John Gruber: The iPad | Hacker News Reader

John Gruber: The iPad

daringfireball.net

112 pointsgeorgekv50 comments

I think Amazon would do well to add color support to Kindle e-books for use on iPads and iPhones.

The Kindle app for iPad already supports color. I downloaded the Kindle sample of the graphic novel "The Impostor's Daughter", and it displays in glorious color (and has more pages than the iBooks sample of the same work).

"Those of you who doubt that the pixels-per-inch resolution isn’t high enough, just wait until you see the type rendering on this summer’s new iPhones."

Hmm, well that's interesting.

Gruber has a history of making very specific "predictions" which are actually leaks from his moles. Maybe he's gotten tired of beating around the bush.

He "predicted" the specific resolution here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj

On MacBreak Weekly he eluded to the fact that some high profile developers are presently working on apps for the next iPhone. I'm sure we'll see some demos tomorrow.

"Alluded" (to mention in passing), not "eluded" (to evade).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allusion

I wonder if some future politician isn't going to "elude" to something in order to get away with something else. (With an American public which is much less literate than past generations.)

Apple has to increase the pixel density. Android phones have sported 240 dpi displays since November (Motorola Droid).

Competitively, they need to increase the pixel density. I don't think Gruber has any firm sources, but just assumes a higher-resolution display is in the works.

You don't think Gruber has any firm sources? How do you think he makes all of his "predictions"? The vast majority is leaks. And I think when he goes to the extreme of saying the exact resolution (http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/03/29/wsj), it's pretty safe to say that he has firm sources.

I enjoyed his "curious choice" description of Apple choosing to go with default wallpaper that looks like a series of deep scratches on the screen. Glad I wasn't the only one who gasped "crap, it's scratched!" when I booted it up.

Yeah, when I went to the Apple store to play with one, I thought for like 5 seconds that it was scratched (as floor models on electronics are sometimes beaten up, though usually not 2 days after launch). Then I felt for the scratches and didn't feel them, and then I opened an app, fixing the screen heroically!

In regards to his criticism of syncing, I think it seems like such an obviously missing feature that Apple has to do something about it, namely opening up MobileMe/iWork.com for free (ad-supported) to offer proper competition to Google.

I wrote some more thoughts on this here, if anyone's interested: http://gen89.net/2010/04/07/prediction-free-mobileme-after-a...

His notes on MobileSafari were interesting. If the iPad is having a hard time keeping a couple of pages in memory due to the lack of traditional virtual memory, then it makes even more sense why Apple is avoiding Flash. Not just the CPU/battery issue, flash is notoriously bad at garbage collecting.

>One thing that’s making it hard for some people to grasp the purpose of the iPad is that no one has an answer to what precisely it is for.

after thinking a bit about it for a while, ipad to me, seems to be more of a media consumption device than either a computer or a phone. i can read books, play video-games etc on it, and it seems to be of the just right form-factor for such activities. given that, i don't think i would be interested in running any arbitrary program on it. i would prefer my computer for doing that. apple store thus becomes more of a alternate clearing-house of published information. i am probably more concerned about some fundamental erosion of fair-use-rights here than anything else, as building strict copyright controls on such a device is probably much simpler . if content-providers/distributors find ipad to be a viable platform for disseminating media, then copyright would be back with a vengeance. libraries / physical books might then be passe...

The iphone and ipad lack virtual memory? They can't be serious... it's a Mach kernel. Maybe he means swap?

That explains the lack of multitasking. Multitasking would work if background apps just swapped to disk and slept. The current guidance for developers (on exit, save state; on startup, restore state) is a poor man's version of swap.

Yup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1240171

I also wonder how useful virtual memory would be on a device like iPad/iPhone. With limited memory and no multitasking how often would address fragmentation be an issue.

Why address fragmentation? The kernel's running with virtual memory on. Just no paging files.

Virtual memory (memory paging and segmentation) is the foundation for being able to start and stop apps. Otherwise memory would have to be defragmented. Both don't require the ability to store somewhere, they both are useful in physical memory only situations.

I think what he means in the article is that Apple disabled Mach's ability to store memory pages on disk in order to free room for more physical memory. The most probable reason being that Apple does not trust the lifetime write capacity of their Flash disk. (And depending on your chicken and egg, the current App situation does not require swapping memory pages to disk since you can only run one App at a time. Which caused the other I don't know.)

I'd guess the most probable reason is to reduce interface stuttering.

Interface stuttering due to swap is an issue on PC's due to hard drive latency, but would it be as much of an issue with solid state storage?

Well, even assuming that they're using top quality solid state storage, you're going from (at worst) hundreds of nanoseconds per retrieval to (at best) a hundred microseconds per (page) retrieval. Still very significant for some data access patterns.

My question wasn't about the article.

My question was how much fragmentation is there on iPhone to warrant VM. It has fixed memory and runs only one app at a time (mostly).

Without virtual memory, you run into memory fragmentation issues quickly, especially with allocation-happy object oriented code. Multitasking or not makes no difference.

Android encourages this as well. With respect to multi-tasking, swap is an abstraction to save developer effort at the expense of performance and persistence.

Why exactly was this downvoted? I'm not trying to justify the lack of multitasking, just pointing out how it's consistent with the lack of swap.

Very interesting review. It's very hard to say this was sycophantic.

I was very surprised with how primitive the iWork document management was. Also, can you imagine being that constrained when web browsing? I need my tabs.

Funny, but I browsed just as if I had tabs. I effectively had tabs. What I missed was "Open In New Tab.". Instead of concurrently opening, I have to wait for each page.

Do you know that you can tap and hold on a hyperlink to bring up a context menu which offers the option "Open in new page"? Where 'page' is functionally equivalent to 'tab'.

It's strange how people say that iPad browsing is tabless. That's true, but it sort of ignores the point. Might as well say Omniweb is tabless.

Tabbed browsing in desktop browsers also brings concurrency with it. On my Macbook, I can open lots of links "In New Tab" and read them as they load, so not have to wait for any one of them to load except the first one. With the iPad, I have to wait for every single page.

You actually don't.

The interface throws you to a new page, but you can go back to your previous page/tab without waiting for the current one to load and it will finish on its own unless the browser runs out of memory.

The interface does a poor job of exposing this feature.

Cool. That worked! But how concurrent is it?

Answer: not concurrent but still snappy feeling. I have to wait longer than on the desktop because of no concurrency, but I mind less than I would otherwise because I can watch the pages zooming around.

It's concurrent on the iPhone...

Really? It's definitely not on the iPod Touch: other windows do not finish loading in the background, they wait until you swith to them to load. If you're right, I wonder why Apple made it different on the iPhone.

iPhone 3GS to be specific. Just checked it now again, definitely works.

Mmh. My iPod Touch is second gen. I guess older iPhones don't load pages in the background and third gen iPod Touches probably do. It seems likely that Apple enables background loading only on devices with more memory (or maybe, on faster nes).

iPad review: It sucks.

maybe so, but the community here wants to know WHY?

It requires iTunes to load content from local storage.

we also want to know, at what and how badly?

there seems to be some areas where the iPad excels unequivocally (its speed, fit/finish etc) some areas that take getting used to, and you'll either like or not like (keyboard) and other areas in serious need of work (document syncing etc).

Wow, John Grubber loves an Apple product?! What's next, the sun rising from the east tomorrow morning?

Reviews have value beyond a simple love/hate judgment which you so intelligently extracted.

No man, you're either with us or against us! </sarcasm>

In Mr. Grubber's defense there's a lot more substance in this review than a thumb up/down conclusion. It's obviously written by and for Apple fans. Friendly critiques are often more valuable than unfriendly ones. I don't want to read a review by someone preaching to me that I need Flash or a command prompt so I can edit my /etc/rc.local file. I'm more interested in a strong focus on the small details of design along with commentary about the bigger picture from someone I agree with on the basics and has a proven track record of understanding Apple.

Would you rather read a review of a new sushi restaurant from a sushi lover, someone who never tried sushi before, or someone who hates sushi? Same idea here.

I'd like to read it from someone who is a sushi lover, but doesn't make their living writing about how great that restaurant's particular chef is.

Fair enough. There are certainly a lot of reviews to pick from.

In all fairness, Gruber makes a good portion of his living complaining about the things he dislikes about Apple's products and processes. He's one of the few Apple fans I know of that has openly (and intelligently) criticized the AppStore for multiple reasons.

Yeah but it often feels hollow, like Fox News having Colmes. It's a ruse (albeit an effective one) to establish trust.

Also - Gruber tends to write meticulously edited, well thought-out essays on Apple products (and the occasional accessory). I read his reviews because they're instructive on how best to write a product review.

I envy John Gruber, as a writer. I think he truly deserves his readership.

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