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Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

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Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#291

Post by venomsnake »

Steko wrote: post #142
seanalltogether wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work. The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a res…

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

Apple have total control of the appstore, so it is their fault. If you could sideload games - then it would have been different because niche games could use other means of getting on devices (like humble bundle for android)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#292

Post by sbuk »

walterbell wrote: post #241
Steko wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For not helping developers make money, developers sure do make a lot of money on iOS compared to other mobile platforms.

How about comparing instead to money made by Apple, enabled by iOS developers?

It sounds like you feel Apple owe developers a living?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#293

Post by Zarel »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #269
Zarel wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like: - International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or s…

There's an app for the 2 software issues. Trackpads are OK, but I like my vertical mouse and touch-screens for Windows.

There is? I've looked everywhere for an international keyboard that doesn't replace how the apostrophe key works in Windows but I've never been able to find it.

I also don't think there's an app to make every textbox behave in a standard way in Windows or Linux. If only it were that easy.

The trackpad is sadly only nice in OS X; the Windows drivers are mediocre and nothing special. Still, though, I think it speaks volumes that Windows users want to use mice all the time while Mac trackpads are so nice that there was enough demand for Apple to release one for their desktops.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#294

Post by Zarel »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #289
ryanSrich wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Xcode - Sketch - Pixate - Framer Studio - iTerm - Fluid - Keynote - Pages - Quick cast - Cloud App Granted I haven't looked into a lot of these to see if they've picked up Linux or Window's support. However I doubt any of the one's I've listed are all on Linux, which I'd for sure need to do any development work. Some of these I'm sure have alternatives but the one app I just can't do without is Sketch. Gimp doesn't…

Side note but, not sure why anyone would bother with wine + hackery these days. Virtualbox works perfectly fine for running any Windows apps you "can't do without". Throwing a few gigs of RAM at running a Windows VM to run these apps is not really an issue if you have a modern rig.

By "modern rig" are you including laptops? I've always been deathly afraid of running VMs on battery power; has this changed recently?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#295

Post by venomsnake »

eridius wrote: post #62
jblow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.

Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an a…

I am talking about Wasteland 2, Pillars of Eternity, Broken age that happened ...

It is impossible on the AppStore ...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#296

Post by task_queue »

Zarel wrote: post #294
laichzeit0 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Side note but, not sure why anyone would bother with wine + hackery these days. Virtualbox works perfectly fine for running any Windows apps you "can't do without". Throwing a few gigs of RAM at running a Windows VM to run these apps is not really an issue if you have a modern rig.

By "modern rig" are you including laptops? I've always been deathly afraid of running VMs on battery power; has this changed recently?

Nothing much has changed in the past couple of years. Wine is still a good go to option if your Windows application will work with it correctly.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#297

Post by pmontra »

saidajigumi wrote: post #157
olefoo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem. Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you a…

> Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0] I've heard this argument before, and if it's true, it's suicidal. Apple will have failed to learn a critical lesson from Microsoft's dominance of the early PC era: it's the apps that matter. Even once there was a significant potential market of would-be platform "switchers" who wanted something beyond what Windows was offering, these switche…

I might be wrong but in the case of Apple it seems that to its customers it's Apple that matters, not apps. It's a brand many people want to buy because of the same mechanisms that make people buy luxury brands. The only time I remember when Apple's branding wasn't really enough has been in the 90s when graphic designers left Macs for Windows machines because Adobe software run so much better there. It was an undeniable combination of hw and sw problems. All of them came back and more thanks to the iPod first and the iPhone later.

So you might be right that too many inconveniences will send faithful customers away (I gave an example) but I don't believe commoditized apps are such a problem. People buy Apple because it's Apple and only a barren app store could drive them away now.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#298

Post by donkeyd »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them. I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a…

Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards.

Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it.

A while ago the fingerprint reader just stopped working after a restart. After a full hour of debugging and restarting I gave up. The next day I figured I'd try one of my debugging steps again and it started working again.

On my Mac, the worst that ever happened was a corrupted HDD. Booted into recovery, used disk utility to find and fix the problem and never had issues again.

Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#299

Post by ddingus »

Zarel wrote: post #293
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an app for the 2 software issues. Trackpads are OK, but I like my vertical mouse and touch-screens for Windows.

There is? I've looked everywhere for an international keyboard that doesn't replace how the apostrophe key works in Windows but I've never been able to find it. I also don't think there's an app to make every textbox behave in a standard way in Windows or Linux. If only it were that easy. The trackpad is sadly only nice in OS X; the Windows drivers are mediocre and nothing special. Still, though, I think it speaks vo…

The apple trackpad rules. I find it's amazingly productive.

No Windows trackpad has even come close.

There is a nice parallel here. Take advanced Mechanical CAD applications. Pro Engineer, Solidworks, Siemens NX, etc...

Back in the 90's, there was a lot of basic UX work being done on view manipulation. It's a hard problem in some respects. Modes, focus, picks, and a complicated thing to spin around and get into.

A company called SDRC spent a bunch of money on UX research. They ended up using a few of the function keys to trigger view manipulation. And it worked no matter what mode, pick, dialog, or anything else was going on. Most importantly, it only required mouse movement. No holding one button down while moving the thing. No finger fatigue after a lot of view manipulation.

Other companies didn't do this work, and their view commands were modal, or required complex mouse button hold + move operations.

A little company making 3D input devices grew a nice, profitable business out of poor UX design. Funny, their sales to SDRC people were nothing compared to the sales for most Mechanical CAD programs...

So, getting back to that track pad on Apple and UX in general. The Apple OS + track pad has it down cold. It's functional in nearly every use case, and it's low fatigue, and it's fairly discoverable as well as usable.

In Windows land, we get better mice to improve on poor UX. We get touch screens to improve on poor UX. And we get other things to improve on poor things...

People may not agree with all of what Apple sees as a value add. Totally get that. I personally won't touch the closed down iPad and iPhone. They aren't useful to me.

But, the UX on those is very solid.

I do the vast majority of my writing, coding and other non Windows specific work on a Mac Pro, and it's because that UX is there, and I don't need anything but the machine and a nice place to work.

When I go to power up on my Windows machine, out comes the mouse, and the utilities, and, and, and...

Not the same experience at all.

All that said, touch on the Surface does provide some options, but I personally don't find extending my hand any where near optimal compared to a quick gesture on the trackpad that is always right there, and that always does the same thing for the same gestures...

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#300

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

waterhouse wrote: post #285
sjm wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just you — love the Emacs bindings everywhere. It always throws me off on Windows when I'm trying to C-n and C-p around, getting hit with new document and printing dialogs all over the place :)

One more for the keybindings here (actually, they're more like readline keybindings -- C-h being the biggest difference). I would rather like to know how to set up those keybindings pervasively on graphical Linux applications. (The terminal and Emacs already have them, of course, but not the browser.) On a related note, I like the command key being solely responsible for most GUI application commands (so it doesn't c…

You can set emacs keybindings in Gnome apps. I normally do it when I get a new box, but always forget how. A quick google normally gets me there: http://askubuntu.com/questions/354489/emacs-gtk-keybindings-... Like this link, which apparently suggests it doesn't work in Gnome 3.6.
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