A big part of this is how cheap and easy it is to do HTML5+H.264 video. The video editing tools all have H.264 encoders, including batch encoding at least in Final Cut, and a standalone encoder is $29. Of course any HTML coder can learn the video tag. Flash is unreasonably complicated by comparison and also $599 a seat.
Considering the Windows malware that is emptying bank accounts, you have to ban Windows if serious about security. If not banning Windows, they should create a Chase-branded native Windows software client for their customers to use so they don't use a browser at all.
Safari support is important because many Windows users do their online banking with their iPod or iPhone because it's exponentially safer than Windows, and because Mac users are extremely trouble-free clients. But they should simply support WebKit to also get Chrome and the other smartphones.
The key takeaway from the IE9 preview is that the Internet Explorer platform is dead. If you support WebKit plus IE6-IE8 then you'll very likely be including IE9 as if it is a WebKit browser since they are making a WebKit-alike so they can reboot their mobile platform.
Overall I think the best strategy is to be aggressive with HTML5, including fallbacks so that you have one site you're focusing on, that can run in any HTML5 browser and fallback gracefully to the old browsers, then be aggressive about getting your clients to upgrade and about communicating whatever problems you have to W3C and the browser vendors. The way out is through.
Yeah, women are generally too practical to spend all day rebooting Windows and rebuilding Windows and making excuses for Windows. With rare exceptions, I-T is in an impractical pit of despair. Solutions are not provided. Users are not given the tools they need for their work. There is almost zero reliability, almost zero security, and I-T takes zero responsibility for that. There's a shrug: "hey, this is what Redmond shat out, so it's what you get." It's a dark time for I-T.
Most ASCAP members don't have health care. Think about that next time you are pontificating about freeing the culture. In the US, we don't even have free basic 911 services, so how can we have free music? An American with health care still dies younger than Europeans and Canadians, but without health care you lose 10-20 years. That's hundreds of lost songs per songwriter. The 2 pennies you may have to pay to a songwriter are not nearly the threat to culture as having no public health care system.
... which is why "laser quality" is 300 dpi. We knew fax looks like shit because it's 200 dpi. It's why chemical photo prints are almost 300 dpi. Why print artwork is done at 300 dpi. The "300 dpi pleases the retina" thing is like 25 or more years old. 300 is the most important point on the resolution scale.
But of course if Steve Jobs says it, then the Nerd Police have to say it's wrong. If it didn't happen in a video game or a Windows patch then they don't fucking know. As if Apple doesn't know about graphics and publishing!
Nokia sued Apple first. Nokia is the leading smartphone vendor by volume who has lost its way technologically and is now trying to get Apple to pay more for GSM than everyone else. So Apple didn't set anything off.
As for HTC, they should have hired designers and inventors. Now they will have to hire lawyers. HTC is like a kind of cancer on the mobile industry. Other cloners are noticing and saying hey we had better hire designers and inventors now instead of lawyers later. That is good unless you want to see the mobile market collapse into a copy of the moribund PC market.
Apple's suit has nothing to do with Google. Google passed on all liability to HTC via software licensing. That is the reason Google only makes software, same as Microsoft. High profit, low liability, no need to be original.
Every once in a while, Android outsells iPhone. Like for a day at a time, when Verizon has a 2-for-1 or something. Extrapolating that one day to a whole year is not just stupid but pathetic.
The hypocrisy of Android is just stupefying. Closed networks, proprietary phones, closed native C API, malware, spyware, spamware, apps being deleted from user's phones, horrendous bugs in every device, and an endless stream of invective directed against the community you copy from that is exceeded only by the grandiose predictions of world domination "any moment now" and excusifying for the current half-assed state of the Android nation. So fucking miserably tiresome. I love it that Linus Torvalds loves his Android phone. I hate it that the same phone is being sold to consumers as "just like an iPhone" when it's not. I hate it that a friend called me up on her landline to ask for my help getting her Android phone to stop crashing like she had a Windows PC. And this is someone who had 2 trouble-free years with iPhone. Just an incredible lack of quality in these devices HTC keeps shitting out. It's a plague.
HTML, CSS, WOFF, and PNG are vendor-neutral open standards. So are AVC and AAC. WebM is not a standard.
W3C and ISO/IEC are standards bodies and Google is not. An AVC-based YouTube competes fairly with all other Internet video, but WebM creates incompatibilities and confusion that will drive publishers to YouTube.
HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC are not vulnerable to submarine patents, and WebM is.
There is a ton of content in HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC, and there is nothing in WebM.
AVC is the same video from iTunes, iPod, iPhone and other smartphones, Blu-Ray, QuickTime Player, FlashPlayer, set-top boxes, and is built into all the hardware, including PC GPU's. If the Web uses nonstandard video publishers have to work in 2 formats, defeating the standard.
The point of HTML5 is to standardize the Web. Using a nonstandard video format defeats the that purpose. If you're not going to respect standards then just make HTML4 or Word documents. Replacing Flash with WebM is not standardization.
If this happens, what will follow is a crackdown on jaywalking and other everybody crimes so that the database becomes universal. They'll be taking DNA at traffic stops.
The main difference between Mac OS and iOS is you can't code on iOS. It's partly a security feature and partly an anti-complexity feature. iOS is for a non-coding approach to all tasks. You may not know this, but a Photoshop pro writes a ton of code. The home user working with their photos doesn't need to.
Another feature of iOS is no custom drivers. The USB audio interfaces that work with iOS are the "class compliant" ones that work with the system's universal driver. This provides stability and ease of use, but it limits the quality to consumer-quality 16/44 stereo. Audio pros still need a system to hook on an 8 channel 24/192 interface. OS X has a pro audio subsystem the likes of which you can't find anywhere else. Are we going to just abandon that and tell music producers to use toy Windows? The iPod app on iOS is filled up by people using Mac OS.
The mouse is going away, no doubt. But you will still have a consumer OS and a pro OS. Web developers need Apache and Ruby and PHP to make websites for iOS users, movie makers and graphic artists need to code workflows, and app developers need to code apps and Apple needs to code OS X itself. The idea that Mac OS can go away is just so fucking stupid and ignorant and disrespectful when you consider how much of our fucking culture is made on Macs.
Anyone who thinks there is no longer a need for Mac OS is an iPad user. Get an iPad ASAP and enjoy! STFU about Mac OS otherwise. You probably don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
So all we have to do is send all Web users to night classes on process management so they can diagnose when Flash is consuming too many resources and identify and kill the relevant process. That way we can rescue Flash designers from having to learn HTML and Adobe from having to compete with anybody. Makes total sense. I mean, playing video ought to be complicated, right?
One thing that seems to be true with Android is it's always "coming". There's always a really great Android moment on the horizon.
But there are already many Android tablets. They're not coming. They've been here a while. Last January's CES was infested with them. They all just suck. They get reviewed and they ship 10 units and they go away. The Nook which is mentioned in this article is an Android tablet!
The idea that manufacturers are going to just copy iPad is asinine. Look at the Sprint EVO, which had 3 iPhones to copy and it gets 8 hours of standby battery life. In other words, if you don't use it at all, it still dies in 8 hours. A key feature of iPad is the 10-12 hours of actual use, and 30 days of standby. I've gotten on a train in Silicon Valley with a fully-charged iPad, surfed on 3G the whole way, and when I'm putting it away in San Francisco, it still says "100%" in the battery meter. I've had the device for 3 weeks and never even seen a low battery warning.
And iOS is not a phone OS scaled-up, it's desktops-and-servers OS X with a touch interface on top. Android doesn't have that kind of graphics layer, multichannel audio, advanced typography, C API, and other desktop-class features that only become even more important as you scale the display up. Being able to port desktop C apps over rather than rewrite in Java only becomes even more important.
And the bag of parts on an iPad approaches the retail price point. There is no room under there. A big display and battery is a big display and battery. An iPad 3G 16GB is $629 retail and Nexus One 4G with 1/4 the screen size and 30% of the battery volume is $649 retail. The biggest problem for Android v2 has been it's more expensive than iPhone! That's why it only sells on the closed networks in the US. That's why 75% of Android devices run v1.6.
In tech, it is a fool's game to try and predict the future anyway. But if you are doing this Android-is-coming-soon thing, that is something you should talk to your therapist about. It's just become so tiresome. Any mention of iPad or iPhone online and the next thing you know "Android will be better next year!" Sheesh. It's like a reflex. If only it was as easy to actually make functional, consumer-ready devices.
They're just doing what they always do: they're copying Apple/NeXT. However, Microsoft didn't adjust when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
It was productive for Microsoft to copy the 1985-1996 Apple that tried to sell to businesses and made drab interfaces and drab boxes and kept their prices high and hardly pushed the technology forward. Microsoft could keep up because Apple was slow, they were safe copying stuff whole because Apple was weak and they had even accidentally given Microsoft a license to clone their API, and the copies Microsoft created were drab enough for their PC maker customers and corporate CTO's to like them.
It's not productive for Microsoft to copy the 1997-present Apple for all the opposite reasons. Apple sells direct to consumers now, even to the point where 1 out of every 3 Apple employees is in retail. Zune can't compete with iPod on price or features. The $99 iPhone is so cheap there's no room under there for a profitable clone. The Intel Mac erased the high-end Windows PC market from existence. The iPad is killing the low-end PC market. The products are sexy and colorful and way beyond the capabilities of Microsoft's PC maker customers to compete with.
Windows Vista/7 was "Windows for Mac users". It's not at all what the PC makers wanted, or the CTO's wanted, or the corporate trainers wanted, and so on. Windows Phone 7 is "Windows Mobile for iPhone users." Microsoft continue to sit on a pile of money from their 2001/2003 products that were copied from the old Apple in the case of Windows XP, or ported from the old Apple system in the case of MS Office 2003.
Plus, technology is moving faster now, and the Internet provides everyone with the latest information on the state-of-the-art, and Apple Stores just make it even worse. You can't pretend Windows Vista/7 is not 10 years behind the Mac. You can't pretend that Windows Phone 7 is not 5 years behind iPhone. People have seen the Apple Store, they've tried the products.
I've personally seen more Windows XP to iPad upgrades than Windows XP to Vista/7, so good riddance to Microsoft. People can get the original item cheap now rather than wait for the Microsoft copy. My iPad already paid for itself. I'm drinking the milkshake of anybody who is waiting around for the Microsoft version. I've been using Mac OS X for 10 years, I've been drinking the milkshake of XP users the whole damn time. I've had a fully usable, full desktop browser in my front jeans pocket for 3 years, the whole time drinking the milkshake of other phone users.
So no, Microsoft's products don't make sense anymore.
> Their only advantage with WM6 was that it was actually an open platform... you could install applications from any source
Not a feature. That's a malware vector. That's something businesses will have to lock down and consumers will have to patrol. Neither of them wants to do that.
> I'm still not buying any device which is effectively a handheld computer, but which lacks the ability > to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
iPhone has never, ever lacked the ability to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
You have always been able to talk on the phone while reading email or doing anything else. You have always been able to listen to music while surfing the Web or doing anything else. Email and texts are always arriving, no matter what you're doing. Since v2.0 you have been able to make an audio recording while doing anything else. The only limitation is you couldn't run 2 3rd party apps at once. That limitation goes away tomorrow (June 21, 2010) with the release of iOS v4.
If you are running a Blackberry and you think a switch to iPhone will give you fewer capabilities, you are sorely mistaken.
iPhone lacked copy/paste in its first couple of versions. In Windows Phone *7* we are seeing the devices lose a feature they already had in 6.
iPhone lacked copy/paste during a time when multitouch was extremely new and there were zero multitouch implementations of copy/paste. Windows Phone 7 is giving up the feature years later, when there are many phones with multitouch copy/paste.
iPhone is a consumer device, sold direct to iPod users. Windows Phone 7 is coming from a B2B company whose phones are sold as enterprise phones, phones you do work on.
When iPhone got copy/paste, it was the full-featured desktop copy/paste from OS X, finally exposed in the iOS interface in a very elegant way, across all of the apps, including over 100,000 native 3rd party apps. It was worth waiting for. Users were immediately highly productive with it and have forgotten it was ever missing. It works with complex data types. It has a speller built-in now. It runs on a full-size tablet now. When Microsoft brings this feature back, it will be as full of caveats as all of their stuff.
You can pick on various features of iPhone as being missing, but since they shipped their very first phone, overall they have been ahead of everyone else, leading the industry. Windows Phone 7 doesn't lead anything.
You still have to write Java apps. You're still running in a virtual machine. On iOS, 3rd party developers are running a full desktop class C toolkit, the same one Apple uses to create their apps and iOS itself.
> iPhone has more applications because it has been out longer
That is total BS and it's time for Android users to stop playing the "we're too new to be successful" card. iPhone did not have native apps until version 2, which shipped at the same time as Android, in mid-2008. The 3rd party app platforms on iPhone and Android are almost exactly the same age. Android lacks apps because of inherent problems with Android, not because it's too new. It's not just the number of apps, but the whole categories of apps that Android lacks.
How are you going to release a C/C++ app on Android? The native API is closed. You have to rewrite in Java, which is why Ansroid is missing so many categories of software and why the overwhelming majority of Apple developers are Apple-only.
If displaying PDF is showing love for Adobe then Apple must want to marry them, because the OS X graphics subsystem is PDF. You're looking at a PDF when you look at the display of an iPhone or iPad or iPod or Mac. And PDF's you view with Safari or Mail are displayed as easily as HTML, right within the browser or email message.
How Google could ship Chrome OS without PDF viewing, I don't know.
PDF is an open standard, in stark contrast to Flash. Every operating system should be able to view it natively.
The malware blacklist has existed since Mac OS v10.6.0, and has always had 2 Trojans on it. Now Apple added a 3rd because there is a new one. That's how it's supposed to work. If this is news, it says really good things about Apple because it's man bites dog. New malware on Windows is dog bites man.
The Mac is not invulnerable to malware. No system is. That would be like saying a building is invulnerable to graffiti. However, if you paint over graffiti the instant it appears, you remove the entire incentive. Apple's Software Update patches 75% of the community within a week or so, and the rest within a month or so. There's just not much to be gained with Mac malware. Whatever you exploit will be replaced almost immediately by Apple. Snow Leopard is not one version of an OS, it's 10 discrete versions. There were 11 versions of Leopard. Each lasts only 2-3 months. A typical Windows version lasts 2-3 years or more. It's a very different situation.
Another thing to understand is that Sophos and other companies who make their living solely because Windows is mismanaged always want to expand into the Mac market and so they like to pretend that it's not a question of platform management but rather that malware is a fact of life and their services and scanners are necessary. No. The 10-20 built-in security systems of Mac OS are superior to anything you can bolt on to Windows.
They spent 2 years resurrecting the audio because it was in an obsolete nonstandard format that not everyone can play and then they put that audio on the Internet in an obsolete nonstandard format [Flash] that not everyone can play!
> Is there something people want to run besides Linux?
Yeah, Macs. All Mac applications can run shell scripts, and Python is included with every Mac, so a Photoshop-to-Picassa workflow would be very easy to create using Google CL. Or BBEdit-to-Blogger.
The way you see British teeth is how the rest of the world sees US health. Yanks will need whole body avatars to hide their many untreated diseases and morbid obesity.
On many sites, if your browser identifies itself as an iPad you will get an HTML5 version of content that would otherwise require FlashPlayer. If you are using a WebKit browser this may improve your browsing experience without Flash. Also works on any platform where you've disabled Flash. I run my Mac browser this way.
I definitely thought it was strange to see Linux users defending Flash and Adobe lately, considering how much content Flash has hidden from Linux users over the years and the way Flash has propped up Windows and the way it killed the Linux smart book in utero. Some of my favorite HTML5 apps were written and deployed on Linux. An open Web is just too important for this Flash foolishness.
Slashdot Mirror
Many porn sites are already iPad ready. I've heard (cough cough) that the experience is much better.
http://youporn.com/
http://pornhub.com/
http://extremetube.com/
A big part of this is how cheap and easy it is to do HTML5+H.264 video. The video editing tools all have H.264 encoders, including batch encoding at least in Final Cut, and a standalone encoder is $29. Of course any HTML coder can learn the video tag. Flash is unreasonably complicated by comparison and also $599 a seat.
Considering the Windows malware that is emptying bank accounts, you have to ban Windows if serious about security. If not banning Windows, they should create a Chase-branded native Windows software client for their customers to use so they don't use a browser at all.
Safari support is important because many Windows users do their online banking with their iPod or iPhone because it's exponentially safer than Windows, and because Mac users are extremely trouble-free clients. But they should simply support WebKit to also get Chrome and the other smartphones.
The key takeaway from the IE9 preview is that the Internet Explorer platform is dead. If you support WebKit plus IE6-IE8 then you'll very likely be including IE9 as if it is a WebKit browser since they are making a WebKit-alike so they can reboot their mobile platform.
Overall I think the best strategy is to be aggressive with HTML5, including fallbacks so that you have one site you're focusing on, that can run in any HTML5 browser and fallback gracefully to the old browsers, then be aggressive about getting your clients to upgrade and about communicating whatever problems you have to W3C and the browser vendors. The way out is through.
Yeah, women are generally too practical to spend all day rebooting Windows and rebuilding Windows and making excuses for Windows. With rare exceptions, I-T is in an impractical pit of despair. Solutions are not provided. Users are not given the tools they need for their work. There is almost zero reliability, almost zero security, and I-T takes zero responsibility for that. There's a shrug: "hey, this is what Redmond shat out, so it's what you get." It's a dark time for I-T.
Most ASCAP members don't have health care. Think about that next time you are pontificating about freeing the culture. In the US, we don't even have free basic 911 services, so how can we have free music? An American with health care still dies younger than Europeans and Canadians, but without health care you lose 10-20 years. That's hundreds of lost songs per songwriter. The 2 pennies you may have to pay to a songwriter are not nearly the threat to culture as having no public health care system.
... which is why "laser quality" is 300 dpi. We knew fax looks like shit because it's 200 dpi. It's why chemical photo prints are almost 300 dpi. Why print artwork is done at 300 dpi. The "300 dpi pleases the retina" thing is like 25 or more years old. 300 is the most important point on the resolution scale.
But of course if Steve Jobs says it, then the Nerd Police have to say it's wrong. If it didn't happen in a video game or a Windows patch then they don't fucking know. As if Apple doesn't know about graphics and publishing!
Nokia sued Apple first. Nokia is the leading smartphone vendor by volume who has lost its way technologically and is now trying to get Apple to pay more for GSM than everyone else. So Apple didn't set anything off.
As for HTC, they should have hired designers and inventors. Now they will have to hire lawyers. HTC is like a kind of cancer on the mobile industry. Other cloners are noticing and saying hey we had better hire designers and inventors now instead of lawyers later. That is good unless you want to see the mobile market collapse into a copy of the moribund PC market.
Apple's suit has nothing to do with Google. Google passed on all liability to HTC via software licensing. That is the reason Google only makes software, same as Microsoft. High profit, low liability, no need to be original.
Every once in a while, Android outsells iPhone. Like for a day at a time, when Verizon has a 2-for-1 or something. Extrapolating that one day to a whole year is not just stupid but pathetic.
The hypocrisy of Android is just stupefying. Closed networks, proprietary phones, closed native C API, malware, spyware, spamware, apps being deleted from user's phones, horrendous bugs in every device, and an endless stream of invective directed against the community you copy from that is exceeded only by the grandiose predictions of world domination "any moment now" and excusifying for the current half-assed state of the Android nation. So fucking miserably tiresome. I love it that Linus Torvalds loves his Android phone. I hate it that the same phone is being sold to consumers as "just like an iPhone" when it's not. I hate it that a friend called me up on her landline to ask for my help getting her Android phone to stop crashing like she had a Windows PC. And this is someone who had 2 trouble-free years with iPhone. Just an incredible lack of quality in these devices HTC keeps shitting out. It's a plague.
HTML, CSS, WOFF, and PNG are vendor-neutral open standards. So are AVC and AAC. WebM is not a standard.
W3C and ISO/IEC are standards bodies and Google is not. An AVC-based YouTube competes fairly with all other Internet video, but WebM creates incompatibilities and confusion that will drive publishers to YouTube.
HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC are not vulnerable to submarine patents, and WebM is.
There is a ton of content in HTML, CSS, WOFF, PNG, AVC, and AAC, and there is nothing in WebM.
AVC is the same video from iTunes, iPod, iPhone and other smartphones, Blu-Ray, QuickTime Player, FlashPlayer, set-top boxes, and is built into all the hardware, including PC GPU's. If the Web uses nonstandard video publishers have to work in 2 formats, defeating the standard.
The point of HTML5 is to standardize the Web. Using a nonstandard video format defeats the that purpose. If you're not going to respect standards then just make HTML4 or Word documents. Replacing Flash with WebM is not standardization.
If this happens, what will follow is a crackdown on jaywalking and other everybody crimes so that the database becomes universal. They'll be taking DNA at traffic stops.
The main difference between Mac OS and iOS is you can't code on iOS. It's partly a security feature and partly an anti-complexity feature. iOS is for a non-coding approach to all tasks. You may not know this, but a Photoshop pro writes a ton of code. The home user working with their photos doesn't need to.
Another feature of iOS is no custom drivers. The USB audio interfaces that work with iOS are the "class compliant" ones that work with the system's universal driver. This provides stability and ease of use, but it limits the quality to consumer-quality 16/44 stereo. Audio pros still need a system to hook on an 8 channel 24/192 interface. OS X has a pro audio subsystem the likes of which you can't find anywhere else. Are we going to just abandon that and tell music producers to use toy Windows? The iPod app on iOS is filled up by people using Mac OS.
The mouse is going away, no doubt. But you will still have a consumer OS and a pro OS. Web developers need Apache and Ruby and PHP to make websites for iOS users, movie makers and graphic artists need to code workflows, and app developers need to code apps and Apple needs to code OS X itself. The idea that Mac OS can go away is just so fucking stupid and ignorant and disrespectful when you consider how much of our fucking culture is made on Macs.
Anyone who thinks there is no longer a need for Mac OS is an iPad user. Get an iPad ASAP and enjoy! STFU about Mac OS otherwise. You probably don't know what the fuck you are talking about.
So all we have to do is send all Web users to night classes on process management so they can diagnose when Flash is consuming too many resources and identify and kill the relevant process. That way we can rescue Flash designers from having to learn HTML and Adobe from having to compete with anybody. Makes total sense. I mean, playing video ought to be complicated, right?
You have to opt-in with Apple also. It says so right in the summary.
There is also a Location Services setting on iOS devices where you can allow/disallow various apps from accessing the location features of the device.
One thing that seems to be true with Android is it's always "coming". There's always a really great Android moment on the horizon.
But there are already many Android tablets. They're not coming. They've been here a while. Last January's CES was infested with them. They all just suck. They get reviewed and they ship 10 units and they go away. The Nook which is mentioned in this article is an Android tablet!
The idea that manufacturers are going to just copy iPad is asinine. Look at the Sprint EVO, which had 3 iPhones to copy and it gets 8 hours of standby battery life. In other words, if you don't use it at all, it still dies in 8 hours. A key feature of iPad is the 10-12 hours of actual use, and 30 days of standby. I've gotten on a train in Silicon Valley with a fully-charged iPad, surfed on 3G the whole way, and when I'm putting it away in San Francisco, it still says "100%" in the battery meter. I've had the device for 3 weeks and never even seen a low battery warning.
And iOS is not a phone OS scaled-up, it's desktops-and-servers OS X with a touch interface on top. Android doesn't have that kind of graphics layer, multichannel audio, advanced typography, C API, and other desktop-class features that only become even more important as you scale the display up. Being able to port desktop C apps over rather than rewrite in Java only becomes even more important.
And the bag of parts on an iPad approaches the retail price point. There is no room under there. A big display and battery is a big display and battery. An iPad 3G 16GB is $629 retail and Nexus One 4G with 1/4 the screen size and 30% of the battery volume is $649 retail. The biggest problem for Android v2 has been it's more expensive than iPhone! That's why it only sells on the closed networks in the US. That's why 75% of Android devices run v1.6.
In tech, it is a fool's game to try and predict the future anyway. But if you are doing this Android-is-coming-soon thing, that is something you should talk to your therapist about. It's just become so tiresome. Any mention of iPad or iPhone online and the next thing you know "Android will be better next year!" Sheesh. It's like a reflex. If only it was as easy to actually make functional, consumer-ready devices.
They're just doing what they always do: they're copying Apple/NeXT. However, Microsoft didn't adjust when Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
It was productive for Microsoft to copy the 1985-1996 Apple that tried to sell to businesses and made drab interfaces and drab boxes and kept their prices high and hardly pushed the technology forward. Microsoft could keep up because Apple was slow, they were safe copying stuff whole because Apple was weak and they had even accidentally given Microsoft a license to clone their API, and the copies Microsoft created were drab enough for their PC maker customers and corporate CTO's to like them.
It's not productive for Microsoft to copy the 1997-present Apple for all the opposite reasons. Apple sells direct to consumers now, even to the point where 1 out of every 3 Apple employees is in retail. Zune can't compete with iPod on price or features. The $99 iPhone is so cheap there's no room under there for a profitable clone. The Intel Mac erased the high-end Windows PC market from existence. The iPad is killing the low-end PC market. The products are sexy and colorful and way beyond the capabilities of Microsoft's PC maker customers to compete with.
Windows Vista/7 was "Windows for Mac users". It's not at all what the PC makers wanted, or the CTO's wanted, or the corporate trainers wanted, and so on. Windows Phone 7 is "Windows Mobile for iPhone users." Microsoft continue to sit on a pile of money from their 2001/2003 products that were copied from the old Apple in the case of Windows XP, or ported from the old Apple system in the case of MS Office 2003.
Plus, technology is moving faster now, and the Internet provides everyone with the latest information on the state-of-the-art, and Apple Stores just make it even worse. You can't pretend Windows Vista/7 is not 10 years behind the Mac. You can't pretend that Windows Phone 7 is not 5 years behind iPhone. People have seen the Apple Store, they've tried the products.
I've personally seen more Windows XP to iPad upgrades than Windows XP to Vista/7, so good riddance to Microsoft. People can get the original item cheap now rather than wait for the Microsoft copy. My iPad already paid for itself. I'm drinking the milkshake of anybody who is waiting around for the Microsoft version. I've been using Mac OS X for 10 years, I've been drinking the milkshake of XP users the whole damn time. I've had a fully usable, full desktop browser in my front jeans pocket for 3 years, the whole time drinking the milkshake of other phone users.
So no, Microsoft's products don't make sense anymore.
> Their only advantage with WM6 was that it was actually an open platform ... you could install applications from any source
Not a feature. That's a malware vector. That's something businesses will have to lock down and consumers will have to patrol. Neither of them wants to do that.
> I'm still not buying any device which is effectively a handheld computer, but which lacks the ability
> to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
iPhone has never, ever lacked the ability to run more than one interactive application simultaneously.
You have always been able to talk on the phone while reading email or doing anything else. You have always been able to listen to music while surfing the Web or doing anything else. Email and texts are always arriving, no matter what you're doing. Since v2.0 you have been able to make an audio recording while doing anything else. The only limitation is you couldn't run 2 3rd party apps at once. That limitation goes away tomorrow (June 21, 2010) with the release of iOS v4.
If you are running a Blackberry and you think a switch to iPhone will give you fewer capabilities, you are sorely mistaken.
The iPhone story is very different.
iPhone lacked copy/paste in its first couple of versions. In Windows Phone *7* we are seeing the devices lose a feature they already had in 6.
iPhone lacked copy/paste during a time when multitouch was extremely new and there were zero multitouch implementations of copy/paste. Windows Phone 7 is giving up the feature years later, when there are many phones with multitouch copy/paste.
iPhone is a consumer device, sold direct to iPod users. Windows Phone 7 is coming from a B2B company whose phones are sold as enterprise phones, phones you do work on.
When iPhone got copy/paste, it was the full-featured desktop copy/paste from OS X, finally exposed in the iOS interface in a very elegant way, across all of the apps, including over 100,000 native 3rd party apps. It was worth waiting for. Users were immediately highly productive with it and have forgotten it was ever missing. It works with complex data types. It has a speller built-in now. It runs on a full-size tablet now. When Microsoft brings this feature back, it will be as full of caveats as all of their stuff.
You can pick on various features of iPhone as being missing, but since they shipped their very first phone, overall they have been ahead of everyone else, leading the industry. Windows Phone 7 doesn't lead anything.
You still have to write Java apps. You're still running in a virtual machine. On iOS, 3rd party developers are running a full desktop class C toolkit, the same one Apple uses to create their apps and iOS itself.
> iPhone has more applications because it has been out longer
That is total BS and it's time for Android users to stop playing the "we're too new to be successful" card. iPhone did not have native apps until version 2, which shipped at the same time as Android, in mid-2008. The 3rd party app platforms on iPhone and Android are almost exactly the same age. Android lacks apps because of inherent problems with Android, not because it's too new. It's not just the number of apps, but the whole categories of apps that Android lacks.
How are you going to release a C/C++ app on Android? The native API is closed. You have to rewrite in Java, which is why Ansroid is missing so many categories of software and why the overwhelming majority of Apple developers are Apple-only.
If displaying PDF is showing love for Adobe then Apple must want to marry them, because the OS X graphics subsystem is PDF. You're looking at a PDF when you look at the display of an iPhone or iPad or iPod or Mac. And PDF's you view with Safari or Mail are displayed as easily as HTML, right within the browser or email message.
How Google could ship Chrome OS without PDF viewing, I don't know.
PDF is an open standard, in stark contrast to Flash. Every operating system should be able to view it natively.
The malware blacklist has existed since Mac OS v10.6.0, and has always had 2 Trojans on it. Now Apple added a 3rd because there is a new one. That's how it's supposed to work. If this is news, it says really good things about Apple because it's man bites dog. New malware on Windows is dog bites man.
The Mac is not invulnerable to malware. No system is. That would be like saying a building is invulnerable to graffiti. However, if you paint over graffiti the instant it appears, you remove the entire incentive. Apple's Software Update patches 75% of the community within a week or so, and the rest within a month or so. There's just not much to be gained with Mac malware. Whatever you exploit will be replaced almost immediately by Apple. Snow Leopard is not one version of an OS, it's 10 discrete versions. There were 11 versions of Leopard. Each lasts only 2-3 months. A typical Windows version lasts 2-3 years or more. It's a very different situation.
Another thing to understand is that Sophos and other companies who make their living solely because Windows is mismanaged always want to expand into the Mac market and so they like to pretend that it's not a question of platform management but rather that malware is a fact of life and their services and scanners are necessary. No. The 10-20 built-in security systems of Mac OS are superior to anything you can bolt on to Windows.
They spent 2 years resurrecting the audio because it was in an obsolete nonstandard format that not everyone can play and then they put that audio on the Internet in an obsolete nonstandard format [Flash] that not everyone can play!
> Is there something people want to run besides Linux?
Yeah, Macs. All Mac applications can run shell scripts, and Python is included with every Mac, so a Photoshop-to-Picassa workflow would be very easy to create using Google CL. Or BBEdit-to-Blogger.
He meant "every [PC] platform", obviously. No, you can't run this on a game console or an iPod or a GPS.
> This from a crowd that rabidly defends its "right" to use AdBlock and FlashBlock and NoScript and Greasemonkey.
Yeah, all you have to do is dangle an opportunity for some Apple-bashing and they stand up on their hind legs with their tongues out.
The way you see British teeth is how the rest of the world sees US health. Yanks will need whole body avatars to hide their many untreated diseases and morbid obesity.
On many sites, if your browser identifies itself as an iPad you will get an HTML5 version of content that would otherwise require FlashPlayer. If you are using a WebKit browser this may improve your browsing experience without Flash. Also works on any platform where you've disabled Flash. I run my Mac browser this way.
You can find the iPad user agent string here:
http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/iPad/index.html#technotes/tn2010/tn2262/index.html
I definitely thought it was strange to see Linux users defending Flash and Adobe lately, considering how much content Flash has hidden from Linux users over the years and the way Flash has propped up Windows and the way it killed the Linux smart book in utero. Some of my favorite HTML5 apps were written and deployed on Linux. An open Web is just too important for this Flash foolishness.