Making a Java/iTunes app shouldn't have taken as long as it did.
The time for the phone to come to market has nothing to do with the difficulty of developing the software and everything to do with the carriers being resistant to the product. The problem with the ROKR, and MP3 phones in general, is that there is no clear revenue stream for Cingular other than maybe getting some new customers. Getting them in the door is nice, but the number you always hear carriers crowing about is ARPU (average revenue per user). When the downloads are to your computer (no airtime) and downloaded over a cable (no airtime), there is no revenue generation there. Rumours around the March CTIA conference, when everyone was expecting the launch but instead got a no show, was that Motorola hadn't gotten the buy in from the carriers and that the product may not even launch.
Does the phone suck? I don't know, it sounds like a shuffle with better functionality and worse ergonomics. I doubt Apple tried to sabotage it though, I'm sure the product is the result of a number of different compromises between Apple, Motorola and the carriers, and when that many parties are involved, the end user will often get lost in the shuffle.
I think what people need to consider is that all those "free" things that come installed on your Dell PCs aren't just free for Dell, they probably get paid for it. So those offers from AOL, Earthlink, Real Player, etc., although they are annoying, probably help reduce the cost of the system. When you are selling a bare system, there is no "advertising" space available to offset the cost of the system, hence the slightly higher price.
Once Microsoft releases their product, you're going to see an arms race of marketing dollars to promote each product. Obviously Microsoft has a big war chest. Skype, not so much. So they'll need to raise money to compete. At least more than they have raised so far.
So now, with this announcement, anyone who wants to sink money into Skype has to make a gut check. Do I really want to go up against Microsoft? History has shown that to be a bad idea. While it won't scare everyone away, it will certainly make it harder to attract the dollars they'll need.
I'm assuming you didn't read any of the articles above.
The exploit was for a patch MICROSOFT HAD ALREADY RELEASED. They were merely taking advantage of the hole that Microsoft revealed by making the patch available.
I fail to see how these guys deserve anything but the punishment they are getting.
Actually, it's just/.ers and tech geeks who love Google and don't like MS. Most people don't give a rat's ass about either and use whatever tool is at hand.
I'm in the trenches, and I know the ins and outs of J2ME, and do quite well on both Java and BREW. That being said, you have to be on crack to think the current generation of J2ME phones is anything to be happy about. I currently have four makefiles to hit every target on BREW, and 30 for our J2ME builds and that is still only a fraction of the Java ports for our next game.
There are phones that leak memory everytime you play a sound file or deallocate an Image, others where they break if you do something silly like close streams that you open, and let's not forget those that like threads and those that don't, phones that can't clip properly, and half-duplex sockets(brilliant). And that is only highlight list of what comes to mind right now.
And forget about nice class hierarchies in J2ME, where the most effective way to program is to have as few monolithic classes as possible to avoid the jar file overhead and get better compression. A common code base requires a preprocessor, since the code bloat for run-time detection is too much of a luxury. The fact that a preprocessor is necessary to make the code somewhat portable speaks volumes alone.
I don't think J2ME isn't inherently bad, it is just that Sun has done a particular shitty job of policing the implementations that are out there. It will always be slower than native code though, and as the demand for higher quality games rises, I expect BREW and other native APIs will become more common. Unfortunately I don't see J2ME disappearing anytime soon, so I just hope that we start seeing VMs which go through some non-trivial QA process.
There are a number of GUIs, we use TortoiseSVN here, which works pretty well and integrates directly into the windows explorer. Takes some getting used to, but I find this much more effective than having a standalone program.
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The time for the phone to come to market has nothing to do with the difficulty of developing the software and everything to do with the carriers being resistant to the product. The problem with the ROKR, and MP3 phones in general, is that there is no clear revenue stream for Cingular other than maybe getting some new customers. Getting them in the door is nice, but the number you always hear carriers crowing about is ARPU (average revenue per user). When the downloads are to your computer (no airtime) and downloaded over a cable (no airtime), there is no revenue generation there. Rumours around the March CTIA conference, when everyone was expecting the launch but instead got a no show, was that Motorola hadn't gotten the buy in from the carriers and that the product may not even launch.
Does the phone suck? I don't know, it sounds like a shuffle with better functionality and worse ergonomics. I doubt Apple tried to sabotage it though, I'm sure the product is the result of a number of different compromises between Apple, Motorola and the carriers, and when that many parties are involved, the end user will often get lost in the shuffle.
Just be careful, I heard there might be Klingons around there...
It just never gets old for me...
I think what people need to consider is that all those "free" things that come installed on your Dell PCs aren't just free for Dell, they probably get paid for it. So those offers from AOL, Earthlink, Real Player, etc., although they are annoying, probably help reduce the cost of the system. When you are selling a bare system, there is no "advertising" space available to offset the cost of the system, hence the slightly higher price.
It's competition at work.
Once Microsoft releases their product, you're going to see an arms race of marketing dollars to promote each product. Obviously Microsoft has a big war chest. Skype, not so much. So they'll need to raise money to compete. At least more than they have raised so far.
So now, with this announcement, anyone who wants to sink money into Skype has to make a gut check. Do I really want to go up against Microsoft? History has shown that to be a bad idea. While it won't scare everyone away, it will certainly make it harder to attract the dollars they'll need.
I'm assuming you didn't read any of the articles above.
The exploit was for a patch MICROSOFT HAD ALREADY RELEASED. They were merely taking advantage of the hole that Microsoft revealed by making the patch available.
I fail to see how these guys deserve anything but the punishment they are getting.
Actually, it's just /.ers and tech geeks who love Google and don't like MS. Most people don't give a rat's ass about either and use whatever tool is at hand.
I'm in the trenches, and I know the ins and outs of J2ME, and do quite well on both Java and BREW. That being said, you have to be on crack to think the current generation of J2ME phones is anything to be happy about. I currently have four makefiles to hit every target on BREW, and 30 for our J2ME builds and that is still only a fraction of the Java ports for our next game.
There are phones that leak memory everytime you play a sound file or deallocate an Image, others where they break if you do something silly like close streams that you open, and let's not forget those that like threads and those that don't, phones that can't clip properly, and half-duplex sockets(brilliant). And that is only highlight list of what comes to mind right now.
And forget about nice class hierarchies in J2ME, where the most effective way to program is to have as few monolithic classes as possible to avoid the jar file overhead and get better compression. A common code base requires a preprocessor, since the code bloat for run-time detection is too much of a luxury. The fact that a preprocessor is necessary to make the code somewhat portable speaks volumes alone.
I don't think J2ME isn't inherently bad, it is just that Sun has done a particular shitty job of policing the implementations that are out there. It will always be slower than native code though, and as the demand for higher quality games rises, I expect BREW and other native APIs will become more common. Unfortunately I don't see J2ME disappearing anytime soon, so I just hope that we start seeing VMs which go through some non-trivial QA process.
There are a number of GUIs, we use TortoiseSVN here, which works pretty well and integrates directly into the windows explorer. Takes some getting used to, but I find this much more effective than having a standalone program.