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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#71

Post by [deleted] »

cma wrote: post #68
scott_s wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be underestimating the impact of the touch screen. It's wasn't just that it was touch, it was the phone. I can't find it, but I remember reading industry reactions that were incredulous that it was even possible to have enough power to drive the screen for significant periods. That large touch screen really set the iPhone apart.

Seems doubtful that people would be incredulous over driving the screen; capacitive touchpads of the time didn't take much power. Color iPAQs from 8 years earlier managed a few hours with a CCFL backlight--white LEDs weren't widely available back then, and lithium-ion batteries of 1999 sucked. If iPhone guts powering a windows phone with a resistive screen came out before iPhone, it wouldn't have sold like crazy. Win…

[deleted]

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#72

Post by ricardobeat »

FireBeyond wrote: post #60
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Nokia N95 was a top of the line phone, released a couple months earlier. "Other phones", as in 95% of them, didn't have those specs.

And even then, the specs didn't make much difference. It was just another phone, bulky, with a small, dark screen, clunky buttons and a shitty interface: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#73

Post by technosmurf »

scott_s wrote: post #15
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 may be underestimating the impact of the touch screen. It's wasn't just that it was touch, it was the phone. I can't find it, but I remember reading industry reactions that were incredulous that it was even possible to have enough power to drive the screen for significant periods. That large touch screen really set the iPhone apart.

You're probably thinking of a RIM employee who told a story about how the engineers thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because the large screen was too power-hungry:

The iPhone "couldn't do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they disassembled an iPhone for the first time and found that the phone was battery with a tiny logic board strapped to it."

http://www.electronista.com/articles/10/12/27/rim.thought.ap...

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#74

Post by arrrg »

FireBeyond wrote: post #60
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So, on par or nearly on par specs on most counts (except, of course, 3G) but vastly superior specs on some counts? People criticised the first iPhone for its lack of 3G. That much is true.

But its horse power? That would have been an exoteric opinion at the time. Legend has it that Nokia was so astonished by the iPhone, they got their high speed cameras out to see whether the phone was really doing 60fps scrolling.

The first iPhone was a towering technical achievement (except for the lack of 3G). It was a phone that made all the right compromises at exactly the right time.

I think you would have been hard pressed to find anyone disputing that in 2007. Sure, people doubted whether it would really be useful without the ability to install third party apps, people doubted whether Edge would be enough, people bemoaned missing features – all good reasons to not want the original iPhone – but the technology was without a doubt great.

And all you are engaging in is revisionist history.

(I’m writing this doubting that iOS7 will be any of that. It’s a train-wreck on the iPad currently. Yeah, it’s just a preview but an OS is so complex, I don’t see how it’s possible to turn this mess into a coherent whole in the few months they have left. No matter how many hours they pour into it. I’m pessimistic.)

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#75

Post by scott_s »

technosmurf wrote: post #73
scott_s wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be underestimating the impact of the touch screen. It's wasn't just that it was touch, it was the phone. I can't find it, but I remember reading industry reactions that were incredulous that it was even possible to have enough power to drive the screen for significant periods. That large touch screen really set the iPhone apart.

You're probably thinking of a RIM employee who told a story about how the engineers thought Apple was lying about the iPhone because the large screen was too power-hungry: The iPhone "couldn't do what [Apple was] demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life," Shacknews poster Kentor heard from his former colleagues of the time. "Imagine their surprise [at RIM] when they…

Indeed I was. You found it a minute before me.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#76

Post by bdcravens »

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…

Yes, you can build Call of Duty with canvas and JavaScript. No, you shouldn't. A claim that faster hardware is a solution is circular: to get native performance today, faster hardware is needed. At that point, native performance on that hardware becomes great and theoretically is doing more amazing things than it did on the old hardware. In other words HTML-based apps always play catch up, unless native can't use the hardware anymore, or the interpreted bottleneck is reduced.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#77

Post by svantana »

Another cynicism that comes to mind - this won't only help staying ahead of competitors, but also perhaps persuading owners of older iphones to get a newer device, even though they were fully satisfied up to this point.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#78

Post by mahyarm »

gfodor wrote: post #11
josteink wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. there's nothing revolutionary in ios7 shown so far. that said, I can't wait for Apple to sue Android over the things they just stole from them.

I haven't used Android since it first came out, but does it have the dynamic physics, layering, dynamic image compositing (blur, etc), parallax, etc, that all are in iOS 7? iOS 7 seems to me to be very much about how it feels and behaves in motion. The current beta still isn't performance tuned, so my guess is the final build is going to be a pretty futuristic experience on the iPhone 5S. I think a lot of people are…

All of the new features are just 'feature libraries' on top of CoreAnimation, which was there since 1.0. You could of made a demo of all of this that ran (slower) on iOS 2.0 with just CoreAnimation and the accelerometer hardware API as a 3rd party developer. CoreAnimation is the impressive part.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#79

Post by bdcravens »

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…

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.

Can you name an app that charges that isn't in the App Store? There's plenty of apps in the App Store that are "HTML apps" (built using PhoneGap, Titanium, etc)

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#80

Post by bdcravens »

baddox wrote: post #26

> The 3D, the blur, the compositing – all of them are disabled or degraded on the [iPhone 4's] A4. I hadn't heard that before, and it's quite interesting. Does anyone know if previous iOS versions have similar feature segmentation, other than the obvious (and perhaps artificial) ones like Siri and 3d maps?

Background apps was a pretty big one when iOS4 came out, and couldn't run on the 3G. (I actually jailbroke to get the feature, and it was painfully slow)
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