What the iPhoneOS does is move away from the Desktop paradigm for GUI design, and use the Appliance paradigm instead.
In the Desktop, the input and display methods are static, and the application has to be moulded into it, but it has the advantage of being more-or-less standard.
In the Appliance paradigm, the actual application you are using takes over the entire device and changes the user interface to suit it. In essence this is a much more powerful concept, as it's something my grandmother can immediately grasp, while the Desktop metaphor is beyond what an 90 year old like her understands.
While I agree that Apple might have a non-technical agenda with this, it is currently pure speculation.
As you seem to be an expert, I am wondering how the examples you give get around the problems mentioned in the article.
I am not interested in the option of building custom Flash (Lite) apps that work on a touchscreen handheld device, but how current existing Flash applications are made to work.
Given the experience you have, I would also like to hear your view on the effect that Flash advertisements have on speed, memory and battery usage of these devices while browsing.
Your examples that a lot of webpages sin against the best practices in user interface design doesn't make them good webpages. Also your example that people have learned to come with such things as Mistery Meat Navigation doesn't make it good design.
What I find a flaw in a lot of webpages, is that they try to mimic the looks of print. This more often than not leads to user interface difficulties. I wish people would realise that the internet is not a paper medium, and would design accordingly.
A link should not require hovering over it to detect it for example. It should be underlined or otherwise distinguishable.
Apple has tried to make a device that does away with the entire desktop metaphor. Instead they use the appliance metaphor, where the entire user interface reconfigures itself to the appliance/application you are currently using the device for. Read up on Jef Raskin if you want to know why this is such a good idea.
I have used PocketPC and Windows Mobile before my iPhone, and I think the finger input is actually superior to stylus input, if only because it's not something that can be lost. As for accuracy, I find that the finger input of the iPhone is as good as the stylus input I had on my previous devices. I was amazed at how accurate I am able to select things in a game like Lux, where I often select areas not more than 2-3 pixels across. I think that one issue with finger selection is, that a lot of the cheaper devices have a less accurate system, while apparently this less of an issue for resistive stylus input.
What I also like a lot, is that you can manpulate the iPhone with one hand, by operating the controls with your thumb, while holding it. This is very useful in a lot of situations, especially for a phone. A stylus operated device can not do that, unless is also has a set of buttons for it's essential functions.
I just want to say that I think it's very much appreciated that you spend time to not only be an expert witness in these cases pro bono, but also to discuss this at length here and elsewhere and pointing out such things as flaws in certain licences.
I'm not sure if you will read this, but I've learned that especially in the more technical professions, we do not often enough give compliments when they are appropriate.
Well written, but I think not the root of the problem.
One of the ideas behind capitalism is that if you have money, that investing it gives you a reward, but also a risk that you loose your money. Usually the reward is proportional to the risk.
What is wrong with the current banking system, is that the bankers and traders got huge rewards while the risks where not theirs but homeowners/pensioners/shareholders.
The problem is that if a banker/trader takes a big risk and it pays off, he gets a big bonus, if he loses money the money, it's someone else who pays the bill. That biassed effect is what fuelled all the craziness.
Rewards should only be proportional to personal risk. Managing someone else's money should not give a big reward, unless you pay out of your own pocket if you loose the money.
I understood from the article (I must be new here) that they went to the developers of ipnat.sys, the driver in windows itself. I suppose those know something about networking, especially their own code.
I work at an institute that basically had its major growth around 1970. The people then hired are now close to retirement age but a lot still work here. Still I'd say that some of my colleagues over 60 are among the most up-to-date and productive among our workforce (I'm 33).
We have a nearly flat age distribution from about 25 to 65 in each cohort. My experience is that age is not a relevant factor in my institute and I think the IT industry, if the people involved are given the time to stay up-to-date in their field, and are willing to learn.
I have a colleague of 66 years old who just spent the last weeks learning Python. When he started his programs would be sent to a computing center 150km away once a week. He has kept learning new things his entire career, and even after retirement age he's still employed with us for 2 days a week because he enjoys it and management values his skill and knowledge.
I have a colleague of 55 who just wrote a mobile app for Layar. Another of 64 years old who writes some of the best Java I've seen. A third one has written the standard work on how to process radio-interferometer data. And I could give at least another dozen examples or people over 50 that are good, current and productive in their work.
If I compare it to my first employer, where the oldest programmer was 45 and his knowledge made him a dinosaur, the difference is huge. And it's all about management giving the opportunity and hiring people willing to keep learning all their lives.
And it's not because we're in a slow moving line of work. We're doing cutting edge science and research work building the largest telescope in the world, space satellite components, integrated circuit and low-noise amplifier design, TFlop digital signal processing. We are one of the fastest and largest computing centres in Europe (top500 supercomputers (#6 in 2005), petabyte storage, 200 GBit/s connections). And only with about 200 employees.
But I'm diverging, basically what I want to say, is that unlike some back-breaking manual labour, people can be very productive in the IT industry until into retirement age, if you get the right kind of people and treat them correctly.
This reminded me of something I saw on TV the other day. Some sporter got interviewed live by a reporter/TV anchor over a satellite link after winning a medal and asked if he had already seen the recording of his race on the [TV station]'s website. He replied that he tried but failed, because they blocked access from Canada to the media on the [TV station]'s website. That was obviously not in the script as the reporter was lost for words for a few moments.
Same thing happens with Britons trying to view the BBC website from abroad (iPlayer and such) because I know some of my British colleagues complain about it.
Exactly, the economic growth in the USA over the past 30 years has almost exclusively benefited the top few percent.
Over the past 30 years CEOs went from making about 40 times to 500 times the average in their company. In the mean time the average wage (for all workers including those with degrees), has not increased in the past 30 years, if you correct for inflation.
Does your phone still work? Do the apps on it still work? Then what's the problem, Apple is only refusing access to the iTunes service, everything you bought and paid for is still yours and working as far as I understand. I can understand if Apple just chooses not to do business with jailbreakers again because jailbroken phones have been giving them bad press. Like a few weeks ago there was this "rickrolling on iPhone", where almost all media coverage glanced over the detail that it could only happen on jailbroken phones. Apple's main asset is their brand, and everything they do is based around marketing and protecting that. Hurt them there and they will lash out.
I've opened about 20 links on fark.com, the iPhone starts closing open tabs automatically at 8 open windows, so I couldn't see exactly how much. It was still working fine.
Could be that you're using an older version of the iPhone (I have 3Gs) and are running out of memory somehow?
Anyway, I don't seem to be able to reproduce your problem, which doesn't mean it's not real. Might be a difference in hardware or configuration.
The only other guy I know with problems with his iPhone, who hasn't jailbroken it, has problems because he dropped it in the dishwashing water once...
Still, if I don't have a problem, and you do, then it might be that tweaking something can solve it for you.
Sorry. But that's exactly what MS has been doing wrong: Trying to put a desktop OS on a handheld device.
What the iPhone did right was a complete rethink of what a user interface should look on a handheld device.
Take one example I know from personal experience on earlier Windows offerings:
scrollbars:
I'm lefthanded, if you really need to have a scrollbar in the UI, you should at least put it on the left, otherwise I can't see the screen when I need to use it.
It's not a PC. It's a handheld, that's the whole point.
Sorry, Microsoft, but you guys claim that every release is the best thing since sliced bread.
This. Mircosoft has been doing it for how long now? Marketing the next release like it will solve world hunger and end all wars, but then it delivers something that is often marginally better, sometimes worse than its previous version. People no longer believe the marketing. Only if Ms starts to consistently live up to its promises will this change. I don't see that happening.
They've been floating on their OS and Office dominance over the past 15 years, but nothing they have done since seems to have become profitable. Even WinCE/PocketPC/WinMobile has been going for 12-13 years now, which is an eternity in this kind of market, but they just don't seem to be getting anywhere. Sure there's the xbox which is kind of going ok, but the only thing they seem to be able to do there is trade money for market share, not make a product that makes a profit on its own.
I've got my iPhone 5 months now and haven't seen a crash of either the OS or Safari yet. What are you doing with it to make it crash?
What I've found until now, is that nearly all these reports of unreliable iPhones are from people who've jailbroken it and are running all kinds of dodgy stuff on it. Prove me you're the exception.
Exactly. It's all this attention to details and optimisation that makes the user experience so much better.
Small things like if I want to take a photograph, I can adjust the brightness and focus by pointing at the object I want to on the screen. They just always go the extra mile compared to similar tools on other offerings.
So I can google something while composing an E-mail. So I can text someone while browsing. So I can look over my contacts list while on a phone call.
I can do all these things without effort on my iPhone. I haven't found anything yet that would require multi-tasking, except playing music while doing something else with the GUI. And the built-in iPod can do that, even when using TomTom. I'd even argue that in most cases, when you switch apps, you want the ones in the background to be "frozen", for example if you're watching YouTube and you get a phone call.
We're talking about a Smartphone, which is effectively a miniature, handheld PC.
No it's not. That's the whole point of the iPhone UI. It doesn't try to be a miniature PC. It's what Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile did wrong all these years. It tries to be a handheld device and that's why people like it.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
This is the real issue. Support. We have a relatively large number of users (including the CEO) that like Mac's, mainly MacBooks (we have around a 100 Mac users). We can't get decent support from Apple. Period. At least not in the Netherlands, maybe somewhere else. The difference with Lenovo, Dell or HP is staggering. I also use a Nac myself, but I shudder at the idea it might break and I might be without it for days or weeks.
What we have found is that the service that Apple has on Macbooks is dismal compared to Dell, Lenovo, HP and such.
We have a lot of Apple users where I work, especially Macbook users (80-100 or so), but it's not possible to get the kind of service that for example Dell offers, where they come and fix your laptop, or give you a replacement unit for the time it takes them to fix it.
In a business environment you can't be without a laptop for 3 weeks or so.
Apple hardware is nice, but they don't have business levels of customer support, at least not in the Netherlands.
It's not just architecture and coding standards. What I find, is that up-to-date documentation is very important. Not so much details about lines of code, but the general design, control flow and design decisions.
I also don't know what you mean with OAC or proper percentage marks, but overall I get the impression that what you mean is that in the USA very much geared towards having as many students as possible attain a minimum level, but doesn't provide little in addition for more gifted/skilled students beyond that.
I think it's essential to differentiate into a number of skill levels for children, as there are huge differences. I agree with your mom, not your teacher.
In the Netherlands we basically split education into four tracts (low, medium, high professional and university level) based on what the parents think their child can handle, teacher advice and tests. Having high scores can mean you move to a higher level, low scores that you move to a slower pace. Each has a pace that's about 1.5 times lower/higher than the one next to it which means switching does get hard in the last couple of years of education, you might end up skipping a year or re-doing it at a higher level. But I think about 20% of students switch level somewhere during their education, abit more down than up.
Yeah, and if I recall correctly, before Bush junior Reagan and Bush senior held the record on budget deficit and national debt, which Clinton spent most of his time repairing, only for his successor to break the bank again.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
What the iPhoneOS does is move away from the Desktop paradigm for GUI design, and use the Appliance paradigm instead.
In the Desktop, the input and display methods are static, and the application has to be moulded into it, but it has the advantage of being more-or-less standard.
In the Appliance paradigm, the actual application you are using takes over the entire device and changes the user interface to suit it. In essence this is a much more powerful concept, as it's something my grandmother can immediately grasp, while the Desktop metaphor is beyond what an 90 year old like her understands.
While I agree that Apple might have a non-technical agenda with this, it is currently pure speculation.
As you seem to be an expert, I am wondering how the examples you give get around the problems mentioned in the article.
I am not interested in the option of building custom Flash (Lite) apps that work on a touchscreen handheld device, but how current existing Flash applications are made to work.
Given the experience you have, I would also like to hear your view on the effect that Flash advertisements have on speed, memory and battery usage of these devices while browsing.
Your examples that a lot of webpages sin against the best practices in user interface design doesn't make them good webpages. Also your example that people have learned to come with such things as Mistery Meat Navigation doesn't make it good design.
What I find a flaw in a lot of webpages, is that they try to mimic the looks of print. This more often than not leads to user interface difficulties. I wish people would realise that the internet is not a paper medium, and would design accordingly.
A link should not require hovering over it to detect it for example. It should be underlined or otherwise distinguishable.
No the difference goes deeper.
Apple has tried to make a device that does away with the entire desktop metaphor. Instead they use the appliance metaphor, where the entire user interface reconfigures itself to the appliance/application you are currently using the device for. Read up on Jef Raskin if you want to know why this is such a good idea.
I have used PocketPC and Windows Mobile before my iPhone, and I think the finger input is actually superior to stylus input, if only because it's not something that can be lost. As for accuracy, I find that the finger input of the iPhone is as good as the stylus input I had on my previous devices. I was amazed at how accurate I am able to select things in a game like Lux, where I often select areas not more than 2-3 pixels across.
I think that one issue with finger selection is, that a lot of the cheaper devices have a less accurate system, while apparently this less of an issue for resistive stylus input.
What I also like a lot, is that you can manpulate the iPhone with one hand, by operating the controls with your thumb, while holding it. This is very useful in a lot of situations, especially for a phone. A stylus operated device can not do that, unless is also has a set of buttons for it's essential functions.
Mr. Bruce Perens,
I just want to say that I think it's very much appreciated that you spend time to not only be an expert witness in these cases pro bono, but also to discuss this at length here and elsewhere and pointing out such things as flaws in certain licences.
I'm not sure if you will read this, but I've learned that especially in the more technical professions, we do not often enough give compliments when they are appropriate.
Well written, but I think not the root of the problem.
One of the ideas behind capitalism is that if you have money, that investing it gives you a reward, but also a risk that you loose your money. Usually the reward is proportional to the risk.
What is wrong with the current banking system, is that the bankers and traders got huge rewards while the risks where not theirs but homeowners/pensioners/shareholders.
The problem is that if a banker/trader takes a big risk and it pays off, he gets a big bonus, if he loses money the money, it's someone else who pays the bill. That biassed effect is what fuelled all the craziness.
Rewards should only be proportional to personal risk. Managing someone else's money should not give a big reward, unless you pay out of your own pocket if you loose the money.
I understood from the article (I must be new here) that they went to the developers of ipnat.sys, the driver in windows itself. I suppose those know something about networking, especially their own code.
I work at an institute that basically had its major growth around 1970. The people then hired are now close to retirement age but a lot still work here. Still I'd say that some of my colleagues over 60 are among the most up-to-date and productive among our workforce (I'm 33).
We have a nearly flat age distribution from about 25 to 65 in each cohort. My experience is that age is not a relevant factor in my institute and I think the IT industry, if the people involved are given the time to stay up-to-date in their field, and are willing to learn.
I have a colleague of 66 years old who just spent the last weeks learning Python. When he started his programs would be sent to a computing center 150km away once a week. He has kept learning new things his entire career, and even after retirement age he's still employed with us for 2 days a week because he enjoys it and management values his skill and knowledge.
I have a colleague of 55 who just wrote a mobile app for Layar. Another of 64 years old who writes some of the best Java I've seen. A third one has written the standard work on how to process radio-interferometer data. And I could give at least another dozen examples or people over 50 that are good, current and productive in their work.
If I compare it to my first employer, where the oldest programmer was 45 and his knowledge made him a dinosaur, the difference is huge. And it's all about management giving the opportunity and hiring people willing to keep learning all their lives.
And it's not because we're in a slow moving line of work. We're doing cutting edge science and research work building the largest telescope in the world, space satellite components, integrated circuit and low-noise amplifier design, TFlop digital signal processing. We are one of the fastest and largest computing centres in Europe (top500 supercomputers (#6 in 2005), petabyte storage, 200 GBit/s connections). And only with about 200 employees.
But I'm diverging, basically what I want to say, is that unlike some back-breaking manual labour, people can be very productive in the IT industry until into retirement age, if you get the right kind of people and treat them correctly.
Hah!
This reminded me of something I saw on TV the other day. Some sporter got interviewed live by a reporter/TV anchor over a satellite link after winning a medal and asked if he had already seen the recording of his race on the [TV station]'s website. He replied that he tried but failed, because they blocked access from Canada to the media on the [TV station]'s website. That was obviously not in the script as the reporter was lost for words for a few moments.
Same thing happens with Britons trying to view the BBC website from abroad (iPlayer and such) because I know some of my British colleagues complain about it.
Exactly, the economic growth in the USA over the past 30 years has almost exclusively benefited the top few percent.
Over the past 30 years CEOs went from making about 40 times to 500 times the average in their company.
In the mean time the average wage (for all workers including those with degrees), has not increased in the past 30 years, if you correct for inflation.
http://www.kyklosproductions.com/articles/wages.html
http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/2007/11/04/has-middle-americas-wages-stagnated/
Does your phone still work? Do the apps on it still work? Then what's the problem, Apple is only refusing access to the iTunes service, everything you bought and paid for is still yours and working as far as I understand.
I can understand if Apple just chooses not to do business with jailbreakers again because jailbroken phones have been giving them bad press. Like a few weeks ago there was this "rickrolling on iPhone", where almost all media coverage glanced over the detail that it could only happen on jailbroken phones. Apple's main asset is their brand, and everything they do is based around marketing and protecting that. Hurt them there and they will lash out.
I've opened about 20 links on fark.com, the iPhone starts closing open tabs automatically at 8 open windows, so I couldn't see exactly how much.
It was still working fine.
Could be that you're using an older version of the iPhone (I have 3Gs) and are running out of memory somehow?
Anyway, I don't seem to be able to reproduce your problem, which doesn't mean it's not real. Might be a difference in hardware or configuration.
The only other guy I know with problems with his iPhone, who hasn't jailbroken it, has problems because he dropped it in the dishwashing water once...
Still, if I don't have a problem, and you do, then it might be that tweaking something can solve it for you.
Sorry. But that's exactly what MS has been doing wrong: Trying to put a desktop OS on a handheld device.
What the iPhone did right was a complete rethink of what a user interface should look on a handheld device.
Take one example I know from personal experience on earlier Windows offerings:
scrollbars:
I'm lefthanded, if you really need to have a scrollbar in the UI, you should at least put it on the left, otherwise I can't see the screen when I need to use it.
It's not a PC. It's a handheld, that's the whole point.
Sorry, Microsoft, but you guys claim that every release is the best thing since sliced bread.
This.
Mircosoft has been doing it for how long now? Marketing the next release like it will solve world hunger and end all wars, but then it delivers something that is often marginally better, sometimes worse than its previous version.
People no longer believe the marketing. Only if Ms starts to consistently live up to its promises will this change. I don't see that happening.
They've been floating on their OS and Office dominance over the past 15 years, but nothing they have done since seems to have become profitable. Even WinCE/PocketPC/WinMobile has been going for 12-13 years now, which is an eternity in this kind of market, but they just don't seem to be getting anywhere. Sure there's the xbox which is kind of going ok, but the only thing they seem to be able to do there is trade money for market share, not make a product that makes a profit on its own.
I've got my iPhone 5 months now and haven't seen a crash of either the OS or Safari yet. What are you doing with it to make it crash?
What I've found until now, is that nearly all these reports of unreliable iPhones are from people who've jailbroken it and are running all kinds of dodgy stuff on it. Prove me you're the exception.
Exactly. It's all this attention to details and optimisation that makes the user experience so much better.
Small things like if I want to take a photograph, I can adjust the brightness and focus by pointing at the object I want to on the screen. They just always go the extra mile compared to similar tools on other offerings.
So I can google something while composing an E-mail. So I can text someone while browsing. So I can look over my contacts list while on a phone call.
I can do all these things without effort on my iPhone. I haven't found anything yet that would require multi-tasking, except playing music while doing something else with the GUI. And the built-in iPod can do that, even when using TomTom.
I'd even argue that in most cases, when you switch apps, you want the ones in the background to be "frozen", for example if you're watching YouTube and you get a phone call.
We're talking about a Smartphone, which is effectively a miniature, handheld PC.
No it's not.
That's the whole point of the iPhone UI. It doesn't try to be a miniature PC. It's what Windows CE/PocketPC/Mobile did wrong all these years. It tries to be a handheld device and that's why people like it.
Corporations say, "If a laptop breaks, we want someone to come in and fix it. And if you won't, we want to be able to train our own IT staff in how to fix them and be able to order parts." Apple a)won't let you order parts unless you're a reseller, b)won't do on-site service of anything except Mac Pros and Xserves. Ever spent your day standing in line at the Genius Bar with a laptop belonging to a CEO of a $50M company because that was the best support option, and then arguing with some pimply-faced "Genius" who is used to talking to grandmas about why their gumdrop iMac is dead?
In big Apple-using companies I've worked at, we kept every single machine that died and cannibalized them for parts for the other ones, because we couldn't get the goddamn parts from Apple, couldn't get service manuals, couldn't train CSRs.
Meanwhile, HP, Dell, IBM, Sun will all happily take our precious dollars and promise that if anything breaks in my shiny server or desktop, I'll have a replacement part sitting on my desk in FOUR HOURS. They'll let almost anyone order parts, and happily train people in how to repair their products. And if a laptop breaks, they'll come out and service it on the spot if you bought that support plan, so our CEO doesn't have to be without his laptop while it gets shipped to fucking TEXAS, the only place you can get a Macbook Pro repaired if it's anything remotely complicated (the Apple Store can do drive replacements, that's about it.)
This is the real issue. Support. We have a relatively large number of users (including the CEO) that like Mac's, mainly MacBooks (we have around a 100 Mac users). We can't get decent support from Apple. Period. At least not in the Netherlands, maybe somewhere else. The difference with Lenovo, Dell or HP is staggering. I also use a Nac myself, but I shudder at the idea it might break and I might be without it for days or weeks.
What we have found is that the service that Apple has on Macbooks is dismal compared to Dell, Lenovo, HP and such.
We have a lot of Apple users where I work, especially Macbook users (80-100 or so), but it's not possible to get the kind of service that for example Dell offers, where they come and fix your laptop, or give you a replacement unit for the time it takes them to fix it.
In a business environment you can't be without a laptop for 3 weeks or so.
Apple hardware is nice, but they don't have business levels of customer support, at least not in the Netherlands.
It's not just architecture and coding standards. What I find, is that up-to-date documentation is very important. Not so much details about lines of code, but the general design, control flow and design decisions.
I've seen an interview on the BBC with the researchers that discovered the method, and your description is exactly what happens.
They make the POS think that the pin was valid, and they make the chip in the card think that a signature was used instead of a pin.
I've looked up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
To get an idea what you mean.
I also don't know what you mean with OAC or proper percentage marks, but overall I get the impression that what you mean is that in the USA very much geared towards having as many students as possible attain a minimum level, but doesn't provide little in addition for more gifted/skilled students beyond that.
I think it's essential to differentiate into a number of skill levels for children, as there are huge differences. I agree with your mom, not your teacher.
In the Netherlands we basically split education into four tracts (low, medium, high professional and university level) based on what the parents think their child can handle, teacher advice and tests. Having high scores can mean you move to a higher level, low scores that you move to a slower pace. Each has a pace that's about 1.5 times lower/higher than the one next to it which means switching does get hard in the last couple of years of education, you might end up skipping a year or re-doing it at a higher level. But I think about 20% of students switch level somewhere during their education, abit more down than up.
Yeah, and if I recall correctly, before Bush junior Reagan and Bush senior held the record on budget deficit and national debt, which Clinton spent most of his time repairing, only for his successor to break the bank again.
The V2 was the first to reach "sbu orbital spaceflight" according to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-orbital_spaceflight
(with reference see #4)