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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#51

Post by jcampbell1 »

ebbv wrote: post #33
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #27

"Try copying this assholes" Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand. Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick imp…

Yeah, I am an iPhone owner and prefer it to Android, but this article is just asinine. First of all, you can absolutely do anything iOS does on the web; it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. There's not a library already in existence that you can use easily which perfectly mimics iOS 7, but if there were then iOS 7 would need more work. But there will be web libraries that allow you to mim…

Explain how you are going to animate blurred glass at 60 FPS if Safari doesn't give you a fast path to the GPU?

I don't understand your comment. Are you just saying that both Javascript and Objective-C are Turing complete? If that is the point your are making, well that isn't really debatable.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#52

Post by Zikes »

Gauging iOS's progress on aesthetics alone is like a Formula 1 driver on the highway saying "I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm making great time!".

They only recently implemented a sane notifications system and quick-access settings, and they STILL don't have anything comparable to Intents on Android, which I believe is a revolutionary feature that should be core to any mobile OS.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#53

Post by mtdewcmu »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #27

"Try copying this assholes" Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand. Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick imp…

"In short, we’d replace 2007′s sliding textures with motion, dimension, and physics."

I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave if the UI was that busy. He was into sleek.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#54

Post by bornhuetter »

joshavant wrote: post #45
ajross wrote: post #5

This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007. The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy.…

I think you meant 'performance' instead of 'capability'. As far as 'performance', Apple has never been one to put performance numbers up as a selling point. Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM. Those were details Steve felt should be abstracted away from the user. So, I'd agree with you that the success of iPhone has never really been driven by 'hardware performance', as that is th…

> Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM.

Not quite true, I don't think. Around the late 90s, early 00s there was a lot of marketing around the high Mhz of the Mac CPU compared with PCs - and arguments about the merits of RISC vs CISC. That was back in the Mhz wars when Mhz was all most people cared about and paid attention to.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#55

Post by gtaylor »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #46
gtaylor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Due to the degree that each of the major mobile players "cross-pollinates" or "copies" these days, why are we even still talking about who is copying who? Who cares? Looking at these new iOS demos, I see a lot of things that were first done elsewhere. But to most people (outside of our ivory tower), that doesn't matter, and it shouldn't. But Apple shouldn't be faulted for some of these "borrowed" elements in iOS 7. G…

Right? I feel like for the first 4-5 years it was whining that Android stole everything from Apple (arguable) and then after that it was whining about iOS leaching Android features. But now... who cares? Or has the effort to care? Look at both of the latest platform releases. It's new APIs. It's new services. It's new ways of giving them more data to improve their services. They're working on UI and UX issues and sma…

> We've reached such feature parity - I honestly believe a choice between iOS/Android/WP8/RIM is going to give you a good, fairly polished experience.

This is exactly right. Just like arguing over the pronunciation of "pecan", or which text editor is the "best", you're probably not going to convince anyone with an existing opinion on the "best" mobile OS. Who cares?

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#56

Post by bornhuetter »

methodin wrote: post #35

Will it be true that Apple still has enough weight to cause ripple effects in design paradigms completely unrelated to a mobile device? I am guessing so, but mostly because a lot of designers are coupled strongly to Apple ideology and it affects their designs directly. This is of course painful as someone outside of this bubble - watching designs that conform to a device and a way of thinking instead of living and br…

Well, at least this design is a lot closer to current Android and WP8. When developers designed specifically for iOS and then ported to Android as an afterthought, the results often looked completely out of place.

I'm hopeful that it will be easier for clever designers to make apps that look very similar on all three platforms, and also look at home on all three platforms.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#58

Post by pbsdp »

jenius wrote: post #43

Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps: - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. - More work to port anywher…

> - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development.

It's not hard for someone that already knows C, or really any other language. The learning curve is in platform knowledge, and every platform -- including the web -- is different.

> - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls.

The IDE is a major win, not a downside. It automates the mundane, and applies equally well to web development -- I use IntelliJ for web work.

> - More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language!

That's unfortunate, but it provides the best user experience.

> - More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort.

On the other hand, Apple has a mountain of customer's credit cards on file. The 30% buys you a lot.

> My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open.

The web has a massive pile of its own drawbacks -- it's a language monoculture, low performance, no platform to speak of, much less platform consistency. Development is a hodgepodge of different interdependent tools, server-side and client-side. None of your users actually own anything, and webapps can just disappear at any time.

Neither proprietary native platforms NOR the web are perfect, and both are imperfect in very different ways.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#59

Post by potatolicious »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #49
potatolicious wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. It was the first time anyone put an OS on a phone that had a blazing fast graphics layer. Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model. Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they i…

My impression was that the iPhone was fully thought out in advance so that everything would work together. Take away a major piece, and the whole thing stops making sense. It needed a touch screen so that it didn't need a keyboard. There couldn't be a keyboard, because it took space away from the display. Replacing a keyboard with a touch screen was radical at that time, and it had to work really well. People would n…

Sort of. It wasn't quite such a clear causal chain - there were some things that positioned them well in the first place.

Quartz, which is the drawing and compositing engine developed for OSX, is really at the core of it. For one thing, Quartz is really fast, and long before iPhone was even a rumor Apple had already tied it deeply into OpenGL and made it hardware accelerated.

Quartz is really the "secret sauce" to the responsiveness and graphics performance of iOS, and it predates iOS by a pretty wide margin. Core Graphics was built on top of Quartz, as well as Core Animation, which form the primary ways third party devs interact with the graphics layer.

If Apple hadn't done OSX first, or done it differently, I don't think they could have pulled off iPhone.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#60

Post by FireBeyond »

coldtea wrote: post #42
ajross wrote: post #5

This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007. The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy.…

> This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. No, they really didn't. Any citation?

Nokia N95. First available March 2007, three months before the iPhone was introduced.

  * Memory - 160MB, versus iPhone: 128MB.
  * CPU - Dual CPU, 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 (ARM11-based), versus
 Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 412 MHz
  * Display - iPhone: 320x480 18-bit 3.5", versus N95: 240x320 24-bit, 2.6"
  * Network ability: HSDPA 3.5G, versus iPhone: GSM/EDGE
  * Camera: 5MP, versus iPhone 2MP
Much as the iPhone was lauded - one of the criticisms leveled at the iPhone was that the hardware was quite underwhelming. My specs were lifted from the respective Wikipedia pages, but this is hardly a subjective or minority opinion.
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