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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#121

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

potatolicious wrote: post #12
ajross wrote: post #5

This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007. The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy.…

It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. It was the first time anyone put an OS on a phone that had a blazing fast graphics layer. Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model. Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they i…

That is a fair assessment. I think the part that can really be attributed to Apple is the hardware accelerated, fluid, instantaneous and very polished interface with touch gestures . It's not any one UI component or gesture in particular but the beautiful integration of all of them together.

The other thing that iPhone had going for it was the iTunes integration that would save you from having to buy an iPod. This brought a lot of monetary value.

For the rest, I remember during the first iPhone reveal thinking it was a more polished, better funded version of the openMoko phone. ( https://www.google.ca/search?q=openmoko&safe=off&source=lnms... )

openMoko was an open source, volunteer made project. One thing openMoko had for it was their plan for promoting third party native apps from the get go, whereas Apple blocked them for almost a year.

In a 2006 article, a few months prior to the iPhone reveal we get about openMoko:

"The Neo1973 is based on a Samsung S3C2410 SoC (system-on-chip) application processor, powered by an ARM9 core. It will have 128MB of RAM, and 64MB of flash, along with an upgradable 64MB MicroSD card.

Typical of Chinese phone designs, the Neo1973 sports a touchscreen, rather than a keypad -- in this case, an ultra-high resolution 2.8-inch VGA (640 x 480) touchscreen. "Maps look stunning on this screen," Moss-Pultz said.

The phone features an A-GPS (assisted GPS) receiver module connected to the application processor via a pair of UARTs. The commercial module has a closed design, but the API is apparently open.

Similarly, the phone's quad-band GSM/GPRS module, built by FIC, runs the proprietary Nucleus OS on a Texas Instruments baseband powered by an ARM7 core. It communicates with Linux over a serial port, using standard "AT" modem commands.

The Neo1973 will charge when connected to a PC via USB. It will also support USB network emulation, and will be capable of routing a connected PC to the Internet, via its GPRS data connection. [...] Moss-Pultz adds, "Applications are the ringtones of the future." [...] As for additional software components, Moss-Pultz admits, "Quite a lot is there, and quite a lot is not there. We're hoping to change this." In addition to a dialer, phonebook, media player, and application manager, the stack will likely include the Minimo browser [...] He adds, "Mobile phones are the PCs of the 21st century, in terms of processing power and broadband network access. "

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#122

Post by potatolicious »

seclorum wrote: post #119
pja wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the computation itself, it's the GPU memory bandwidth it takes up. (Assuming you're doing it in real-time of course.)

Shaders.

Most certainly you want to use a shader, but that doesn't fix all your problems. You have to push a (very large) texture across the bus. The GPU will chew on it and spit out the result, which you then have to pull back across the bus into main memory so that it plays nicely with other UI elements that are CPU-bound and not cached in VRAM.

So you've removed the processing bottleneck in exchange for a bus bandwidth bottleneck :(

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#123

Post by methodin »

bornhuetter wrote: post #56
methodin wrote: post #35

Will it be true that Apple still has enough weight to cause ripple effects in design paradigms completely unrelated to a mobile device? I am guessing so, but mostly because a lot of designers are coupled strongly to Apple ideology and it affects their designs directly. This is of course painful as someone outside of this bubble - watching designs that conform to a device and a way of thinking instead of living and br…

Well, at least this design is a lot closer to current Android and WP8. When developers designed specifically for iOS and then ported to Android as an afterthought, the results often looked completely out of place. I'm hopeful that it will be easier for clever designers to make apps that look very similar on all three platforms, and also look at home on all three platforms.

Good point. That may not actually be too bad. I would hate to see blur and super-thin lines propagating all designs but those would hopefully be minor details if the apps themselves are more similar.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#124

Post by myko »

coldtea wrote: post #113
myko wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well. Only the chuginess comes standard with Android. The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely. It's not really close to CA. > Not sure this warrants calling the platform far behind though. If you casually dismiss everything else too, of course not. > I'm not sure…

> Only the chuginess comes standard with Android.

Sounds to me like you're trolling. This is not the case unless one is using a low end device.

> If you casually dismiss everything else too, of course not.

Pot, meet kettle.

> Like Android apps allowed to run rampant in the bg, draining the batteries pronto -- a complaint you hear all the time, and of which you can also find some measurements.

I honestly think you're just making things up at this point? Have you even used an Android device?

Yes, LTE was a big drain when it first came out. Generally Android devices handle power management very nicely.

At this point you just sound like a combative troll.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#125

Post by seanmcdirmid »

madoublet wrote: post #120
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows phone metro doesn't include a physics engine. The motions are all tweened. Windows phone metro includes no depth at all, it truly is flat and 2D spatial. Dynamics?

I don't know (or frankly care) how it is implemented. While the UI is flat, the apps use transitions and a parallax effect to build the illusion of the depth (similar to how Apple does it using their gyroscopic parallax effect on the home screen).

There is no depth or layering in metro, not even small drop shadows and definitely not layered application screens. The panaroma metaphor is panning left or right with some disjoint movement of the background (not really parallax, very fake) and the cutting off lots of text...

Lets wait until we can judge them side by side. I have a windows phone device, but no apps (my market doesn't really have anything decent), so I'm not really sure if the metaphors have evolved much from the panaromas.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#126

Post by ebbv »

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.

You really think you need direct GPU access for a simple blur effect?

There's already plenty of ways to accomplish blur effects with CSS and JS. Do a little research.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#127

Post by ebbv »

bdcravens wrote: post #76
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…

Yes, you can build Call of Duty with canvas and JavaScript. No, you shouldn't. A claim that faster hardware is a solution is circular: to get native performance today, faster hardware is needed. At that point, native performance on that hardware becomes great and theoretically is doing more amazing things than it did on the old hardware. In other words HTML-based apps always play catch up, unless native can't use the…

Of course mobile apps are always running slower than native, but that wasn't the issue here. The claim was that web apps CANNOT do what iOS 7 does and that's just horseshit.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#128

Post by coldtea »

myko wrote: post #124
coldtea wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well. Only the chuginess comes standard with Android. The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely. It's not really close to CA. > Not sure this warrants calling the platform far behind though. If you casually dismiss everything else too, of course not. > I'm not sure…

> Only the chuginess comes standard with Android. Sounds to me like you're trolling. This is not the case unless one is using a low end device. > If you casually dismiss everything else too, of course not. Pot, meet kettle. > Like Android apps allowed to run rampant in the bg, draining the batteries pronto -- a complaint you hear all the time, and of which you can also find some measurements. I honestly think you're…

This troll word. Do you use it with anything you find too uncomfortable to hear?

It's like discussing with a 10-year old. Either respond to what I write, ask me a question, ask for clarifications, or provide counter-arguments -- or don't and refrain from this subthread. The "you are a troll" accusation gets old quickly, as I approach forty. I could not fucking care less about going to a forum and making "joke comments". What I write is what I believe to be true, based on what I know.

So.

>Sounds to me like you're trolling. This is not the case unless one is using a low end device.

No, it's very much the case, EVEN on high end devices. And there have been posts from Android engineers on the issue, blaming various stuff, from the stop the world GC to the drawing thread scheduling. Here's one:

https://plus.google.com/100838276097451809262/posts/VDkV9XaJ...

It also links to another Google person, saying that "that's not it, it's because of the extra security Android offers, that has an overhead". Which is funny considering:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/05/14/mobile-malware-exp...

>>Like Android apps allowed to run rampant in the bg, draining the batteries pronto -- a complaint you hear all the time, and of which you can also find some measurements.

>I honestly think you're just making things up at this point? Have you even used an Android device?

Yes, I have. A Samsung mid-range one. Also borrowed briefly a high end LG one. Not impressed on both counts.

As for the battery thing, not only it's an issue, but a whole cottage industry has sprung around it -- with battery-saving apps being among the most popular (LOL):

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-57581440-251/five-andro...

http://lifehacker.com/5990553/betterbatterystats-tells-you-e...

http://www.topapps.net/android/top-10-battery-saver-apps-for...

http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobil...

I could similar list stuff forever...

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#129

Post by myko »

coldtea wrote: post #128
myko wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only the chuginess comes standard with Android. Sounds to me like you're trolling. This is not the case unless one is using a low end device. > If you casually dismiss everything else too, of course not. Pot, meet kettle. > Like Android apps allowed to run rampant in the bg, draining the batteries pronto -- a complaint you hear all the time, and of which you can also find some measurements. I honestly think you're…

This troll word. Do you use it with anything you find too uncomfortable to hear? It's like discussing with a 10-year old. Either respond to what I write, ask me a question, ask for clarifications, or provide counter-arguments -- or don't and refrain from this subthread. The "you are a troll" accusation gets old quickly, as I approach forty. I could not fucking care less about going to a forum and making "joke comment…

> No, it's very much the case, EVEN on high end devices. And there have been posts from Android engineers on the issue, blaming various stuff, from the stop the world GC to the drawing thread scheduling. Here's one:

You're still just being ignorant. This was a post by a former Software Engineer in Test Android intern who didn't know what he was talking about, hence why he was corrected multiple times all over the internet. In your own link he mentions that he was wrong but leaving the thread up for posterity! It's like you only post things you assume support your pre-determined world view without even reading them. Quote from Andrew on that post:

> BEFORE READING: A LOT OF MY ANALYSIS OF ANDROID PERFORMANCE IS WRONG, HOWEVER I AM LEAVING THIS POST UP BECAUSE OF MY COMMENTARY ON THE ISSUE.

So yes, I think at this point you're just trolling. I have addressed your points - performance is an issue on low end devices, not on high end devices. This is not unexpected. There are lots of battery packs for iPhones, that doesn't mean iPhones have relatively shit battery life, it just means there is a market for extending that battery.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#130

Post by Gravityloss »

potatolicious wrote: post #122
seclorum wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shaders.

Most certainly you want to use a shader, but that doesn't fix all your problems. You have to push a (very large) texture across the bus. The GPU will chew on it and spit out the result, which you then have to pull back across the bus into main memory so that it plays nicely with other UI elements that are CPU-bound and not cached in VRAM. So you've removed the processing bottleneck in exchange for a bus bandwidth bot…

are you sure it has to be pulled back to main memory?
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