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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#81

Post by FireBeyond »

ricardobeat wrote: post #72
FireBeyond wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"The Nokia N95 was a top of the line phone"

Whereas, of course, the iPhone was brought out as a budget, bottom line phone, marketed at low end consumers, given away by carriers...

Only in the RDF could a phone that was 15g lighter (120 vs 135), and smaller (99x53x21mm vs 115x61x12) be described as "bulky".

Of course, "bulky" will be redefined shortly to mean "less deep, which as everyone knows, is the only metric that matters" - just like the iPhone's aspect ratio was perfect - until the iPhone 5 came out, of course.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#82

Post by potatolicious »

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?

Besides what others have already mentioned, third party devs (including myself) find ourselves disabling features on the iPhone 4 also.

The important thing to recall is that the iPhone 4 quadrupled the number of pixels you had to render while doing almost nothing for CPU performance. Graphics performance-wise the iPhone 4 was a huge downgrade from the 3GS.

If you're doing any sort of graphics work that's CPU-bound, your iPhone 4 performance is going to be dismal.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#83

Post by enraged_camel »

potatolicious wrote: post #12
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.…

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…

>>It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution.

I disagree. Only a very small minority cares about operating systems and revolutionizing them.

What the iPhone revolutionized was user experience. For the first time, someone invented a device that was easy to understand, fun to use, and seemingly limitless in capability. When Steve went on stage and showed it off, the minds of everyone in the audience went into overdrive to start imagining all the possible things they could do with it. Both the hardware and the OS were designed to maximize those aspects of the device.

This is what sets the iPhone apart from its competitors, who to this day focus on hardware features and software gimmicks. In my opinion neither Android nor Windows Phone have managed to capture and learn to communicate in the higher level thinking that constitutes UX. They are still great operating systems. They just work in a very different context.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#84

Post by andrewflnr »

potatolicious wrote: post #48
peatmoss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One that recharges itself continuously via radioactive decay? I wonder if, regulatory challenges aside, a radioactive decay trickle charge could be enough of a trickle charge to meaningfully extend daily battery life...

None of what goes into modern battery is notably radioactive, unless your'e suggesting a battery that's similar to a RTG?

I don't remember what RTG stands for, but I'm pretty sure they mean adding radioactive bits to the battery.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#85

Post by dakimov »

You may be surprised, but iPhone 5, or even more, Galaxy S4 are capable of much more than that crap. Like the full 3D with bump mapping, environment mapping and dynamic lighting.

The main problem is iOS 7 does not invoke a desire to copy it.

Whereas various items of the old iPhone's UI can be found all over the web. That UI style is so routinely copied nobody even notices. Some things from the iPhone have even become some sort of a standard.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#86

Post by seanmcdirmid »

madoublet wrote: post #31
bengotow wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but it's funny. iOS 7 is all about dynamic, physical interfaces - so much so that they built a physics engine into UIKit. At the same time, they're ripping apart the user experience so that nothing onscreen _looks_ like a physical object. Before, interfaces looked like a bunch of real-world objects. Now, they look like a bunch of thin-ass lines and boxes, but behave like real-world objects. I agree that iOS…

Motion, dynamics, and depth are a hallmark of the Windows Phone Metro experience.

Windows phone metro doesn't include a physics engine. The motions are all tweened.

Windows phone metro includes no depth at all, it truly is flat and 2D spatial.

Dynamics?

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#87

Post by jdgiese »

pbsdp wrote: post #47
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes. Assume I'm ignorant about the technology you claim is superior (the exact same thing happened the last time I tried to point out that the web has advanced a bit in the last 10 years). I didn't even try to make any claim about the web being better than native, but for your own knowledge, I have experience with native SDKs from win32, to cocoa, to android and iOS. >Trying to portray web stack as superior is la…

> Surely not in ease of development? Nope. Building a complex application in JS+HTML+CSS is still an enormously painful undertaking. > Ease of learning? Also nope. Complex applications are still complex. > Ease/portability/availability of tools? Compared to the development tools for other platforms (IDEs, profilers, etc), the web tools are far, far, far more limited. > Portability of the end app itself? Portability i…

Hmm, I suspect that the comparison is relative, whereas many of your comments are absolute. E.g. Quality engineers are certainly hard to find, but are good javascript developers _harder_ or _easier_ to find than iOS developers? I don't really know, but I suspect that good javascript developers are easier to find. Also, I think web-development tools are pretty on par to xcode.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#88

Post by dakimov »

Gravityloss wrote: post #57

Why is blur supposed to be computationally intensive? It's very simple mathematically...

Actually, in a naive implementation it is very computationally intensive, especially with large convolution cores (like on iOS 7 where it appears huge) and high resolutions.

Even optimized implementations on GPU are still computationally intensive compared to alpha blending.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#89

Post by potatolicious »

enraged_camel wrote: post #83
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…

>>It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. I disagree. Only a very small minority cares about operating systems and revolutionizing them. What the iPhone revolutionized was user experience. For the first time, someone invented a device that was easy to understand, fun to use, and seemingly limitless in capability. When Steve went on stage and showed it off,…

I don't think we're actually disagreeing. I'm not saying that the average iPhone user has remarked "Core Graphics is great! It makes my phone so responsive and fast!". I'd be very surprised if any lay iOS user has ever said that ;)

But the idea is the level of interactivity and the UX around iPhone would have been impossible without the platform Apple first built for OSX.

Many other manufacturers at the time had UX ambitions like Apple, but were held back by their own platforms. This infamous video comparing the concept renders of the Nokia N97 vs. what shipped really demonstrates this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJpEuMidcSU

It's not that Apple didn't innovate on the UX, they sure as hell did, but rather that they bought themselves a huge lead on the competition by having, for all practical purposes, the only platform around that could even do something like that.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#90

Post by m3mnoch »

ricardobeat wrote: post #72
FireBeyond wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

heh. slow down turbo. nobody's arguing that the execution on the iphone wasn't completely awesome.

that being said, i find it funny that you flippantly discard the number of phones with better specs in one breath, and then acknowledge them in the next. (despite them having shitty implementations)

i am totally entertained picturing you as a slavering apple fanboy raging at a hacker news thread. makes me giggle.

m3mnoch.

p.s. btw, using your number and a gsma.com estimated 500 new phone models per year, 5% of them that "have those specs" amounts to 25 phone models that had better specs than the iphone. just sayin'.

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