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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

#361

Post by pjc50 »

regularfry wrote: post #345
stevoo wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is not Microsoft. I am surface pro 3 owner and i have to say that is one of the best machines i have used. I wouldn't change it for anything. I agree that MS is heading in the right direction. The steps that they are taking are to my opinion great for everyone. I have been a linux user for almost 10 years and windows 10 might be the reason to switch back. We will see. As for the driver issues, that i…

It absolutely is Microsoft's... well, not fault, exactly, but the way the ecosystem has evolved has been driven largely by choices they've made. If the ecosystem allows for buggy hardware driver releases to screw things up for customers, it's because MS made the choice, possibly by default, not to run an Apple-like ecosystem. The reason I don't blame MS entirely for this is because it's clearly a trade-off. In return…

Microsoft were not initially in control of the ecosystem; it was IBM's PC cloned by Compaq and then a horde of others. At one point there were competing desktop environments - Desqview, OS/2.

They then faced the upgrade problem: at any point, restrictive control over drivers would mean that hardware that ran Windows N-1 would not run Windows N.

There is also the antitrust argument: control over the OEMs restricts the possibilities for competing software.

And there's a limit to what they can do. My latest driver/hardware bug was discovering that my Crucial MX100 has some horrible interaction with write caching and link power management such that it can vanish from underneath the operating system.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#362

Post by lloeki »

ikurei wrote: post #303
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…

I think that's very subjective: - International text input: I can't remember the last time I had to use accents or special characters not in my native language; a few greek letters for formulae, and generally I can use '/alpha' instead of α. Isn't having to use chars not in your language pretty uncommon? - Trackpad quality: yes, I love using Macbook trackpads, but I use the mouse/trackpad very little anyway, and isn'…

> b) don't know if they'd be that great for Vim-ers like me.

They are: I am addicted to vim, and I use bash/zsh in emacs mode, so having the consistency is incredible.

Also having cmd+C for the GUI and ctrl+C for the command line is awesome. This last feature is one of the few things that kills Linux for me (ended up hacking on GTK, which turns out to have both an undocumented setting and an obscure compile time constant somewhere that ends up not working. And no, remapping every single app shortcut is not an option — I tried).

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#363

Post by donkeyd »

sz4kerto wrote: post #316
donkeyd wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

> Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards. That's strange. I'm now sitting in front of a Windows box that had W7 installed on it 3 years ago. I've upgraded to W8, then swapped the SSD in it (restored to the new SSD from image), resized the system partition many times (it's a Windows-Linux dual boot box), then upgraded to W8.1, then Windows 10. Oh, this is…

My comment was anecdotal too, no worries ;)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#364

Post by thom »

lukeschlather wrote: post #183
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

You can map drives from a client over Remote Desktop if that's at all helpful.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#365

Post by lloeki »

jakobegger wrote: post #353
escherize wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C-a, C-e, C-n, C-p all work. EDIT: C-f, C-b work as well. Are there any others? Actually, I can tell you for a fact, I've hit M-b (∫) many times and been disappointed by it. I get why, but I'm still disappointed.

And of course there's kill C-k and yank C-y

But sadly, no C-w.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#366

Post by donkeyd »

andrewfong wrote: post #340
donkeyd wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

> Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes... Trackpoint. Makes it very hard for me to switch from Thinkpads. Also, I'm growing quite fond of having a touch screen and a pen for my laptop.

I can imagine, must be the opposite of actually starting to work with the Trackpoint. I tried, I really did, but I never got it to work for me.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#367

Post by TeMPOraL »

vbezhenar wrote: post #342
donkeyd wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

Everyone has different experience. I never had hardware problems with HP, Lenovo, Dell notebooks. It was built badly, it could broke something, but notebook worked well. With Macbook I had broken HDD which was replaced by warranty but it took almost a month without my working tool. And 2 years later sound just stopped working. Headphones work but buggy. I don't think I can pay for repair, probably will tinker with it…

> Everyone has different experience.

Yeah, I'm acutely reminded of this every time someone brings up Windows 7's predecessor. Apparently I'm the only person who ever lived on this planet who had absolutely zero problems with Windows Vista, and even liked it quite a bit.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#368

Post by lloeki »

lukeschlather wrote: post #183
api wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

Using (boot2)docker/docker-machine+virtualbox and mapping a volume to the host OS (which is trivial) might be viable.

I use it on OS X to do linux-only stuff (such as loop-mounting an ext4 image).

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#369

Post by TeMPOraL »

zmb_ wrote: post #328
izacus wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, updating my Mac to Yosemite turned it into a slow stuttering mess - WindowServer memory leak forced me to reboot the Mac about every two hours or so or watch my desktop at While Windows does have problems, latest Apple software is mostly worse bug and update-wise.

Updating my iMac to Yosemite fried the graphics card. It seems Apple is putting form way ahead of function, and as a result stuffing too hot components into too small space (the same iMac has previously fried the screen and the HDD to death).

This comment just made me realize why most computers sold today wouldn't work in vacuum of space. Even if we shielded it from radiation, they'd just fry to death.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#370

Post by netcan »

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…

I'm not really a fanboy, so maybe my expectations are lower. I think Apple are doing a good job. I admire what I think of as Apple's unique quality: the product/marketing/tech strategy.

Apple insist on charging a premium. In addition they prefer to play the above median range of the market. Apart from first-to-market "freebies" they don't play for dominant market share. They insist on that premium, at the expense of market share and other trade-offs.

They don't play for check box ticking. They don't adjust to appeal to mobile service companies, IT purchasing departments or other buyers that make decisions about what other people will use. IE, it's not corporate sales departments dictating strategy according based on short term sales.

In order to get their premium they make stuff appealing enough to a subset of people that they are willing to spend their own money, pay that premium and get the thing that they decided they want for themselves. To make a stretched, contrived and over-complimentary analogy.. It's like a politician who wants to convince the voting public to join him in his position vs a politician that checks the polls to find out what his positions are.

Like I said, I don't have that much loyalty to Apple. I don't buy iphones because androids @ half the price are pretty good. I'd be interested if Apple puts out a laptop with a sub €500 price, but I'm not cranky if they don't have one. When they do happen to have a product that I buy for whatever reason, I'm usually on the fence mostly because of price but fairly well impressed once if I buy it.

But….I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking, and it's getting harder to justify buying a macbook. I still expect to get years out of the one I have, but I wouldn't be surprised if I opt for a €200 something when the time comes. Unless… Apple happens to be making something I'm willing to pay extra for at the time.

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