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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

#451

Post by ThomPete »

emsy wrote: post #425
ThomPete wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They buy what they are presented with and whats considered popular. How can they know up front whats good and bad? Thats how the movie industry still works that how the music industry used to work. I bet you Netflix show the same tendency of having more people see non-chart movies than if they had to pay for it.

As to why you're downvoted: HN has become rather eager to downvote. I'd even say toxic, because a few months ago I were downvoted and I knew I deserved it. Nowadays it's because I or someone else has an unpopular (but well reasoned) opinion. It's frustrating, not because I care for my Karma but because I'd like to have a discourse beyond agreeing on the popular opinion.

Yeah. I thought down votes was for things that was factually wrong, trolling or ruining a discussion not for disagreement.

Which is why I really wished down votes came with a requirement to quality why you are being down voted.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#452

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

smacktoward wrote: post #19
dyarosla wrote: post #16

I admire the developer, but the whole post feels like a cop-out blaming Apple. Too much competition? Let's give up. Engine broke from some change, don't want to try fixing it? Let's give up. Ads cost too much? Not, 'let's stop advertising on iOS', instead, Let's give up. I can understand as much as the next iOS developer that changes that require large workarounds due to software/hardware updates that aren't backward…

> Why do developers feel entitled to hardware devices that will always work with legacy code? "Entitled" isn't really the word I would use there. It's not like developers throughout history have forced poor platform vendors to provide backwards compatibility at gunpoint. It's that most platform developers have provided backwards compatibility because doing so helps them attract developers. This has been true literall…

Why Microsoft as an example? They are pretty nuts about backward compatibility, including fixing other people bugs so their software would continue to run (the old SimCity bug). I believe I can still run Doom and, say, Ventura Publisher 3.0 on vanilla Windows 8 (although I'd prefer DOSBox, of course, at least for games).

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#453

Post by TeMPOraL »

wlesieutre wrote: post #450
TeMPOraL wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The biggest problem with Vista for most people was that it was sold on computers without enough RAM. We have a couple in our office (thankfully not used regularly) where it's 1 GB and the integrated GPU borrows a quarter of it for VRAM. Windows Vista on 768 MB of memory is not a happy thing.

I can imagine it. I guess the experience is sort of like the one I had with a cheap Android smartphone, where the hardware was too weak to handle the OS itself (and if you tried to connect to the Internet, you basically had to pull the battery out because it went totally unresponsive).

I'm not sure why such things happen. Selling a product where the hardware is below minimum reasonable specs for the software it needs should be banned, or something.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#454

Post by CWuestefeld »

Rapzid wrote: post #360
sz4kerto wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I use linux at work and run Windows 7 in a VM. It's domain joined and my company pushes updates to it seemingly many times a month. This rears it head more often than not when I'm going home for the day.. Sometimes I can't be bothered waiting for updates to install so I throw caution to the wind and power the VM off when it says not to... Still ticking! I run the opposite on my home PC, Windows host and linux guest.…

Twice now I've been stuck during a power failure with just a few minutes of battery in my UPS, and when I try to shutdown Windows, it goes into its "installing updates" thing. There's no way around it, and of course losing power during this is probably the most dangerous thing imaginable. Luckily, I escaped with my life on both occasions.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#455

Post by LoSboccacc »

oblio wrote: post #407
LoSboccacc wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I just bought space program manager, got many more before and will pay ten bucks for prison architect, even more for tiny trek or if ever rimword would get a porting Fact is all iOS categories and ratings are useless to me, mostly rubbish game built for freemium and with loads of marketing wind behind get visibility on the store, while real games get buried and I've had to follow third party website just to even…

App-store-sarcasm-on: Oh, the curated library of applications and games is failing? You have to resort to 3rd party sites to actually filter things? At this point App Stores are nothing more than extremely expensive anti viruses for all the applications installed. We'll see on the long term if giving up so much control is worth it for a security scan :|

given the many malicious app that pass trough, I guess not.

anyway, even steam has given up, but at least they added curators before opening the early access floodgates

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#456

Post by Nullabillity »

stravid wrote: post #327
ikurei wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Re: International text input: I only use keyboards with the english international layout although I'm from Austria and the german layout would be the natural one. Therefore the keyboard layout in the OS is also set to english international. I do this because I program. And still I'm very happy about the easy access for special characters, because in literally every email I have to use one of ß, ä, ö or ü.

> I do this because I program.

Really? I guess it might be different with the german keyboards, but I've had no difficulties programming on a Swedish keyboard.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#457

Post by regularfry »

coolnow wrote: post #372
regularfry wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>They control the OS, so they control the ability of a manufacturer's bug to affect the user. Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time. As you stated, the decisions Microsoft took got them to their throne. I've switched to OSX but i still use Windows 10 on my other laptop and Windows 8.1 on my gaming PC and haven't had a bluescreen since Vista. I literally have…

> Ugh, kernel drivers will always have bugs and that cannot be isolated from the user all the time.

And MS are in control of how much of a driver needs to be in the kernel. It's not a foregone conclusion that a driver bug cannot be isolated from the user. The techniques involved aren't new. Hell, I don't think they were new when Windows 95 was being written. Again, it's a trade-off; it's easier to write an OS where a driver lives by default in kernel space (certainly with reasonable performance), and where to draw that dividing line is a choice which Microsoft made. They've introduced user-mode drivers for some things, and this is a very good thing.

I don't have a dog in the OS X/Windows reliability pissing match, but part of the reason you won't have seen a bluescreen in years is because Windows 7 (apart from being more reliable from having more man-hours thrown at it, along with an updated driver model from Vista) changed the default behaviour: what would have caused a BSOD in Vista causes a reboot in 7, so you never actually see the error.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#458

Post by jamesgeck0 »

yellowapple wrote: post #231
quietplatypus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, compared to Windows, which up until Windows 7 let you run a bunch of very old games (and even then you could still get some of them to work in compatibility mode), I'd say no. And that's a software platform that has to run on a bunch of different hardware. Also, your Xbox 360 games will all still work on your Xbox 360, as long as you have the hardware around. AFAIK all the Xbox 360 software updates never broke…

Up until recently, consoles have been a bit of a weird case, since "game" in that context usually meant something more like "game plus a baked-in operating system communicating directly with the hardware". The Xbox360 and PS3 were among the first major systems (outside of the PC realm) to run games on top of an existing operating system. Even somewhat-recent consoles that ran proper operating systems (original Xbox,…

The baked-in operating system thing is especially visible with Nintendo DS games, where the network stack and configuration UI was shipped on the cartridge. Wifi has to be configured in each individual game, and it only supports WEP, even if the game is run on a newer handheld.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#459

Post by WorldWideWayne »

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…

Yes, AutoHotKey can easily take care of the issue with accent keys and with the Emacs shortcuts you want to implement. A search for `autohotkey accent characters` shows many people using it for this purpose. You can implement all kinds of keyboard shortcuts with AutoHotKey.

On the topic of trackpads - maybe you could help me understand - when you use the keyboard and trackpad that's built-into the laptop, is it because you're forced to (in a plane) or because you prefer it? I imagine all Mac users who say they can't ever leave the Apple trackpad are environmentally limited to using whatever is built-in to the laptop.

In other words - when I work, I prefer 2 or 3 monitors that are situated about 2 feet from my face and a full size keyboard with numpad (Microsoft Natural). So, I just could never see myself reaching all the way over to the laptop that is driving all of this in order to use a touch pad. But even so, I find all touch pads including Apple's to be imprecise compared to my 5 button vertical mouse. I also have auto-scrolling on Windows which OS X doesn't really do (this is where you push the middle mouse button down and then as you move the entire mouse, things scroll, until you release the button).

I tried using an Apple wireless trackpad (magic trackpad?). Maybe you use one of those with your work setup?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#460

Post by amelius »

rappr wrote: post #436
amelius wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Just have a look at the enormous amount of open research available at http://research.microsoft.com and try to find the equivalent of Apple. That tells me enough.

Nothing new there. Microsoft has always been very open their research, and Apple hasn't. They prefer to talk about products they will actually ship vs. things that might happen at some point in the future.

I wonder what self-respecting scientist would want to work in a company like Apple where publication of research results is prohibited?
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