maxi pad

Sure it will run iPhone OS. iPhone OS would run on any platform, Apple willing. I think Nokia is trying to go the same route with Maemo as Apple (and Palm), get a semi open OS to lock the customer base in. Populate it with enough apps and other content to keep the customers hooked.

Which is good for the publishers of operating systems and application developers, right? You want just enough similarity between two separately definable OS's to not be pain inducing to program for both at one and the same time. Everybody can win at that kind of game.

While the theoretical possibility exists, I suspect that just as "automotive hot rodding" has largely lost its "core constituency" the overwhelming "appliance-like nature" of all operating systems (and HW) will see further decline in the spread of "hack" oriented devices.

There are many reasons that we are on the downhill side of "hobbyist" customization of computing devices, from commercialization of some of the most widely wanted personalization features (skins, audio changes and the like) to shear lack of technical ability/access ( who wants to guess how many changes this page has had in the WWW way-back machine, let alone speculate on how low it ranks on hits: http://developer.apple.com/tools/gcc_overview.html , and somehow I doubt MSFT would be proud to share stats on similar sites: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualc/default.aspx )

You think there is a reason this thing looks like it has the same color scheme as the CRT IMac? http://www.serialio.com/products/adaptors/usb_serial.php I would speculate that was about the last time any company was making physical apparatus for schools (as opposed to just software simulations).

iPad doesn't fit in pocket, thus iPod lives!

OmniGroup moving apps to iPad ... productivity FTW!
http://blog.omnigroup.com/2010/01/29/ipad-or-bust/

iPad will be more than a content consumption device.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. I personally think that Omni is cool company and has a better-than-average take on making useful / usable tools for Mac owners, but I don't {yet} think that most of the target market for iPads will be enthusiastic adopters of the kinds of things the Omni tools do. I could be very wrong and there might be millions of people of that dream of having technically oriented drawings, outlines and presentations that they can draw with their finger but these strike me as more suited to a "real" computer and the kind or peripherals that attache to 'em.

Yes, but will it blend?

Welcome back, Madaracs!

I can't for the life of me find it, but I think it was linked off of Daring Fireball, so I'll just summarize.

Before the iPad announcement, there was a blog posting basically saying that all apple has to do is make a bigger iPhone and it'll be a success. The key here is the integration. Apple has a huge infrastructure in place (iTunes, iTMS, AppStore, etc) and has experienced developers (iPhone/Touch) along with a lot of content deals (movies, TV, podcasts, etc) and having what is essentially an iPhone with a 9.7 inch screen is enough innovation that the product will be successful.

I agreed with him then, and I agree just as much if not more now. They've added support for older iphone/touch apps. I think that's underrated. This time (as opposed the Iphone 1.0) they ship with 100k apps ready to go. That's huge, especially for people that already bought a ton of apps.

I think this thing is going to be very successful for the non-geeks of the world. They get a netbook (just to check email and browse a bit) and they have to deal with drivers for their headphones, and their bluetooth keyboards/mice and they have to figure out how to get on the internet, and all that stuff. I think this thing, locked down as it is (and as much as that kind of bums me out) is perfect for the non-geeks.

Regarding Multitasking, I can see why people want it (again us geeks) but I don't see apple doing more than lipservice to it. I can't see apple having a system where grandma forgets that the hulu app, and the iWork app, and the Safari app, and the app she's currently working on are all sucking down processor power and grandma starts bitching about 2 hours of battery life to all her friends.

I could see for example a 2 process multitask, where if you go to run a "third" app, it asks you which of the other two to close. Especially considering the current state of affairs, where apps by design know that they can "be killed" at any time, I see that as a pretty decent compromise. I know that there will be rending of garments when the geeks start going "But if you can do TWO why cant you do THREE! Please allow THREE!" and then "I just need FOUR! That's all FOUR".

Not going to happen. This device needs to be, and I think will be, absolutely rock solid in terms of "crashing and hanging". (See Flash, lack thereof)

Morg "Anyone got $500 bux they can... um... lend me?" anti

Regarding the flash whining, that I'm sure about will stop being a discussion 12 months from now. This serves as a good example why Flash will never work on touch based devices, a demo of Farmville on the Nexus One (with Flash 10.1 beta); http://www.redmondpie.com/farmville-on-nexus-one-flash-10.1-demo-on-android-2.1-9140472/

Also; a Flash developer writes why he thinks it just cannot be done (in a user friendly way) on touch based devices; http://bit.ly/9DTLR3.

On the "problem of mouseover" -- a big lazy 'meh', as I have used various touchscreen that do seem to sorta work, I think the difference is that when the folks that write the drivers for touch-screens conceive of the various test cases that they'll need to prove that their implementation of the various modes of mouse control work in getting the pointer to where it needs to be, making "click" "click & drag" and "right click" all the other combos work is easy to spec.

How friggin' hard would be for the "mouse detect" layer of an iPad to detect "one, two, three" or more 'fingers' to represent "mouse over"? Not very....

Of course you could say TSO was a visionary genius decades of all others when, upon seeing the multiple button from Xerox Palo Alto transformed it into the "one button" mouse of the 1984 Mac knowing that it would make things SO MUCH BETTER FOR THE EVENTUAL DYNABOOK of the iPad OR you could be more realistic that the confluence of the two Steve's early notorious thriftiness and the elegant minimalism of "one button to rule them all" is sorta outdated...

Believe me, if the STUPID default control panel of Flash would be changed to allow folks to not just "allow access to microphone & camera < none installed > " to something like "tell site I am on a touchscreen" {or heaven forbid rely on the browser string to set that fact} Adobe could address 99% of mouse over issues.

All that being true, the points from morg are VERY DAMNED RELEVANT, as I am sure we can all relate to ridiculously memory hogging / CPU wasting apps that we have left to "multi-task" away the resources of our big fat expensive rigs rendering them useful for anything w/o a three fingered salute to invoke the "force quit" or "end process" selection on Mac or PC. TSO wants no such "escape hatch" on a device like a phone for LOTS of very good reasons. Like the battery life. Like the mysterious data sending. Like the potential to "hijack" through a trojan. And on and on. The whole "everything you hate about your computer is not part of the iPad" mantra. No "orbs of weakness" no "beachball of doom". No "not waking up becuase of stupid app hogging the "wake from sleep" sequence... Believe me, it won't be just non-geeks that realize what a wonderful thing tightly defined OS can be.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/22/2010 01:13PM by stan adams.

The rivals join forces.

The way the iPad/iPhone OS handles applications is very much nirvana for the average user who isn't yet a user of PCs. One way to start an app and one way to quit an app.

And I'm sure the mouse over issues could be solved, look at the Farmville demo. That's what you get.

Ok. Someone clear something up for me.

Why do I need Flash again?

I'm not talking about why do I need casual games. Or why do I need Hulu. Or why do I need stupid Band pages that are all one big SWF or Flash app.

I'm asking why do I need the ADOBE FLASH PLUG-IN specifically, as in what is it that IT can do that I can't do in other ways on said iPad.

Can I play video? Youtube says yes.
Can I play casual/free games? many times yes.
Can I have "locked down/well designed/walled garden" band pages? Uh, yeah.

What am I not getting in a iPad that I can get with Flash?

Seriously, other than the "that's what all the stuff out there uses" factor, which can easily change over the next 6 months lets say, what am is so technologically amazing about proprietary Flash stuff?

Morg "I think the more open the web, the better" anti

hip designers like Flash because it gives them the ability to make "moody" webssites

moody website helps companies that are old and kinda creepy at their core feel less so

Uh......

oookkkaaay :). It certainly SOUNDS like something you cant do in straight HTML5.....

or... something.

Morg "I'm hoping they start making more emo websites... then my life will be complete" anti

I just redesigned Molecular's website using jQuery and such. Many people think it's flash.

We initially had a music player which was HTML5 but nobody liked it. The jPlayer jquery module gracefully degrades from HTML5 audio to flash where necessary.

http://www.molecularmedia.com/

I plan on using video for everyone or one of the other gracefully degrading video libs. when we put up some video.

More sinister, pump up the GOTH... but seriously Tom shows off the sort of "slideshow of shows" that many folks feel makes their site less static / stodgy (and does so in a tasteful compellingly professional way) Bravo!

I remember when HTML coding was done in a simple text editor. How did I fall so far behind?

javacript has become so much more advanced with stuff like jquery, mootools, and scriptaliscious over the last four years. Flash is becoming the lazy way to do things in a lot of places.

John: I code in vi. Doesn't get more simple than that.

If someone built a timeline editor for one of the emerging JS vector animation libraries, Flash would have competition.

As it stands, the pieces are all there in at least two of the three major browsers to have open, cross-browser, standards-based, plug-inless rich multimedia.