SecondLife on IPad

You must buy gadgets like I buy shoes.

What I meant by that, and also nodding towards Argents post, is that they're not going to allow a direct competitors API code to run on there, they'll pursue other options first, if they can. Sure you can have flash and WM on a Mac, but typically it's not going to be code from the direct competitor, like MS or Adobe (tho it may, this is about iPad). It's usually going to be a third party's code that makes that possible. It's typical of a company to not want to support a competitor in any way, shape, or form. Just like nVidia disabling Physx on systems that have an ATI card present in them. It's not just to make your own product appear more special, but to limit usability as much as you can of the other guys product as well. In Apples case, that would be to limit dependance on flash by not allowing it natively, and seeking work-arounds rather than to just allow flash code to run natively. Not only do the big companies want to be trend-setters, they also want to be the *standards setter*, like MS, Intel, Apple, etc.. have shown they love to try to do. You can't set a defacto industry standard if people are easily and freely using something else, and which is why they all try like maniacs to get their own proprietary thing adopted by the masses, instead of just going with what's proven to work... just look at Sony for a good example.

I blame that on the other Vendors. They got lazy & careless. Basically thought people were morons.

The only real driver issues I've had is with Older stuff. Worms Armageddon wont even run!!! DAMMIT!!!!

Meh. Nothing worse than when they went from Windows 3.1 to 95. I still gotta go over the diff between the 2003 & 2008 server changes.

And no, I wont mention Windows ME. Its like how the Highlander movies treated the 2nd movie.... like it NEVER existed.

Having encountered TRULY computer illiterate people.... they didnt know what I meant by OS or Operating System ...... I can see an appeal for the iPad. If they havent the slightest clue what a "hard drive" is, then I doubt they'd notice anything bad about the iPad.

But then again.... these folks keep me working and making $$$$$

Sorry for my misunderstanding, your quote indicated you were talking about all of Apple's platforms, not just the iPhone OS. Yes, the Iphone OS is closed; the Mac is not. Flash on the Mac is Adobe's code. The Windows Media code used to be from Microsoft, but they (not Apple) chose to stop updating it and instead now endorse a third party's product.

Just out of curiosity, how do you see Adobe being a "direct competitor" of Apple?

Flash v. Quicktime
PhotoShop v. Aperture
Premiere v. FinalCut

Hmmm, I never considered Quicktime equivalent to Flash, but you have good points about Aperture and FinalCut. I tend to forget about those, as they are expensive and far beyond my needs.

For a time Quicktime was one of the major media formats on the internet. Flash has been one factor in its decline.

Apple and Adobe have had a hate-hate relationship since the mid '90s.

It started with Postscript versus Quickdraw printers, but it was the whole NeXT thing that really pissed Adobe off. And then what Adobe did really pissed Apple off. See, here's what it was like:

Apple was all "hey, we're going to abandon Mac OS and switch to NeXTstep"

And Adobe was all "oh no you're not!"

And Apple was all "yes we are, it's so cool"

And Adobe was all "OK, but we're not going to convert Photoshop to NeXTstep"

And Apple was all

And so Apple made Carbon

And then Apple was all "We're going to Intel"

And Adobe was all "OK, but we're still not going to convert Photoshop for Cocoa"

(because Cocoa was NeXTstep reborn)

And Apple was all

And so Apple promised 64 bit Carbon

And then Adobe took like two extra years to get Photoshop ported to Intel

And Apple was all

And so Apple said "We're not going to do 64 bit Carbon, you have to convert to Cocoa"

And Adobe was all

And Apple was all

OMG this is better than Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie!

Wow, 6 pages and I still have no idea what anybody is talking about.

The fact that I've been sleeping with Steve Jobs for six years, and he STILL hasn't named anything after me.

That's what you get for laying down on the Jobs.

Bah-dum-bum-tshhhh!

A very BIG factor. Quicktime was one of the first, if not THE first media format with a compression ratio good enough to make streaming video over the internet practical (at that time). When Macromedias Flash became a big player, and it was obvious it was more flexible than Quicktime, it just made things even worse between Apple and Adobe when Adobe bought up Macromedia. Now flash is everywhere (in both ads and media) and it's kinda hard to even find a native quicktime format stream anymore.

I wouldn't really call a design goal of trying to make technology invisible to the user a "vision problem". The same reasoning behind their mice is exactly the same as for iPods and iPhones etc. Less buttons equals less technology getting in the way of what the device is supposed to do. Tech savvy users tend to not appreciate this (to put it mildly) but remember we're the minority. Anyhow, the mice Apple churn out today do have a right-click, and the OS has always been right-click enabled. Why is a right-click or lack thereof right or wrong anyway - we're heading away from it. How often do you see people right-clicking in Star Trek? And we all know Star Trek is a perfect representation of what the future holds

I'm in two minds about the iPad. Other than the name being dodgy. First impression was the bezel is big and bugger all effort went into the home screen. The bezel isn't as bad as I first thought because the device has no right way up and you need somewhere to hold it regardless of orientation. Certainly not as bad as the Kindle's bezel. The home screen really needs more work though. Ability to place widgets on it would be a big improvement. Anything which means info and notifications can be seen at a glance. The apps demoed in the keynote looked quite polished. I'd rather read content on an iPad than a laptop because it's light and completely silent for starters. But it's a luxury device rather than something most will need so I'm in two minds whether to get one. Though I guess I could justify the cost - it would see more use than my iPod. The one reaction I don't get is "It's just a big iPod Touch". What else were people expecting exactly and why is that a bad thing? Apple have built on their OS designed for touch input. Using Mac OS X would have made little sense.

Would quite like to see Touch Life make full use of the iPad. It feels unfinished and cobbled together on the iPhone though. It's one thing after another. I tried to upload a photo to SL but it crops it to a square rather then resize/stretch, discarding much of the original image. Then it forces you to type using the portrait keyboard - the only chat app I have which doesn't support landscape. I logged in to reply to an offline IM and the message didnt appear. Then I tried to send someone a folder and it couldn't do that (can only send individual items). Once they finish it properly it'll be mighty useful.

EDIT: Oh, and if Apple caves on Flash they better offer a FlashBlock plugin like the one in Firefox. I'd rather poke my eyes out with sharp stick than browse the web with Flash enabled.

On the contrary, trying to minimize the interface too far makes it more complex, and harder for the user.

Consider the mouse.

Instead of remembering that the left button is "select" and right button is "menu", you have to remember what command, option, and shift do for every single program you use. And you do have to memorize these things, because there are operations that you can't get to through ANY discoverable interface. Not through the menu. Not through the context menu. ONLY through command/shift/option clicks. And you have to remember not to hold the mouse button too long, or else that'll activate the contextual menu operation... but only in programs where that operation has been implemented. Great for propeller-heads, lousy for ordinary humans.

So even if you simplify your life by getting a regular two button plus scroll wheel mouse, you still have to deal with the heritage of the one button mouse. Complicating the interface for the sake of minimalism.

Consider the iPod Shuffle. The 1st and 2nd generation shuffles have a nuce simple control, logical, well laid out. The 3rd generation has more operations than the previous versions, jammed into only three buttons with a series of complex squeeze-and-hold-and-doubleclick operations that only appeal to propeller-heads.

This isn't "making technology invisible", this is "shoving technology in your face".

But Argent, minimal is the new black!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA

It's from The Onion, and REALLY worth watching.

IPad/pod/phone does not support having multiple apps running. So...(initially) no.

And how is this scenario different from a multi monitor setup, as I have been using for years, or simply having 2 windows open side by side, as is possible on any computer since 1995?

Apple has a long history of this. Remember how it took forever for a Mac OS to graduate from "cooperative multitasking"?

I can kind of see some virtue of "controlled multitasking" for a handheld smartphone. It's awfully easy to do something awfully stupid in an app that hoses the thing's usability as a phone. I can't see any reason for it on an iPad, though, so I'll bet this will be a short-lived situation.

That wasn't because they didn't want to go multitasking, it's because the fundamental design of the old Mac OS was broken from the start. One huge problem was memory handles. When Mac OS handed you a chunk of memory, you didn't get the address of that memory, you got the address of a handle that pointed to the memory, and any time you called "get next event" and handed control to the OS that memory chunk could be moved and you would have to fetch it again.

If they used preemptive multitasking, then that could happen at ANY TIME. You'd be reading or (worse) writing something into memory, and all of a sudden it'd be someone else's memory. Hello memory corruption... within milliseconds your OS would be a pile of splinters on the floor.

One thing that might has helped (ironically) was that they used memory partitions. You had to decide how much memory each application could have, and the OS would actually allocate that much memory to the application, permanently. It would always use that much, and it could never use less. Kind of like the old LSL scripting model, except instead of running a little script in that partition you're trying to run Photoshop there.

The problem is that desk accessories and OS components were still running alongside the application, so that while you could potentially interrupt applications and switch between them, all the glue in between the apps would still cause corruption... and the multitasking hack was originally implemented by making each app look like a desk accessory to all the rest, so that didn't help.

They eventually had some limited concurrency on OS 8 or so, but by that time every application was full of workarounds for the old cooperative multitasking charade, and they really had to throw the whole thing away and start over.