Apple ignores bug report
phoboslab.org
phoboslab.org
Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform. Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise. Right now, when one pissed off developer leaves or goes bankrupt because their app was yanked from the store or wasn't approved for some BS reason, 50 developers replace him.
This isn't something that is exclusive to Apple though this has always been an issue with them even regarding security issues with OS X.
>Despite all of the rightful moaning of iOS developers, for some reason they continue to flock to the Apple platform.
They develop for iOS because that is where the money is though this isn't the issue. It isn't as if the Android browser doesn't have its fair share of bugs.
>Apple will continue to treat their developers like second class citizens until there is a financial incentive to do otherwise.
You're right. Apple puts the interests of their customers first (not trying to be smug here). The developers come second. The only time you do hear complaints that go unanswered for devs it is usually only answered when there's a public (consumer) interest regarding it. A good example of this is Phil Schiller replying to customer's email about the Rogue Amoeba situation.
I'm certainly not defending Apple but this is a problem that has existed for as long as I've been interested in tech.
Of course Apple cares about money but they make their money by customers buying their hardware. They put their customers first because that is where they make their money.
As a counterpoint, Apple refuses to pay employees on commission because Jobs didn't want them upselling to consumers because there is a less chance of them being a returning customer.
It's the goal of every business to make money. It's how you go about it that tells the story.
As for maximizing shareholder value, I think they've done pretty well there. I don't care for their software that much, but in terms of running a publicly-traded corporation, they've done an excellent job.
Apple shows a nice face to the public but then does only what it's needed to get more money. proved by both this article and how they treat developers.
If it wasn't for the developers that filled the appstore with content apple would be still years back. But apple doesn't care.
I had to go through the HN thread to see that it's more complicated than what you make it out to be but I also read a story by John Paczkowski regarding this:
http://allthingsd.com/20120702/italy-accuses-apple-of-misrep...
I think you're trying to paint a picture from a certain perspective that doesn't contain the whole truth. I'm not saying that Apple isn't greedy as everyone else but I do believe your argument has flaws.
Plus, if it wasn't for jailbreakers and first Cydia not-native apps that Jobs hated and for a long time was against an idea of giving third-parties abilities to build so-called not-native apps, Apple would still not had their App Store and never grew to today's sizes.
Meanwhile, the device setup really wasn't designed to run third-party apps, and we were actually able to watch as the software was ripped apart and rewritten to work around those problems. Had you actually been there, in the field, developing for the platform at the time, you might not consider the opinion so naive. I agree, however, that people oft fail to look at how long it takes to accomplish things like this, and somehow take the release date as the point of inception: but here we could actually watch the progress.
Regardless, it might be they had it "on the horizon" (although I'd even question that, after years of talking about this story with people at conferences), but the idea that it was going to happen at that point--sufficiently early and with sufficient unknowns that they actually slipped on their release dates (not thforties slips got much press)--for that first device.. to me that is far-fetched (but I sadly realize that most of my evidence is not transferable).
All companies exist to make money. The subtleties of how they do so is not nearly so black and white as you want to make it.
Is that in the same imaginary universe where phones before the iPhone had tiny black and white screens? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1519377)
Because in this one there were several third-party mobile application stores and distribution platforms.
Please cite your figures for the pre App Store mobile app economy. I'm genuinely curious.
So, even if they are as evil and plotting as you claim, they seem to be confused on how to be efficient and effective in implementing their evil plan.
Anyway, there are some horror stories regarding the defective Nvidia GPUs where Apple denied repairs and said it was another problem - even though Nvidia fully paid the repair because it was their fault.
http://www.seattlerex.com/seattle-rex-vs-apple-the-verdict-i...
[0] http://www.fnac.com/Console-Xbox-360-250-Go-Microsoft-Halo-R...
I thought Apple was over priced non-sense years ago, until I bought one thanks to a spending account from my employer. Now I find it hard to justify buying anything but.
EU law mandates a two year warranty for only those defects present at time of sale. Within the first 6 months of sale, the burden of proof is on Apple to prove that the defect wasn't there at sale. After those 6 months are up, the burden of proof switches to the consumer to prove that it was there at sale.
Apple complies with this law.
Apple also provides a 1 year warranty from time of purchase for defects that develop after the time of sale. This, too, is perfectly in the law, and Applecare extends this post-sale defect coverage to two years.
tl;dr EU law involves two different kinds of warranties (covering present-at-sale and post-sale defects). You've confused them.
Any notion that Apple has altruistic motives is absurd. All companies exist for one reason: to make as much money as possible. Apple is no exception.
Microsoft wants money. Microsoft makes a product that its customers (until recently, third party hardware manufacturers and enterprise IT) buy to put on their crappy products in the hope of selling them to me. To support their wafer thin margins, they rent out advertising space on the hardware they well.
Google wants money. Google gives goods and services away and convinces its customers (advertisers) that they will be able to sell its users stuff that they see advertised when they use their free product or service running on some crappy product someone else sells them.
Everyone is after money. It's called capitalism. When it works well it leads people to do things that make other people happier in pursuit of getting money.
Apple is making money because they're better at capitalism than these other guys. For as long as it's existed, Apple has believed that the way to make money is to create products people -- actual end-users -- want to own and use, and for a long time this was successful but not as successful as making PC manufacturers happy, or making advertisers happy. Right now, it's working very well for Apple, and once they stopped doing stupid random half-arsed things they started making ridiculous amounts of money.
Is Apple doing something illegal w.r.t. warranties in Italy? Who knows? (a) It's the register. (b) There's no telling if the warranty Apple is obliged to provide in Italy in any way resembles AppleCare.
In general, Apple seems to handle "defects in manufacturing" very generously everywhere the world over. AppleCare covers you against all kinds of stuff that you'd be very lucky to get covered by warranty anywhere else. And if this Italian warranty policy is so all-pervasive, why do Apple's customers need to be told about it?
"America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy." John Updike
" Do I need anti-virus software?
Ah! The loaded question. That's up to you. To date, all of the Mac anti-virus software still checks primarily for Windows viruses. The anti-virus companies have literally stopped counting how many Windows viruses there are. The Flashback trojan didn't even qualify to be called a virus. Still, all Windows users run anti-virus software. The only growth opportunities for them are Macintosh and Android. Expect a hard sell. Nothing sells better than fear. My advice? Be fearless!"
For hacker news audience ,who can take care of their own security, antivirus may just be snake oil but for clueless end user it is a big help.
(edit: in offline conversation with comex, he came up with an article from last week that implies a change in Apple's stance on this subject)
Patches welcome
I'd probably spend my time trying to work around the bug rather than submit a fix and wait for it to make it into production.
It's not like there are money to be made there, or that is the most successful mobile app ecosystem in sales volume, returns and customer base. Or that it has a nice platform overall, despite having the occasional 2 year old unfixed bug...
That said I've seen 2 and 5 year old unfixed bugs in open source software too. Come to think of it, Webkit, which powers Mobile Safari, is open source itself. Why not go and submit a patch there?
Because WebKit is a rendering engine, not a UI. The Safari UI wrapper is responsible for receiving those touch events and properly notifying the rest of the browser code.
Really, as WebKit is under a BSD license, Apple can thereby leach off other developer's work without having to contribute back. They have to make a token effort at releasing their modifications to WebCore (a part of WebKit that is under LGPL), but even there they release binary object files for anything remotely related to the mobile UI.
(Aside: this is possible, as LGPL does let you static ally link against closed-source code as long as you provide the half-compiled binaries required to re-link a complete binary with modifications to the LGPL parts made by third parties.)
You're stuck in a Nash equilibrium and something tells me that it'll last until some new factor disrupts it.
2 - 3 weeks seems to be the norm. That's pretty frustrating if you consider that people's income depends on that. And that developers pay $100 + 30% share for this.
Developers will put up with more crap than they should when platform religion gets in the way. Sure, there are arguments against switching platforms to Android or Windows, but most of these mean very little. Those that refuse to ditch iOS aren't doing so because they'll miss out on potential customers, it's because they like the idea of building apps for the most popular phone on the market, despite the crap they have to put up with.
It's the equivalent of dating a bitchy model. You could be a lot happier with the cute girl next door, but you'd rather put up with her shit just because you can say to your mates "I go out with a model".
Trying to assess peoples motivations is unlikely to be accurate or useful.
It's much easier when you accept that people have different opinions about just about everything and that those differing opinions don't always indicate a lack of reason or ulterior motive.
If any developers get satisfaction working on the platform it's because they like the platform; again a personal preference rather than a solid reason for believing Apple's development platforms are up to par with, say, Microsoft's .NET platform.
We disagree on use of language so we won't be able to reach agreement.
That's a bit rich considering that the iOS app store is where developers can make money. I think that's a far, far more powerful motivating factor than "platform religion." The Blackberry had plenty of fervent followers and advocates: look where that got them.
Also, comparing Mac/iOS users to members of a religion is the oldest, saggiest, most lackluster thought-terminating-cliche in the book. Come off it already.
There's a reason why the cliche exists, because it is true. The biggest truths in this world are the obvious ones, not the exciting ones. You pick a platform on perceived value and it's likely that your gut feeling (along with the crowd) will lead you to Apple.
If I'm wrong, then why aren't developers ditching Apple? Why is no one boycotting a platform that is happy to litigate, rather than innovate? Why are there so many weak money-related excuses to not developing for Android? It's because of personal belief, and it is your personal belief that iOS is better and will make you more money.
By that logic, we'd all set up shop in silicon valley, otherwise working would just be pointless...
First of all, the cost of developing for Android, for us, would be higher, because our code to render slides is somewhat resolution-dependent and iDevices come in fewer resolution variants than Android devices. One could make the claim that we should be doing everything in a completely resolution-adaptive way, but we haven't.
Second, developing for iPhone gives you the iPad for a negligible development cost, giving you access to the tablet market where Android does not have a meaningful presence yet. The great thing about the tablet market is that people spend more money on similar-functionality apps for iPad than for iPhone.
Third, the fact of the matter is that while you can make money on the Android market, the revenue economics of iOS apps are currently completely dominating Android. Both upfront and recurring revenue is higher on iOS. We don't have any qualms about leaving Android on the table today -- obviously, changes in any of these three premises, or huge growth in Android marketshare on tabloid and handheld, could change this.
...science.
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-19/tech/apple.religion_1_app...
http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-05-21/tech/29982282...
et. al.
Because those that have understand that you do not put in the hundreds and hundreds of hours for nothing. You don't do out of some misguided dedication to Steve Jobs, Apple or because you want to be cool.
You do it because you have a family to feed, want to make some extra money (iOS is far more profitable) or just make people happy (iOS users are far less likely to pirate).
Also, if your app gets pulled, gets rejected, or you have trouble getting a new version out for whatever reason, the lack of straight-forward communication with Apple could be dangerous if you have other mouths depending on that income. My roommate worked for an iPhone game company and he and many other developers got laid off when one of their games got rejected.
Regardless of my credentials, if you're relying on building apps to feed your family then I highly suggest that you find yourself a proper job before they starve. I've known enough people jump on the app bandwagon and drag themselves into the dirt.
This doesn't mean that fixing this bug in Mobile Safari should be expected to be unimportant to Apple, since it affects one of their top priorities, the users. It would rather seem to be an indication of either a sub-optimal process for dealing with bug reports, or an issue with the author's submission, which given his liberal use of strong language, doesn't seem to be out of the realm of possibility to me.
You only have to take a look at the WWDC videos and the vast array of well documented APIs provided to know that Apple does care about developers and treats them.
So Apple doesn't have an open bug tracking system. Big deal. It's rare to see a company that does.
"Because that's where the money is"
If you want to talk about how Apple is terrible to developers, fine, talk about the App store double-standards and the developer agreement. But this is hardly an exceptional case of a company being 'anti-developer'.
I can't tell you how many bugs I've filed from OS X, chrome, to various python libraries well the response is pretty much "welp its broke" (if that). If you depend on some sort of functionality that you're not getting, it's time to move on or create your own.
The tone of this post reminds me of 'why I'm not developing for twitter' post ... where the take away for that was be weary of developing on platforms you don't control. I would assume that most of us have learned that the hard way with esoteric libraries with ghost-maintainers. Myself, I'm becoming weary of turning every inconvenience into some sort of political issue. This is _hacker_ news. Can we get back to making clever and disruptive solutions please?
This bug is affecting many HTML5 games and as long as I'm not allowed to install another browser (engine) on iOS, I will keep complaining.
So wait, when MS was abusing its IE product then HN is justified in angry anti-MS rants, but when Apple purposely keeps html5 gimped on iOS and refuses any other browser on iOS suddenly you're all about tolerance and double-standards.
This a very legitimate issue. Apple can't applaud HTML5 in public and piss on it in private. Yes, its a threat to your app ecosystem. Accept it, fix the bugs, and allow other browsers. This is HN worthy, if not extraordinarily HN worthy.
Then dont generalize about HN because it has an anti-MS focus and once we start talking about what is HN worthy, then we have to admit that criticism of big players is the status quo not the exception.
Again, how is MS relevant to this discussion?
1. Hold one finger down in the blue area above
OK, that's easy enough :)
2. Touch straight down with another finger - don't move your fingers on the surface
And here's where the confusion lies; I thought you wanted the tester to slide their finger down the screen or something like that. From the video it appears that you want to ensure that they "hold another finger on the blue area" or something like that.
Now, I confess that I don't own an iPhone, so couldn't test whether that made much of a difference, but that could be one reason why they rejected your test case. If in doubt blame incompetence, not malice :)
So how does that level up with the instruction : don't move your fingers on the surface ? Please never try using any industrial machinery.
Might be we are all just stupid, but the best instructions are those that even stupid people can understand.
If your natural response to ambiguous instructions are "you're just too stupid", please stay away from designing any instructions for industrial machinery.
Also, I was not meaning that the person reading was stupid, but that they were careless in their reading of the instruction, which is the sort of thing that can lead you to counting in base nine for the rest of your life, if applied to anything big and heavy that spins.
Analysis of the sentence does indicate movement, and that is because there is movement.
This is because your finger needs to move down to touch the screen.
There are more than two dimensions of motion when describing fingers.
And this does not change just because a screen is involved.
Heh, and that's exactly why it's ambiguous: the first part suggests movement; and the second commands against it.
so the only reasonable conclusion from this is...
You can make an educated guess at what's intended, but you're still guessing. What if "fingers" was a typo and "finger" was written in its place? You couldn't say for certain, and that would give an entirely different "reasonable" conclusion - all based on a typo.
And this instruction is part of the same statement
And it contradicts the first part of instruction.
Also, I was not meaning that the person reading was stupid, but that they were careless in their reading of the instruction, which is the sort of thing that can lead you to counting in base nine for the rest of your life
Your concern is for my well-being is touching, but I really do take exception to your claim of careless reading being at fault. If you don't understand an instruction, sure, go back and check that you haven't missed a bit, but the best option afterwards is to seek further clarification. That's a good life rule, and I absolutely have no shame in asking when I don't understand something.
Plus, unlike guessing at "the only reasonable conclusion," I think this approach will lead to counting in base 10 for a while longer ;-)
Obviously it is ambiguous, as several commenters have indicated that they had other interpretations.
Back then, I built the test case and asked on twitter if anybody else could confirm the bug. I got several answers (e.g. one from mrdoob within the minute: https://twitter.com/mrdoob/statuses/6896165488427008 ) so I thought the instructions were fine.
2. Use another finger to touch the screen somewhere below the first finger.
3. Lift your second finger and repeat step 2.
2. Tap a second finger somewhere else in the same blue area (again, do not move your finger only tap)
3. Observe the orange bar. It should become green when both finger are touching the screen. Response time should be near instantaneous. It is not. Additionally, about 1 out of 3 touches results in an inconsistent state in which the bar remains green after both fingers are removed.
I'd remove the "straight down" part altogether.
1. Observe that the feedback bar above the blue area is orange.
2. Tap and hold the blue area.
3. While still holding, tap and hold a different part of the blue area with a second finger.
4. Observe that the feedback bar is now green.
5. While still holding with the first finger, stop holding with the second finger.
6. Observe that the feedback bar is now orange.
7. While still holding with the first finger, again tap and hold a different part of the blue area with the second finger.
8. It is expected that the feedback bar be green at this point. However observe the feedback bar actually remains orange.
My experience is that Apple will almost never admit they don't know about a bug. The only exception are security bugs where one actually gets real feedback.
One that never got fixed was crashers in Console. That's been going on for years now.
I do have an expensive support relationship with Microsoft, and I've gotten similar results for the same types of problems. We log bug reports, and the serious ones with business impact get fixed. UI glitches or corner-case Outlook problems get fixed more slowly, or only via custom hotfix. Serious bugs get fixed more quickly, and typically get rolled into a future patch.
In the past, I've had similar or even worse results from other large companies like IBM, Oracle, Informix and Sun.
Software has bugs, and low-priority bugs persist for a long time, for reasons that may be good or bad. In any case, posting expletive-laden rants railing against a vendor is unprofessional and unlikely to garner a positive reaction.
Emphasis on the expletive because this is absurd.
It's easy to see that when building a platformer game, unimpeded multitouch functionality is pretty essential. Have you been able to identify other games that have the same problem? I would of thought that this would be resolved so much sooner than 2 years. It's a core part of multitouch functionality.
At least you still have your app available on iOS!.. It is total BS how developers are treated. Apple has built up a product which sells hundreds of millions of units per year, largely in part due to the developers who have invested time in their ecosystem, but it's total shit how they return no investment back to the people who have supported this system. (Yes, developers are largely to thank. Look at how RIM and MS are failing, because they don't control nor have the content).
Everyone deserves better.
So if you don't want to write for it, then don't. The only force that can change Apple's behavior is the consumer. Apple doesn't care about anything else. And they never will.
So stop complaining. Write your app. And hope it's a hit. Then you can sell it and buy a house on the beach.
Apple only cares about what makes it money, not delivering the best experience to consumers.
And you can be damn sure that they don't give a shit about developers, especially if they aren't making native iOS apps which aren't being sold in the app store.
> Apple only cares about what makes it money, not delivering the best experience to consumers.
I disagree here, mainly because the amount of money Apple makes from the App Store is tiny, relative to their overall revenues. This year at WWDC, Tim Cook announced that Apple had paid $5 billion to developers on the App Store, which translates into a little over $7.1 billion in apps sold, or $2.1 billion in revenue for Apple since 2008. That's about $130 million per quarter, against revenue of between $7 billion and $30 billion per quarter. That's without considering hosting costs and credit card fees.
$130 million is certainly no small change. But for Apple, in the big scope, it isn't printing money for them.
If a great application can be used instantly off the internet, with no download, no install, no hassles, no App Store, (the way software should be) then the consumer has no particular reason to buy an Apple device over one of their competitors.
By preventing developers from building quality web applications, Apple helps maintain the need for developers to build for their native platform, which means consumers need to buy Apple devices to use those applications.
Because you haven't written it yet?
Plenty of Android devs owned Nexus Ones. It was the Android dev phone for a pretty important year. Yet we heard little griping at Google from devs over the fact that they cheaped out on the hardware for their flagship device.
Moreover there are countless ignored bugs in Android, many of the most starred issues have been there for two years or more. This griping about Apple is ridiculous.
They're a massive faceless software & hardware vendor, big surprise a low-priority bug (never once seen someone who isn't a dev or similar play an HTML5 game in my life) slipped through the cracks.
This isn't new, nor is it unique to Apple, so it would be nice if we could can the melodrama and focus on the issue.
One was about an issue I was having running the Britannica encyclopedia. I don't recall what it was, but Apple even called me about it.
One was about a bug in Lion, where if you pick a large desktop image, and tile it, it gets all corrupted and there are artifacts in the desktop image that respond to movement of windows above the desktop. The corruption of the image looks like what happens when CIAffineClamp is applied to an image: a row of pixels at some place in the image is repeated out to the edge of the screen.
The response was that it was fixed in a point release, but the fix was to disable the Tile option for large images. Except if you have it set to alternate images periodically, with the Tile option selected, a large image can still be tiled and displayed incorrectly.
The situation where any platform owner has a bug that impacts your software you should try as best you can to work around it because you never know if and when it will get fixed.
He should have learned to adapt instead of wait for a change that obviously wasn't going to happen.
The only choice is to do something completely different, but I can't think of anything that doesn't profoundly change the nature of the game (continuously jump makes a completely different game, use upward motion to jump will have a lot of false positives) and is basically an admission that a game that involves two buttons like this is simply impossible. And that's an unreasonable outcome.
(The continuously jumping game has interesting potential, but it is a different game. Plus I've think I've seen it way back in the day and it's very visually tiring.)
The entire article revolves around a bug that came about from an HTML5 game the author was working on.
> Almost two years ago I noticed a strange multitouch problem in Mobile Safari with one of my games.
TwistedWeasel has a valid point. OS X and iOS are not open source projects one can fork and submit patches to. Neither is Windows or Windows Mobile for that matter. If someone finds a bug, submitting a testcase and doing a lot of legwork is probably appreciated, but none of that will guarantee the bug will get fixed. Finding a workaround is a much better short term solution for the developer because they can continue on developing the way they need to and not have to wait for the black box of Apple's Radar to return a positive result. On some occasions, the developer might be able to search into WebKit to see if the problem is there, and submitting a bug report to that project might return more valid feedback. Significant portions of both OS X and iOS are available in source code form.
Is this ideal? No. Is it how it works? Yes. Can an everyday non-Apple engineer do anything about it? Not really.
Its this kind of behavior some of us strive to avoid on HN. http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I thought my remark was fairly civil. I was not trying to start an argument or flame war, and dedicated a significant portion of my reply to the topic of conversation and tried to be brief in reminding him/her about the reasons most of us visit HN over other news aggregating sites.
This bug, in particular is not a an easy thing to work around, I agree and maybe he did try all sorts of things but none of them worked, we don't know.
My point is - in the general case you should not rely on Apple fixing a bug to make your product work correctly.
There aren't many game concepts which work with just one button. Actually, having just one button is so absurd that people turned this particular limitation into a competition (similar to <=4kB and the like).
You can make your code much more reliable by handling all touch events and looking that the touches or targetTouches respectively instead of incremental a total touch counter on each start and decrementing on each end. This causes even the slightest movement to trigger a touchmove event which and the entire current touch state is in touches within all the events. So changing your test like so gets close and you can at least see the use more clearly:
var i = 0; var numTouches = 0; var out = document.getElementById('out'); var indicator = document.getElementById('indicator');
function handleTouch( ev ) {
ev.preventDefault();
i++;
numTouches = ev.touches.length;
out.value += i + ': ' + ev.type + ', ' + numTouches + '\n';
indicator.style.backgroundColor
= (numTouches == 2) ? '#8e6' : '#fb7';
out.scrollTop = out.scrollHeight;
}
var ta = document.getElementById('ta');
ta.addEventListener('touchstart', handleTouch, false);
ta.addEventListener('touchend', handleTouch, false);
ta.addEventListener('touchmove', handleTouch, false);
ta.addEventListener('touchcancel', handleTouch, false);2) I almost fell over laughing when you mentioned a whole "40" hours. I think if I went through that whole process with Apple, I'd be happy if I got it out of the way in 40 hours.
Apple "used to" (as in, they cast a damn good image of) following Dieter Rams type of design philosophy, but that's long gone in the freak show app-orgy that exists within iOS now. It's a mess, it's terribly disorganized, it's not "less, but better" it's "more, and worse".
Personally, I'm surprised that they let iOS get this stale. But apparently as long as the penumbra of Steve's[RIP] reality distortion field exists, they will blindly march on.
What Apple needs is a new visionary. Not someone to try to emulate Steve Jobs. And they need to open the hell out of their products.
If you believe your hardware and OS are best, then open the hardware to letting people install Android on it if they don't agree, and write a version of iOS to run on other hardware.
It's not going to happen (and I hope they prove me wrong). Apple is designed as a coupled HW-SW ship, and I don't see them changing course any time soon.
My advice: Pay attention to your perspective bed partners before you commit and get into bed with them.
I'd rather go with something thats open-ish and stale than this controlled freakshow that is the iOS ecosystem.
What Apple's doing right is introducing new features and then aggressively pushing these down to the devices. iOS 5 is by far the majority of devices now, and very few are on anything under 4.
Android on the other hand seems perpetually stuck in 2.3 land. As you point out there's not much in the way of advantages if none of the apps are dependent on features introduced in 4.0. This further stalls the upgrade cycle.
To succeed Google is going to have to take a more active role and ensure that there's fewer conflicting interpretations of their standard, well-defined reference devices, and more urgency to get users to upgrade.
Two years spent building a work-around would be a far better use of OP's time.
Besides, with a headline like this it will also get automatic upvotes by everyone who dislikes Apple.
I filed all the bug reports in a professional manner, without insults or swearing. I have a lot of respect for the engineers working at Apple, ...
Why are we excluded?
People was complaining Flash was vendor lock-in. So kicked out Flash and now we are prisoners of fucking browsers. Kicked out poor Adobe, and Apple, Google and MS rules! Yay! Do you enjoy this?
I think plug-ins were clever, liberal and democratic software designing. We were able to choice the best technology we want to use (including Java Applet, Unity Web Player, Silverlight and even Shockwave). We were even able to develop our plug-ins freely. We had a freedom of programming language other than fucking JavaScript.
I feel people's enthusiasm for HTML5 is completely wrong. At least they should stop saying "HTML5 is a cool technology" "HTML5 is an open technology". COMPLETELY WRONG.
how could you not know that iOS is a closed garden ? Stop being complicit of this dangerous ecosystem. I understand that a lot of people have spent a decade or more in a very good relationship with Apple, swimming in wonderful hardware, nice frameworks and a helpful and friendly community, but it is finished now. This is not the Apple of today anymore.
Not that I know of. You probably just started hanging out with people who tend to complain about this kind of thing. I, for one, complain about this stuff because it's a defect I have to fix if I happen to see it in someone's copy.
It also might be a frequency illusion [1].
[1] The illusion in which a word, a name or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears "everywhere" with improbable frequency. Sometimes called "The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon".
So games, music, and video apps in mobile Safari are all hopelessly hobbled, and if you build a browser that fixes these issues you'll be banned.
Happy developing!
It also prevents MySpace. I consider that a Good Thing overall - I remember the period of the web where it was trivial to auto-play video and audio, and I remember that the consumer reaction to that was deeply hostile. HTML5 music/video apps certainly are an interesting thought, but you must consider what happens when you let random or malicious developers do those things too!
On desktops with Flash or the HTML5 Audio/Video API you can already do these things. I don't see anyone complaining that things like Youtube and Grooveshark are malicious, so why should iOS be sabotaged? Non-Apple devices like Android, and Playbook work just fine. You can build music, and video, and game web applications on those devices without these limitations, and it is not a problem. Apple simply wants a hobbled platform, to force all content through the iTunes store instead of over the internet.
I argue that Apple's focus on the user experience, especially in the areas of responsiveness, battery life, and consistency with the general Apple design aesthetic, cause Apple to make choices here that you disagree with, but which aren't necessarily bad decisions.
"You can build music, and video, and game web applications on those devices without these limitations, and it is not a problem."
Actually it is a problem: Android malware exists, and I say that it proves my point: if you hand out capabilities without thinking through the consequences, it will come back and bite you.
The uses that you intend for tools are never the only possible uses of those tools.
Though, I am impressed by the combination of vitriolic text and cool, crystal-clear and calm bug explanation in the video. :)
In what way has Flash ever been the only way to display web content? This statement is absurd.
To ignore the previous ubiquity of Flash is absurd.
Similarly, there's not other vendor than Adobe providing access to Flash.
HTML5 on the iPhone is just as bad: the only way to display HTML5 content is with Apple's (buggy) implementation.
The iOS restriction is very real and enforced, there is nothing forcing people to use Flash for any popular platform.
However if you put it in terms of "if I want to use Flash, I'm forced into Adobe's implementation" then I can see that argument.
Why would the FIRE button be immune to a bug in the browser? Any chance this is a timing issue in your own code, rather than a bug in the browser?
If this bug was in the actual native API, it would've got fixed in the next minor patch.
Not all bugs are fixed. There's only so many hours in the day, and some bugs are simply not worth fixing.
It's also not clear to me why you think no one else is affected by this bug. How many duplicates from other reporters have been closed? We have no way to know. Presumably others, though-- not every instance of an issue results in a front-page HN article.
Still, this does smell like it's a "feature", where the event is thrown away in an effort to prevent accidental touches or such. I imagine the bug is being ignored because of the difficulty of fixing it without removing the feature in question.
Alas, I suspect that Apple's secrecy harms their process as well as ours: they probably live in such a bubble that they don't see these bugs as being problems. And I really wish Android was a better HTML5 alternative, but it's been problematic as well, as evidenced by Sencha's HTML5 Scorecards (we'll see with Chrome on Jelly Bean).
"boo fucking hoo. I guess their fucking priorities don't line the FUCK up with yours. "
The blog post on the other hand was written in that manner to get public attention - which seems to have worked.
The code for the test case is about 20 lines of JavaScript. You don't have to trust me to write correct code, you can easily check it yourself.
I wouldn't be surprised if other people at Apple now just feel insulted, and the people working on this problem likewise demoralized; all with the result that you are even /less/ likely to see a bug fixed in this project in a short period of time (and even if someone does "react" to this one, to be slightly more hostile and slightly less forgiving of your future bug reports, even of they are posed in a "professional manner", as they now "know better").