future in the business world of databases, web-development and science-based applications, but rather in the end-user market phone, games and entertainment space. Apple intends not to compete with Microsoft or Linux. With OS X, their primary targets are increasingly Sony, Nitendo, Nokia, Samsung and the like.
Lets face it modern American youth are really no longer receiving the kind of educations that they would need to remain current in the computer-tech world. Jobs is just adapting to market realities and the fact he has a captive market of folks who recognize that they can't really be "cool" unless they buy Apple products.
You have no idea what you are blathering about. Apple is in no way getting out of computers. As always, they simply do not sell computers to I-T, they sell them to consumers and creatives. Nobody else fills that need.
The apps that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. iOS itself is made on Macs. The music and movies that sell to iOS users are made on Macs. Apple is the leading provider of pro video editing tools by volume, and the leading provider of consumer video editing tools by volume. They are the leading provider of music and audio editing tools by volume. All of this stuff runs only on the Mac. They are the leading provider of graphics workstations. They sell 90% of the high-end Intel PC's sold every year. They sell 20% of the Intel PC's sold at US retail every year, in spite of having no low end model. Their Mac business by itself would be 110 in the Fortune 500 if it were a standalone company. It is not only not going away, it is growing and it is more important than ever.
Java doesn't have anything to do with any of this. The concerns of I-T and Slashdot nerds don't have anything to do with all of this. Get it through your head that there are computer users that are not part of the I-T market and the Mac is the computer for those users. Not because it is trendy (you moron) but because it satisfies the needs of those users. It has a pro video subsystem, a pro audio subsystem, a pro graphics subsystem, a pro Web development subsystem, it can be maintained without I-T support. None of those things are true of any other computer.
It is absolutely wonderful if your computing needs are satisfied with a generic box running Ubuntu, but grow up enough to realize that other users needs are only satisfied with a Mac.
The side-effects are that Java developers won't use Macs. (Since I use neither Java nor Apple products, I don't really care that mcuh, but I think Apple might be shooting itself in the foot.)
Of much more concern is the App store for Mac OS X idea. Apple is turning Mac OS X into a closed iPhone-like system. I guess my anti-Apple rant will soon apply to Mac OS X as well as the iP* systems.
Keep ranting. Nobody gives a shit.
Users want to be able to install apps with one click and have them just work, whether they are native apps or Web apps. Apple has done a ton of work to enable that on both their own Cocoa platform and the common HTML5 platform, which they have done at least as much as anybody else to realize. Apps that depend on Flash or Java don't fit this model. Not only are there various versions of the runtimes which may or may not run the app you're trying to use, and not only are there various security issues that come up regularly, the user is expected to play I-T guy and sort that all out.
If you are a Java developer, you can run Java on your own server and provide an HTML5 interface on the client, or a Cocoa interface on Apple platforms. That is how Apple themselves use Java. Cocoa and HTML5 both have auto installs and auto updates built-in, and are therefore consistent with consumer use. Whatever is on the server can be as nerdy as you like, but what is on the client has to be consumer grade. Flash and Java are not consumer grade.
Understand that Apple makes consumer products. Would you expect a TV or DVD Player to have Flash and Java and expect the user to update them regularly? That is insanity. So you're not going to have those runtimes on iPads and MacBooks either. These devices don't have I-T support people. The users don't know what Flash or Java is.
So you missed the point entirely. Apple's App Stores are not about being closed, they are about working for consumers 100% of the time with absolutely zero I-T work. Apple makes very, very little money from App Store. The incentive is not to close it, but rather to make it work perfectly. Same with Apple's Web app platform, which is 100% open it's pure W3C HTML5 and ISO MPEG-4 media so that it works 100% of the time for consumers with zero I-T work. You don't need various browsers you switch to for some sites, you don't need to update your Flash or Java, you don't need to download codecs, the one in your GPU is the only one you need. Flash and Java don't make the cut in consumer computing. Blaming Apple for that is just denialism, a way to put your nerd head in the sand and wish the clock would turn back.
I have a lot of friends who have 50 3rd party apps on their iPhone, and zero 3rd party apps on their Mac, because they don't know how to install them. That is the main reason for Mac App Store.
So you're saying that in 5 years you want to be using the largest, heaviest system possible with a bunch of moving parts?
If MacBook Air is not for you, that is fine. But it works really well for an awful lot of people who never miss what is left out and who benefit many times per day from carrying a 1 kilo system. It isn't like the other notebooks were end-of-lifed, and MacBook Air is not even new. I have one that is 18 months old and it is a 2nd gen. I also have a MacBook Pro that is a few months old and has all the ports and an optical drive, so it isn't even an either or situation.
Finally, as we all know, Slashdot readers are not typical consumers. If you can't understand that Jobs talking to the other 95%, then don't watch him. I have a friend who is going to buy one of these new MacBook Airs and her only concern was does it have a place to plug-in "USB's" because she has "a bunch of USB's". She's a little tiny thing, the 1 kilo weight will be a killer feature for her.
Cocoa development is so easy that it is literally child's play. There are kids with apps in Apple's App Store. If you want to sell in iPhone/iPad/Mac App Store and keep 70%, make a Cocoa app. EASY.
Apple is prioritizing the user, not the developer. That is very unnatural to most developers, who expect to have their toes sucked at every turn. If you require us to waste battery power or play I-T guy so you can play with your favorite technology instead of making a native app like a professional then we're not interested. We don't want that kind of developer on Apple platforms. It's not some scheme, we're just not interested.
There are a lot of platforms right now that don't even support C. Not supporting Java is no big deal when you have Objective-C and Cocoa and OpenGL.
QuickTime is not required to watch videos on Apple's website. Their videos are HTTP live streams of MPEG4, all open standard. Your system is simply behind the curve.
Windows is too expensive in support costs and training costs. Building-your-own just means more support costs and training costs. Again and again I have seen companies and individuals save money by buying Macs and now iPads because the users take them and go off and do productive work with them without I-T support, without training. And a ton of money is saved by reduced need for I-T consultants. I've seen places where 1 I-T guy manages hundreds and hundreds of Macs because AppleCare is cheap and Apple Stores are nearby when components fail. A $999 MacBook and $149 AppleCare is 3 years of guaranteed computing, day-in, day-out, for $380 per year. Then you sell the MacBook for $400, reducing your cost to $250 per year, and go again with another MacBook and AppleCare for the next 3 years. No viruses, self-patching, automatic backup, reliable Unix, and world class software all built-in and ready to run.
Rewrite this article about phones ... would you save money by building your own BlackBerry? It's an archaic mindset. It would be great if more than one PC maker knew what the fuck they were doing, but that is not so. Only Apple is shipping 21st century systems right now. And users go more easily from XP to Mac OS than they do from XP to Windows 7.
For corporate users, just having Keynote alone is an improvement for them. Their presentations will be a hundred times better, more like Steve Jobs or Al Gore, they will communicate better, sell more. And Keynote is a fraction of the price of PowerPoint.
But I'm wasting my breath because I-T people are very, very rarely involved in doing what's best for their clients. Instead, you will take advantage of their naiveté and keep them as powerless as possible and that means Microsoft.
3.5 million LP's is less than some single artist's numbers 30 years ago. So not really new peaks for vinyl. And it's less than a month's worth of iPods.
Going forward, expect there to be only one physical media version of everything for collecting. So we will likely see hard cover books and even leather bound books as well as LP's for collecting, but people will read the digital book on an iPad or listen to the digital music on an iPod most of the time.
If you know C, then iOS, which is C. Android is Java. With Xcode you can make apps for iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac, and potentially AppleTV. They are desktop class native apps, not applets that run in a virtual machine.
As far as the market, Apple's App Store has 50 times the revenue of Android Market, operates in many more countries, and has a much larger installed base of users. iOS users specifically buy iOS devices and like to buy apps and accessories for them.
It is also cheaper to develop for iOS, because you can buy an iPod touch for $229 with no contract and have the latest handheld hardware. That combined with the simulators in the dev tools is all you need because there is little hardware variation. The SoC in the iPod touch is also in iPhone, iPad, and AppleTV. With Android, you are talking about $500 devices and you'll need a few of them at least.
Android's Dalvik engine is also under a patent suit from Oracle, and HTC is under a patent suit from Apple. On the Apple side you are working with an app platform with 20 year heritage back to NeXT and hardware platform with 10 year heritage back to iPod and 20 years back to Newton. It wasn't just cloned yesterday.
Yes, iPod is standardized. It only plays ISO standard media. Same audio and video you find in every single consumer electronics device in the entire fucking world.
It's Microsoft and the Windows PC that are famous for their lack of support for standards.
Apple makes 50% of the profits, Nokia makes 25%, RIM makes 15%, and all the rest divvy up the other 10%. All of Android combined makes 3%. Motorola has not made any money on Android at all, and will likely be out of the business in 2014.
So who is going to be making all those 2014 Android phones? Or will users just make their own on a breadboard by 2014?
IE9 has zero (0) users. That means it is fucking irrelevant.
Don't get me wrong ... it's great that they're cloning WebKit. It's great that they will finally have a real Web browser.
But ship something, Microsoft! Sheesh.
iTunes is just the media player from Mac OS. It runs great on a Mac. It's fast, it never crashes. It's happy to download many 1-2GB movie files while transcoding and syncing hundreds of music files to multiple mobile devices.
When you're running iTunes on Windows, you're essentially running a chunk of Mac OS to get that done, because Windows doesn't have the corresponding systems like open media playback. But you're running it on the creaky Windows core, which can't multitask to save its own life and which falls over if you blow on it.
It's like running PHP on Mac or Windows. On a Mac, you have actual PHP on actual Unix and you just turn on PHP and you go. On Windows, you install something like EasyPHP that has to put a hunk of Unix into a creaky Windows application.
Maybe if 90% of the Windows platform was on the latest OS version like Apple's users, then Windows users would have a right to complain about how iTunes performs on Windows 7. But you are mostly on the 2001 version of Windows, which predates the iPod by a few months. So Windows apps are XP apps, even if you're running Vista or 7.
If you want good performance from your PC, get a Mac. This has been true for the entire 21st century. If you haven't caught on to that yet, then STFU. Nobody gives a damn about how bad your Windows works anymore. We all know it's broken, we all know it's not being fixed, we all know there is an alternative that has thousands of advantages as well as much cheaper TCO. You're working harder and paying more to run Windows. Stop complaining that it sucks. Your destiny is in your own hands.
> Now I have to have Quicktime on my machine ... which I am not a fan of.
Sorry your crappy PC didn't come with a standard media layer and Apple had to provide you with a free one.
> Somehow they figured out the free software 'clean room implementation' of
> their own (patented) TrueType technology
Apple developed TrueType in the 1980's because Adobe's licensing fees for PostScript typefaces were out of control. Microsoft licensed TrueType from Apple in the early 1990's and it appeared first on Windows in v3.1.
TrueType is not central to typography in OS X, which is font-format agnostic and renders true WYSIWYG. Everything on the screen of an OS X device is a PDF that displays the same on low or hi -res screens or print. TrueType compatibility in OS X is done via FreeType as far as I know, not via the original Apple implementation from before OS X. So that is why Microsoft is using it for TrueType compatibility on OS X as well.
This article just suffers from lack of Mac knowledge. It would also sound strange to a Windows user to know that PowerPoint features MPEG-4 playback, but not to a Mac user, because on the Mac, PowerPoint has been able to do that for years. And it would sound strange to a Windows user to know that Microsoft Word can run bash shell scripts, which it can do on the Mac via AppleScript. It might be strange to consider that MS Office Mac has been running on a Unix core for 10 years. It's all very mundane to Mac users.