I continuously tap links as small as 3 or 4px on my iPhone and it works well enough that I rarely bother zooming in on the page before taping the link.
My finger maybe 40px on a screen that high res, but it knows exactly where my finger is and can pinpoint the center of my finger to a single pixel with good accuracy. If you watch the video you'll see that the nexus one can only do this when you press firmly (which i rarely do on my iPhone). While the droid is, as the slashdot story says, never accurate and insanely inaccurate when you don't press firmly. The iPhone is always accurate except at the edge of the screen.
This stuff is critical! Even just typing in on a touch screen keyboard needs good accuracy, because the keys are about half the size of your finger. And it needs accuracy when you lightly tap the keys, because you won't bother pressing firmly while typing a quick text message or email and you will be pissed off when there are continuous typo's. The end result is, without a good touch screen, you won't use your phone as often as you could be.
Normal metal will flex under load, then spring back into place afterwards. Welded metal will not flex, instead it holds rigidly in place and will crack. When metal flexes it "cushions" the strain of the wind gust/cars/etc, massively increasing it's strength.
Welded metal is *always* inferior to non-welded metal, and it's critical to avoid placing load on a weld joint. It has nothing to do with how many kg of metal there is.
Apple isn't just about boutique computers. They're also about mainstream mp3 players.
I'm honestly surprised woolworths isn't selling their own brand of mp3 player. They already have their own brand of several other mainstream electronics products.
Not to mention woolworths completely owns dick smith and tandy, the two retail outlets which probably sell more iPods than every other store in australia combined. This law suite is all about stopping a woolworths branded mp3 player from being sold on the same shelf as an apple branded mp3 player by a company which is continuously under fire for being anti-competitive.
Trademark law permits companies to have similar logos and names so long as they don't compete in the markets and there is no likelihood of reasonable consumers getting confused about which company they're doing business with.
You seem to forget that woolworths is already competing with apple (they sell phones and electronics, and are selling more in that industry every year), and the woolworths trademark application includes all of the industries that apple's trademark is registered in.
The *very definition* of a trademark is a goverment sanction to stop anyone else from using a particular word/symbol in your industry(ies).
Apple's name is "apple" and their graphic of an "apple" is trademarked in the electronics industry, and means that nobody else is permitted to trade in that industry under an "apple" logo.
Woolworhs logo does look somewhat like an apple, and their application includes the electronics industry, and if the trademark is granted woolworths has enough legal clout to eat Apple for breakfast (no pun intended...). Trademark suites are about "mindshare", and with upwards of 90% of australia's population visiting woolworths or a woolworths owned retail outlet regularly, apple doesn't stand a chance unless they take it to court before the trademark is granted.
Woolworths should not be trading under the new logo before the trademark is approved, and if it's is rejected in the electronics industry, then that's just too bad.
Apple's trademark is "Apple" and their logo is an apple with a bite taken out and a leaf pointing in a certain direction. Their trademark is in the electronics industry.
Woolworths trademark application is somewhat shaped like an apple and has a leaf pointing in the same direction. They're applying for a blanket trademark, which includes the electronics industry.
Lets not forget that Woolworths is the 100 pound gorilla in this case, they are a huge corporation with 10 times more employees *just in australia* than apple has worldwide, and while they sell products which only slightly compete with apple, they also completely own the largest two electronics outlets in australia (dick smith & tandy), and both of those make a huge percentage of their market selling apple products.
Apple has a real case, and if they don't fight it then in the long term they are in serious danger of being on the receiving end of a court case like this one. The most likely outcome is woolworths having to stop using the logo which they don't even have a trademark for yet (it's their own fault that they're using it before it's approved), or more likely a court order forbidding woolworths from using their logo in the electronics industry.
Exactly. Woolworths is already selling simple phones and cheap dvd players. There's no doubt they will gradually extend to mp3 players, smart phones, hard drive based set top boxes, and possibly netbooks. And apple is also moving towards a every day consumer electronics products just like those woolworths is already selling.
If woolworths receives the blanket trademark which is currently pending approval, then in a few years when they compete more directly, woolworths might demand that apple change their logo. Woolworths is a bigger, older, richer company, with a lot more customers and "mindshare" than apple will ever have (at least in australia).
"Intention" has nothing to do with it. Australian trademark law will not allow two businesses with similar trademarks to trade in the same industry.
If woolworths was just a grocery store, the australian government would tell apple to get f****d. But woolworths is applying for a "blanket" trademark, and they are already selling products which are similar to apple's offerings. They are applying for a blanket trademark because they have every intention of offering products in every industry where a buck can be made, including competing directly with Apple.
Apple's logo has a bite taken out of it, and the Woolworths logo is stylised like a "w", but they are both silhouettes of an apple.
Webkit isn't apple's only open source initiative, it's just their most successful one. They work hard in a lot of other areas too, such as CalDav, GCC and so on.
Whenever I want. Apple's window manager now, that they're pretty sensitive about.
An operating system is more than then kernel - and Quartz is a helluva lot more than a window manager.
Apple bars you from installing their operating system on non-apple devices. End of story.
You are implying that darwin is just a kernel, when it is in fact a full operating system which is perfectly suitable for being used on a server, just like the vast majority of the world's linux installations. Not many people actually do use it as an OS, but it is definitely one.
From wikipedia:
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NEXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.
Those that simply have to stay connected to others at all times in order to feel validated and important will love Google Wave. Right there in front of you is evidence that people are connected to you! In real time! Better than texting! It's so amazingly interactive! It's like... like... a telephone!
It doesn't need to be a "real time" system at all. Everyone pays attention to the instant message/email side of Wave. People need to pay more attention to using it for things like an issue tracker or a wiki.
An issue tracker starts out as a single idea, then may move into a discussion, and then it gets completed. Wave looks perfect, you stick the description as a new wave, you discuss it, and then once it's complete you drop the whole wave and swap in a one line summary of the problem and the implemented solution.
A wiki article is similar, if we are working on a new system we will first start with a list of objectives, and then discuss how each objective will be implemented, and then once it is implemented we drop the whole thing and insert documentation for how to use the freshly built system.
Wave is a natural fit for a real world conversation or meeting. First someone kicks it off with a description of the topic to be covered, and then everyone talks about it, and from then on you don't care about the conversation, you only want to see the final product. Conversations and meetings are real time *because we have no good tools to do it any other way*. Google wave allows you to have a discussion either in real time, or not in real time. It's up to the user to decide.
I would work on open source alternatives to software which currently only has good commercial options. Anything which I didn't have the knowledge to work on myself (artwork, interface design, low level algorithms, security...), I would hire experts to work on.
Comparing JavaScript to Objective-C is a big leap. They're completely different.
Yes, they're both "dynamic". But:
* JavaScript is not a "proper" object oriented language, Objective-C is.
* JavaScript is a lot more dynamic than Objective-C, it's compiled at run time. Objective-C just does some decisions at runtime.
* Objective-C is orders of magnitude faster than JavaScript (I don't actually know how much faster, but having programmed in both I'm confident a few test would reveal tasks that take 2 seconds in javascript would take less than a millisecond in Objective-C)
* Objective-C is compiled by a *C* compiler (more often than not, a C++ compiler). This means that any C/C++ code you find on the 'net, or any C/C++ library you find on the net, can be accessed seamlessly within your Objective-C code.
* Because you can mix C/C++ code into your Objective C code, you can use the language which bests suites your task, for example a function could start with 3 lines of Objective-C code, then have 20 lines of C++, and then 4 more lines of Objective-C.
As for not being convinced of dynamic languages... it really does depend on the task at hand. But it is generally accepted (definitely by me) that software written in a dynamic language tends to be less buggy (buffer over-runs and memory leaks are virtually impossible in many dynamic languages for example) and faster to write. Where you draw the line between bugs/faster to write and performance/flexibility depends on the individual project.
Yeah, but it wasn't using WebKit when I bought OmniWeb, it was using it's own custom built rendering engine which is (believe it or not...) older than any of the current rendering engines (older than netscape or internet explorer even!)
Even now that it's using WebKit, it's not a very recent version.
In the case of browsers, it has become a technical issue. Microsoft has a monopoly marketshare, and also has several commercial products which are threatened by the new generation of online platform-independent software. This has lead to microsoft freezing their previously rapid development of IE to a snails pace, and open source web browsers (which could not keep up with IE's old development speed) have overtaken it and become much more technically advanced.
Personally, I love open source (and am involved in several projects of various sizes, some of which I created myself). But I will use commercial software over open source if it is better and reasonably priced. For example, a few years ago I purchased the OmniWeb browser, but no-longer use it because most of the open source browsers available today are better.
If you're not a web developer, don't comment on something involving web development stuff.
I *am* a web developer, with several years experience building business websites (which must run seamlessly in virtually any browser), I can tell you that FireFox is one of the most buggy browsers out there.
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?
About two years ago, and only after spending 5 hours trying to figure out why the CSS we were using for that particular page layout was not working in Internet Explorer 6.
And even then, the table was only a tiny part of the layout. It only had one row, and that row only had one cell, and there were no tables inside tables.
Just to put it in perspective, there are oven 700 websites in our portfolio, and that is the only one I know of which has a table on every page. There are probably others (i'm one of 5 web developers in our small business), but they're rare enough I haven't come across them.
I work at a web development company, and we are already starting to move away from flash and relying more and more heavily on javascript. The motivation is mostly because:
a) the flash development tools are inferior to javascript ones
b) every web programmer knows at least basic javascript, many don't know any flash. Easier to build on basic js than train someone in flash from scratch
c) the flash development tools cost a fortune, the javascript ones are either free or very afordable
In fact, just yesterday I wrote a javascript replacement for a flash script which we use on many of our websites. (a general purpose loop of photos, with animated transitions). The javascript alternative is smaller, faster to load, *smoother animated in most browsers*, and easier to maintain or improve on in future.
We're also planning to do the same for other flash scripts in our code library.
Even when we do still use flash, it's in smaller ways. We will virtually never build an entire page (let alone website) with flash, instead we'll do the website in html and then embed a tiny piece of flash.
For example, a photo gallery will be pure html/javascript right up until the point where you click the "full screen" button. And even then, the flash doesn't exist in the page until you click that button, it is injected into the page and configured using javascript.
There are still some places where we need flash: video, full screen, and proper file uploads. Video will be the next to drop off the list, pretty soon we'll be doing video in javascript/html, with flash loaded in as a fallback in browsers that can't do video in html.
Your solution only works with "kids in tree-house" strength encryption. With any of the modern and well-regarded encryption algorithm, the position *does* effect the output.
For example, sha1 of two similar strings give completely different output (sha1 is a hashing algorithm, but modern encryption systems have the same behaviour):
Slashdot Mirror
What "quality"? This is essentially the whole app:
oldPoint = getFingerPosition()
while (true and fingerTouchingScreen()) {
point = getFingerPosition()
drawLine(oldPoint, point)
oldPoint = point;
}
I continuously tap links as small as 3 or 4px on my iPhone and it works well enough that I rarely bother zooming in on the page before taping the link.
My finger maybe 40px on a screen that high res, but it knows exactly where my finger is and can pinpoint the center of my finger to a single pixel with good accuracy. If you watch the video you'll see that the nexus one can only do this when you press firmly (which i rarely do on my iPhone). While the droid is, as the slashdot story says, never accurate and insanely inaccurate when you don't press firmly. The iPhone is always accurate except at the edge of the screen.
This stuff is critical! Even just typing in on a touch screen keyboard needs good accuracy, because the keys are about half the size of your finger. And it needs accuracy when you lightly tap the keys, because you won't bother pressing firmly while typing a quick text message or email and you will be pissed off when there are continuous typo's. The end result is, without a good touch screen, you won't use your phone as often as you could be.
Sounds like a lot of effort to move a pointer around.
I have a small device (slightly smaller than my hand) which achieves the same result.
Because it's old, messy code. WebKit is the most modern rendering engine out there.
Normal metal will flex under load, then spring back into place afterwards. Welded metal will not flex, instead it holds rigidly in place and will crack. When metal flexes it "cushions" the strain of the wind gust/cars/etc, massively increasing it's strength.
Welded metal is *always* inferior to non-welded metal, and it's critical to avoid placing load on a weld joint. It has nothing to do with how many kg of metal there is.
In general, if it has a full querty keyboard and can run third party software, then it's a smart phone.
Apple isn't just about boutique computers. They're also about mainstream mp3 players.
I'm honestly surprised woolworths isn't selling their own brand of mp3 player. They already have their own brand of several other mainstream electronics products.
Not to mention woolworths completely owns dick smith and tandy, the two retail outlets which probably sell more iPods than every other store in australia combined. This law suite is all about stopping a woolworths branded mp3 player from being sold on the same shelf as an apple branded mp3 player by a company which is continuously under fire for being anti-competitive.
Not "fruit" related. But they definitely do have a monopoly on "apple fruit" related logos in the electronics industry.
That's the whole point of a trademark.
Trademark law permits companies to have similar logos and names so long as they don't compete in the markets and there is no likelihood of reasonable consumers getting confused about which company they're doing business with.
You seem to forget that woolworths is already competing with apple (they sell phones and electronics, and are selling more in that industry every year), and the woolworths trademark application includes all of the industries that apple's trademark is registered in.
The *very definition* of a trademark is a goverment sanction to stop anyone else from using a particular word/symbol in your industry(ies).
Apple's name is "apple" and their graphic of an "apple" is trademarked in the electronics industry, and means that nobody else is permitted to trade in that industry under an "apple" logo.
Woolworhs logo does look somewhat like an apple, and their application includes the electronics industry, and if the trademark is granted woolworths has enough legal clout to eat Apple for breakfast (no pun intended...). Trademark suites are about "mindshare", and with upwards of 90% of australia's population visiting woolworths or a woolworths owned retail outlet regularly, apple doesn't stand a chance unless they take it to court before the trademark is granted.
Woolworths should not be trading under the new logo before the trademark is approved, and if it's is rejected in the electronics industry, then that's just too bad.
Apple's trademark is "Apple" and their logo is an apple with a bite taken out and a leaf pointing in a certain direction. Their trademark is in the electronics industry.
Woolworths trademark application is somewhat shaped like an apple and has a leaf pointing in the same direction. They're applying for a blanket trademark, which includes the electronics industry.
Lets not forget that Woolworths is the 100 pound gorilla in this case, they are a huge corporation with 10 times more employees *just in australia* than apple has worldwide, and while they sell products which only slightly compete with apple, they also completely own the largest two electronics outlets in australia (dick smith & tandy), and both of those make a huge percentage of their market selling apple products.
Apple has a real case, and if they don't fight it then in the long term they are in serious danger of being on the receiving end of a court case like this one. The most likely outcome is woolworths having to stop using the logo which they don't even have a trademark for yet (it's their own fault that they're using it before it's approved), or more likely a court order forbidding woolworths from using their logo in the electronics industry.
Exactly. Woolworths is already selling simple phones and cheap dvd players. There's no doubt they will gradually extend to mp3 players, smart phones, hard drive based set top boxes, and possibly netbooks. And apple is also moving towards a every day consumer electronics products just like those woolworths is already selling.
If woolworths receives the blanket trademark which is currently pending approval, then in a few years when they compete more directly, woolworths might demand that apple change their logo. Woolworths is a bigger, older, richer company, with a lot more customers and "mindshare" than apple will ever have (at least in australia).
"Intention" has nothing to do with it. Australian trademark law will not allow two businesses with similar trademarks to trade in the same industry.
If woolworths was just a grocery store, the australian government would tell apple to get f****d. But woolworths is applying for a "blanket" trademark, and they are already selling products which are similar to apple's offerings. They are applying for a blanket trademark because they have every intention of offering products in every industry where a buck can be made, including competing directly with Apple.
Apple's logo has a bite taken out of it, and the Woolworths logo is stylised like a "w", but they are both silhouettes of an apple.
Webkit isn't apple's only open source initiative, it's just their most successful one. They work hard in a lot of other areas too, such as CalDav, GCC and so on.
Whenever I want. Apple's window manager now, that they're pretty sensitive about.
An operating system is more than then kernel - and Quartz is a helluva lot more than a window manager.
Apple bars you from installing their operating system on non-apple devices. End of story.
You are implying that darwin is just a kernel, when it is in fact a full operating system which is perfectly suitable for being used on a server, just like the vast majority of the world's linux installations. Not many people actually do use it as an OS, but it is definitely one.
From wikipedia:
Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NEXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects.
Those that simply have to stay connected to others at all times in order to feel validated and important will love Google Wave. Right there in front of you is evidence that people are connected to you! In real time! Better than texting! It's so amazingly interactive! It's like... like... a telephone!
It doesn't need to be a "real time" system at all. Everyone pays attention to the instant message/email side of Wave. People need to pay more attention to using it for things like an issue tracker or a wiki.
An issue tracker starts out as a single idea, then may move into a discussion, and then it gets completed. Wave looks perfect, you stick the description as a new wave, you discuss it, and then once it's complete you drop the whole wave and swap in a one line summary of the problem and the implemented solution.
A wiki article is similar, if we are working on a new system we will first start with a list of objectives, and then discuss how each objective will be implemented, and then once it is implemented we drop the whole thing and insert documentation for how to use the freshly built system.
Wave is a natural fit for a real world conversation or meeting. First someone kicks it off with a description of the topic to be covered, and then everyone talks about it, and from then on you don't care about the conversation, you only want to see the final product. Conversations and meetings are real time *because we have no good tools to do it any other way*. Google wave allows you to have a discussion either in real time, or not in real time. It's up to the user to decide.
I would work on open source alternatives to software which currently only has good commercial options. Anything which I didn't have the knowledge to work on myself (artwork, interface design, low level algorithms, security...), I would hire experts to work on.
Comparing JavaScript to Objective-C is a big leap. They're completely different.
Yes, they're both "dynamic". But:
* JavaScript is not a "proper" object oriented language, Objective-C is.
* JavaScript is a lot more dynamic than Objective-C, it's compiled at run time. Objective-C just does some decisions at runtime.
* Objective-C is orders of magnitude faster than JavaScript (I don't actually know how much faster, but having programmed in both I'm confident a few test would reveal tasks that take 2 seconds in javascript would take less than a millisecond in Objective-C)
* Objective-C is compiled by a *C* compiler (more often than not, a C++ compiler). This means that any C/C++ code you find on the 'net, or any C/C++ library you find on the net, can be accessed seamlessly within your Objective-C code.
* Because you can mix C/C++ code into your Objective C code, you can use the language which bests suites your task, for example a function could start with 3 lines of Objective-C code, then have 20 lines of C++, and then 4 more lines of Objective-C.
As for not being convinced of dynamic languages... it really does depend on the task at hand. But it is generally accepted (definitely by me) that software written in a dynamic language tends to be less buggy (buffer over-runs and memory leaks are virtually impossible in many dynamic languages for example) and faster to write. Where you draw the line between bugs/faster to write and performance/flexibility depends on the individual project.
Safari is in the test. It's just that they focused on the three new kids on the block, of which safari 4 is not among.
TFA does list results of Safari and IE, as well as other browsers, for every test in a separate graph.
Yeah, but it wasn't using WebKit when I bought OmniWeb, it was using it's own custom built rendering engine which is (believe it or not...) older than any of the current rendering engines (older than netscape or internet explorer even!)
Even now that it's using WebKit, it's not a very recent version.
In the case of browsers, it has become a technical issue. Microsoft has a monopoly marketshare, and also has several commercial products which are threatened by the new generation of online platform-independent software. This has lead to microsoft freezing their previously rapid development of IE to a snails pace, and open source web browsers (which could not keep up with IE's old development speed) have overtaken it and become much more technically advanced.
Personally, I love open source (and am involved in several projects of various sizes, some of which I created myself). But I will use commercial software over open source if it is better and reasonably priced. For example, a few years ago I purchased the OmniWeb browser, but no-longer use it because most of the open source browsers available today are better.
If you're not a web developer, don't comment on something involving web development stuff.
I *am* a web developer, with several years experience building business websites (which must run seamlessly in virtually any browser), I can tell you that FireFox is one of the most buggy browsers out there.
Not as bad as IE, but it's still very bad.
About two years ago, and only after spending 5 hours trying to figure out why the CSS we were using for that particular page layout was not working in Internet Explorer 6.
And even then, the table was only a tiny part of the layout. It only had one row, and that row only had one cell, and there were no tables inside tables.
Just to put it in perspective, there are oven 700 websites in our portfolio, and that is the only one I know of which has a table on every page. There are probably others (i'm one of 5 web developers in our small business), but they're rare enough I haven't come across them.
Tables are for tabular data. Not for layout.
I work at a web development company, and we are already starting to move away from flash and relying more and more heavily on javascript. The motivation is mostly because:
a) the flash development tools are inferior to javascript ones
b) every web programmer knows at least basic javascript, many don't know any flash. Easier to build on basic js than train someone in flash from scratch
c) the flash development tools cost a fortune, the javascript ones are either free or very afordable
In fact, just yesterday I wrote a javascript replacement for a flash script which we use on many of our websites. (a general purpose loop of photos, with animated transitions). The javascript alternative is smaller, faster to load, *smoother animated in most browsers*, and easier to maintain or improve on in future.
We're also planning to do the same for other flash scripts in our code library.
Even when we do still use flash, it's in smaller ways. We will virtually never build an entire page (let alone website) with flash, instead we'll do the website in html and then embed a tiny piece of flash.
For example, a photo gallery will be pure html/javascript right up until the point where you click the "full screen" button. And even then, the flash doesn't exist in the page until you click that button, it is injected into the page and configured using javascript.
There are still some places where we need flash: video, full screen, and proper file uploads. Video will be the next to drop off the list, pretty soon we'll be doing video in javascript/html, with flash loaded in as a fallback in browsers that can't do video in html.
Your solution only works with "kids in tree-house" strength encryption. With any of the modern and well-regarded encryption algorithm, the position *does* effect the output.
For example, sha1 of two similar strings give completely different output (sha1 is a hashing algorithm, but modern encryption systems have the same behaviour):
sha1 'abc'
a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d
sha1 ' abc'
3a2d0af63d31343a13054b9758c00398c772c5fd