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Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

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41–50 of 116 posts

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Select Q&A: Q: What do you think about the 7" tablets? A: one naturally thinks a 7" screen offers 70% of the benefits of a 10" screen, but this is far from the truth a 7% screen is only 45% as large as a 10% screen because the measurements are diagonal. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion. One could increase the resolution to make up for the difference, it's meaningless unless the t…

Actually the term "cloud" and "internet" generally mean different things. The cloud refers to services sitting on endpoints that you don't maintain (or likely don't own either). The internet generally refers to the communication infrastructure between endpoints. You can be all in on the internet and not care about the cloud. The opposite is more difficult though. Also Steve's 7" answer seemed odd. The iPod Touch is a…

Can you give me some example of 'cloud' services? Aren't they web application/services?

And Apple classifies iPod touch as portable music player/gaming device and not 3.5" tablet.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the term "cloud" and "internet" generally mean different things. The cloud refers to services sitting on endpoints that you don't maintain (or likely don't own either). The internet generally refers to the communication infrastructure between endpoints. You can be all in on the internet and not care about the cloud. The opposite is more difficult though. Also Steve's 7" answer seemed odd. The iPod Touch is a…

Can you give me some example of 'cloud' services? Aren't they web application/services? And Apple classifies iPod touch as portable music player/gaming device and not 3.5" tablet.

Cloud services don't have to be web services, although it is becoming more common that they are.

FTP sites are often hosted for a single user or small group of users who host and maintain the site. They own the burden of full site upkeep. It's not something that sits in this "cloud", but its a service on the internet that they maintain.

There's another thing that is implicit about cloud services, which is why I choose the FTP example, which is that the content on the service that is of most value is the content you, the user put in the service. So CNN.com, while a service on the internet, isn't generally considered a cloud service. Whereas FaceBook, Flickr, and GMail are examples of cloud services.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#44
post #42

Will iPad sales dissuade developers from using Flash or promote the development of iPad apps to augment rich Flash sites?

I think the onus is now on Flash developers now to make the case for why Flash is necessary in new development. And I think that's an important threshold.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the term "cloud" and "internet" generally mean different things. The cloud refers to services sitting on endpoints that you don't maintain (or likely don't own either). The internet generally refers to the communication infrastructure between endpoints. You can be all in on the internet and not care about the cloud. The opposite is more difficult though. Also Steve's 7" answer seemed odd. The iPod Touch is a…

Can you give me some example of 'cloud' services? Aren't they web application/services? And Apple classifies iPod touch as portable music player/gaming device and not 3.5" tablet.

There are many cloud services not tied to the web - an example is a service that replaces tape backups (for enterprise data) by letting you stream the data to an online service.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#46
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the term "cloud" and "internet" generally mean different things. The cloud refers to services sitting on endpoints that you don't maintain (or likely don't own either). The internet generally refers to the communication infrastructure between endpoints. You can be all in on the internet and not care about the cloud. The opposite is more difficult though. Also Steve's 7" answer seemed odd. The iPod Touch is a…

I believe Jobs was talking about fragmentation. You would have to especially adapt the UI for a 7" device, like you have to especially adapt the UI for a 3.5" and 10" device. You can’t just shrink it down or blow it up. Jobs seems to believe that Apple shouldn’t fragment their product line any further. He seems to think that 3.5" (pocketable) and 10" (more stationary and more capable) are sort of local optima and tha…

Yep. And he made it sound specifically like they think of 10" as a minimum for the iPad line, not necessarily a maximum.

Edit: I've always thought that was the biggest problem with a 7" Apple device: either you have to scale 3.5" iPhone apps up or 9.7" iPad apps down. Neither of which is optimal. And I don't believe you're gonna be able to (or even that you want to) get devs to adapt their existing apps for a third "sub-platform".

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#47
post #42

Will iPad sales dissuade developers from using Flash or promote the development of iPad apps to augment rich Flash sites?

I think the onus is now on Flash developers now to make the case for why Flash is necessary in new development. And I think that's an important threshold.

It's not really. Right now Flash can be used to deploy for iOS finally thanks to Jobs' recent change of heart so essentially "Flash vs. iOS" is a solved problem (although it needs and will get more work from Adobe).

Flash cops a bad rap but it is a massive platform for gaming with hundreds of millions of people choosing Flash games over every other form of entertainment and distraction all day, every day. Yesterday I tracked almost 6 million people that collectively spent 171 years playing Flash games.

There are a handful of technologies that promise we'll be able to make once, deploy everywhere - whoever does it best is going to win the developers. It's not Flash vs. iOS, it's "how do I get my game on n platforms". Adobe fancies themselves in the running, people are working on positioning Mono to solve that problem, Unity are a very likely contender, and of course there's HTML5.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the onus is now on Flash developers now to make the case for why Flash is necessary in new development. And I think that's an important threshold.

It's not really. Right now Flash can be used to deploy for iOS finally thanks to Jobs' recent change of heart so essentially "Flash vs. iOS" is a solved problem (although it needs and will get more work from Adobe). Flash cops a bad rap but it is a massive platform for gaming with hundreds of millions of people choosing Flash games over every other form of entertainment and distraction all day, every day. Yesterday I…

Absolutely Flash still has a place - for some web games, HTML5 is a contender; but for most, Flash is still where it's at.

But if, say, a company were making a new website for the car they're selling (or their restaurant!), Flash was the obvious way a year ago: a case didn't generally need to be made for it. But now, an in-touch manager should demand that a strong case be made for it before going down that path.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Select Q&A: Q: What do you think about the 7" tablets? A: one naturally thinks a 7" screen offers 70% of the benefits of a 10" screen, but this is far from the truth a 7% screen is only 45% as large as a 10% screen because the measurements are diagonal. This size isn't sufficient to create great tablet apps, in our opinion. One could increase the resolution to make up for the difference, it's meaningless unless the t…

Actually the term "cloud" and "internet" generally mean different things. The cloud refers to services sitting on endpoints that you don't maintain (or likely don't own either). The internet generally refers to the communication infrastructure between endpoints. You can be all in on the internet and not care about the cloud. The opposite is more difficult though. Also Steve's 7" answer seemed odd. The iPod Touch is a…

I think his point was the size of the human finger creates some hard limitations for multi-touch UI design. So at any resolution a 7" tablet isn't going to offer the physical space required to significantly increase the number of tap targets on screen. As a result you're probably going to end up with applications that look, feel and operate more like a SmartPhone app though with less scrolling & resizing. I believe this might be partly negated by the way Android hides so much functionality under the Menu button. You possibly don't need significantly more tap targets on-screen at any given time in Android to have a good workable tablet UI. It does water down the whole multi-touch experience by adding a layer of abstraction to the UI. Direct manipulation is the real magic of multi-touch and that's lost when we start working with multi-step procedural UI checklists to do common tasks.

Re: Apple Reports Fourth Quarter Results

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the onus is now on Flash developers now to make the case for why Flash is necessary in new development. And I think that's an important threshold.

It's not really. Right now Flash can be used to deploy for iOS finally thanks to Jobs' recent change of heart so essentially "Flash vs. iOS" is a solved problem (although it needs and will get more work from Adobe). Flash cops a bad rap but it is a massive platform for gaming with hundreds of millions of people choosing Flash games over every other form of entertainment and distraction all day, every day. Yesterday I…

Given that different OSes have different UI idioms and capabilities, it's not clear that "write once, deploy everywhere" is the right strategy.
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