If you are thinking about, talking about, wondering about Microsoft you are wasting your time.
If you are trying to get them to "do the right thing" you are really wasting your time.
If you think there is a kb of value in MS Office, you are out of your mind.
Maybe you are into FOSS, maybe you are a C coder. If you want to make apps that make documents, you need to learn a bit about DOCUMENTS. You need to learn more about PUBLISHING and less about word processing and Microsoft.
In the same way that grandmothers and rock stars are all using BSD in their Macs, they need to be using HTML in their documents. It's not acceptable to categorize them in some DOC or ODF ghetto. I'm the guy who has to take those shitty documents and "rip" the text out and do the formatting all over. Complete waste of time. If you are making DOC or ODF you might as well just print hardcopy, that is ALL they are good for. Funny thing is, that's what they were designed for also, so we shouldn't be surprised. What purpose is there in that here in the 21st century? A print out of a Web page, maybe. But a printout with no Web page? Useless.
How hard is it for software coders to build a 1980's style word processing interface that uses 1990's style word processing codes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and save the user's work as a single 21st century document with very plain readable code? Have you watched people use an office suite? Just watch them for a bit and write down which features they use. At the end of weeks of testing on hundreds of users you'll find that they use maybe 10% of the features. People take courses in MS Word for a month and they end up not knowing how to use Styles it is abysmal, there is no point to working on a document if you can't use styles, you will find that user selecting words and changing their typeface, that is also a bullshit function you would never ever give the user a one-way whip they can only use on themselves like that.
Microsoft has convinced the world that operating systems and office suites are hard. They are if you do them the Microsoft way, and there seem to be 10,000 FOSS idiots out there who want to inflict ODF and other faux-Microsoft bullshit upon the world. Every time I see a Linux desktop that looks like Windows (never mind acts) I am so disappointed. It is so meet the new boss same as the old boss.
As much as Web servers need BSD, Apache, PHP and others, and Web clients need Gecko or WebKit, regular everyday people who need to make documents need better casual HTML tools.
You can use external CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript to provide styles and behaviors for the user. Then all you have to do is help them make one valid HTML 4 Strict document (no forms) that is like 10 tags you use over and over again. About 95% of the documents that people create are just , , etc. and
and and that is all the information people even have outside of their actual typing, that's all the tagging they want to do.
There is probably a Linux distro somewhere where some mad coder is working hard to commingle Firefox with the kernel as per Windows and IE. It makes no sense.
> If you love software freedom, then you will spend your money on an open phone based on Linux, not on anything from Apple.
That is so ignorant it hurts to read it.
The iPhone and the Mac are overflowing with FOSS software. On the Mac, the core OS, the browser engine, and the compiler are all FOSS, not black boxes. There are dozens if not hundreds of FOSS apps in every Mac. Fucking pico is there, emacs, vi.
I can't imagine not using BSD, Apache, and PHP but similarly I can't imagine not using Photoshop, AppleScript, BBEdit. You can have your black or your white, I choose the yin-yang, I want it all. Photoshop costs me $100 per year, I use it full time, it works with my Art Tablet interactively or works automatically with AppleScript, it never crashes, the files it makes are compatible with everything, and the art tools are extraordinary. Photoshop costs less than it costs to maintain a good set of pastels.
If the GIMP project had resisted the temptation to star fuck Photoshop, they might have built the iTunes of Photoshop, they might have built a much smaller yet complete set of common image editing tools. I'm talking about a 10 item toolbox and one of those is "zap red eye", and 10 filters, all with training wheels so that the output always looks good. That is what every user should have. You can do 90% of the tasks with 10% of the tools. That is the secret behind iLife. What you leave out is so important. The other 90% of the tools are going to trip the user, get in their way.
And rename GIMP to something that is not offensive. I feel the same way about Apache. The names are a burden. Are you going to name your kid "Shithead" or "Arab/Israeli Conflict"? You're not doing him any favors.
I love creative freedom, not software freedom. The freedom to choose my own tools, make what I want, the freedom of a software writer to choose their own licensing, the freedom of a computer maker to not enter the commodity PC market. Photoshop may be behind the curve politically, but GIMP is behind the curve artistically, and I'm an artist not a politician.
> While some people on here despise flash, it could possibly take advantage of the multi-touch interface on the iPhone without leaving the > Safari sandbox.
So can Ajax. It is even the same JavaScript.
> Not to mention a lot of popular sites such as homestarrunner.com use it.
Here is the problem, though: the "Flash" in PSP and in phones is 5 years behind the PC version. Yet to many users today, "Flash" means YouTube. It means H.263 video decoded by a general purpose CPU such as a PC or Mac. The iPhone is like an iPod, it can only play one kind of video: H.264. When Apple announced YouTube on AppleTV, it is only the subsection of YouTube that Google has already transcoded to H.264. This is because, just like an iPod or iPhone, AppleTV decodes video using an H.264 chip. At no time does any of these devices run video through its CPU. That is not at all how Flash video works.
> $500 for a revolutionary smart phone whose browser isn't as good as the psps?
That is such a ridiculous thing to say. In the first place, the browser on the PSP has almost no JavaScript, although it has decent CSS but not the whole thing (more than Explorer, though).
Safari is full-spec... it has all of CSS 2.1, it has all of JavaScript including Ajax, it has SVG, it has desktop typography, and it is the faster browser in the world also. It's a desktop browser. It also has an open source rendering engine and a future.
The PSP browser was purchased for the PSP and the company that wrote it is long gone. There is no more development of that. They're going to make another browser from scratch for future PSP. Typical not getting it.
And the browser is an extra on both iPhone and PSP. If you want to make calls, you get an iPhone, if you want to play games, you get a PSP.
> if someone writes an awesome app for Palm, I can't get it on my PocketPC
That's the best argument for Ajax iPhone development I've heard all day.
If someone writes an awesome app for iPhone, you can get it in Firefox on Linux. You can run them on any future phone that also has a Web 2.0 browser. You can run them on an iPhone but share them with a friend who does not have an iPhone.
You can write your apps and even if Apple kills the iPhone or even goes out of business your code is not wasted. It still runs on the Web.
> Furthermore, it doesn't do the ONE thing I want and need: allow me to take eink notes or annotate over pdfs.
Buy a Tablet PC, not a phone. Duh.
>Apple really missed the boat here.
No, they specifically refused to get on board. At the iPhone introduction, Steve Jobs said that the iPhone prototype was a Mac Tablet PC that didn't fly. So they used the touch screen on a phone and made an iPod killer.
> Jobs made a very nice toy. Unfortunately, I need a tool - and the iPhone ain't it.
If you wanted to make phone calls all day, say you were a movie producer, then the iPhone would be exactly the right tool for you and you would be deriding Tablet PC's as toys.
> With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was
SPREADSHEETS. It was spreadsheets.
A "killer app" is one that is so popular, it becomes the raison d'etre of the platform it runs on.
With the IBM PC it was spreadsheets. It wasn't even "word processing" because that is something that "secretaries" did until well into the 90's. In the 80's you had to know your word processor's formatting codes in the way that you have to know HTML in order to write it by hand. WordPerfect was a blue screen with yellow character mode type, you could switch to a graphical preview in later versions like you can look at your ongoing HTML in a browser. And typewriting was old hat, business letters were old hat. It was controversial to switch from typewriter to word processor because people didn't see the improvement, you get an 8.5x11 sheet out at the end of both and PC's are expensive. People who could make a typewriter sing were plentiful while "word processing professionals" were not.
But with spreadsheets you had a chart that you entered numbers into, just like accounting paper, anyone could use it, and you could demonstrate how it would pay for itself in a week or month compared to an adding machine, because you'd put those numbers in there and the spreadsheet would show you how much you screwing up without it. You couldn't be an accountant without a spreadsheet anymore.
The first spreadsheet came out like 1978 and it was literally the killer app for the Apple II, sales went through the roof. The reason IBM had to make a PC at all, they didn't want to, they did so grudgingly, was because every business that had an adding machine wanted to replace it with a spreadsheet app. They were calling up IBM, "hey, we got some Selectrics down here, we got some IBM adding machines, but we want a PC so we can run spreadsheets. What have you got?" We got mainframes, we got adding machines, we got typewriters. "OK, I'll get an Apple II." So IBM threw something together to answer the market in 1982. Once Compaq cloned the IBM PC, then you get into what you're saying with
The killer app for the Mac was Desktop Publishing in about 1986. Once Apple shipped the first laser printer and Adobe got started, Mac sales took off. You could use a Mac and a laser printer and in one day one person could do the work of 10 people, you simply couldn't be in publishing without doing desktop publishing, you had to either get in or get out of the business.
Around 1990, the killer app for NeXT was object-oriented rapid application development that anyone could use. That's almost the only reason people bought NeXT machines. Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on a NeXT machine in 1990, and he's a physicist.
The killer app for Windows 3.0 and 3.1 was the WYSIWYG "office suite" that an executive could use his or herself, no assistant required, no typing pool, because you didn't have to learn word processor codes or know DOS. For Windows 95 it was the World Wide Web, it was the first Windows with TCP/IP, therefore you could just install Netscape from a CD and go.
With a phone, the killer app is the cell network. Wireless calling. The commercials say "can you hear me now?" not "do you want to check your calendar?" If all you need is a calendar, no phone, you use a calendar made out of paper. If you want to make wireless calls you get a cell phone, there is no other option, but it can hold your calendar also. People are calling up Apple, "hey, I got an iPod, it's awesome, but man, does my phone ever suck, it treats me bad, it's like a pocket calculator crossed with a Chinese finger trap, do you guys make a phone also?" So Apple is going to come into the phone market late like IBM did with PC's, but they are not coming in halfway, or grudgingly. They didn't even do a plain phone and tell you to keep buying iPods, they made an iPhone that is an iPod killer, they even call it the best iPod ever when iPod is a whole other product line that's selling 50 million a year. However, just like IBM they don't have to wonde
> Anyway, if you're not blowing all your CPU doing stupid graphics, 500MHz is more than capable for tons of cool apps.
No that is not true. The term "500Mhz" is completely meaningless unless you also say "Power6" or "Core Duo" or "Cyrix L420948". It is meaningless as a metric for running third-party apps if you don't know what the system needs when it is idling.
It may be that the iPhone spends 20% of its time getting ready in case the user scrolls, otherwise it would not be smooth.
> My primary OS-X machine is a 400MHz G3 powerbook, and while it has 1GB of ram and certain video codecs don't play at high > resolutions, it doesn't have hardware support for that either...
Completely irrelevant. A PowerBook G3 400 MHz is 10x the computer that the iPhone is. Maybe 20x. The iPhone is a better phone.
If you have heard the term "LLVM" going around, it is apparently in the iPhone, it stands for "Low-Level Virtual Machine". As I understand it, some of the iPhone's time will be spent virtualizing Mac features in software so that OS X runs.
So where your PowerBook gets a benefit from a certain feature, say, L2 cache, the iPhone might not only be lacking that feature, but it has to virtualize it also, it's a double hit.
The iPhone has a dock connector, Apple already said it will run most current dock accessories. So it already has thousands of non-Apple apps.
There will be a GPS you can plug on. There will be a __________ you can plug on. There will be sex toys, alright?
I remember after the launch of the original iPod, the press asked Steve "looks like it could get scratched, are you going to sell a case?" and he said "we think third parties will make them" and some people laughed at that. Right now there may not be a single "case-maker" in the world who hasn't made an iPod case. You can buy ones that cost more than the iPod.
> happy to spend over $1,000 on your "just a phone" iPhone now,
It's $499, the same price people paid for their "just an iPod" only a couple of years ago if they wanted to spring for the color screen. It's also half the price of a decent notebook computer, yet it has many notebook computer features that you don't find in phones.
> For example, what would stop them from releasing a devkit for iPhone that only runs 3rd party apps on iPhones > equiped with a special SIM chip dongle
You are describing iPod development precisely, except it's not a SIM chip dongle whatever that is, it's called a dock connector. The Nike iPod Sport Kit is the most popular handheld application of all time. You just plug it onto any nano and use it. There are no drivers, no configuration, no software to install, no updating to do. The reason for this is that consumers won't do that anyway. They will just not buy your app, like what's happened on all other phone platforms.
If you count all of the sales from all of the third-party phone apps that have ever existed, on every phone/PDA platform, it is less than just iPod dock accessories. So you have to ask yourself who has the right system?
Years ago I had a Newton, and I paid $25 for "voice recording software" which I had to install and then serialize with a call/response thing. Inside the Newton was some audio hardware that I paid for when I bought the Newton, probably another $25. This year I bought a $50 "voice recording hardware" for my iPod nano and I just plugged it on and the iPod goes "ready to record" and you go. No serializing, no updating, and it's much better because the recorder is in its own housing away from the radio noise of the inside of the iPod/Newton, and the mic on the nano recorder is on a 5 cm gooseneck it can come further away from the device. The Newton had a little hole in it with a mic peeking out, if you left the backlight on while recording you could hear a loud whine.
> Instead, forcing developers to go the Web 2.0/AJAX route is going to result in extremely mediocre apps
Not as mediocre as the apps for all other phones. They couldn't possibly be that bad.
> that all look exactly the same
That is ridiculous. There is a much wider variation in look and feel on the Web than any other application platform. Cocoa apps look much more like each other, there is very little variation there, that is part of the whole idea of Cocoa. You don't make your own "button" you hook into one of the system's "buttons". On the Web, you make the whole thing yourself.
> or semi-featured apps that run slowly using the iPhone as a dumb terminal across AT&T's mediocre cellular data network
iPhone has Wi-Fi "n" the cell network is the secondary data network. Wi-Fi has no meter and it is as fast as Ethernet in many cases.
> to a server hosted by the developer that does all the processing and spews the result back to the iPhone.
No. You're describing Web 1.0... click-wait click-wait click-wait. The entire point of Ajax, in fact its very definition, is a Web application without the click-wait-click-wait-click-wait. It is not a dumb front end that has to call home to find out how to add 1+1. If you have built or used a Web application that goes click-wait click-wait click-wait that is not Ajax. It doesn't matter how many XML HTTP requests you make or how many times the developer tells you its Ajax.
Ajax apps can have local storage just like Cocoa apps, except in the case of Ajax it is within the sandbox. Check out Google Gears it is compatible with WebKit 3 which is what's in the iPhone. If your Cocoa app doesn't need the network, neither will the Ajax version of it.
If your app needs the network, then you can write it in Cocoa or Ajax or machine language you aren't going to speed up the network. If your app just wants to do some thinking, it can think in Ajax just as well as Cocoa, without the network.
> that requires you to use airtime or have a good connection to use an app
Local storage is not an issue. The Web browser stores things locally all the time. With Ajax it is a bit more complex technologically, but not for the user.
Check out Google Gears it is compatible with WebKit v3 (iPhone, Safari 3 for Mac and Windows, Mac OS X Leopard).
The key is the apps you download stay in the sandbox. You don't get access to the user's storage. And they install and update themselves.
However, you have to be careful complaining about "having to have a network" because to many users there is no point in even bothering if they don't have a network. Most consumers won't even run a Mac or PC if it doesn't have a live connection, and there is much more to do on a solo Mac than on solo iPhone. People don't want to run puzzle games on iPhone, they want to run MySpace and Flickr and Twitter and look up movie times because iPhone has a real Web browser. The iPhone also has Wi-Fi "n" that is ubiquitous where I am, I even have a Wi-Fi phone. If you are in Wi-Fi the iPhone switches to that for data, there is no meter.
> All Apple has to do is say from the outset, "we can only guarantee the stability of the iPhone with programs that have gone through our quality assurance > process." "Stability" problem solved.
That's not good enough for the consumer market. You have to be a Slashdot reader to understand any of what you just said.
It's like a lawyer saying "it doesn't have to actually work, we'll put a disclaimer on there: whereas the party of the third part is indemnified against accidental damage due to the party of the first part's actions, irrespective of the party of the second part, heretofore referred to as the Mark..."
What's more, 98% or more of consumers cannot define for you what "software" is. They don't know. They also do not know what "electrons" are. Yet they can use a Mac/iPod/iPhone and they can use AC power. The Mac/iPod/iPhone is the consumer version of "software" same as AC power is the consumer version of "electrons". That's what Steve Jobs means when he says Apple is a software company. The thing is, they sell software that is alive, not dead. You buy tropical fish and they bring an aquarium to your house with the fish in it. You count the fish and see that they're healthy and you got what you paid for. Bill Gates sells you a cardboard box with freeze-dried tropical fish eggs and no guarantees what the fish look like or how long they'll last.
The iPhone's video decoder is ISO MPEG H.264 only. It can't decode Ogg. If you were to install an Ogg decoder software onto the iPhone, if there were even a place to put it (no QuickTime), and if you could get full frame full-rate playback, you would probably drain the battery in an hour or less instead of five.
You could potentially make an iPod dock accessory that decodes Ogg in a chip. However if people wanted one this would already exist.
The thing with Ogg is that is scratches an itch that only 0.0000001% of humans have, and you have to understand patents to even understand why it exists. And you have to think that paying a few bucks for an encoder that has a matching free decoder is a bad thing, which nobody in the audio video business actually does. We pay Apple $29 every couple of years and they maintain a collection of professional codecs as QuickTime plug-ins that work throughout the system and within all of your applications. For example, you can open up the Mac version of Microsoft Word and put H.264 video into your documents. You can export H.264 from your 3D app, your video editor, Adobe Flash.
MP3 has come and gone, so has Ogg. The world standardized on MPEG-4 in 2001, 2002. Google is converting YouTube to MPEG-4 right now.
I already forgot it because the iPhone has a 1 GHz ARM, it is a phone, not a computer. Apple is one of the leaders in video editing, and they have 10 years of iMovie to leverage. If the iPhone could edit video they would build that in.
It's a PHONE. It has the same CPU as an iPod and other smart phones. It costs $300 more than the iPod it replaces. For $1100 Apple will sell you a MacBook with built-in video editing and hundreds of other similar PC features.
The CPU in these pocket devices cannot even decode a video stream for playback. There is a second chip in there that decodes H.264. And 8 GB of flash RAM that is mostly filled with movies and music is very poor non-linear editing storage.
> custom multi-touch UI
Every Web browser has its own custom behaviors, it is just as easy to add multi-touch features to the iPhone's browser environment as it would be to put it in iPhone's mythical third-party development environment. For example, Apple was behind some new Web standards that have to do with detecting the DPI of a display with JavaScript, they are adding features to Web 2.0 specifically for the iPhone and standardizing them and Mozilla is adopting them. So the custom multi-touch UI features will either end up as part of Safari or part of the Web instead of being limited to just third-party apps.
> robotics control
I don't even know what this means, but I know it doesn't sell phones. And I'm pretty sure if you have a robot you have a PC. And isn't it running Linux? You don't need any help from Apple for that.
> If consumers want a particular app for the iPhone(and it's voiced through emails/community) it'll happen.
What many people who have technology backgrounds fail to realize is that Apple plays the part of your geek friend who "sets up" your computer for you.
It's as if you bought a Windows PC and you called your hacker friend who's into FOSS and he comes by and wipes Windows, puts on BSD, Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, and much more, and then he installs an HD video editor, DVD-Video creator, CD burning, photo manager, music and video manager, all 200 professional audio video codecs, a complete pro audio subsystem with digital mixer and effects and synthesizer plug-ins, a Web 2.0 browser, 3D graphics, mail, calendar, IM, 10-way audio conferencing, 4-way video conferencing, multitrack music and audio workstation, object-oriented rapid application development tools, Java, Unicode, a wonderful font collection and outstanding typography, PDF out the yin-yang, a complete set of GUI utilities, workflow automation, Widgets, Exposé (mmmm), DVD player, WYSIWG Web/blog editor, system-wide instant search, Oxford Dictionary integrated throughout, Unicode text editor (also emacs and vi and pico), drivers for thousands of devices, and I am sure I forgot a bunch of shit.
Then you, the user, sit down and use your PC. You don't set it up or configure it, you USE it.
So if there is stuff missing from iPhone that can't be added with Ajax or dock connector or as a separate Bluetooth or Wi-Fi device, if it can only be added by Apple, then they will either build the best version of it in the world or they will buy the best version of it in the world.
Similarly, when Sony needed a Web browser for PSP they bought a company that made a Web browser for a set-top box with the same CPU or something. They didn't tell their users "sorry, we can't give you a Web browser because we don't have a third-party development platform."
> I don't get it when people start saying 'it is underpowered to run any real apps.'
You also have to consider space and heat and battery life, not just specs or GHz.
For example, the AppleTV has a 1 GHz Intel chip in there, but it is supposed to sleep almost all of the time. When a movie is running, it's decoded by the NVIDIA chip in the graphics adapter. If you do something with your AppleTV that makes the CPU run (like decoding Flash video from YouTube with a third-party plug-in) then you are going to have to get some air around that AppleTV, and it's likely it won't last as long as if you only run H.264 through it. That's why part of Apple's YouTube on AppleTV announcement was Google converting YouTube to MPEG-4 H.264.
Same sort of thing goes for iPhone. Although it has a 1 GHz ARM chip which sounds fast, that is not a PC CPU, it lacks stuff we take for granted on PC's, Apple had to use LLVM to emulate some PC stuff, and to get 5 hours of battery and no first-degree burn on your palm, you have to use the device pretty much as Apple intended, so that their optimizations hold, same as AppleTV. As far as I can tell, there is no Adobe Flash in iPhone because Flash video requires a full PC, that is always required to decode a software codec. The iPhone does its H.264 in an H.264 chip. So you can't assume the iPhone can play all video formats because it can play Pirates of the Caribbean in H.264.
If they could run iMovie on there, I think they would. They have 10 years of iMovie development they could leverage. The "iTunes" that is on the iPhone is also not the real iTunes, which is a "Carbon" Mac app, it's 10 years old also, of course it is a little iTunes for iPhone, specifically optimized. No doubt what is in the iPhone is all from OS X, but it's just the minimal shit. It's like the first iPod had the same font as the first Mac, but don't think that the Finder is in there.
> Look at Palm, with it's thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Palm ever envisioned.
Look at iPod, with its thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Apple ever envisioned.
Over 3000+ dock apps, dozens of games, photos, contacts, notes, video... all of that came after music playback. Video was waiting on MPEG-4 H.264 (third-party), notes and contacts were done by third-party Mac apps first, the dock connector did not even arrive until the 2G iPod, and nobody could have predicted the toilet tissue holder with built-in iPod dock. I bet everybody has seen at least one iPod accessory that amazed them.
Somebody told me once that Nike iPod Sport Kit is the single highest-selling handheld application ever but I don't know if they were right.
The iPhone has a dock connector and an iPod built in. That's just one of the things it does.
> The same goes for Symbian.
Symbian apps are not even compatible with other manufacturer's Symbian phones. There are 3 or 4 separate platforms. I think you are even disallowed from moving an app from phone to phone when you get a new one. It is also technologically obsolete and very closed, very bolted down, worse than iPod games.
The way the iPhone really kills those other platforms, though, is when you ask a phone user what are their favorite apps? What do you want to see on the iPhone?
- Flickr - eBay - MySpace - Twitter
What? You don't want to install a "memory manager" so you can eke out an extra 28k of RAM so you can install a calorie manager? You don't want to pay $20 to install a poker game? You'd rather play online with other humans and win actual prizes?
> The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
No. What has been happening is the OEM cripples the platform so that the user is inclined to buy essentials from the development community and do I-T work to install them, update them, maintain them. Consumers won't do that. They don't do it. There is 10 years of handheld Windows development to prove that. Has it really taken 10 years for Microsoft to NOT put the Web in your pocket? How can that be? Are they trying to sell you a calorie manager and they can't compete with the ones on the Web? Ahhhhh. That's great for the user. Thanks. Good to know that software writers are so helpful to society that they have to shake me down in order for me to buy their stuff.
All of the applications you just listed can be done with Ajax.
Airtime has nothing to do with it, unless your app has to have network data. If the only thing your app wants from the network is a newer version of itself, then there is no need to have the network to run the app. Offline Ajax involves the browser serving itself when the network is down. It's the same idea as a browser showing you its cached page if the network is down, but there is some translating going on so that the JavaScript in the app calls out for yahoo.com but gets back the right response from localhost/yahoo essentially, and both JavaScript and user are oblivious.
Most Mac OS X Widgets can run in Firefox for Windows on a machine with no network connection. It isn't rocket science. The rocket science part of Ajax is getting it to run in both standards-based browsers and Explorer. Same as with all Web development.
If you were going to write an "iPhone app" anyway, then develop for Safari, you get iPhones, and you also get Macs and Firefox for free, as well as Safari for Windows. Serve Explorer users a page with a Safari link and a Firefox link and an invitation to join you on the World Wide Web.
Me, I was looking forward to an "iPhone Web SDK" much more than buying and installing (serializing?) an app on my iPhone.
Apple has also given a boost to Ajax, to Web 2.0, to standards, and to other pocket Web browser makers. They are celebrating somewhere at Nokia right now, they sell $1000 phones that can surf the Web with their port of Safari (S60) and there's nothing stopping them from running every iPhone app. Also it's good for the user who does an iPhone for 2 years and then wants to do a Nokia or other brand after that, they can take their MPEG-4 media with them and their Ajax applications, and their Vcard contacts and their iCal calendars, the whole iPhone is standardized, they are going to lock you in with sheer lickability.
First, iPhone comes with four killer apps built-in. All a device needs is one. The iPod is a sensation and it has one killer app: seamless integration with your iTunes audio video collection which enables on-the-go playback of same anywhere, anytime.
The iPhone has:
1) Calls - the killer app from phones 2) iPod - the killer app from iPods 3) Web (Web 2.0 even) - the real full-featured Web, the killer app from the last decade of mainstream computing 4) Email - the killer app of the Internet some say
Notice that Apple put these four along the bottom of the iPhone's display. The other 11 apps are chachkis. You can do Google Maps or calendaring online.
Some have called the iPhone's UI a killer app. If you have been frustrated by a phone UI before you may agree.
OK, but what if that isn't enough for you? What if you are considering an iPhone but you really don't need it for the phone, iPod, Web, or email features? (Please read the previous sentence again while considering the absurdity of it.)
Then for you, the iPhone has many avenues for third-party accessories:
1) Ajax applications 2) iPod dock connector applications 3) Bluetooth applications 4) Wi-Fi-n applications 5) custom hardware modifications (this is huge in phones already) 6) iPhone-related Mac/PC apps 7) cases, holders, mounts, etc.
The funny thing is, with the original Mac you could install software on it, and developers complained about not having any accessory slots to put hardware. Now iPhone has a slot that is being ignored and everybody wants to install software on it.
The consumer market is all about zero configuration. Installing and updating software is configuration. Nine out of ten people fucking hate it. It's why most people still do not have PC's. People will make outrageous sacrifices to avoid having to configure something. They'll use lab computers at school, surf the Web only at work, or use online productivity apps that suck, just to avoid owning their own computer or installing software on it. Among Mac users, the majority do not install software, and it has been reduced to dragging and dropping one icon from some other storage to your hard disk... still people hate it.
Everybody wants to know, what is Apple's secret? What makes their stuff so easy to use, what makes people like it so much? It is zero configuration. When Apple did Mac networking in the 1980's the Macs networked themselves, you just had to physically connect them. When they rebuilt their OS for the 21st century they re-built the zero configuration networking as well, this time around TCP/IP. There were 20 years of "configuration TCP/IP" before Apple switched from AppleTalk to TCP/IP and created zero configuration TCP/IP. Why didn't somebody other than Apple build zero conf networking first? Apple is the only computer company in the consumer market. All others are in the mainframe replacement business. So it is no wonder that non-technical people like Apple's zero configuration products, because non-technical people fucking hate configuring things.
Oh, they hate it. They hate it worse than taking an exam, they hate it worse than going to the doctor. If your business plan involves consumers configuring things, then get out of the consumer industry now.
It is amazing to me in 2007 that the PC industry a) still exists, b) hasn't gotten a clue yet. ZERO, I mean ZERO configuration. You turn it on, it works (built-in apps). You plug it on, it works (dock connector). You click it, it works (Web/Ajax).
From what I understand, you buy an iTunes Plus track and once the track is downloaded, rather than wrapping the audio in DRM, the user's email address is added to the meta data and a kind of checksum is created that enables iTunes to tell later whether the email address meta data in a file is what came from Apple or if it has been tampered with.
As has been pointed out many times in many posts on this topic, the user meta data is almost trivially easy for a user to remove. On the other hand, it seems like it would be outrageously hard to add it yourself. If I want to turn iTunes Plus into "generic" AAC I can do that, but if I want to rip a 256 kbit/s AAC from CD and turn it into a counterfeit iTunes Plus track that is going to be hard work.
This leads me to think that the user meta data in iTunes Plus tracks is there as a proof of purchase, to enable the user to upgrade their 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a few years. Apple doesn't care if you remove it; they just don't want you to add it to tracks you rip from CD and then later ask them to upgrade you to lossless for 30 cents and they do it. They only want to upgrade actual purchases. Right now they are upgrading the 128 kbit/s tracks to 256 as part of the iTunes Plus introduction. Because of FairPlay it is easy to identify previous purchases, it was necessary to identify them just to play them, however the new iTunes Plus tracks do not have to be identified to be played, only to be upgraded. Unless this is the one and only audio quality upgrade there has to be some non-DRM identification method.
I have to add that I'm terribly disappointed in EFF because they have come off like the worst kind of Napster fan-boy throughout this whole iTunes Plus thing. Not only did Apple put a knife in the heart of DRM, they did it while fighting both Microsoft and the RIAA and all of the major label record company executives that are alive and living today. AND they upgraded their old users for a handling charge instead of selling them over again at full price which is the record industry STANDARD for decades, nobody ever got to turn in an LP for 75% off the price of a CD.
> laptop stolen, you will know that your "easy solution" is not well thought out. You do not want any personal information embedded > in music, especially unwittingly.
That is bullshit for many reasons:
1) if you have a laptop and you don't want your data to be shared with the world, IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO ENCRYPT THE DISK. On a Mac, this has been so easy that lawyers do it for themselves for many years now (Apple Menu > System Preferences > Security > FileVault).
2) if you don't encrypt the disk, there are many, many, many more places a thief can find your email address on there aside from within the meta data of some of your music files. For example, your email reader likely has not only the one email address you used for iTunes Store, but also other and also the passwords, and also your email, which has lots of personal info in there.
3) if your iPod is stolen, the music on there is one-way. It goes from iTunes to iPod and not back again. Plus the guy probably also stole your wallet, you have worse problems than iTunes Store meta data.
> Is there a good explanation somewhere written in layman's terms?
If you write a letter and then put it in an envelope and address and stamp the envelope you have one item which has both data (the contents of the letter you wrote) and meta data (the to and from address, the stamp). No matter who you address the letter to or how much postage you apply, the contents of the letter do not change, the recipient is going to take the letter out of the envelope before they even begin to "decode" the thoughts within. The user info we're talking about in the iTunes Plus tracks is equivalent to a postmark, it is on the outside of the audio, not mixed in with it. Whatever other information is in the file the audio bit stream (the letter) is going to be the same. It's not just that they're stored separately, they are made separately, they are two independent items of information, in different formats even (the data is audio, the meta data is text and images).
Just because you see what appears to be "one file" do not assume it is one solid data set, like a piece of cheese, the same throughout. It is likely to be more like a layer cake.
Letters, cheese, cake... I'm making this much harder aren't I?
This kind of information storage is why the Mac file system originally had "forked" files, with both a data fork and resource fork. Also why QuickTime movies aren't real files but rather more like a folder for media tracks, like one video track, one audio track, and one subtitle track. That way the subtitles never get separated from the movie. You also don't want the artist info for a song to get separated from the audio data, especially if you want to find that audio data by searching for the artist info.
> They're not encrypted, but they are probably signed. The iTunes Plus files have blocks called "sign" and "chtb" which were > not present in the old DRM'd files
Sigh... this is a proof of purchase. It is advantageous to the legitimate purchaser to leave this information in the file so as to future-proof their music investment.
There were three big announcements with iTunes Plus: 1) no DRM, 2) double the bit-rate for higher quality sound, 3) PREVIOUSLY PURCHASED iTUNES STORE TRACKS CAN BE UPGRADED FOR A TOKEN HANDLING FEE TO THE NEW HIGHER-QUALITY BIT RATE.
In order to upgrade you now or in the future, iTunes needs to be able to identify "iTunes Store purchases" from "other" in your music collection, which thanks to Apple's progressive and practical user-centric policies may include audio from dozens or hundreds of different sources.
If a person follows the EFF's advice and strips the unique meta data out of their iTunes Plus purchase, iTunes will not be able to identify those tracks as iTunes Store purchases, and the tracks will never be upgradable to lossless, which is the next bump, within 3-5 years. After that, expect to see higher-than-CD bit rates and sample depths next, that is when you will START to hear the audio as it is recorded in the studio (even in my small project studio we have 24-bits and 192 kHz, but still to publish you have to distill down to 16-bits and 44.1 KHz using arcane and vicious audio hacking, a lot is lost). In other words, if you have anything other than a 24-bit 192 kHz lossless audio file, you are not done upgrading yet. Since there will be 3 or 4 jumps before we get there (and by then the music studio may have moved up ahead) you are looking at a lot of money to stay current if you insist on paying full price for every track every time out.
A few years ago I heard a record company executive from a big label talk about DVD-Audio. Was he excited that consumers would soon be able to buy much higher quality music? Not really. He could not wait to sell Sgt. Pepper's to baby boomers again for full price, he couldn't wait to sell someone the whole Led Zeppelin catalog for the fifth time, again at full price. What Apple is doing by upgrading your audio quality for a handling fee did not come from the record companies, I can assure you.
I had a Sony portable DAT machine during the 90's which I used only to record myself, at jam sessions and songwriting sessions. I was the copyright holder to everything the machine ever encountered in its whole life. Fucking DRM in there made me miserable. A DAT tape is not very rugged, if you record something onto one, you want to make a dupe. However if you make a digital dupe the dupe is an analog tape essentially, the bits are flagged as "do not copy". Then your master gets a glitch and the digital recording is gone forever. Not to mention that the consumer electronics makers deliberately set the DAT sample rate at 48 kHz so that you could never, ever, burn a digital copy of a DAT to CD. The sample rate conversion from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz is so audibly destructive that it is better to just make an analog dub to 44.1 kHz digital and burn that to CD. Working with a DAT machine was always like playing tug of war with yourself. It's ironic that pretty much only musicians and audio pros ever had them, because as bad as they were, we had a lot of music to record while on the go. The lost productivity, the lost music. Digital audio recording dates back to the 1970's, even the CD was around in the very early 80's. For a songwriter to pay $1000 for a DAT recorder in the 90's and have to fight with it tells you how slow the progress has been.
Similarly, I had a Creative Nomad MP3 player in 1999 or so that had a voice recorder in it. However the voice recorder was artificially limited to a really low sample rate in order to prevent you from making a quality recording. The first iPods with voice recorder attachments were also done this way, you recorded at 8 kHz or 11 kHz just to make it scratchy and prevent you from recording a concert or CD. This is the ultimate poor man's DRM. However when I bought an iPod nano recently and a voice recorder for it, the thing does stereo 16-bit 44.1 kHz recording, same quality as it can play. The worm has turned. You have to sell a functional device now to compete with Apple.
Consumer electronics companies spent the entire decade before the iPod really hit just shooting themselves in the foot over digital audio. It's just too fucking much power to put in the hands of the individual! Ha ha ha ha ha. Good-bye Sony and Creative, it was nice to know you back in the day (yes I just predicted Sony's demise look at the numbers you will hardly believe how bad it is for them, Apple may buy a piece of the body, but Sony is done).
So after experiencing decades of digital audio DRM, forgive me if I don't have any tears for punters who find an email address watermark in a major label download from the iTunes Store to be crippling their music bootlegging potential.
What's worse is that this guy has not even noticed that a 256 kbit/s AAC is much better sound quality than the consumer has ever had access to, including CD. CD's have many legacy problems that we are used to making excuses for, such as poor error-correction, scratches, and if the song skips just once the CD loses. I have participated in listening tests with CD, DVD, MP3, and MP4 (AAC) and at no time were we able to do a whole CD or DVD without a single glitch. On the other hand, MP3 sounded so bad we were willing to put up with a glitch on the discs. But when we got the AAC up to 256 kbit/s we were all like "ahhhhhh." It sounded like the original studio mix file (pre-CD) and it was small and portable and didn't skip like MP3, it is the best of both worlds.
The guy who wrote this article ought to seek out Steve Jobs and kiss him right on the ass. Then find Fake Steve and kiss his ass too. Fucking pathetic.
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If you are trying to get them to "do the right thing" you are really wasting your time.
If you think there is a kb of value in MS Office, you are out of your mind.
Maybe you are into FOSS, maybe you are a C coder. If you want to make apps that make documents, you need to learn a bit about DOCUMENTS. You need to learn more about PUBLISHING and less about word processing and Microsoft.
In the same way that grandmothers and rock stars are all using BSD in their Macs, they need to be using HTML in their documents. It's not acceptable to categorize them in some DOC or ODF ghetto. I'm the guy who has to take those shitty documents and "rip" the text out and do the formatting all over. Complete waste of time. If you are making DOC or ODF you might as well just print hardcopy, that is ALL they are good for. Funny thing is, that's what they were designed for also, so we shouldn't be surprised. What purpose is there in that here in the 21st century? A print out of a Web page, maybe. But a printout with no Web page? Useless.
How hard is it for software coders to build a 1980's style word processing interface that uses 1990's style word processing codes (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and save the user's work as a single 21st century document with very plain readable code? Have you watched people use an office suite? Just watch them for a bit and write down which features they use. At the end of weeks of testing on hundreds of users you'll find that they use maybe 10% of the features. People take courses in MS Word for a month and they end up not knowing how to use Styles it is abysmal, there is no point to working on a document if you can't use styles, you will find that user selecting words and changing their typeface, that is also a bullshit function you would never ever give the user a one-way whip they can only use on themselves like that.
Microsoft has convinced the world that operating systems and office suites are hard. They are if you do them the Microsoft way, and there seem to be 10,000 FOSS idiots out there who want to inflict ODF and other faux-Microsoft bullshit upon the world. Every time I see a Linux desktop that looks like Windows (never mind acts) I am so disappointed. It is so meet the new boss same as the old boss.
As much as Web servers need BSD, Apache, PHP and others, and Web clients need Gecko or WebKit, regular everyday people who need to make documents need better casual HTML tools.
You can use external CSS and unobtrusive JavaScript to provide styles and behaviors for the user. Then all you have to do is help them make one valid HTML 4 Strict document (no forms) that is like 10 tags you use over and over again. About 95% of the documents that people create are just , , etc. and
and and that is all the information people even have outside of their actual typing, that's all the tagging they want to do.
There is probably a Linux distro somewhere where some mad coder is working hard to commingle Firefox with the kernel as per Windows and IE. It makes no sense.
Bill Gates or Tim Berners-Lee? Choose.
> If you love software freedom, then you will spend your money on an open phone based on Linux, not on anything from Apple.
That is so ignorant it hurts to read it.
The iPhone and the Mac are overflowing with FOSS software. On the Mac, the core OS, the browser engine, and the compiler are all FOSS, not black boxes. There are dozens if not hundreds of FOSS apps in every Mac. Fucking pico is there, emacs, vi.
I can't imagine not using BSD, Apache, and PHP but similarly I can't imagine not using Photoshop, AppleScript, BBEdit. You can have your black or your white, I choose the yin-yang, I want it all. Photoshop costs me $100 per year, I use it full time, it works with my Art Tablet interactively or works automatically with AppleScript, it never crashes, the files it makes are compatible with everything, and the art tools are extraordinary. Photoshop costs less than it costs to maintain a good set of pastels.
If the GIMP project had resisted the temptation to star fuck Photoshop, they might have built the iTunes of Photoshop, they might have built a much smaller yet complete set of common image editing tools. I'm talking about a 10 item toolbox and one of those is "zap red eye", and 10 filters, all with training wheels so that the output always looks good. That is what every user should have. You can do 90% of the tasks with 10% of the tools. That is the secret behind iLife. What you leave out is so important. The other 90% of the tools are going to trip the user, get in their way.
And rename GIMP to something that is not offensive. I feel the same way about Apache. The names are a burden. Are you going to name your kid "Shithead" or "Arab/Israeli Conflict"? You're not doing him any favors.
I love creative freedom, not software freedom. The freedom to choose my own tools, make what I want, the freedom of a software writer to choose their own licensing, the freedom of a computer maker to not enter the commodity PC market. Photoshop may be behind the curve politically, but GIMP is behind the curve artistically, and I'm an artist not a politician.
> While some people on here despise flash, it could possibly take advantage of the multi-touch interface on the iPhone without leaving the
... it has all of CSS 2.1, it has all of JavaScript including Ajax, it has SVG, it has desktop typography, and it is the faster browser in the world also. It's a desktop browser. It also has an open source rendering engine and a future.
> Safari sandbox.
So can Ajax. It is even the same JavaScript.
> Not to mention a lot of popular sites such as homestarrunner.com use it.
Here is the problem, though: the "Flash" in PSP and in phones is 5 years behind the PC version. Yet to many users today, "Flash" means YouTube. It means H.263 video decoded by a general purpose CPU such as a PC or Mac. The iPhone is like an iPod, it can only play one kind of video: H.264. When Apple announced YouTube on AppleTV, it is only the subsection of YouTube that Google has already transcoded to H.264. This is because, just like an iPod or iPhone, AppleTV decodes video using an H.264 chip. At no time does any of these devices run video through its CPU. That is not at all how Flash video works.
> $500 for a revolutionary smart phone whose browser isn't as good as the psps?
That is such a ridiculous thing to say. In the first place, the browser on the PSP has almost no JavaScript, although it has decent CSS but not the whole thing (more than Explorer, though).
Safari is full-spec
The PSP browser was purchased for the PSP and the company that wrote it is long gone. There is no more development of that. They're going to make another browser from scratch for future PSP. Typical not getting it.
And the browser is an extra on both iPhone and PSP. If you want to make calls, you get an iPhone, if you want to play games, you get a PSP.
> if someone writes an awesome app for Palm, I can't get it on my PocketPC
That's the best argument for Ajax iPhone development I've heard all day.
If someone writes an awesome app for iPhone, you can get it in Firefox on Linux. You can run them on any future phone that also has a Web 2.0 browser. You can run them on an iPhone but share them with a friend who does not have an iPhone.
You can write your apps and even if Apple kills the iPhone or even goes out of business your code is not wasted. It still runs on the Web.
> Furthermore, it doesn't do the ONE thing I want and need: allow me to take eink notes or annotate over pdfs.
Buy a Tablet PC, not a phone. Duh.
>Apple really missed the boat here.
No, they specifically refused to get on board. At the iPhone introduction, Steve Jobs said that the iPhone prototype was a Mac Tablet PC that didn't fly. So they used the touch screen on a phone and made an iPod killer.
> Jobs made a very nice toy. Unfortunately, I need a tool - and the iPhone ain't it.
If you wanted to make phone calls all day, say you were a movie producer, then the iPhone would be exactly the right tool for you and you would be deriding Tablet PC's as toys.
> With the original IBM PC, the real killer app was
SPREADSHEETS. It was spreadsheets.
A "killer app" is one that is so popular, it becomes the raison d'etre of the platform it runs on.
With the IBM PC it was spreadsheets. It wasn't even "word processing" because that is something that "secretaries" did until well into the 90's. In the 80's you had to know your word processor's formatting codes in the way that you have to know HTML in order to write it by hand. WordPerfect was a blue screen with yellow character mode type, you could switch to a graphical preview in later versions like you can look at your ongoing HTML in a browser. And typewriting was old hat, business letters were old hat. It was controversial to switch from typewriter to word processor because people didn't see the improvement, you get an 8.5x11 sheet out at the end of both and PC's are expensive. People who could make a typewriter sing were plentiful while "word processing professionals" were not.
But with spreadsheets you had a chart that you entered numbers into, just like accounting paper, anyone could use it, and you could demonstrate how it would pay for itself in a week or month compared to an adding machine, because you'd put those numbers in there and the spreadsheet would show you how much you screwing up without it. You couldn't be an accountant without a spreadsheet anymore.
The first spreadsheet came out like 1978 and it was literally the killer app for the Apple II, sales went through the roof. The reason IBM had to make a PC at all, they didn't want to, they did so grudgingly, was because every business that had an adding machine wanted to replace it with a spreadsheet app. They were calling up IBM, "hey, we got some Selectrics down here, we got some IBM adding machines, but we want a PC so we can run spreadsheets. What have you got?" We got mainframes, we got adding machines, we got typewriters. "OK, I'll get an Apple II." So IBM threw something together to answer the market in 1982. Once Compaq cloned the IBM PC, then you get into what you're saying with
The killer app for the Mac was Desktop Publishing in about 1986. Once Apple shipped the first laser printer and Adobe got started, Mac sales took off. You could use a Mac and a laser printer and in one day one person could do the work of 10 people, you simply couldn't be in publishing without doing desktop publishing, you had to either get in or get out of the business.
Around 1990, the killer app for NeXT was object-oriented rapid application development that anyone could use. That's almost the only reason people bought NeXT machines. Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on a NeXT machine in 1990, and he's a physicist.
The killer app for Windows 3.0 and 3.1 was the WYSIWYG "office suite" that an executive could use his or herself, no assistant required, no typing pool, because you didn't have to learn word processor codes or know DOS. For Windows 95 it was the World Wide Web, it was the first Windows with TCP/IP, therefore you could just install Netscape from a CD and go.
With a phone, the killer app is the cell network. Wireless calling. The commercials say "can you hear me now?" not "do you want to check your calendar?" If all you need is a calendar, no phone, you use a calendar made out of paper. If you want to make wireless calls you get a cell phone, there is no other option, but it can hold your calendar also. People are calling up Apple, "hey, I got an iPod, it's awesome, but man, does my phone ever suck, it treats me bad, it's like a pocket calculator crossed with a Chinese finger trap, do you guys make a phone also?" So Apple is going to come into the phone market late like IBM did with PC's, but they are not coming in halfway, or grudgingly. They didn't even do a plain phone and tell you to keep buying iPods, they made an iPhone that is an iPod killer, they even call it the best iPod ever when iPod is a whole other product line that's selling 50 million a year. However, just like IBM they don't have to wonde
> Anyway, if you're not blowing all your CPU doing stupid graphics, 500MHz is more than capable for tons of cool apps.
No that is not true. The term "500Mhz" is completely meaningless unless you also say "Power6" or "Core Duo" or "Cyrix L420948". It is meaningless as a metric for running third-party apps if you don't know what the system needs when it is idling.
It may be that the iPhone spends 20% of its time getting ready in case the user scrolls, otherwise it would not be smooth.
> My primary OS-X machine is a 400MHz G3 powerbook, and while it has 1GB of ram and certain video codecs don't play at high
> resolutions, it doesn't have hardware support for that either...
Completely irrelevant. A PowerBook G3 400 MHz is 10x the computer that the iPhone is. Maybe 20x. The iPhone is a better phone.
If you have heard the term "LLVM" going around, it is apparently in the iPhone, it stands for "Low-Level Virtual Machine". As I understand it, some of the iPhone's time will be spent virtualizing Mac features in software so that OS X runs.
So where your PowerBook gets a benefit from a certain feature, say, L2 cache, the iPhone might not only be lacking that feature, but it has to virtualize it also, it's a double hit.
Good thing for Apple, the Web browser is only one of four killer apps in the phone:
- calls (phone killer app)
- Web (PC killer app)
- email (Internet killer app)
- iPod (audio video killer app)
Even so, I think putting a modern Web browser into a phone is pretty spectacular, and it definitely hasn't been done yet.
The iPhone has a dock connector, Apple already said it will run most current dock accessories. So it already has thousands of non-Apple apps.
There will be a GPS you can plug on. There will be a __________ you can plug on. There will be sex toys, alright?
I remember after the launch of the original iPod, the press asked Steve "looks like it could get scratched, are you going to sell a case?" and he said "we think third parties will make them" and some people laughed at that. Right now there may not be a single "case-maker" in the world who hasn't made an iPod case. You can buy ones that cost more than the iPod.
> happy to spend over $1,000 on your "just a phone" iPhone now,
... click-wait click-wait click-wait. The entire point of Ajax, in fact its very definition, is a Web application without the click-wait-click-wait-click-wait. It is not a dumb front end that has to call home to find out how to add 1+1. If you have built or used a Web application that goes click-wait click-wait click-wait that is not Ajax. It doesn't matter how many XML HTTP requests you make or how many times the developer tells you its Ajax.
It's $499, the same price people paid for their "just an iPod" only a couple of years ago if they wanted to spring for the color screen. It's also half the price of a decent notebook computer, yet it has many notebook computer features that you don't find in phones.
> For example, what would stop them from releasing a devkit for iPhone that only runs 3rd party apps on iPhones
> equiped with a special SIM chip dongle
You are describing iPod development precisely, except it's not a SIM chip dongle whatever that is, it's called a dock connector. The Nike iPod Sport Kit is the most popular handheld application of all time. You just plug it onto any nano and use it. There are no drivers, no configuration, no software to install, no updating to do. The reason for this is that consumers won't do that anyway. They will just not buy your app, like what's happened on all other phone platforms.
If you count all of the sales from all of the third-party phone apps that have ever existed, on every phone/PDA platform, it is less than just iPod dock accessories. So you have to ask yourself who has the right system?
Years ago I had a Newton, and I paid $25 for "voice recording software" which I had to install and then serialize with a call/response thing. Inside the Newton was some audio hardware that I paid for when I bought the Newton, probably another $25. This year I bought a $50 "voice recording hardware" for my iPod nano and I just plugged it on and the iPod goes "ready to record" and you go. No serializing, no updating, and it's much better because the recorder is in its own housing away from the radio noise of the inside of the iPod/Newton, and the mic on the nano recorder is on a 5 cm gooseneck it can come further away from the device. The Newton had a little hole in it with a mic peeking out, if you left the backlight on while recording you could hear a loud whine.
> Instead, forcing developers to go the Web 2.0/AJAX route is going to result in extremely mediocre apps
Not as mediocre as the apps for all other phones. They couldn't possibly be that bad.
> that all look exactly the same
That is ridiculous. There is a much wider variation in look and feel on the Web than any other application platform. Cocoa apps look much more like each other, there is very little variation there, that is part of the whole idea of Cocoa. You don't make your own "button" you hook into one of the system's "buttons". On the Web, you make the whole thing yourself.
> or semi-featured apps that run slowly using the iPhone as a dumb terminal across AT&T's mediocre cellular data network
iPhone has Wi-Fi "n" the cell network is the secondary data network. Wi-Fi has no meter and it is as fast as Ethernet in many cases.
> to a server hosted by the developer that does all the processing and spews the result back to the iPhone.
No. You're describing Web 1.0
Ajax apps can have local storage just like Cocoa apps, except in the case of Ajax it is within the sandbox. Check out Google Gears it is compatible with WebKit 3 which is what's in the iPhone. If your Cocoa app doesn't need the network, neither will the Ajax version of it.
If your app needs the network, then you can write it in Cocoa or Ajax or machine language you aren't going to speed up the network. If your app just wants to do some thinking, it can think in Ajax just as well as Cocoa, without the network.
The thing is, anything you can say about
> that requires you to use airtime or have a good connection to use an app
Local storage is not an issue. The Web browser stores things locally all the time. With Ajax it is a bit more complex technologically, but not for the user.
Check out Google Gears it is compatible with WebKit v3 (iPhone, Safari 3 for Mac and Windows, Mac OS X Leopard).
The key is the apps you download stay in the sandbox. You don't get access to the user's storage. And they install and update themselves.
However, you have to be careful complaining about "having to have a network" because to many users there is no point in even bothering if they don't have a network. Most consumers won't even run a Mac or PC if it doesn't have a live connection, and there is much more to do on a solo Mac than on solo iPhone. People don't want to run puzzle games on iPhone, they want to run MySpace and Flickr and Twitter and look up movie times because iPhone has a real Web browser. The iPhone also has Wi-Fi "n" that is ubiquitous where I am, I even have a Wi-Fi phone. If you are in Wi-Fi the iPhone switches to that for data, there is no meter.
> All Apple has to do is say from the outset, "we can only guarantee the stability of the iPhone with programs that have gone through our quality assurance
..."
> process." "Stability" problem solved.
That's not good enough for the consumer market. You have to be a Slashdot reader to understand any of what you just said.
It's like a lawyer saying "it doesn't have to actually work, we'll put a disclaimer on there: whereas the party of the third part is indemnified against accidental damage due to the party of the first part's actions, irrespective of the party of the second part, heretofore referred to as the Mark
What's more, 98% or more of consumers cannot define for you what "software" is. They don't know. They also do not know what "electrons" are. Yet they can use a Mac/iPod/iPhone and they can use AC power. The Mac/iPod/iPhone is the consumer version of "software" same as AC power is the consumer version of "electrons". That's what Steve Jobs means when he says Apple is a software company. The thing is, they sell software that is alive, not dead. You buy tropical fish and they bring an aquarium to your house with the fish in it. You count the fish and see that they're healthy and you got what you paid for. Bill Gates sells you a cardboard box with freeze-dried tropical fish eggs and no guarantees what the fish look like or how long they'll last.
> OGG player
The iPhone's video decoder is ISO MPEG H.264 only. It can't decode Ogg. If you were to install an Ogg decoder software onto the iPhone, if there were even a place to put it (no QuickTime), and if you could get full frame full-rate playback, you would probably drain the battery in an hour or less instead of five.
You could potentially make an iPod dock accessory that decodes Ogg in a chip. However if people wanted one this would already exist.
The thing with Ogg is that is scratches an itch that only 0.0000001% of humans have, and you have to understand patents to even understand why it exists. And you have to think that paying a few bucks for an encoder that has a matching free decoder is a bad thing, which nobody in the audio video business actually does. We pay Apple $29 every couple of years and they maintain a collection of professional codecs as QuickTime plug-ins that work throughout the system and within all of your applications. For example, you can open up the Mac version of Microsoft Word and put H.264 video into your documents. You can export H.264 from your 3D app, your video editor, Adobe Flash.
MP3 has come and gone, so has Ogg. The world standardized on MPEG-4 in 2001, 2002. Google is converting YouTube to MPEG-4 right now.
> Forget about video editing,
I already forgot it because the iPhone has a 1 GHz ARM, it is a phone, not a computer. Apple is one of the leaders in video editing, and they have 10 years of iMovie to leverage. If the iPhone could edit video they would build that in.
It's a PHONE. It has the same CPU as an iPod and other smart phones. It costs $300 more than the iPod it replaces. For $1100 Apple will sell you a MacBook with built-in video editing and hundreds of other similar PC features.
The CPU in these pocket devices cannot even decode a video stream for playback. There is a second chip in there that decodes H.264. And 8 GB of flash RAM that is mostly filled with movies and music is very poor non-linear editing storage.
> custom multi-touch UI
Every Web browser has its own custom behaviors, it is just as easy to add multi-touch features to the iPhone's browser environment as it would be to put it in iPhone's mythical third-party development environment. For example, Apple was behind some new Web standards that have to do with detecting the DPI of a display with JavaScript, they are adding features to Web 2.0 specifically for the iPhone and standardizing them and Mozilla is adopting them. So the custom multi-touch UI features will either end up as part of Safari or part of the Web instead of being limited to just third-party apps.
> robotics control
I don't even know what this means, but I know it doesn't sell phones. And I'm pretty sure if you have a robot you have a PC. And isn't it running Linux? You don't need any help from Apple for that.
> If consumers want a particular app for the iPhone(and it's voiced through emails/community) it'll happen.
What many people who have technology backgrounds fail to realize is that Apple plays the part of your geek friend who "sets up" your computer for you.
It's as if you bought a Windows PC and you called your hacker friend who's into FOSS and he comes by and wipes Windows, puts on BSD, Apache, PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, and much more, and then he installs an HD video editor, DVD-Video creator, CD burning, photo manager, music and video manager, all 200 professional audio video codecs, a complete pro audio subsystem with digital mixer and effects and synthesizer plug-ins, a Web 2.0 browser, 3D graphics, mail, calendar, IM, 10-way audio conferencing, 4-way video conferencing, multitrack music and audio workstation, object-oriented rapid application development tools, Java, Unicode, a wonderful font collection and outstanding typography, PDF out the yin-yang, a complete set of GUI utilities, workflow automation, Widgets, Exposé (mmmm), DVD player, WYSIWG Web/blog editor, system-wide instant search, Oxford Dictionary integrated throughout, Unicode text editor (also emacs and vi and pico), drivers for thousands of devices, and I am sure I forgot a bunch of shit.
Then you, the user, sit down and use your PC. You don't set it up or configure it, you USE it.
So if there is stuff missing from iPhone that can't be added with Ajax or dock connector or as a separate Bluetooth or Wi-Fi device, if it can only be added by Apple, then they will either build the best version of it in the world or they will buy the best version of it in the world.
Similarly, when Sony needed a Web browser for PSP they bought a company that made a Web browser for a set-top box with the same CPU or something. They didn't tell their users "sorry, we can't give you a Web browser because we don't have a third-party development platform."
> I don't get it when people start saying 'it is underpowered to run any real apps.'
You also have to consider space and heat and battery life, not just specs or GHz.
For example, the AppleTV has a 1 GHz Intel chip in there, but it is supposed to sleep almost all of the time. When a movie is running, it's decoded by the NVIDIA chip in the graphics adapter. If you do something with your AppleTV that makes the CPU run (like decoding Flash video from YouTube with a third-party plug-in) then you are going to have to get some air around that AppleTV, and it's likely it won't last as long as if you only run H.264 through it. That's why part of Apple's YouTube on AppleTV announcement was Google converting YouTube to MPEG-4 H.264.
Same sort of thing goes for iPhone. Although it has a 1 GHz ARM chip which sounds fast, that is not a PC CPU, it lacks stuff we take for granted on PC's, Apple had to use LLVM to emulate some PC stuff, and to get 5 hours of battery and no first-degree burn on your palm, you have to use the device pretty much as Apple intended, so that their optimizations hold, same as AppleTV. As far as I can tell, there is no Adobe Flash in iPhone because Flash video requires a full PC, that is always required to decode a software codec. The iPhone does its H.264 in an H.264 chip. So you can't assume the iPhone can play all video formats because it can play Pirates of the Caribbean in H.264.
If they could run iMovie on there, I think they would. They have 10 years of iMovie development they could leverage. The "iTunes" that is on the iPhone is also not the real iTunes, which is a "Carbon" Mac app, it's 10 years old also, of course it is a little iTunes for iPhone, specifically optimized. No doubt what is in the iPhone is all from OS X, but it's just the minimal shit. It's like the first iPod had the same font as the first Mac, but don't think that the Finder is in there.
> Look at Palm, with it's thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Palm ever envisioned.
... all of that came after music playback. Video was waiting on MPEG-4 H.264 (third-party), notes and contacts were done by third-party Mac apps first, the dock connector did not even arrive until the 2G iPod, and nobody could have predicted the toilet tissue holder with built-in iPod dock. I bet everybody has seen at least one iPod accessory that amazed them.
Look at iPod, with its thousands of apps (big and small) that enable it to be so much more than Apple ever envisioned.
Over 3000+ dock apps, dozens of games, photos, contacts, notes, video
Somebody told me once that Nike iPod Sport Kit is the single highest-selling handheld application ever but I don't know if they were right.
The iPhone has a dock connector and an iPod built in. That's just one of the things it does.
> The same goes for Symbian.
Symbian apps are not even compatible with other manufacturer's Symbian phones. There are 3 or 4 separate platforms. I think you are even disallowed from moving an app from phone to phone when you get a new one. It is also technologically obsolete and very closed, very bolted down, worse than iPod games.
The way the iPhone really kills those other platforms, though, is when you ask a phone user what are their favorite apps? What do you want to see on the iPhone?
- Flickr
- eBay
- MySpace
- Twitter
What? You don't want to install a "memory manager" so you can eke out an extra 28k of RAM so you can install a calorie manager? You don't want to pay $20 to install a poker game? You'd rather play online with other humans and win actual prizes?
> The OEM's provide a platform, the development community makes it better.
No. What has been happening is the OEM cripples the platform so that the user is inclined to buy essentials from the development community and do I-T work to install them, update them, maintain them. Consumers won't do that. They don't do it. There is 10 years of handheld Windows development to prove that. Has it really taken 10 years for Microsoft to NOT put the Web in your pocket? How can that be? Are they trying to sell you a calorie manager and they can't compete with the ones on the Web? Ahhhhh. That's great for the user. Thanks. Good to know that software writers are so helpful to society that they have to shake me down in order for me to buy their stuff.
All of the applications you just listed can be done with Ajax.
Airtime has nothing to do with it, unless your app has to have network data. If the only thing your app wants from the network is a newer version of itself, then there is no need to have the network to run the app. Offline Ajax involves the browser serving itself when the network is down. It's the same idea as a browser showing you its cached page if the network is down, but there is some translating going on so that the JavaScript in the app calls out for yahoo.com but gets back the right response from localhost/yahoo essentially, and both JavaScript and user are oblivious.
Most Mac OS X Widgets can run in Firefox for Windows on a machine with no network connection. It isn't rocket science. The rocket science part of Ajax is getting it to run in both standards-based browsers and Explorer. Same as with all Web development.
If you were going to write an "iPhone app" anyway, then develop for Safari, you get iPhones, and you also get Macs and Firefox for free, as well as Safari for Windows. Serve Explorer users a page with a Safari link and a Firefox link and an invitation to join you on the World Wide Web.
Me, I was looking forward to an "iPhone Web SDK" much more than buying and installing (serializing?) an app on my iPhone.
Apple has also given a boost to Ajax, to Web 2.0, to standards, and to other pocket Web browser makers. They are celebrating somewhere at Nokia right now, they sell $1000 phones that can surf the Web with their port of Safari (S60) and there's nothing stopping them from running every iPhone app. Also it's good for the user who does an iPhone for 2 years and then wants to do a Nokia or other brand after that, they can take their MPEG-4 media with them and their Ajax applications, and their Vcard contacts and their iCal calendars, the whole iPhone is standardized, they are going to lock you in with sheer lickability.
Bullshit for so many reasons.
... still people hate it.
First, iPhone comes with four killer apps built-in. All a device needs is one. The iPod is a sensation and it has one killer app: seamless integration with your iTunes audio video collection which enables on-the-go playback of same anywhere, anytime.
The iPhone has:
1) Calls - the killer app from phones
2) iPod - the killer app from iPods
3) Web (Web 2.0 even) - the real full-featured Web, the killer app from the last decade of mainstream computing
4) Email - the killer app of the Internet some say
Notice that Apple put these four along the bottom of the iPhone's display. The other 11 apps are chachkis. You can do Google Maps or calendaring online.
Some have called the iPhone's UI a killer app. If you have been frustrated by a phone UI before you may agree.
OK, but what if that isn't enough for you? What if you are considering an iPhone but you really don't need it for the phone, iPod, Web, or email features? (Please read the previous sentence again while considering the absurdity of it.)
Then for you, the iPhone has many avenues for third-party accessories:
1) Ajax applications
2) iPod dock connector applications
3) Bluetooth applications
4) Wi-Fi-n applications
5) custom hardware modifications (this is huge in phones already)
6) iPhone-related Mac/PC apps
7) cases, holders, mounts, etc.
The funny thing is, with the original Mac you could install software on it, and developers complained about not having any accessory slots to put hardware. Now iPhone has a slot that is being ignored and everybody wants to install software on it.
The consumer market is all about zero configuration. Installing and updating software is configuration. Nine out of ten people fucking hate it. It's why most people still do not have PC's. People will make outrageous sacrifices to avoid having to configure something. They'll use lab computers at school, surf the Web only at work, or use online productivity apps that suck, just to avoid owning their own computer or installing software on it. Among Mac users, the majority do not install software, and it has been reduced to dragging and dropping one icon from some other storage to your hard disk
Everybody wants to know, what is Apple's secret? What makes their stuff so easy to use, what makes people like it so much? It is zero configuration. When Apple did Mac networking in the 1980's the Macs networked themselves, you just had to physically connect them. When they rebuilt their OS for the 21st century they re-built the zero configuration networking as well, this time around TCP/IP. There were 20 years of "configuration TCP/IP" before Apple switched from AppleTalk to TCP/IP and created zero configuration TCP/IP. Why didn't somebody other than Apple build zero conf networking first? Apple is the only computer company in the consumer market. All others are in the mainframe replacement business. So it is no wonder that non-technical people like Apple's zero configuration products, because non-technical people fucking hate configuring things.
Oh, they hate it. They hate it worse than taking an exam, they hate it worse than going to the doctor. If your business plan involves consumers configuring things, then get out of the consumer industry now.
It is amazing to me in 2007 that the PC industry a) still exists, b) hasn't gotten a clue yet. ZERO, I mean ZERO configuration. You turn it on, it works (built-in apps). You plug it on, it works (dock connector). You click it, it works (Web/Ajax).
From what I understand, you buy an iTunes Plus track and once the track is downloaded, rather than wrapping the audio in DRM, the user's email address is added to the meta data and a kind of checksum is created that enables iTunes to tell later whether the email address meta data in a file is what came from Apple or if it has been tampered with.
As has been pointed out many times in many posts on this topic, the user meta data is almost trivially easy for a user to remove. On the other hand, it seems like it would be outrageously hard to add it yourself. If I want to turn iTunes Plus into "generic" AAC I can do that, but if I want to rip a 256 kbit/s AAC from CD and turn it into a counterfeit iTunes Plus track that is going to be hard work.
This leads me to think that the user meta data in iTunes Plus tracks is there as a proof of purchase, to enable the user to upgrade their 256 kbit/s AAC to lossless in a few years. Apple doesn't care if you remove it; they just don't want you to add it to tracks you rip from CD and then later ask them to upgrade you to lossless for 30 cents and they do it. They only want to upgrade actual purchases. Right now they are upgrading the 128 kbit/s tracks to 256 as part of the iTunes Plus introduction. Because of FairPlay it is easy to identify previous purchases, it was necessary to identify them just to play them, however the new iTunes Plus tracks do not have to be identified to be played, only to be upgraded. Unless this is the one and only audio quality upgrade there has to be some non-DRM identification method.
I have to add that I'm terribly disappointed in EFF because they have come off like the worst kind of Napster fan-boy throughout this whole iTunes Plus thing. Not only did Apple put a knife in the heart of DRM, they did it while fighting both Microsoft and the RIAA and all of the major label record company executives that are alive and living today. AND they upgraded their old users for a handling charge instead of selling them over again at full price which is the record industry STANDARD for decades, nobody ever got to turn in an LP for 75% off the price of a CD.
You know when you send someone an email they get your email address, right?
> laptop stolen, you will know that your "easy solution" is not well thought out. You do not want any personal information embedded
> in music, especially unwittingly.
That is bullshit for many reasons:
1) if you have a laptop and you don't want your data to be shared with the world, IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO ENCRYPT THE DISK. On a Mac, this has been so easy that lawyers do it for themselves for many years now (Apple Menu > System Preferences > Security > FileVault).
2) if you don't encrypt the disk, there are many, many, many more places a thief can find your email address on there aside from within the meta data of some of your music files. For example, your email reader likely has not only the one email address you used for iTunes Store, but also other and also the passwords, and also your email, which has lots of personal info in there.
3) if your iPod is stolen, the music on there is one-way. It goes from iTunes to iPod and not back again. Plus the guy probably also stole your wallet, you have worse problems than iTunes Store meta data.
> Is there a good explanation somewhere written in layman's terms?
... I'm making this much harder aren't I?
If you write a letter and then put it in an envelope and address and stamp the envelope you have one item which has both data (the contents of the letter you wrote) and meta data (the to and from address, the stamp). No matter who you address the letter to or how much postage you apply, the contents of the letter do not change, the recipient is going to take the letter out of the envelope before they even begin to "decode" the thoughts within. The user info we're talking about in the iTunes Plus tracks is equivalent to a postmark, it is on the outside of the audio, not mixed in with it. Whatever other information is in the file the audio bit stream (the letter) is going to be the same. It's not just that they're stored separately, they are made separately, they are two independent items of information, in different formats even (the data is audio, the meta data is text and images).
Just because you see what appears to be "one file" do not assume it is one solid data set, like a piece of cheese, the same throughout. It is likely to be more like a layer cake.
Letters, cheese, cake
This kind of information storage is why the Mac file system originally had "forked" files, with both a data fork and resource fork. Also why QuickTime movies aren't real files but rather more like a folder for media tracks, like one video track, one audio track, and one subtitle track. That way the subtitles never get separated from the movie. You also don't want the artist info for a song to get separated from the audio data, especially if you want to find that audio data by searching for the artist info.
> They're not encrypted, but they are probably signed. The iTunes Plus files have blocks called "sign" and "chtb" which were
... this is a proof of purchase. It is advantageous to the legitimate purchaser to leave this information in the file so as to future-proof their music investment.
> not present in the old DRM'd files
Sigh
There were three big announcements with iTunes Plus: 1) no DRM, 2) double the bit-rate for higher quality sound, 3) PREVIOUSLY PURCHASED iTUNES STORE TRACKS CAN BE UPGRADED FOR A TOKEN HANDLING FEE TO THE NEW HIGHER-QUALITY BIT RATE.
In order to upgrade you now or in the future, iTunes needs to be able to identify "iTunes Store purchases" from "other" in your music collection, which thanks to Apple's progressive and practical user-centric policies may include audio from dozens or hundreds of different sources.
If a person follows the EFF's advice and strips the unique meta data out of their iTunes Plus purchase, iTunes will not be able to identify those tracks as iTunes Store purchases, and the tracks will never be upgradable to lossless, which is the next bump, within 3-5 years. After that, expect to see higher-than-CD bit rates and sample depths next, that is when you will START to hear the audio as it is recorded in the studio (even in my small project studio we have 24-bits and 192 kHz, but still to publish you have to distill down to 16-bits and 44.1 KHz using arcane and vicious audio hacking, a lot is lost). In other words, if you have anything other than a 24-bit 192 kHz lossless audio file, you are not done upgrading yet. Since there will be 3 or 4 jumps before we get there (and by then the music studio may have moved up ahead) you are looking at a lot of money to stay current if you insist on paying full price for every track every time out.
A few years ago I heard a record company executive from a big label talk about DVD-Audio. Was he excited that consumers would soon be able to buy much higher quality music? Not really. He could not wait to sell Sgt. Pepper's to baby boomers again for full price, he couldn't wait to sell someone the whole Led Zeppelin catalog for the fifth time, again at full price. What Apple is doing by upgrading your audio quality for a handling fee did not come from the record companies, I can assure you.
I had a Sony portable DAT machine during the 90's which I used only to record myself, at jam sessions and songwriting sessions. I was the copyright holder to everything the machine ever encountered in its whole life. Fucking DRM in there made me miserable. A DAT tape is not very rugged, if you record something onto one, you want to make a dupe. However if you make a digital dupe the dupe is an analog tape essentially, the bits are flagged as "do not copy". Then your master gets a glitch and the digital recording is gone forever. Not to mention that the consumer electronics makers deliberately set the DAT sample rate at 48 kHz so that you could never, ever, burn a digital copy of a DAT to CD. The sample rate conversion from 48 kHz to 44.1 kHz is so audibly destructive that it is better to just make an analog dub to 44.1 kHz digital and burn that to CD. Working with a DAT machine was always like playing tug of war with yourself. It's ironic that pretty much only musicians and audio pros ever had them, because as bad as they were, we had a lot of music to record while on the go. The lost productivity, the lost music. Digital audio recording dates back to the 1970's, even the CD was around in the very early 80's. For a songwriter to pay $1000 for a DAT recorder in the 90's and have to fight with it tells you how slow the progress has been.
Similarly, I had a Creative Nomad MP3 player in 1999 or so that had a voice recorder in it. However the voice recorder was artificially limited to a really low sample rate in order to prevent you from making a quality recording. The first iPods with voice recorder attachments were also done this way, you recorded at 8 kHz or 11 kHz just to make it scratchy and prevent you from recording a concert or CD. This is the ultimate poor man's DRM. However when I bought an iPod nano recently and a voice recorder for it, the thing does stereo 16-bit 44.1 kHz recording, same quality as it can play. The worm has turned. You have to sell a functional device now to compete with Apple.
Consumer electronics companies spent the entire decade before the iPod really hit just shooting themselves in the foot over digital audio. It's just too fucking much power to put in the hands of the individual! Ha ha ha ha ha. Good-bye Sony and Creative, it was nice to know you back in the day (yes I just predicted Sony's demise look at the numbers you will hardly believe how bad it is for them, Apple may buy a piece of the body, but Sony is done).
So after experiencing decades of digital audio DRM, forgive me if I don't have any tears for punters who find an email address watermark in a major label download from the iTunes Store to be crippling their music bootlegging potential.
What's worse is that this guy has not even noticed that a 256 kbit/s AAC is much better sound quality than the consumer has ever had access to, including CD. CD's have many legacy problems that we are used to making excuses for, such as poor error-correction, scratches, and if the song skips just once the CD loses. I have participated in listening tests with CD, DVD, MP3, and MP4 (AAC) and at no time were we able to do a whole CD or DVD without a single glitch. On the other hand, MP3 sounded so bad we were willing to put up with a glitch on the discs. But when we got the AAC up to 256 kbit/s we were all like "ahhhhhh." It sounded like the original studio mix file (pre-CD) and it was small and portable and didn't skip like MP3, it is the best of both worlds.
The guy who wrote this article ought to seek out Steve Jobs and kiss him right on the ass. Then find Fake Steve and kiss his ass too. Fucking pathetic.