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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

#281

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Compare and contrast the experience of buying an iPhone with the experience of buying an iPhone app. When you buy an app, you are basically looking at sales sheets from people you don't know making claims you can't verify. The only way out is to go find reviews about the apps from blogs you can't trust. Now think about buying an iPhone. I've owned an iPhone for 8 years. I know intimately the support experience. I kno…

If you sold your app for $600 I bet you could create that kind of experience. And if Apple sold phones for $2 you can bet the buying experience would be a lot different.

I completely disagree.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? You're going to pick out Xcode out of the whole list? I even clearly stated what the most important app I use is and it wasn't Xcode. ...however, if you're developing iOS and OSX apps you need Xcode. So I'm not sure what your point is.

XCode is a pretty good choice for writing Mac applications. I'm not aware of many accepted alternatives.

There really is only one–AppCode, and not really an alternative, because usually you end up using both.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#283
post #222

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…

> 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…

Note that the emacs keybindings even work on iOS. I develop a coding app on iOS and when I use it with a bluetooth keyboard I always take advantage of the emacs-inspired shortcuts.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#284
post #31

It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else. Spiderweb throwing in the towel I would guess has a lot more to do with their #1 point "Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level." than the others. The top two grossing games - Clash of Clans and Game of War - receive metacritic scores of 74 and 67 respectively. Whereas the most recent Spi…

IAPs have destroyed the gaming market on iOS. Funnily enough there's a lot of money being thrown around and a few companies have become rich, but if you're looking for quality it's really really difficult to find something worthwile.

I was hoping that iOS could become a premium platform for games, with titles like Broken sword, The orient express and others. There are a few gems here and there, but most of it is IAP-infested, pay to win. Even if I could in theory play those few good games, I've decided to give up on the iPad, as ultimately those companies won't be able to support themselves and I expect fewer and fewer quality games.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#285
post #254
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…

Not just you — love the Emacs bindings everywhere. It always throws me off on Windows when I'm trying to C-n and C-p around, getting hit with new document and printing dialogs all over the place :)

One more for the keybindings here (actually, they're more like readline keybindings -- C-h being the biggest difference). I would rather like to know how to set up those keybindings pervasively on graphical Linux applications. (The terminal and Emacs already have them, of course, but not the browser.)

On a related note, I like the command key being solely responsible for most GUI application commands (so it doesn't conflict with the above), and would probably also want to incorporate that into an ideal Linux setup. I wonder if someone makes a Linux distro with this sort of thing preconfigured.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#286

The app stores need what Steam has added a touch of lately, other lists curated by anyone that highlight good games. The Appstore top lists are full of bad games and ones I am tired of seeing. You can't hide them and they still show even if you bought them. Places like Touch Arcade and other curations also highlight lots of great games. There needs to be the ability to make curated lists like a mall within the app st…

Sadly, this will never happen: All of the bullshit f2p apps out there generate incredible revenue for Apple. Clash of clans alone generates 1M/day. That's 300k/day Apple gets for doing nothing. Apple would have to give up that free cash.... Not happenimg.

I can't see Apple looking at it as "free cash."

The App Store generates such an insubstantial amount of cash (for Apple, as compared to their other platforms and products) that it would be completely insane for them not to focus on the long-term quality of the store — which would be a driver for their hardware sales.

I am absolutely certain that they realise this, but it just happens to be an incredibly difficult problem to solve without basically rejecting 90% of the apps that get submitted.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#287
post #142

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I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work. The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a res…

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

Apple is 100% guilty of this. Of course consumers will prefer free or very cheap software, but what most of them don't realise is that software is STILL very expensive to produce and maintain, so there will be a perverse incentive to extract value in other ways.

The solution is very simple: ban buying gems, virtual dollars and all that crap.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

- Xcode - Sketch - Pixate - Framer Studio - iTerm - Fluid - Keynote - Pages - Quick cast - Cloud App Granted I haven't looked into a lot of these to see if they've picked up Linux or Window's support. However I doubt any of the one's I've listed are all on Linux, which I'd for sure need to do any development work. Some of these I'm sure have alternatives but the one app I just can't do without is Sketch. Gimp doesn't…

Side note but, not sure why anyone would bother with wine + hackery these days. Virtualbox works perfectly fine for running any Windows apps you "can't do without". Throwing a few gigs of RAM at running a Windows VM to run these apps is not really an issue if you have a modern rig.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#290
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear the substantial difference between Clash of Clans selling you gems that make your building finish faster and LOL selling you XP boosts?

Gladly. First off, i need to clarify how the two work, since they work substantially different to one another: LOL boosts come in two variants, but the net effect is the same: XP income per time unit played is doubled. You can spend more money to have them apply to more time units played, but you can't increase the effects of the boosts. They do nothing else. (I assume rising in level also pushes one into higher leve…

Lol have level cap. So after a while xp boosts are pointless. What they really sell is cosmetics and rune pages
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