Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

layeredbyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#41

Post by jstevens85 »

dbz wrote: post #17
chrischen wrote: post #15

iPad is really good at doing what it's designed to do, and really bad otherwise. It's not a satisfy all device, as we've seen in the response to it so far.

Really? What the fuck was it supposed to be really good at doing? Running the iphone OS?

Yep, exactly.

A lot of tech nerds don't understand just how unnecessarily complex computers are today. Watch a 60 year old try and use a PC for the first time and you'll realise how non-intuitive the modern desktop OS is today.

The iPhone OS moves away from antiquated input devices (mice and keyboards with cursor keys and function buttons) and towards a touch interface that is simple and intuitive.

The other benefit is the sandboxed limited nature of the native apps. The average user is tired of having to do a clean wipe of their computer every couple of years because the software they've installed has slowed down the OS. I think that in the future, apps won't be allowed to make changes to the underlying OS. If you want to do something complicated, you'll need offload your app to the cloud.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#42

Post by dschobel »

jsz0 wrote: post #40

I don't understand why this individual is so angry. If it doesn't meet your needs don't buy it. What's the problem? I always feel like people who write this type of stuff just have a really bad attitude because they get so upset over something so unimportant. It's like they're just trying to find things to be upset about.

It's the flip side of the Apple adoration. If Apple releases something which doesn't suit people it's as upsetting as if their favorite band had released a clunker of an album because you know it'll be a long time until they have a chance to redeem themselves and in the mean time you'll worry that they've lost their touch.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#43

Post by jstevens85 »

Zak wrote: post #32
alextgordon wrote: post #10

No tabbed browsing in Safari . I'm guessing dozens of tabbed browsers will pop up in the App store almost immediately. Unless Apple rejects them of course.

Last I checked, Apple rejects anything that duplicates the core functions included on the device. Those include web browsing, media playing and email.

http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409

Apple doesn't have a problem with third-party web browsers as long as they use the WebKit engine. Otherwise, the app would be implementing its own language interpreter and therefore be against the developer agreement.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#44

Post by Lazlo_Nibble »

pyre wrote: post #26
jkincaid wrote: post #13

I don't really get why everyone is talking about Flash and its relation to porn. If the the number of non-Flash playing devices grows, couldn't these porn sites just go to HTML5?(this applies to all other video sites, actually)

Well, he could also be talking about no flash memory card slot. If you were to watch non-streaming porn on the device, I doubt that you would want it to be in the same place on the device as your regular movies (lest you hand the iPad to someone else that stumbles across them). You would probably want to have your porn on a memory card that you could remove when you are no longer using it.

Or in a locked "porn vault" on the device. Which there are already apps for.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#45

Post by Lazlo_Nibble »

chrischen wrote: post #28
pyre wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be, but in the Keynote they did push the 'you can watch 10 hours of video on a single charge' so they are pushing this as a device to watch video on. If it fails at video, then it's a failure of the device if that is one of its goals.

They also pushed YouTube on the iPhone and video on the iPhone. Both features have been unpractical for me (converting videos, tiny screen, battery drain with 3G video) and the Youtube feature just seems to have been a selling point tacked on.

The Youtube feature was Apple laying the groundwork for H.264 displacing FLV on the web as a whole.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#46

Post by spot »

jstevens85 wrote: post #43
Zak wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Apple rejects anything that duplicates the core functions included on the device. Those include web browsing, media playing and email.

http://www.macworld.com/appguide/article.html?article=138409 Apple doesn't have a problem with third-party web browsers as long as they use the WebKit engine. Otherwise, the app would be implementing its own language interpreter and therefore be against the developer agreement.

wait did i hear you right -- apple prohibits interpreters?? that would be truly sad. i was thinking of making a graphical programming language for kids.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#47

Post by jsz0 »

archgrove wrote: post #39

Well, the browser has tabs (at least, the iPhone Mobile Safari does, so it's no stretch to think this does as well). The lack of a camera is, I agree, silly. Rather than rebut the rest of his "points" directly, I'll focus on "multitasking". Frankly, the iPhone and iPad do multitask, in the ways that are important to (most) people. Multitasking in an end user product really means "I can do more than one thing at once"…

Apple is changing the way massive numbers of people use technology. For any revolution there's going to be some group of people who prefer the old way of doing things because they see the new way as some type of threat to what they're comfortable with. Personally I think these people are upset that the "coolness" factor of technology is no longer limited to technical bullet points and has expanded well past it's geeky roots. They really don't like technology being designed for a big mainstream audience because it weakens whatever part of their identity they have built around being a geek if anyone can walk into a store and buy something that is functional and get, basically, the same results as the geek who spends hours customizing a system to work exactly as they want it to. I think they feel left out when technology skips the geeky early adopter market.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#48

Post by jeffcoat »

jsz0 wrote: post #40

I don't understand why this individual is so angry. If it doesn't meet your needs don't buy it. What's the problem? I always feel like people who write this type of stuff just have a really bad attitude because they get so upset over something so unimportant. It's like they're just trying to find things to be upset about.

No one complains about something that they have no interest at all in -- it's not a rant about how IBM's newest z/OS mainframe has poor support for browsing websites that use Flash.

Much more frustrating is something that looks like it could be just exactly perfect for you, but is for some reason fatally flawed, or just out of reach.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#49

Post by yuvi »

archgrove wrote: post #39

Well, the browser has tabs (at least, the iPhone Mobile Safari does, so it's no stretch to think this does as well). The lack of a camera is, I agree, silly. Rather than rebut the rest of his "points" directly, I'll focus on "multitasking". Frankly, the iPhone and iPad do multitask, in the ways that are important to (most) people. Multitasking in an end user product really means "I can do more than one thing at once"…

Develop all you want for free: as long as you only want to run your application on a simulated iPhone. You can't load apps onto your own device without paying $100/year or jailbreaking. Heck, you can't even use XCode to compile an app for the iPhone (not simulator) without a license.

Anyway, an additional multitasking use-case is IRC and other apps where you're in constant contact with a server. With Colloquy, for instance, right now you need to setup a server to bounce off of or else you leave all channels every time you switch apps. Of course, this class of uses is one that you don't want running when the device is off or else the battery drains quickly.

I've always felt that Apple was waiting both for their hardware to become powerful enough (the original iPod touch consistently ran out of RAM with 2 open webpages + music for instance, and page rendering wasn't exactly snappy) and also to come up with a good way of limiting the number of background processes without user involvement. You don't want every other app you launch hanging around so that when you run out of resources, the OS kills the music player which you actually wanted open.

Re: The iPad Literally Breaks Every Use Case I Had For It

#50

Post by jacquesm »

akamaka wrote: post #11

This guy is a complete idiot, and has obviously never even used and iPhone or iPod Touch. Apple almost got there with this one, copying someone else’s interface for iBooks. But then it hit me again, only one app at a time! I listen to music while I read.

> have to use my iPhone while we video chat.

In the article strongly suggests he has an iphone.

Post reply on HN