101–110 of 219 posts
Fertile ground is Google Glass, the new Kinect sensor, 3d printing, etc... There are so many more interesting targets, I hope we don't focus our best on new skins for flashlight apps.
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Except for all those not so old iPhones that are stuck on iOS 6 forever.
> those not so old iPhones that are stuck on iOS 6 forever. Of all the devices supported by iOS 6, only the iPhone 3G S and the 4th gen iPod touch won’t get the upgrade. The iPads that could run iOS 6 will also be able to run iOS 7. The iPhone 4 has been out for 3 years and will be able to run iOS 7 when it is released later this year. How many 3 year old Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone models do you know of th…
Not quite, at least as far as the iPod Touch goes. iOS 7 will only run on the 5th generation iPod Touch (see http://www.apple.com/ios/ios7/features/ - bottom of the page), the version with the 4-inch screen.
Apple was selling the 4th generation device up until May 30 of this year. In other words, there's people who bought this thing two weeks ago who will not be able to upgrade to iOS 7.
"iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards..." Beyond the parallax effect, what are these new navigation and structural changes? I'm not trolling here, I'm genuinely curious. I'm about to build a new iOS app and I did not see major navigation or structural changes that would drastically affect how I design an app's UI or UX.
There are is support for physics effects in the UI now, I'm not really sure what navigational changes he could be talking about though.
There is some money in porting something between the old and the new playing field, but the incumbents will eventually update.
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iOS6 is at 93% and it hasn't even been a year yet. Where's Jellybean? Who's still stuck writing apps that are compatible with Gingerbread and have to use ActionBar Sherlock?
The thing is a number of developers are just writing for 4.0 and above. I've not saying fragmentation on Android isn't bad. What I'm arguing is fragmentation on iOS is being framed as a good thing (actually a "great" thing) by the author of the post.
Contrast that to iOS, sure different API's get added but at least the same versions of the os behave the same across devices. Sure for a very short time iOS will be split between versions but that will be exceedingly short and you'll never have the true fragmentation problems that Android has in iOS.
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The thing is a number of developers are just writing for 4.0 and above. I've not saying fragmentation on Android isn't bad. What I'm arguing is fragmentation on iOS is being framed as a good thing (actually a "great" thing) by the author of the post.
He's not saying it's a great thing for users - he's saying it's a great thing for developers looking to enter a crowded space, because there will be some room to enter the market targeting only iOS 7 while established players are figuring out how to juggle the multiple OS versions.
In one of the Google IO talks, Google has been encouraging developers to develop only on 4.0 and above. To quote, "go to where the puck is going" and "develop the best app possible for every phone".
How can this be sustainable? all this fragmentation/versions - iOS new >=7 and I feel like unless the app is taking advantage of some inherent hardware capability of the phone/tablet everything should eventually be HTML5.
Yay change for change's sake. This is exactly the wrong attitude in my opinion. How does it help users to all of a sudden have most apps feel ancient? Is it really something to be proud of? That for the next year we'll be working on replacing existing utilities so that they feel "right" and "fresh" instead of doing what we should be doing: thinking of actual new software that is worthwhile to write. I've been saying…
> Software was interesting on its own a decade ago, but the industry has grown up, its time to do things now.
Smartphones are important because they allow people to use computers in a manner that wasn't feasible in the past because of the size of computing devices.
However, smartphones have not produced any important innovations from a software point of view. They are not innovative because they don't need to be; they are simply the logical consequent of the advances in the miniaturization of hardware.
The market saturation you describe is not the result of a glut of innovation, but rather is just a consequence of developers porting existing desktop functionality onto a smartphone. You can take pictures and use voice recognition software to ask where nearby restaurants if you carry around a desktop or a laptop; you just probably wouldn't want to.
Actually, smartphones are a good example of how non-innovative and illogical the computing world can be. Underneath the touch-based interfaces, they run on a kernel written in a memory-unsafe, non-garbage collected, insecure, and inexpressive language that was designed to target the PDP-11. Because the operating system is so flawed and incompetent that it can't be trusted to prevent rogue processes from stepping on others, you end up with a lack of a useable file system and awful communication between apps. Of course, the joke is that these restrictions are almost worthless because you can almost always bypass the system security and jailbreak the device; then maybe you can do something useful with your phone without.
Its part of a larger trend in the computing world to ignore history and reinvent wheels, and call it innovation. Case in point: web apps, which, unless you are replacing a legacy application, are a terrible idea. Not only will they always face latency issues, but they also use awful languages designed to serve and manipulate text and are at least twice as slow as native code. Software on smartphones is interesting in the same way that a "Hello world!" program is interesting to C programmer; the programmer is so surprised that he has fought an unfriendly, unintuitive system full of kludges and managed to output text to the screen without the program crashing and dumping core that he doesn't notice how trivial the output is.
Of course, what we have today is better than nothing. In a way, the massive and unnecessarily resource intensive process that we have now is uplifting because it shows the determination of the human spirit; just imagine what we could accomplish if we invested in the right things.
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You mean the four year old non-retina iphone 3gs? I think it's safe to take that device behind the barn to retire forever. Few tears will be shed.
I don't like the idea that four years is a prohibitively long time for a device that I spend hundreds of dollars on.
And, let's be clear - it's only a prohibitively long time if you wish to continue to get the new feature release platforms - indeed, it's only Today, June 11, 2013, that the original iPhone, released in 2007, is now being obsoleted by Apple [1], a full five years after it was discontinued.
[1] http://www.macrumors.com/2013/04/29/original-iphone-will-soo...
I've seen this in several places, but when people say Apple "changed everything about how use it" in this version of iOS, what did they actually change? The only big things I've seen with regards to the OS seem to be the flat iconography and the pull-up menu from the bottom that has the setting changes. Everything else looked approximately identical functionally (at first glance anyway).