iOS 9.3 Preview
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I have sweet memories of spending many a rainy day in the computer lab during recess on the candy-colored imacs, creating art on kidpix, putting together a crappy HTML site that would link to a friend's crappy HTML site, and playing nanosaur, bugdom, and the oregon trail.
Computer education is huge, but I'm not sure if iPads are the right/necessary stepping stone into using an actual computer. They seem more like entertainment consumption devices than creation driving devices where things get messy and frustrating and force you to fool around to fix them, learning in the process.
I've never owned one and I don't have any insight into how much good vs. harm (distraction) they do in the classroom. Anyone have any anecdotes or thoughts to share on Apple's continuing push into the classroom w/ the iPad?
He said:
> “I’ve been against Macintosh company lately. They’re trying to get everyone to use iPads and when people use iPads they end up just using technology to consume things instead of making things. With a computer you can make things. You can code, you can make things and create things that have never before existed and do things that have never been done before.”
The full story is here - http://impossiblehq.com/an-unexpected-ass-kicking/
I hope it doesn't seem like I'm trying to link to my own stuff, but you asked for anecdotes :-/
You are locked down to a small subset of site-licensed applications your domain administrator has deemed appropriate for the least common denominator in your age group. All forms of customization are disabled with Group Policy. Novell and Citrix application delivery are common, so you don't even have a Start menu but a proprietary launcher. Extremely aggressive Internet filtering bans large swaths of content about networking to prevent students from learning how to bypass the filter.
Our IT department enabled access to the hilariously antiquated QBasic environment only for students currently enrolled in a programming course and revoked it the next semester. You had to sign a special waiver saying you promised to only write code directly in fulfillment of course requirements and not do any independent experimentation or goofing around.
I get it, but K12 students on non-iPads aren't getting Linux, they're definitely not getting root, and they're probably not getting user-mode code execution either. You'd need to change the entire culture around K12 IT to make that happen.
The best way for kids to learn to be hackers is on their hardware, free from school or parental controls.
In terms of evaluating Apple as a company, one has to look at their whole product line. iPads may be locked down, but Macs are great platforms for kids to tinker. They ship with a ton of programming languages and integrate with all sorts of free open source technologies.
And I agree that personal hardware is the best place to hack. Decades ago, school computers were the only place to hack because school was the only place to actually put hands on a computer. Today computers (even Macs) are much more affordable, especially used.
No more sharing or copying knowledge for free for those filthy free-loading kids!
That's what the polish government do (or did try to do) - instead of paying licenses, they hired people to build free educational books.
That's why I think the Raspberry Pi et al are so important, they're disposable yet fully capable pieces of hardware that kids can hack on.
The Linux command line and the permissions system are incredibly unfriendly to adults, never mind kids. Have you tried to set up a web server with PHP on a Pi? It makes no concessions at all to beginners. You might as well be setting up Ubuntu Server LTS - only it doesn't give you any clues about security.
I'd be more interested in something that updated the experience of the old 8-bit micros, which dropped you straight into a simplified programming environment, and gave you a path to bare-metal machine code if you wanted to take it.
Maybe something like a Python IDE, with a way through to Linux for expert users, but with basic extras - a web server, a mail server, a VPS that could connect to other Pi users, a few other options - pre-installed and ready to go?
There's something to be said for those old machines. Basic was a good learning intro and assembly is still valid today. I remember Logo too.. I'm just chomping at the bit when my kids are old enough to dust off the C-64 and start diving in.
He faced a problem one time where his Python program wouldn't execute, and I unfortunately had to explain to him what shebang lines do, how to use them, the UNIX executable bit, etc.
The Raspberry Pi is indeed not as educational as it is made out to be. It may have been envisioned as a tool for classrooms, but in practice the Pi is just a toy for hackers. It's not like it was ever going to do much for the classroom anyway. Instead of spending $40 to teach a kid to program using Linux on a Pi, you could spend $0 to teach them to program using Linux in a virtual machine.
The other default, raspbian, has a game programming environment on the desktop.
Though hackernews usually just runs stories on the pi being used for 'smart mirrors' and emulation stations.
Yes, you need a computer to compile code, but I think k-12 is not really the code compiling scene-- maybe 9th-12th graders, sure, but that's not what the teachers are going to teach (high school teachers that can teach programming are very rare.)
Playing Oregon Trail.
But there are always one or two kids (I was one of them and I bet you were too!) who wanted to play with code or build something. For those interested in computers, we'll find how to get our hands on them!
For example, "Hopscotch" - http://www.gethopscotch.com - looks promising. It's a visual programming language (plug and socket) with graphics primitives that includes tutorial videos/lessons and a social networking aspect for sharing your creations. It looks like they've gotten some engagement, with people creating little games.
In 1951 Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) as part of the team which ran SEAC, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer.[2] SEAC was the U.S.'s first stored-program computer to become operational.
""" The University of Manchester's Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM)[15] is generally recognized as world's first electronic computer that ran a stored program—an event that occurred on 21 June 1948.[16][17] However the SSEM was not regarded as a full-fledged computer, but more a proof of concept predecessor to the Manchester Mark 1 computer, which was first put to research work in April 1949. On 6 May 1949 the EDSAC in Cambridge ran its first program, making it arguably "the first complete and fully operational regular electronic digital stored-program computer".[18] It is sometimes claimed that the IBM SSEC, operational in January 1948, was the first stored-program computer;[19] this claim is controversial, not least because of the hierarchical memory system of the SSEC, and because some aspects of its operations, like access to relays or tape drives, were determined by plugging.[20] """
Still not someone whose words on the subject should be dismissed lightly, of course.
Remember computers are not just limited to educating students about computers -- they can function as alternatives to pencil and paper in some cases. For example, they can help students compose papers who otherwise would not be able to write (a student might have a disorder that interferes with the ability to translate thoughts/words into handwriting motion, but otherwise the student might be perfectly capable of composing sentences and logical thoughts -- so dictation is groundbreaking.) They can also help teachers explore understanding of concepts in a way that's uncoupled from traditional representations -- for example letting students answer questions by pointing at pictures instead of speaking.
I don't really know the full extent of it, but from special education teachers I know, the iPad seems to have become an essential tool because it makes these alternative interactions so much easier than they were before.
My two year old can work an iPad, but has no idea what a mouse or keyboard is. It's crazy when you watch a child that young manipulating technology like they know what they're doing (turn on, swipe open, find YouTube Kids app, watch Thomas the Train, press home button when done to find a new app).
To think that this can't be applied to educating children of any age seems a bit naive.
Because you have given them access to an iPad, but not a (real) computer?
This is going to mirror the helicopter parenting conversation, where other opinions are an attack on the way we were raised.
The teachers seemed very excited about it and about building on the experience.
If I give my 10 yo son a 15 year old Dell laptop with OpenBSD and wifi over a USB dongle, and a book (1), he learns python.
Give him a 27" iMac and he learns to find and play meaningless random crappy Flash games, watch Minecraft videos, and occasionally play minecraft or do something else, like looks something up, checks his homework assignments, et
Give him an iPhone or an iPad, he just learns to find and play meaningless random crappy iOS games.
I honestly think letting my daughter buy her own ipad was poor parenting on my part.
I begged for a computer and finally got a C64. Typing basic was soooo slow going then...
The default MicroBee install came with games, but they were all written in basic, with source code included. My proudest earliest computing memory for the age of 10 is editing the game code to "Cricket" to get it to spout profanities when you hit a 4 or a 6. At this stage I didn't even know what the word hacking meant.
Several years later I got my first PC, a 386 with Windows 3.1. I was thoroughly confused that I couldn't find the source code to change anything. Eventually I found Gorillas and Snake in gw-basic, but it wasn't the same.
I'm forever grateful that the creators of the MicroBee chose to provide games in interpreted basic. I am certain that I wouldn't have pursued a career in programming if not for that initial spark of wanting to understand how things work underneath the hood.
Pointing this out because (from this comment) you seem like the kind of person who'd want to be correct: Gorillas and Snake were qbasic (and they were DOS programs, even though you could run them in a window on Win 3.x (from MS-DOS 5.x or 6.x)). gw-basic was the old, numbered-line interpreter that ran on DOS 3.x (or maybe even earlier).
Again, no trying to be "well-actually guy"; just trying to help preserve some nostalgia. (-:
The old laptop, the iMac, and the book are all in the same room.
I credit much of my childhood computer engineering learning to having to hack on an old cruddy laptop, where either I got nothing or had to learn to make do with what I had. If Minecraft were more readily available to me back then, I wouldn't have much of a reason to learn Python or anything else.
Nu-huh!
C'mon. Is this what HN has come to?
Look, I'm made an observation: put a kid in a room with three objects, 2 computers and 1 book, and in only one combination does he in fact learn python! He knows the terminal is on the iMac. I know he knows, because he knows how to ssh to another server to launch our Minecraft server. I've shown him python is there. But he doesn't use it.
He frankly seems quite proud of his "hacker laptop" that boots to console. He logs in, starts X, and gets a full-screen xterm running tmux. It even has an antenna sticking out. He thinks it's cool.
Fine. Whatever floats his boat.
But, seriously, if you're writing code, you are quite literally not doing any of the other things that you could be doing with that computer. E.g., browsing the internet, writing a document, drawing, etc, etc.
It's like saying "When I'm writing with this pencil, I'm not doing any of the other things I could be doing with this pencil." E.g., throwing it in the air, braking it in half, pulling the eraser out, sharpening it, whittling it down with a knife, splitting the wood to get the whole lead out, etc, etc.
I'm just stating a fact. There's no argument to be made there. If you want an argument, there are other things to argue about.
There are multiple to choose from, even if they aren't featured as app of the day.
Granted, they are much more limited than a desktop version, but good enough to stir the curiosity of creating something.
As other users said, I think they're trying to replace the textbook rather than replacing the computer lab. But alot of what we've seen so far shows that students may actually retain info better from a physical book. Also, netbooks with keyboards are probably better for typing &co. than much of the interface (while being quite a bit cheaper).
So it feels more like a shiny, expensive, early adopter/guinea pig program than this revolution in education. OTOH, there is a huge potential upside once the tech matures, and maybe it can't mature without starting somewhere.
There is something pretty special with the tablet, and the only thing that is changing is really the way input (and less so-output) is done.
As a kid, I also remember the power strips for the Apple lab were so janky, that if you accidently kicked it, it would reset the entire bank of computers.
Or those old 5 1/2 floppy disks that had exposed magnetic media that tended to get screwed up.
Logo-writer, kidpix (omg so great), Hypercard, were foundational to me.
But todays children have access to minecraft, and very soon Virtual Reality. There is no way I'd want to force the tools of my education on kids today.
I'm so excited for my (soon to be born) child.
In my day job we make educational HTML games for kids learning english and math. A heap of schools use this as part of lessons, and we get a lot of extremely positive feedback from teachers.
As to whether an iPad is better than a computer? From a kid's UX, and IT infrastructure POV, tablets are generally seen as better/easier to use and maintain.
At home, I try to keep my kids off screens whenever I can though...
Its buying new customers. If kids are literally raised on your products, you take them as yours before they even have money to buy computers in the first place. I went to a high school that used macbooks, and I'm probably the only person staunchly anti-Apple from my graduating class I know out of 50+ people - the vast majority of them are now primary Apple users over Windows, Android, Linux, etc.
Its not philanthropy, that's for sure.
I personally think its extremely important to get open, hackable hardware in the hands of students instead of some of the most locked down proprietary consumer devices to ever be pushed so aggressively on kids. For selfish reasons, because I don't want a proprietary world of tonka class computers and corporate controlled software - I want open platforms using open standards so I can use what I want and not be strong armed into some proprietary control by a business entity. The only way to get that is with an understanding and appreciation for hacker / open culture, and kids using ipads in class are definitely not getting exposure to anything like that.
The synopsis is that there's no substitute for shutting off screens 1-2 hours before bedtime. This coming from someone who not only uses f.lux but sometimes when needing to use the computer late, will adorn an old pair of sunglasses to further cut down on light from 3 monitors.
If you want you can turn f.lux into "darkroom" modes, which inverts the display and uses only the red channel.
https://www.ecse.rpi.edu/~schubert/Light-Emitting-Diodes-dot...
Here’s a sketch of the basic idea: https://dotcolordotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/filter-sp...
My quick google image search isn’t turning up any particularly good SPD graphs of real recent LCDs, but if you poke around you can surely find some.
In the experiment you linked, they used looking through orange-tinted safety glasses as a control, because such glasses basically filter out all of the relevant wavelengths.
Not sure I’d recommend regularly using your laptop with orange safety glasses though.
Notes has many features that I considered well implemented: a simple interface, native integration with the OS including sharing from and to the app, seamless iOS & OSX syncing over iCloud, decent search, PDF export.
I hope Apple keeps investing in it adding relevant, useful features, but without allowing it to become too big, like it happened to Evernote.
For me it's the best todo list, shopping list, notes of all sorts, url bookmarking, collaboration tool, etc.
Good to see competition from Apple in this regard.
There's also a Chrome app that wraps the site, which almost makes it feel like a real desktop app: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-keep-notes-....
Every single time I open the app it requires me to sign in again. Spent several hours Googling and trying different "Fixes" but can't narrow down why it wont stay signed in.
Hoping this is some edge case bug and they will release an update so I can use it. From what I hear it's actually a really great app.
Previously this has not been a problem.
Apple's Pages/Keynote/Numbers support WebDAV sync and 3rd-party file-share apps, e.g. https://panic.com/transmit-ios/, so there is precedent.
Once I had Evernote delete a months worth of notes randomly. I wish Google Keep was more refined.
Not that I care about Flux. But this is definitely not helping them.
Software running in the background is something Apple tightly controls in iOS (battery life and security being major concerns). They also don't let apps make changes to the OS appearance. That may be the wrong approach, but Apple is at least consistent in it. This was either an OS level feature or a no go from Apple's perspective. As a user I'm happy it's a feature!
It's just access control at the framework level. Apple could embed a copy in each application using the framework, but that's inefficient, so they install it at the system level.
However, it has nothing to do with rejecting apps because of it, and offering their own version of the functionality. Apple has always reserved this domain for themselves from day one, and f.lux would have had the exact same problems even if Apple hadn't been doing their own version of it.
> f.lux is patent pending. Do you make a cell phone, display, lighting system, or other cool sleep tech, and want to talk about collaboration? Email us: support@justgetflux.com
So happy it is being cloned but it would've be nice if it was just on the AppStore to begin with.
You can compile and sideload any software yourself using XCode and an AppleID. I run Gamma Thingy (a f.lux alternative) on my non-jailbroken iPhone. You can compile and run emulators, use any private API, whatever. Those apps will just never be in the App Store.
I don't want my screen to dim at 15:00/3PM, that's just super annoying instead of useful. Let me input a time for dimming instead.
Oh and could they spare a thought for managing devices in remote locations? Oh you've forgotten your AppleID so now you can't update the MDM client and have been disconnected from Exchange? Too bad all we can do is waste 30 minutes on the phone talking you through it. Even basic things like allowing iOS updates over 4G (as well as forcing/postponing updates) would make such a big difference.
Too bad I'm sure it'll be 2018 before half of the features make it to businesses in the US, then 2019 for the rest of the world. :/
OSX Server has iCloud caching, that caches both updates and user data.
Night Shift uses your iOS device’s clock and geolocation to determine when it’s sunset in your location. Then it automatically shifts the colors in your display to the warmer end of the spectrum, making it easier on your eyes.
Testing and implementing new technology midstream is tough in education. Most of that gets done over the summers in the US.
I hope Safari gets more meaningful updates as well - the once-a-year updates sometimes with not much new (looking at you Safari 9) is real slow progress for web developers, especially compared to Chrome and Firefox.
Does nightshift allow a variety of night colours, or just one setting?
Either way, this is great news. For years I had been jailbroken merely in order to have f.lux on my phone. I have mild insominia, and flux has greatly reduced that.
It is worth noting that during the day you should NOT use night mode even in a dark environment, the whole point of the color shifting is to reproduce how the sun interacts with the world around you, turning on night mode during the day won't do your internal clock any favours.
That being said, there might be good arguments for having manual night mode control, like if you're a night shift worker and want day mode at night, and night mode during the day. And a lot of international travel scenarios.
That's one use case. There are situations where blue light reduces the length of time one can look at a screen, and "night" mode enables longer usage.
Or in other words, after a short zap of a smartphone display, you won’t be able to see very well in the dark.
I'll let someone else worry about whether or not they're violating NDA: http://www.macrumors.com/2016/01/11/apple-ios-9-3-night-shif....
If that site is to be believed, there is indeed a slider.
Yours is the better link, though, as it has a pic right in the article.
"The Apple private frameworks have been removed from the iOS/watchOS/tvOS SDKs."
Probably not a reason to double down on your private API usage.
They were definitely paying close attention to that whole "side load our proprietary blob using Xcode" debacle on HN 2 months ago.
f.lux for iOS announcement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10544770
Apple's actions the next day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10556375
Dear Apple, it's time to stop putting out new features. Instead, bring back the "it just works" again.
I guess it's just convention by this point. Feature updates across the board periodically, then security updates in between
IIRC it does require the master password once, perhaps each boot, but after that I'm able to unlock with only fingerprint (this is customizable globally or on a per-password basis pretty sure).
Very last line on that page.
AFAIK, the fastest way to close a tab is to push on the screen to get Safari's bar on the bottom, push on the multiple tabs, then swipe right to left or click the X on the tab I want to close.
On my mac it's Command-W. Which is a lot easier and probably why I prefer to browse a lot on it.
From the left is "go back to previous page", from the right is "go to next page" or "open side app on iPad", from the bottom is control center, and from the top is notification center.
There is no where left to swipe from.
Another native iOS app I use a lot is Reminders - great for appointments and todo reminders (like calling someone back). It would be great to see if that got a bit of an upgrade.
Now my point is... (and I'm not pointing my finger to apple, I like my ipad more now than before, with the exception of the music application), seems like we have started to reach the point where enhancements are only marginal.
I'm not sure how much more cpu power can fix that situation (apple can still play the quad-core card), or if this is a development language restriction issue, or a problem with compilers-languages that cannot make use of multi-core cpus or maybe there is nowhere else to go because everything has been made.
If my previous statement holds true... maybe this is the beginning of the "pc era" of the smartphones with lower sales and no more features worth upgrading to the latest and greatest.
* There is still not a good solution for group-transactional data over the devices as a first-class citizen feature in the system. Live, collaborative editing with versioning of just a list, for starters, is considered an app'able feature worth $50 USD per year per person. * Internationalization still takes a back seat. Calendar apps still don't pick up that if you set an appointment for someone in a different time zone than you, you are likely scheduling to a time convenient for them. There should be an option to auto-detect and display applicable time zones as you create the appointment. * Customization still takes a back seat. When I add custom phone types ("concall", "support", "after-hours support", etc.), it ends up UNSORTED in the list of custom phone types when I go to choose one. That's just the tip of the iceberg of enhancements. For address records of people in a specific organization, I want to be able to set only a certain list of custom phone types for anyone in that organization. * There still is no sense of tracking versions of information. I have thousands of contacts, and I keep track of old addresses for example; it helps me orient myself to the possible cultures someone has experienced. But only the here-and-now data is recognized. * Linking data between apps takes an explicit act of coordination between app developers; the Newton data soups were particularly good with breaking down this artificial barrier. * Deep-linking into your own data from within an app in general is not very well-recognized as a use case. Not to speak of deep-linking from an external laptop.
I'm personally gravitating back towards making my information in my Emacs Org mode buffer the primary system of record, and the phone is just a thinly-sliced perspective of that.
Let's hope they keep that trend for when the iOS 10 betas start
It's also worth noting that Android Auto only allows 3rd party apps that do music and messaging. No 3rd party navigation apps, not even Waze.
So to my reading it's showing passwords which are about to be protected, not something that already has been locked.
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(I didn't see anything about Mobile Safari on this page, but maybe there's something nonetheless...?)
No support for service workers unfortunately.
http://imgur.com/b3OTMJO Now available with 13 apps, in 36 brands of cars, 3 different brands of aftermarket solutions on 7 different models of iPhones.
Compatibility with all the things means the experience is going to vary widely across the board.
It's got some bugs (9.2 seems to have introduced one where it messes up system audio playback at times), but interface wise it works very well.
Car manufacturers can't mess with it. Apple pre-maps certain buttons and supports a scroll wheel, but they can't customize it at all, Apple has control.
This seems like an extremely minor thing, and I'm not sure what your proposed solution would be.
What to do about it? I can't presume to know what they tested and rejected, but screen orientation control needs to be independent of screen orientation.
TL;DR: If you have a landscape only app, trigger the lock before you launch the app and it should stay in place.
http://9to5mac.com/2015/09/23/best-iphone-6s-feature-3d-touc...
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/06/11/first-look-ios-9s-...
Of course, things may still go wrong, betas being betas :)
Finally I gave in & upgraded to iOS 9.x (on iPad 4). Suddenly Safari has started freezing on lightweight simple websites. Is that better experience part of "planned obsolescence" ? It's more or less the same story with any mobile device after 2-3 years.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sync-solver-for-fitbit/id935...
Well played Apple.
Edit: Seriously? This gets down voted? How would this NOT be a helpful feature? It works wonderfully on my Android devices. Would love to see it on my iOS devices. Wow, Just wow. Bunch of fanboiz or something?
Take a step back and a nice deep breath and consider why you might have been downvoted. It may have more to do with the tone of your delivery than the actual content of your message.
Lashing out at those who disagree with you with baseless accusations is counterproductive.
People are very happy to exercise their ability to punish others when given that power. It's gotten out of hand here.
Edit: here being HN, not necessarily this thread.
What you're saying doesn't match what I typically observe on HN, which is (a) that most downvoted comments have something wrong with them, not just an unpopular opinion, and (b) inappropriate downvotes usually get canceled out be users who see a good comment faded faded and give it a corrective upvote.
EDIT: Apple kind of added some similar functionality with background app refresh, but the fact that the system tries really hard to "guess" which apps you want updated and which you don't doesn't work so well - I am constantly having to launch SyncSolver to get it to post my Apple Watch steps to fitbit. Just let the apps I set to refresh run on a regular schedule, I can control what I don't want to update.
That said, there is probably a good case for the case of background uploads to be added to the existing backgrounding framework as an additional use case, with its own set of governing rules (another user brought up: Wi-Fi only, while charging, while battery is high, while reception is good, etc).
The solution to inconvenient background syncing IMO isn't opening the floodgates to everyone running their own daemons and sucking down battery power like it's their last day on Earth. It's a valuable use case, but not a good reason to "loosen the grips" so to speak.
RE: Background services. It's a pocket computer. I want my devices to do more for me. When I set them down, I want them to continue to work for me so I can be productive. Just because something runs in the background doesn't automatically make it a battery suck nor does it make it a security risk.
It's not (per Apple). It's an appliance, and they use that as guidance in the decisions they make. It may be capable of acting like a computer, technically it obviously IS a computer, but Apple treats it as an appliance.
I think the relevant distinction between iOS and OS X is that, with iOS, there is sort of an understanding that the user is granted less direct control, in exchange for a near-guarantee that they won’t have to worry about certain things (like malware, or to a certain extent, battery life) anymore.