lurch_mojoff

As you pointed out in your next paragraph, it was because that way Adobe can point a finger at Apple and say "it's them to blame". This blog post [ http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html ], quite similarly informative as the one astrange linked to, describes very well part of the reason why the Flash plugin is a dog on Mac OS X. I can only add to it a detail that is not explicitly mentioned in there - the drawing contexts mess and lack of support (e.g. OpenGL) is only applicable to NPAPI plugins. WebKit has an alternative, modern, clean, and fairly flexible plugin API. So if Adobe really wanted to make Flash highly performant on Mac OS X, they could have done what Apple do with their Quicktime plugin - have an NPAPI one for compatibility and have a WebKit one for performance for most users.

Calling AppleCare - Apple's customer support - apparently? No, it is not reasonable. Going above and beyond the call of duty would have been stuff like - leaving contact information at the bar, so if someone comes looking for it they can get in touch with you; calling Apple corporate (you can find the number on apple.com/contact ) and demanding to speak with someone in charge; having access to the guy's Facebook information, you can try contacting him directly; and so on and so forth.

The "finder's" actions are a lousy cop out, after which they started shopping the phone around to tech blogs.

Because competing devices have higher density displays. And high density allows for prettier, crisper, more natural graphics. iBooks are just the icing on the cake.

Why 960x640 precisely?

Because it makes things simple. Whether you have a bitmap or some procedural drawing (vector if you will) you can easily translate it into coordinates on the new screen - just multiply by 2. No need to worry about sub-pixel drawing and artifacts occurring as result of rounding errors.

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built- in interpreter(s)."(emphasis mine)

However it was changed, with OS 3.0 SDK I believe, certainly before the OS 4.0 SDK changes, to its current wording:

"An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded or used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Documented APIs and built- in interpreter(s)."(emphasis mine)

I still maintain my position that for quite some time now developers should have had no expectations to be able to write applications for the iPhone in Ruby or Python, or some other interpreted language or at least to be able to distribute them through Apple's app store. Although in reality there seem to be plenty of applications in there that have some scripting component or another.

What I believe programmers are truly angry about is that Apple broke their long standing promise of supporting multiple languages when they originally attracted them to the platform. They're really saying:

"You told me if I bought a mac, and an iPhone, and an iPad, that you would create LLVM and MacRuby and Python bindings so I can code in my favorite language. You lied!"

Nobody is really saying that because neither Apple nor any of their employees have ever told anyone such a thing. On one hand the ban of interpreted code, except for Javascript, has been there since day one, so no sane programmer has had the illusion that they can use Ruby, or Python, or whatever to write iPhone apps. And on the other hand there is absolutely nothing preventing Apple from amending that clause in the license agreement once the technical limitations, e.g. garbage collected Objective-C runtime, behind toll-free, ahead of time compiled wrappers like MacRuby disappear. Especially since MacRuby in particular is an Apple run project.

In short, if you are reasonable (e.g. not trying to sneak in a porn app or an app that obviously violates Apple's terms) you are practically guaranteed that you'll get your app in the store. And if you are not reasonable being big or close to Apple will likely not help you much.

(By the way, I cannot come up with a single case in which ngmoco might seem to have bypassed the approval process. Do they have a tits app in the store or something?)

Statements like these, though:

"It happens every now and then in a big company, like Nokia, even if you have the most stringent quality control mechanisms."

and

"We have taken the learnings and when Symbian^3 comes out you can rest assured it will be perfect."

and

re:early adopters not getting answers from Nokia about the issues they have encountered - "Like I said, that was a surprise to us. It was not expected."

make me suspicious that they have learned anything.

First these are not QA issues. The problems with N97 are not a result of obscure bugs that could have slipped through. The problems are result of bad design and development decisions. Unless Nokia is staffed entirely by blind and mentally retarded people, they cannot play the surprised-that-our-product-sucks card. And it is very discouraging that Nokia - the biggest mobile phone maker in the world and a company with decades of experience in the telco and mobile phone business - is just learning that user experience is the most important concern they should have when developing a new product.

And for two, it should be noted that competing devices released in the past year have higher density displays. Also higher density displays allow for better looking user interface. I would imagine Apple wouldn't want to be outdone in either respect.

In short, I don't think we should draw conclusions neither from Gruber's post, nor from the densities of other devices Apple may be selling.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar?

For what I understand, unlike trademarks, patents don't have a provision that you should protect them or enforce them. In fact that's why defensive patent portfolios work, isn't it?

Since Firefox is by far the largest HTML5 browser, encoding your video in H264 alone is shooting yourself in the foot.

Saying so completely disregards the fact that a lot of, maybe even the majority of, the video on the web now is already in h.264 alone, because that's one of the encodings that the Flash plugin supports. And when we add to that the fact that for the foreseeable future there will continue being a non-insignificant portion of people using browsers that do not implement HTML5 at all, meaning video sites which go HTML5 will still have to provide a some form of a fallback - most logically through a Flash player - a fallback that can easily be served to Firefox and Opera users, exactly the opposite of Thom's statement becomes obvious. Not encoding your video in h.264 alone is shooting yourself in the foot - you'd be more than doubling your storage cost and your video transcoding cost and even increasing your bandwidth bill, for no good reason whatsoever.

OK, Bild, you don't like that Apple's new policy is screwing with your promo app, I get it. But can we cut the "freedom of the press" bull crap. Not that I should expect rationality and perspective from a tabloid rag, but is it even worth the energy to get into that argument - does anyone who matters buy that line?

And to the author of that blog post, dude, how bloody entitled do you have to think you are to bitch that Apple didn't catch an obscure bug in your application. What do you think they do, play through every scenario of every game? If you had made a, say, unit converter, do you think that Apple would check if all your conversion formulas are correct? Do you think they should?

The review process is in place for one purpose - so Apple can protect iPhone users from things that are obviously detrimental to them and their experience with the device - things like obvious crashes, like obvious use of private APIs (which would lead to obvious crashes at some future point), and like obviously inappropriate content.

On a related note, where is my liquid-quark fueled warp engine? I'n not giving all that gold for you to propel to 99% c for nothing, am I?

Dumb, sophomoric "humor" aside, what practical implications does this discovery have? There is a blurb about proteins and what we can digest, which to a layman like me makes no sense, and something about a desolate universe made up of dark matter, which again fails to come home to me.

Just as you believe that a proper social structure and sufficiently clear conventions can overcome deficiencies in software, I believe the oposite - the capabilities and limitations of software can enforce certain patterns of behavior. And in my experience DVCSs end up having more of a positive effect on the development process.

Also, my experience, as non-representative as it is, has shown that cheap branching with efficient merging results in much less of a mess than everybody playing in the same sandbox and inevitably kicking everybody else's sand castles.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2009/05/jorge-colo...

And simply because Apple don't supply a stylus with the device, doesn't mean that you can't use one with it.

http://tenonedesign.com/stylus.php