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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

#471

Post by tomc1985 »

csomar wrote: post #146
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…

For general consumers, Microsoft is catching up. But Apple never really gained marketshare there because of its high prices. For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.

Idunno, after running a MBP for almost five years, IMO Windows software is better. Most of it's not very pretty, but in terms of pound-for-pound productivity shortcuts and features-in-general, Windows designers/programmers seem to favor productivity over cheesy gimmicks (or, this contemptible trend of data sparsity)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#472

Post by astrodust »

deong wrote: post #445
fernandotakai wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on linux, using us-mac: è: option/r-alt+` ê: option/r-alt+i ë: option/r-alt+u (for example, option+` followed by e will do è) i mostly use us-mac because i'm used to using option to type accents and because i can keep my en keyboard and type on pt-br without problems.

I vastly prefer the compose key method on Linux. You almost never have to worry about how to type a character. Type compose, hit something that vaguely looks like the accent you want, and then the letter. Compose, ", e => ë Compose, ', e => é Compose, ^, e => ê I so wish this system was available more universally.

What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Apple's consistent use of the "optional" characters is a lot like the old C-64 with the graphical extras available at the push of two buttons.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#473

Post by deveac »

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…

>Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. 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. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground.

To keep this on the rails, I have to wonder exactly how much Apple has paid out to developers on the iOS platform vs Microsoft on their mobile platform. The very first reason the author of the linked article cited for his decision to pull out was competition, which combined with having the largest payouts by a large margin speaks to the health of the platform imho. Native vs. web apps has been debated endlessly, but the doomsday scenario for Apple's approach has which has been trumpeted for many years now has conclusively not come to pass. I suppose if you extend the time horizon out to some Nth degree that may change, but what has Apple been doing in the meantime? Making a ton of money and paying a ton of money to developers.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#474

Post by dragonwriter »

astrodust wrote: post #472
deong wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I vastly prefer the compose key method on Linux. You almost never have to worry about how to type a character. Type compose, hit something that vaguely looks like the accent you want, and then the letter. Compose, ", e => ë Compose, ', e => é Compose, ^, e => ê I so wish this system was available more universally.

What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿? Apple's consistent use of the "optional" characters is a lot like the old C-64 with the graphical extras available at the push of two buttons.

> What about ç or å or other stuff like ° or ¡ and ¿?

Those are all covered:

http://fsymbols.com/keyboard/linux/compose/

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#475

Post by xenophonf »

baddox wrote: post #308
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'm a long time Emacs user, but I certainly am not aware that OS X supports Emacs key bindings in every text box. My initial reaction is to not believe you, but I will certainly try it out tomorrow.

> OS X supports Emacs key bindings

It's a NextStep thing. You can find the complete list in /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Resources/StandardKeyBinding.dict. You can customize them in ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict. The Cocoa API documentation has the details (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/...). There's a graphical editor for the DefaultKeyBinding dictionary (http://www.cocoabits.com/KeyBindingsEditor/), but I've never used it.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#476

Post by Joeri »

donkeyd wrote: post #298
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 fi…

Then again, upgrading has made the wifi on my mac mini go wonky, twice, and last week an upgrade made it stop recognizing the display's native resolution and downgraded it to 1024x768. Upgrades are always dangerous.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#477

Post by emodendroket »

snuxoll wrote: post #464
emodendroket wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, OS X comes with a terrible Japanese IME. The Google one that's available on OS X and Windows makes things better but until that came out Windows was just unquestionably way better for Japanese text input.

Really? I thought kotoeri was pretty decent, although I will forever remain an ibus fan when it comes to IME's.

It's hard to notice until you're really using it a lot, but it has a hard time with stuff like people's names that Windows does better with. I might be getting a little carried away saying it's "terrible" but I was a student in Japan for a while and the limitations became obvious and annoying to me under those circumstances.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#478

Post by ptaipale »

octaveguin wrote: post #390
ptaipale wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add about the employment costs in Finland: 5000 € gross salary means about 6000 € total cost with payroll-related taxes and mandatory payments included, and about 3250 € net pay per month after taxes. It's certainly no sweat shop, but I would consider it modest cost if you account for the quality of the developers.

You're absolutely right. Actually, Scandinavia in general has high quality developers on the cheap compared to the states. This while their quality of life seems on a whole better - seems a win/win to invest in or open satellite offices there :)

And, for good or bad, it is also much easier to both expand/hire and close/downsize in Scandinavia than in other parts of Europe. At least in Denmark and Finland, maybe less so in Sweden. (Norway is really expensive to hire anyone, though).

This flexibility to lay off people is not always a win/win for employees (considering Nokia/ALU merger right now) but I think that investors generally overestimate the bureaucratic difficulties in Scandinavian countries in this respect. Scandinavian countries are very free market economies despite being "socialist".

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#479

Post by baddox »

escherize wrote: post #322
baddox wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a long time Emacs user, but I certainly am not aware that OS X supports Emacs key bindings in every text box. My initial reaction is to not believe you, but I will certainly try it out tomorrow.

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.

Ah, so here's the trick. However I have my modifier keys set up for my external (non-Mac) keyboard means I can't really use them. I use my Caps Lock in Emacs for the C modifier, but in OS X my Alt key is the one that works in normal text inputs.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#480

Post by tjl »

NotOscarWilde wrote: post #386
tjl wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a laptop from mid-2009 that's still good (it's a white MacBook). The only problem I've had has been the battery bulging and Apple replaced them under Applecare with no problems. The last I had replaced out of warranty for no charge. It's slow, but everything still works. I used it for my main machine until late 2012 (when I bought an i7 Mac Mini) and was my portable machine until late 2013. My Mac Mini has bee…

> I have a laptop from mid-2009 that's still good ... was my portable machine until late 2013. I don't think this should count as a counterexample. You have switched laptops in 2013, and while there could be many valid reasons for that (battery life, more power for development, your old laptop does not support a new OS) it made you old laptop inadequate -- and hence the switch.

The only reason why I switched laptops was because I got a new one as part of my work. I'd still be using it otherwise.
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