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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

#491

Post by thesagan »

jawngee wrote: post #403
thesagan wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a fresh install from a seemingly healthy, semi-recent MBP and Yosemite's WindowServer seemed to begin a slow strangulation on my machine. Solved it by buying a top-of-the-line machine, which I'm sure Apple is loving.

Gotta be a hardware issue of some variety. I'm running Yosemite on a MBPro Retina mid-2012 with zero issues at all.

Hmmmm, possibly my slow-as-could-be hard drive. The SSD in my newer machine really does make a HUGE difference, to speak obviously ;)

I have the feeling my old machine is using a bit of VRAM when WindowServer starts getting too heavy.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#492

Post by endemic »

yaeger wrote: post #310
seanalltogether wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple hasn't pushed this. Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

>otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. Like LITE version and Pro version of an app? Yeah, Why don't aht exist? Oh wait, it does. The devs just choose to make a free app and then have the pro version as in app purchase. But I guess the devs doing it that way is also Apples fault. Somehow everything is Apples fault according to you people.

No, the goal is to have only _one_ version of an app, with a time limit or limit to the # of times it can launch, etc., which Apple doesn't have any provision for. IAP for content is the next best thing, otherwise you have to maintain two separate apps, which is objectively terrible.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#493

Post by soylentcola »

pmelendez wrote: post #440
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.

I didn't have any problem with Vista either and I feel your pain, most people I speak with seems to love to hate Vista. I also have a similar feeling when somebody tells me that Windows 8 was only good for touch devices (I enjoyed it in a HP 8710w and didn't miss the touchscreen at all)

My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening programs or files much faster. Then 7 combined the quick launch bar and the taskbar to include pinning common apps to the bottom of your screen (more like the OSX dock). So between launching 90% of your programs from the taskbar and search&query for the rest, the Start menu was mostly legacy...

...but with Win8 I've learned just how many people never stopped doing things the old way. Does a full-screen Start make sense? Not particularly. But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds. And while you're looking at the search results, you aren't really working actively on what's in your other running apps. Otherwise, you never really see it if you don't want to use it.

I'm glad 10 has shrunk Start back down because my minor complaint has always been that the full screen Start was just a little "jarring" but that's about it. If nothing else, it will make the old school Start menu die hards (read: the faculty I deal with) happier I guess.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#494

Post by dragonwriter »

soylentcola wrote: post #493
pmelendez wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't have any problem with Vista either and I feel your pain, most people I speak with seems to love to hate Vista. I also have a similar feeling when somebody tells me that Windows 8 was only good for touch devices (I enjoyed it in a HP 8710w and didn't miss the touchscreen at all)

My impression of Windows 8 (for most use cases at least) has always been that it's essentially Win7 with the beginnings of some "transitional" stuff tacked on. Still, they are mostly unobtrusive unless you never moved away from the old "drill down through menus" method of launching programs from the Start menu. Vista introduced a search function (to finally catch up with OSX's Spotlight) that made finding and opening…

> But if you're just hitting the Windows key and typing the name of what you're looking for, you only see it for a few seconds.

Which I'm probably not doing if I'm going from one program with a WIMP-optimized interface to another program with a WIMP-optimized interface; context-switching to keyboard-driven mode is a bigger UX loss than the start screen is there.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#495

Post by mgkimsal »

Steko wrote: post #232
walterbell wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more about what they don't do to help developers make money. A web search will find research papers on software ecosystems, which discuss best practices for mutually-reinforcing, virtuous circle, feedback loops between platforms and developers. Stardock's 2014 report touches on related topics, http://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2014.p...

For not helping developers make money, developers sure do make a lot of money on iOS compared to other mobile platforms.

it's not that they don't make money, but they don't allow developers to operate good businesses. being able to give trials to users, or to handle advertising in certain ways, or to have more flexibility with payments, etc - all of these things would be beneficial for businesses to be able to control directly, but they can't, as they're in the walled garden.

Many are making money right now, but I would suggest they don't have terribly good businesses, in that they don't own the relationship with the end user. One change of Apple's policies can put you out of business.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#496

Post by mherdeg »

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…

It's funny you should say "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."

That's funny because …

I just surrendered my MacBook Pro to an Apple Store for service yesterday because the external display mysteriously stopped working and the system won't fully boot. The on-site service tech was super competent but totally baffled and sent the machine away for Apple to replace components until things start working again.

And today Apple just released OS X 10.10.3 Supplemental Update which has description "The OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 Supplemental Update fixes a video driver issue that may prevent your Mac from starting up when running certain apps that capture video."

Hmmmmmmm.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#497

Post by jamiesonbecker »

task_queue wrote: post #465
lloeki wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is changing Recently I challenged myself to learn more about USB, HID devices and kernel development, so I partially reverse engineered and wrote a driver for the Xbox One controller. This is great and all, but it needs to be signed for people to use it without lowering a level of defense. Turns out you don't just need to be an Apple Developer, you also need to make a special request and regenerate your certif…

I believe this is similar to Microsoft's driver model, where at the end of the day, they decide what's signed or not and thus what can hook into the kernel. Stallman was prescient.

UEFI's secure boot enables Microsoft to force out other operating systems in hardware:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

(+1 for the RMS reference)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#498

Post by jamiesonbecker »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #392
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…

I've been running Win7 on a Dell Optiplex 980 for years, and have never had a BSOD. Except yesterday when I pressed Ctrl-Up arrow/Ctrl-Right/Ctrl-Down in Visual Studio. That was just asking for it :o) (Ctrl-Up flips the screen).

I've been running Debian Wheezy Linux for years. A few minor issues in Word 2010 (it always opens on my top screen!) and playing GTA4. Never had a BSOD. :)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#499

Post by zxcvcxz »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #454
Rapzid wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I use to dual boot windows I never updated and always "restarted" by just holding the power button down (stupid, yes I know, but it's the only way to reboot it as fast as I'm used to when booted into Linux). Never installed updates and it always worked fine, until I wanted to install updates, then everything broke. I assume this was just caused by waiting too long between updates. My solution was to delete the windows partition and just use a VM.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#500

Post by Flow »

thesagan wrote: post #389
reustle wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These kinds of issues are why I always suggest people do fresh installs of operating systems, and not upgrades.

I did a fresh install from a seemingly healthy, semi-recent MBP and Yosemite's WindowServer seemed to begin a slow strangulation on my machine. Solved it by buying a top-of-the-line machine, which I'm sure Apple is loving.

I discovered a weird interaction between f.lux and fullscreen gaming. They seemed to fight about which gamma etc to use.

It was nothing you could see, and other than a jerky in-game mouse you did not notice it. And after an hour of playing, dying cmd+tabbing out to Safari to surf while waiting for respawn, WindowServer core dumped, logging out all users in an instant.

This is fixed in 10.10.3. The jerky mouse pointer problem still remains. I don't use f.lux anymore.

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