Poorly Rendered

I have been watching the ongoing spat between Adobe and Apple about how Flash is “not allowed” on the iPhone and iPad OS.

Apple control the iPhone and iPad OS very carefully, to ensure that the user experience is as good as it can be. This means that they try not to allow dubious apps in the App Store (although there were all those fart apps – did people really pay money for those?), and it means that they are now telling developers that they cannot use third-party libraries that sit between the app and the OS.

I mentioned this second issue in my previous post about iPhone OS v4, and how in my view it makes perfect sense for Apple to do this, because relying on a third-party library to be bug-free and to use all the latest OS features (as well as to be updated in a timely fashion when new OS features are released) is dangerous for Apple.

Flash in particular is a contentious point, because on the MacOS, it performs horribly. Even when using the 10.1 beta versions, it is horribly slow – you get mouse cursor lag on a Core 2 Duo CPU with ample RAM. So in my opinion, Apple are right to say to Adobe that Flash should not be allowed on their OS until it works. Basically.

Well, after all the posturing, and the immature ads Adobe has taken out saying how much they love Apple “but …”, I had another thought: it’s time Adobe showed the world how good their Flash Player is on the iPhone!

Adobe should release a Flash Player that can be installed on a jailbroken iPhone or iPad.

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Popularity: 100% [?]

This week, Apple had one of their famous announcements. As usual it was on at an unfriendly time of day for me, since I live in the UTC+0700 timezone (meaning it started at midnight on the Thursday/Friday) – but I still stayed awake to watch it. I am a registered iPhone developer and I myself have an iPhone 3G, so I am interested in Apple’s announcements generally, and in particular I am interested in the iPhone OS announcements.

So we have all seen the stuff that was publicly announced, and that is all I am using as source material for this post – as well as some of the online ‘gossip’ sites. I am not breaking any NDAs or talking about anything that is specifically marked as “Apple Confidential” on the iPhone Developers section of the Apple Developers site.

After the event, I have been listening to people complaining about a few items. Specifically, the biggest complaints have been:

1. The new section in the developers’ agreement about only allowing code written in C/C++/ObjectiveC and Javascript to be interpreted by Safari in a web application.
2. The new version of iPhone OS will only support iPhone 3G and 3GS in “summer” and the iPad in “fall”.
3. The headline feature (multitasking) only works on the iPhone 3GS.

I will address these in order.

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Popularity: 35% [?]

Linux has been with us in one form or another for a very long time now. The first ‘real’ distribution of Linux was released over 16 years ago – in dog years that’s 112, and in computer years that’s like … forever.

The first version of Linux that I remember was Yggdrasil, which was released (according to wikipedia) in December 1992. However, the first one that was really usable was Slackware, released in 1993 (again, according to teh ‘Pedia).

Back then, the whole Linux thing was purely for techies.

I was a young programmer who was caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 2, when a friend at work showed me this new operating system that was available for the Atari ST. As someone who was both an Atari ST owner and a total nerd, I thought this MINIX thing sounded fantastic, and got a copy from my friend. Making it boot from my ridiculously-expensive 20MB hard disk, rather than booting from floppy and then mounting the hard disk, took me weeks – but once it was done I could settle down and look at how to write device drivers, and how to use Unix-like system calls. There was no internet available to mortals back then, and the ‘man’ system had not yet arrived in Minix-land.

Fast forward a couple of years, and I was a young programmer caught in the horrors of coding for DOS 3.3x and Windows 3.1, as well as venturing forth into the exciting new world of Windows NT. My friend showed me Yggdrasil Linux running on a PC. This had advantages, in that PCs were by then cheap enough to build from parts, and those parts had become inexpensive enough that you could put a system together for relatively little money.

So I built my first Linux machine.

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Popularity: 81% [?]

People like to read.

There is something about reading that is totally unlike, say, watching a movie or listening to music.

It does not matter if the book is written on actual paper, on a computer screen or on a handheld device designed specifically for portability and long battery life.

I read recently (on http://daringfireball.net/) that some publishers are not sure how to handle this newfangled technology stuff. At first glance, it is easy to think that this could be the same as the problems surrounding music and movies – but there is a fundamental difference between those types of content, and books:

Traditionally, publishers release a book in the expensive hardback (or hardcover) format for a period of time, and then later release it for a much lower price in paperback form.

Given this business model, it makes sense that they would try to sell as many hardback books as they can, before they then drop the prices and then sell the paperback edition. Of course some people prefer the hardback because it is more robust, has larger print or larger pages, or it just feels like a ‘real book’ – but for the most part, after the paperback has been released that’s what most people buy.

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Popularity: 15% [?]

If you wanted to buy a new phone and you were trying to make up your mind which one you wanted, what things would you be taking into consideration to help you decide which one was right for you?

Here are the things I want to be thinking about:

• Quality of the screen and the user interface.
• Usability of the keyboard.
• How long does the battery last? Is it removable?
• How well does it interoperate with different systems (e.g. MacOS, Windows, ‘net-based systems)?
• How much does it cost?
• What are its dimensions? How much does it weigh?
• What frequency bands does it work on, and what data formats (GPRS/EDGE/3G) does it support?
• How much memory does it have, and what kind of memory cards (if any) does it take?

But every single time I go to a review by so-called knowledgeable people about the latest and greatest phones, you know what they talk about?

Mobile phone carriers in the US.

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Popularity: 11% [?]

As of yesterday evening (local time here), people in the US have been able to pre-order the iPad. Apparently.

The Apple Store worldwide was taken down for about an hour, and the only one that was reopened with the ability to pre-order the iPad was the US one.

And yet it seems like everyone is falling over themselves to shout about this like it’s the next great event! All the websites are proclaiming this new fantastic piece of news, shouting it from the rooftops!

But what does it really mean?

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Popularity: 22% [?]

My Windows 7 experience probably reads a lot like a lot of other people’s experiences. I put the RC1 onto my wife’s PC as soon as it came out, as she was running VISTA at the time (I blame Spore). I then dallied with a dual boot system on my own machine as XP SP3 was running my racing simulators just fine and I didn’t need to splash out on a memory upgrade to make my machine games worthy in W7. Once I’d got the extra memory though there was no real reason to keep XP around longer than it took me to find a cross disk migrate tool so I could move my PATA installed W7 onto my SATA drive, for which I thank Acronis who sell an awesome bunch of tools to handle exactly this sort of thing.

So about a week ago I get a MASSIVE panic on when I see a message pop up telling me that my RC1 install will roll over and stick its legs in the air (and not in a good way) at the end of Feb. Now, I’ve been running this install as my main desktop for 9 months, as my wife has on hers. So in very little time I have to install two Windows 7s without losing any program data, settings, game saves and all the other gumph you accumulate on your desktop machine. I really really don’t want to do a fresh install, and my wife tells me that if I mess with her Sims3 neighbourhoods she will have parts of my person as adornment, if you know what I’m saying.

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Popularity: 16% [?]

This is a new blog, started because I like to post stuff of general tech interest, and thought it better to have a proper blog rather than using a ‘personal’ website to vent my rantings.

The intention is to use this site to post whenever interesting stuff arises – lets see how it turns out!

Popularity: 19% [?]