211–220 of 322 posts
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No, Steve was very vocally against it until jailbreaks forced the issue. It’s well documented.
Vocally public yes… but they wanted to see what the diy scene created, how the power users were using the device and letting them develop the ideas and implement… they would open up and co-opt… boss tools is your drag down for all your settings case in point. This has been openly admitted to in interviews after the fact.
I recently was in the market for a new e-reader and steered away from Kobo and Kindle because of their non-free ecosystem. I don’t know how exactly it would negatively impact me but I didn’t want to find out. Got a refurbished pocketbook in the end and very happy with it, it reads all imaginable file formats and I can just send books to it via email or cable.
I don't really have an issue with kindle, I just download anything off of z-library and use the email to kindle tool. I haven't given Amazon a penny other than from the original purchase of the kindle. I only have used epub/pdf (and will never have a need for another format).
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I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
I remember seeing stories about Adobe not being able to, or not wanting to, write a good energy efficient flash renderer for the iPhone, thus being another reason not to support it for Jobs (Adobe being of the mind that "Flash is so big, they'll have to support it" and Jobs proving otherwise)
I bounced around a lot between the three OSes at that time, and Flash was bad enough on the other two that I would almost automatically reach for Windows when I had to use it.
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It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
and now they make probably insane marketshare on the AppStore alone.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-r...
Then again, they chose to use those exact words in their webpage, so you decide how large a grain of salt to take.
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Yes, it is widely known in the epub space that targeting 3.1 or 2 is the more sane option. With EPUB compatibility issues CSS should always be suspect number 1. Using "modern" CSS features and complaining about missing flex boxz grid, etc is a web developer's mindset. Just because EPUB shares some of the stack with the web doesn't mean they perfectly overlap (or even should). Hardly any e-ink embedded e-reader device…
Shouldn't a CSS engine just ignore directives it doesn't know? At least it shouldn't fail without an error.
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I don't really have an issue with kindle, I just download anything off of z-library and use the email to kindle tool. I haven't given Amazon a penny other than from the original purchase of the kindle. I only have used epub/pdf (and will never have a need for another format).
Technically you already have need of another format, because Kindles don't support epub, and your books get converted before the transfer.
I don't like .epub. I understand the reasons why this format exists, and I am 100% behind those reasons. But it's because I don't find any EPUB readers appealing to me. Just give me a FoxIt Reader clone for .epub, that's all. But naaaah!!, every single fucking e-pub reader that I tried must be a fucking library collector instead, like it's 2000's Windows Media Player style. I hate that. As such, whenever I get my han…
As someone who loves FoxIt reader, I'm building https://merrilin.ai to be the best damned ebook reader out there, to support PDF and epub. FoxIt's annotation system is one of the best I've experienced and I want to design one that is just as good if not better.
AIUI, Kobo devices have a more advanced rendering engine if you name the file with .kepub.epub. (I think it's based on ePub 3?) Not sure if it would fix the problem here. But I personally run ePubs through kepubify ( https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/try/ ) before transferring them to my Kobo.
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No, Steve was very vocally against it until jailbreaks forced the issue. It’s well documented.
Vocally public yes… but they wanted to see what the diy scene created, how the power users were using the device and letting them develop the ideas and implement… they would open up and co-opt… boss tools is your drag down for all your settings case in point. This has been openly admitted to in interviews after the fact.
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> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
> What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today Show me the JavaScript framework (or tool that exports JS) that you can give it to a middle schooler and have them make a cartoon with audio and moving images that they can draw themselves, while responding to user input. Have the exported artifact be consistent across all major operating systems and browsers. Yeah,…