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iOS 7: Catch me if you can

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Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#61

Post by alayne »

jenius wrote: post #43

Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps: - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. - More work to port anywher…

I find the web programming model to be very difficult and limiting relative to desktop or mobile UI development. I don't take on any development work in that area because it is so unpleasant to me (JavaScript, HTML/CSS, DOM manipulation, and making that stuff work on multiple browsers reliably). I suspect I am not the only one hoping that someone comes up with an entirely new web development model that is much more like classic desktop UI development, and portable. JavaServer Faces was one attempt I can think of. GWT is another.

The user experience with web apps isn't there yet either, particularly for mobile where you don't have a mouse, keyboard, and screen real estate to burn.

There are of course many other advantages web-based applications. Good application UX is just not one of those advantages and I think it is the main reason that native continues to rule mobile, not anything Apple or any other mobile OS vendor is doing.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#62

Post by pja »

Gravityloss wrote: post #57

Why is blur supposed to be computationally intensive? It's very simple mathematically...

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.)

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#63

Post by mason55 »

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.

> 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

Funnily enough that exactly corresponds to Apple's dark period

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#64

Post by pohl »

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…

CoreAnimation is another great example: it was first made public in the summer of '06. It's easier to see why they were working on such a thing now.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#65

Post by sjtgraham »

jenius wrote: post #43

Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps: - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. - More work to port anywher…

> Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development.

I don't think you know what a low level language is. Also, Obj-C is quite a breeze to learn.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#66

Post by FireBeyond »

coldtea wrote: post #44
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'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. Catch up? Actually it was more of a "let's go another 100 miles ahead, Android seems to be catching up finally to were we've been the last 3 years".

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.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#67

Post by ChikkaChiChi »

Apple doesn't need to introduce delicious eye-candy to its interfaces that nobody needs to hamper web developers...they can just keep neutering the shit out of WebView by keeping it several generations behind the Safari javascript engine.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#68

Post by cma »

scott_s wrote: post #15
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.…

I think you may be underestimating the impact of the touch screen. It's wasn't just that it was touch, it was the phone. I can't find it, but I remember reading industry reactions that were incredulous that it was even possible to have enough power to drive the screen for significant periods. That large touch screen really set the iPhone apart.

Seems doubtful that people would be incredulous over driving the screen; capacitive touchpads of the time didn't take much power. Color iPAQs from 8 years earlier managed a few hours with a CCFL backlight--white LEDs weren't widely available back then, and lithium-ion batteries of 1999 sucked.

If iPhone guts powering a windows phone with a resistive screen came out before iPhone, it wouldn't have sold like crazy. Windows phone software had a start menu... the fastest text input was drawing misunderstood letters with a stylus, resistive screens had to be manually calibrated and were very inaccurate unless using a stylus; iphone-like typing just didn't work.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#69

Post by kevinbluer »

From my brief, albeit limited time, running iOS 7 beta 2 on my 3rd gen iPad I have to say that I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. Bugginess aside, it just feels like a significant step backwards in terms of intuitiveness and usability.

It's as if Apple (obviously) had to do something and prioritized jumping on the flat UI bandwagon over a well thought-out / polished experience.

Re: iOS 7: Catch me if you can

#70

Post by wmf »

FireBeyond wrote: post #60
coldtea wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. No, they really didn't. Any citation?

Nokia N95. First available March 2007, three months before the iPhone was introduced. * Memory - 160MB, versus iPhone: 128MB. * CPU - Dual CPU, 332 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 (ARM11-based), versus Samsung 32-bit RISC ARM 1176JZ(F)-S v1.0 412 MHz * Display - iPhone: 320x480 18-bit 3.5", versus N95: 240x320 24-bit, 2.6" * Network ability: HSDPA 3.5G, versus iPhone: GSM/EDGE * Camera: 5MP, versus iPhone 2MP Much as…

My impression is that other 2007 phones were wasting their hardware on 1990s style UIs because their OSes were designed for used its performance.
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