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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#101

Post by coldtea »

FireBeyond wrote: post #81
ricardobeat wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

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

Whereas, of course, the Nokia was 40% more expensive -- at $699.

Not to mention that, hw specs aside, it was so last decade, and the inefficient BS OS it had, made it dog slow, unintuitive and unfit for the intertubes.

>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.

Err, what? Bulk is about volume. Unless you have 2D pockets, the Nokia being smaller in the other 2 dimensions doesn't mean shit. Just look at the thing in the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HwT...

Also look at the UI. Is this supposed to be a joke?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GmLchZN1Dc

So, yes, it had a better camera (since Nokia mostly slapped on a huge-ass compact camera lens on it), and it had 3G (since Nokia could not care less about battery life with 3G on).

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#102

Post by chinpokomon »

gfodor wrote: post #11
josteink wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. there's nothing revolutionary in ios7 shown so far. that said, I can't wait for Apple to sue Android over the things they just stole from them.

I haven't used Android since it first came out, but does it have the dynamic physics, layering, dynamic image compositing (blur, etc), parallax, etc, that all are in iOS 7? iOS 7 seems to me to be very much about how it feels and behaves in motion. The current beta still isn't performance tuned, so my guess is the final build is going to be a pretty futuristic experience on the iPhone 5S. I think a lot of people are…

Well I've had a parallax (sic? I don't think I've spelt that right) Live Wallpaper for some time now. Android lends itself to allowing other developers to innovate without waiting for the OS to introduce those "features". There are also other Launchers that can provide the iOS 7 graphical embellishments while other Launchers have provided even more 3D enhancements. I've used those before, but I'm running a fairly stock UI out of personal choice. And that I think is still why Android gives me the best platform -- choice. There are a variety of device manufactures and I can replace whole system components, but at the end of the day, while my particular device is unique to my experience, I can run the same software as another device that looks, and in some cases feels, completely different than mine.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#103

Post by potatolicious »

Cookingboy wrote: post #97
jdgiese wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never used objective C, although I use C quite a bit. Javascript is much higher level than C, thus you can code more faster with less bugs in javascript. Of course it all depends on if you need low-level performance.

Objective-C is about on the same level as Java.

Well... No. And I say this as someone who write Obj-C all day and actually likes Obj-C.

Obj-C is a relatively thin layer around C, it's nowhere near Java's level of abstraction.

For one thing, at least on iOS, there is no actual garbage collector. ARC is a static analyzer that injects manual memory management code into your app - it does not collect garbage at runtime.

Even with ARC you are still managing your own memory - it is not possible to write a complex iOS app without understanding manual memory management and what the different reference types do in this regard. This is in contrast with Java where you really don't have to understand memory at all to write non-leaky code.

You're also allowed to (though not encouraged to) do low-level hackery like pointer arithmetic. There is nothing stopping you from reaching down and fiddling with raw memory addresses and values. This is in sharp contrast with Java and other high-level languages where you're very explicitly forbidden from doing anything that might blow your foot off.

The runtime itself is also really thin compared to the JVM. Hell, frequently the first you know something is wrong is when your program segfaults. Try that with Java.

Not Obj-C, but OSX/iOS, is also that as soon as you get into any of the deeper libraries you're in C-land. Core Graphics is exclusively a C API, as are many of the other APIs like calendaring and address book. You really can't go deep into the platform without touching raw C.

Anyways, Obj-C isn't on the same abstraction plane as Java, not even close.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#104

Post by myko »

Cookingboy wrote: post #95
FireBeyond wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote you: "Citation"? What iOS features have been present for three years that Android is just now getting? Let's be clear too, three years ago, iOS was at version 3.1.3. I would love to be enlightened, as an iPhone 5/iPad 4/rMBP owner.

60fps scrolling? A semi-decent animation framework for developers? Low audio latency and good power management? Pretty much all the advantages Apple has from their decade of experience of developing OS X frameworks?

> 60fps scrolling?

It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well.

> A semi-decent animation framework for developers?

The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely.

> Low audio latency

Audio has been an issue on Android. I've not delved into it myself but this is certainly something that only seems recently fixed. Not sure this warrants calling the platform far behind though.

> and good power management?

I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#105

Post by altcognito »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #51
ebbv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I am an iPhone owner and prefer it to Android, but this article is just asinine. First of all, you can absolutely do anything iOS does on the web; it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. There's not a library already in existence that you can use easily which perfectly mimics iOS 7, but if there were then iOS 7 would need more work. But there will be web libraries that allow you to mim…

Explain how you are going to animate blurred glass at 60 FPS if Safari doesn't give you a fast path to the GPU? I don't understand your comment. Are you just saying that both Javascript and Objective-C are Turing complete? If that is the point your are making, well that isn't really debatable.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design...

I'm baffled why all the Apple people are excited about features I disable in Windows because they are obnoxious and ugly.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#106

Post by Cookingboy »

myko wrote: post #104
Cookingboy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

60fps scrolling? A semi-decent animation framework for developers? Low audio latency and good power management? Pretty much all the advantages Apple has from their decade of experience of developing OS X frameworks?

> 60fps scrolling? It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well. > A semi-decent animation framework for developers? The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely. > Low audio latency Audio has been an issue on Android. I've not delved into it myself but this is certainly something that only seems recently f…

There is a property animation system on Android, but it's woefully lacking when compared to iOS. IIRC it doesn't even support 2.5D transform with a Z axis and variable camera distance (which is useful for perspective transform). On iOS 7 they now have a full rigid-body physics engine built in and comes with a nice high level API for developers to take advantage of.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#107

Post by Cookingboy »

potatolicious wrote: post #103
Cookingboy wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Objective-C is about on the same level as Java.

Well... No. And I say this as someone who write Obj-C all day and actually likes Obj-C. Obj-C is a relatively thin layer around C, it's nowhere near Java's level of abstraction. For one thing, at least on iOS, there is no actual garbage collector. ARC is a static analyzer that injects manual memory management code into your app - it does not collect garbage at runtime. Even with ARC you are still managing your own me…

It was a generalized statement for people who want to begin to learn it, I personally find that Obj-C offers very similar level of abstraction for beginners as Java does (especially with ARC, and not everyone has to deal with CoreAudio, AddressBook and other C libraries or integrate C and C++ code into their app).

I'm a professional iOS dev as well and everything you said were correct, so no arguing there.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#108

Post by mtdewcmu »

potatolicious wrote: post #59
mtdewcmu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression was that the iPhone was fully thought out in advance so that everything would work together. Take away a major piece, and the whole thing stops making sense. It needed a touch screen so that it didn't need a keyboard. There couldn't be a keyboard, because it took space away from the display. Replacing a keyboard with a touch screen was radical at that time, and it had to work really well. People would n…

Sort of. It wasn't quite such a clear causal chain - there were some things that positioned them well in the first place. Quartz, which is the drawing and compositing engine developed for OSX, is really at the core of it. For one thing, Quartz is really fast, and long before iPhone was even a rumor Apple had already tied it deeply into OpenGL and made it hardware accelerated. Quartz is really the "secret sauce" to th…

For sure, it wasn't conceived in a vacuum. Apple's existing IP would have provided essential pieces to make it possible.

I've only owned a single smart phone so far, and it's an Android device. But I've noticed that Apple's devices have smoother interfaces. I've wondered how much of that can be traced to platform factors, and how much is simply execution and polish. And whether the OS design, and the difference between ObjC and Java, play a significant role. My impression was that Java was a dog, but it seems to run pretty well on Android. It's possible that with the meticulous attention to detail of a company like Apple, Android could be made as responsive and smooth as iOS. Or, maybe, platform issues make that virtually impossible. It would be more technically intriguing to think that native code and Quartz are decisively better, but I'm leaning toward the more boring explanation that Apple just worked harder on the UI, and expended the effort to do all the little things right. The basis for my opinion is the observation that true explanations are more often boring.

I'm not very expert on graphics, but I've had a suspicion that dedicated graphics hardware makes iPhone-type devices possible. Highly-integrated and highly power efficient graphics hardware was only just becoming available when the iPhone was in development. And, as you mentioned, the software layers to take full advantage of it in a GUI wasn't something you could just take for granted.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#109

Post by Samuel_Michon »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #53
drivebyacct2 wrote: post #27

"Try copying this assholes" Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand. Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick imp…

"In short, we’d replace 2007′s sliding textures with motion, dimension, and physics." I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave if the UI was that busy. He was into sleek.

> Steve Jobs would be rolling in his grave

Please, let’s not play that game.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#110

Post by Samuel_Michon »

bornhuetter wrote: post #54
joshavant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you meant 'performance' instead of 'capability'. As far as 'performance', Apple has never been one to put performance numbers up as a selling point. Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM. Those were details Steve felt should be abstracted away from the user. So, I'd agree with you that the success of iPhone has never really been driven by 'hardware performance', as that is th…

> Macs have never been marketed as an X (M|G)hz machine with Y (M|G)B RAM. Not quite true, I don't think. Around the late 90s, early 00s there was a lot of marketing around the high Mhz of the Mac CPU compared with PCs - and arguments about the merits of RISC vs CISC. That was back in the Mhz wars when Mhz was all most people cared about and paid attention to.

> there was a lot of marketing around the high Mhz of the Mac CPU compared with PCs

Em, no. At a time when Apple used PowerPC instead of Intel processors, Apple wanted to de-emphasize Megahertzes because the PowerPC chips had lower clock frequencies than the Intel chips of the day. Instead, Apple would advertise the PowerMac as being twice as fast as PC workstations, and it would speak of megaflops and ‘the first desktop supercomputer’. See also ‘The Megahertz Myth’[1].

So yes, Apple did compare the performance of their pro models (PowerMac, PowerBook) with PC counterparts, but they didn’t use clock frequency or memory speed to make their point.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

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