iPad

[Lantyssa]

Diablo 2 doesn't play very well at that resolution, either...

[squirrel]

Posers.  If you own anything with an Apple logo higher up the price chain than an iPod Nano, you're an idiot and nobody should have to listen to anything you have to say about technology, period.  Some leniency can be granted to people who bought an iPhone before the third generation, but only if they use it in private and wash their hands afterwards.

--Dave

Um. What? So you're discounting anyone who might prefer OS X or have custom applications that require it as an idiot? You're a fucking tool. I undertand what you're trying to say, how about a little less "RAWR APPLE BAD" and a little more logic.



Edit - your not you're, removed baiting

[naum]

Android surpasses iPhone.

Surprised it took this long.

Android runs on a variety of hardware and multiples of carriers. iPhone runs on only one.

Also, iPhone OS is more homogenous sans the outlier jailbreaking. Android is splintered amongst varying UI and even OS versions. At a programming group gathering recently, several expressed disgust about crappy G1 (and Android OS version <2.0) performance and not being at the upgrade point yet (without incurring large cost to break contract).

[Righ]

you're an idiot and nobody should have to listen to anything you have to say about technology

Il bue che dà del cornuto all'asino.

[Prospero]

Excuse me, what crazy shit? Those are two very different situations. O

The situation I quoted was that a user could be stuck with an application that the developer decided not to support any longer. That particular situation can happen on most platforms. Theoretically with open source software you can fix your problem yourself, but that's not always practical. I do not disagree that Apple's ability to cockblock app developers sucks. I know I haven't pushed to get my app put together purely because I'm afraid I might offend the might Jobs and be banned after sacrificing all my free time. However, I follow app development a fair amount and can't think of a time a developer was not allowed to fix bugs in their application, and I have certainly been screwed by buggy apps that the developer never chose to fix.

[naum]

Posers.  If you own anything with an Apple logo higher up the price chain than an iPod Nano, you're an idiot and nobody should have to listen to anything you have to say about technology, period.  Some leniency can be granted to people who bought an iPhone before the third generation, but only if they use it in private and wash their hands afterwards.

Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

[tgr]

The situation I quoted was that a user could be stuck with an application that the developer decided not to support any longer. That particular situation can happen on most platforms.

Yes. The end result of the publisher or developer not supporting an app is the same (the user isn't getting his app fixed), but I still think it's a case of apples and oranges.

Theoretically with open source software you can fix your problem yourself, but that's not always practical. I do not disagree that Apple's ability to cockblock app developers sucks. I know I haven't pushed to get my app put together purely because I'm afraid I might offend the might Jobs and be banned after sacrificing all my free time. However, I follow app development a fair amount and can't think of a time a developer was not allowed to fix bugs in their application, and I have certainly been screwed by buggy apps that the developer never chose to fix.

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/2009/11/13/airfoil-speakers-touch-1-0-1-finally-ships/
http://www.infoworld.com/d/mobilize/iphone-app-store-roulette-tale-rejection-773?page=0,1
http://www.marco.org/122990476
http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/iphone-app-store/latest-stupid-app-store-rejection-ewallet-for-using-an-iphone-icon-thats-been-in-the-app-for-over-a-year

[Prospero]

Ahh yes, perma-delays. My bad for not thinking about those. They definitely need to fix their approval process. I still don't think the concept of an app store with some gates to entry is a terrible thing, but their implementation is severely lacking.

[tgr]

Ahh yes, perma-delays. My bad for not thinking about those. They definitely need to fix their approval process. I still don't think the concept of an app store with some gates to entry is a terrible thing, but their implementation is severely lacking.

I wasn't just talking about delays, I was actually trying to demonstrate that there were severe hinders to getting bugfixes in sometimes, the funniest being this one:

http://justanotheriphoneblog.com/wordpress/iphone-app-store/latest-stupid-app-store-rejection-ewallet-for-using-an-iphone-icon-thats-been-in-the-app-for-over-a-year

Old app uses the same icon, but the new version is suddenly verboten. I am strongly against any one company having that kind of veto power, especially when they seem to have a habit of being slow and horribly inconsistent in their enforcing of said rules, and with the latest "anti-flash" clause, also awful with how they make/modify rules.

[Engels]

GTA 4 isn't playable?

I haven't tried GTA4 on PC myself, but I've seen a friend of mine play it. It does not scale well when it comes to performance when you crank the resolution to 2560x1600 and that's certainly not because the graphics are high up on the awesome scale.

Bit late to the party, but I am enjoying GTAIV immensely at 1920x1200. I'd argue that very few games are playable at the resolution you mention without a very expensive setup. This has Jack all to do with optimization for pc and more to do with your particular, exacting tastes.
 

[Prospero]

How is it that one company shouldn't have that power over the device they sell? I mean, it's dickish, and I can very much see why people don't want to buy or develop for the Apple's new toys, but to say they shouldn't have that power just seems unbalanced. Should Nintendo and Sony not have the power to say what games can play on their consoles? It seems like exactly the same situation to me.

It just seems like there is a whole lotta extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple, and I don't understand why. I understand why Quinton hates them, but that's a bit more personal.

[Engels]

Because the reasonings seem the reasonings of a woefully out of touch, supercilious effete bunch of spoiled nincompoops hell bent on a brow-beaten hegemony rather than smart, customer-centric decisions. It exasperates many of us that so many of its customers have drunk the cool-aid and refuse to see this as a problem. It lowers standards and will inevitably lower the quality of other products in the marketplace.

[Prospero]

I dare say, at least based on their sales, they seem to understand their customers. It isn't 1 million Apple fanatics buying those iPads, nor the piles of iPhones and iPod Touches. I'm curious what your definition of customer-centric is. Isn't making things your customers want to buy pretty customer-centric?

Again, there have totally been problems with their approval process. It has gotten better, although it is not nearly good enough.  There seem to be a whole lot of stupid people in that department, or at the very least the worst guidelines ever written.

But the same arguments could be made against Sony or Nintendo; they have the same power and have made some of the same stupid mistakes. I don't remember any rage about that over the years. I may have missed those threads though. I do tend to vanish for months at a time.

[Margalis]

I'd have to agree that the iPad is more of a consumer electronics device than a computer. Computers are general purpose devices, an iPad is definitely not that.

[Engels]

But the same arguments could be made against Sony or Nintendo; they have the same power and have made some of the same stupid mistakes. I don't remember any rage about that over the years. I may have missed those threads though. I do tend to vanish for months at a time.

Sony and Nintendo have the same power as Apple? Are you serious? Not even close to the same sphere of influence. But yes, I have a similar issue with console platforms; they reduce the expectations of gamers. You end up with people playing FPS on the XBox.

[Prospero]

Who decides what is allowed on their respective consoles? They have the final say over any game. Seems similar to me.

[Tebonas]

The consumers aren't the only complaining, the developers are (and rightly so). But don't confuse the two. Or is anybody really thinking the average customer even realizes when an application or update is or isn't approved in the appstore? We are dangerously close to becoming a geek echo chamber.

The iPad, as it is now, is a media consumption device. Everything else is padding. For that it is still too expensive. But that doesn't make the iphone less of a phone. Some hatred here is bordering on irrational.

[Engels]

Who decides what is allowed on their respective consoles? They have the final say over any game. Seems similar to me.

As much as I'd like to agree, if only for the sake of a gratifying dig at consoles, this isn't true, as far as I know. Programmers are not limited to 'Sony/MS approved' SDKs in a hysterical grab at monopoly.

[MahrinSkel]

The iPad, as it is now, is a media consumption device. Everything else is padding. For that it is still too expensive. But that doesn't make the iphone less of a phone. Some hatred here is bordering on irrational.

Steve Jobs touched me in a bad place when I was a child.  Actually, he took the expansion slots out of the Apple ][c and then broke the compilers from earlier models when I was 13, forcing me to try to program in machine code, I've never forgiven him.

--Dave

[Quinton]

Who decides what is allowed on their respective consoles? They have the final say over any game. Seems similar to me.

As much as I'd like to agree, if only for the sake of a gratifying dig at consoles, this isn't true, as far as I know. Programmers are not limited to 'Sony/MS approved' SDKs in a hysterical grab at monopoly.

The console vendors often are not keen on you coding directly to the metal, instead of using their provided libraries, but I've never heard of them doing anything like banning libraries and middleware, banning interpreters, banning code generation tools, etc.  I really think that Apple has accomplished an industry first here in dictating what *source* language you can write your app in.

My understanding is that console vendors typically have pretty strict approval processes, but console game developers get something for that -- price support where they're not hugely undercut by other developers, for example.

[tgr]

Bit late to the party, but I am enjoying GTAIV immensely at 1920x1200. I'd argue that very few games are playable at the resolution you mention without a very expensive setup. This has Jack all to do with optimization for pc and more to do with your particular, exacting tastes.

I'm not going to disagree with the fact that it does require a fairly hefty machine to do so, but that wasn't my point. My point was that I've played games I consider should be more demanding than GTA4 on lesser hardware than my friend did, and I still usually peg the refresh rate whereas he just got 20-30fps.

Again, I'm not complaining that GTA4 "ran slowly", just pointing out that it seemed to be a fair bit less optimized than some games.

Who decides what is allowed on their respective consoles? They have the final say over any game. Seems similar to me.

We're not just talking about what's allowed on the iPad, we're talking about what it's written in as well. What do you think would happen to the consoles if MS said "you're not allowed to write your games in anything other than VB.NET from now on"? I would assume tons of programmers would tell MS to go fuck itself raw with a carrot and go over to the PS3. Or rather, I would hope they would do that, because that would be fairly bat-shit crazy.

[Prospero]

As much as I'd like to agree, if only for the sake of a gratifying dig at consoles, this isn't true, as far as I know. Programmers are not limited to 'Sony/MS approved' SDKs in a hysterical grab at monopoly.

The obnoxious thing the console companies control is access to dev kits. No dev kit, no game. Their acceptance rules can also be just as archaic as Apple's, or at least so went the horror stories from my instructors at school.

Also MS requires all code on the 360 to be managed code which can also be a big pain in the ass. One of my instructors had to reverse engineer the RPC protocol of their VCS to make a managed version so they could pull builds to their dev 360's. Most of their tool chanin had to be rewritten when they moved to 360 development because of the managed code rules. So yes, MS has the exact same rule on their console. Most developers just don't have to deal with it, and to be fair, most Windows developers already live in Visual Studio so it's less of an issue. Still, no Java or Erlang for you on the 360.

[Quinton]

Also MS requires all code on the 360 to be managed code which can also be a big pain in the ass. One of my instructors had to reverse engineer the RPC protocol of their VCS to make a managed version so they could pull builds to their dev 360's. Most of their tool chanin had to be rewritten when they moved to 360 development because of the managed code rules. So yes, MS has the exact same rule on their console. Most developers just don't have to deal with it, and to be fair, most Windows developers already live in Visual Studio so it's less of an issue. Still, no Java or Erlang for you on the 360.

Managed code is an output format restriction, not a source restriction (assuming the restriction is "must be managed code", not "you must write it in C#").  You should be able to compile java or erlang to managed CLI and there should be no visible difference to the runtime environment (just as compiling FORTRAN to ARM ELF binaries would be no different to the ip*d execution environment).

Does MS require this of full professional dev shops?  I had heard the managed code limitation was applied for their $99 indie developer stuff and the big guys still often used C++, etc?  (perhaps I was misinformed)

[squirrel]

Like a lot of people I find Apple's draconian application framework deplorable. But here's the thing - if you don't like it don't develop for it. I mean I hear Android is doing awesome (beating iPhone OS in market share) so develop for that. If the Emperor wears no clothes why are you so worried about the criteria to be his tailor?

[Samwise]

I'm just popping into this thread to comment that I'm living out of a netbook this week and every day I've discovered a new reason to be glad I didn't bring an iPad instead. 

Wait, the fact that I'm typing this post on something resembling a real keyboard makes another one. 

[tgr]

Like a lot of people I find Apple's draconian application framework deplorable. But here's the thing - if you don't like it don't develop for it. I mean I hear Android is doing awesome (beating iPhone OS in market share) so develop for that. If the Emperor wears no clothes why are you so worried about the criteria to be his tailor?

Because iPhone users are sometimes apt to spend stupid amounts of cash for apps?

[Tebonas]

But mostly they are cheap and want applications that are cheaper than 5 dollars.

http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-app-prices-tanking-2009-2

[Mattemeo]

Android surpasses iPhone.

Enjoy.

Delicious Apple tears...

"This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide," said Apple spokeswoman Natalie Harrison.

Bless. Did someone not mention to Natalie that iPod Touches aren't phones? Kind of takes the wind out of a desperate brag, really.

[Surlyboi]

It just seems like there is a whole lotta extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple, and I don't understand why. I understand why Quinton hates them, but that's a bit more personal.

It just seems like there is a whole lotta extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple, and I don't understand why.

It just seems like there is a whole lotta extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple

extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple

because it is Apple

[tgr]

It just seems like there is a whole lotta extra nerd rage in this thread( amongst a number of people ) because it is Apple, and I don't understand why. I understand why Quinton hates them, but that's a bit more personal.

Oh, don't you worry, I'll be saying the same thing if MS turns out to be doing the same batshit crazy shit with requirements as Apple is doing. I'm not hating on Apple because it's Apple (even though some'll probably think I am, because it'll justify them hating on me in return), I'm hating on Apple because Apple is acting like an unreasonable cocktard.

Just like everyone was hating on microsoft a few years back, and giving them fines in the billions. Maybe that's what Apple needs?

[Jeff Kelly]

Yeah and it kills any hope of having a sensible discussion about the merits and disadvantages of certain devices, because it always devolves in an Apple hatefest.

It would be nice if people could at least acknowledge that doing things differently might actually be a good thing instead of belittling and patronizing people that have the audacity to buy something that's not internet nerd approved.

I wonder if the engineers designing new products are as condescending about their customers as internet nerds are about technology. It would actually explain a lot.

I'd rather my parents use limited devices like internet tablets and actually enjoy using the internet and media, than having to suffer through the travesty that are modern personal computers just because some condescending prick in an engineering department somewhere secretly hates his 'stupid customers' that should educate themselves about the complex technology instead of demanding something easier to use. Because you know it's flexible and open and people that don't want what I want are any number of derogatory terms.

Instead of patronizing everybody that hasn't "seen the light" yet we could actually discuss why people buy and actually like those devices (hint: it's not because they're stupid) and hopefully learn something that we all benefit from.

Or we can continue being dicks on the internet, whatever.

[Righ]

because it is Apple, and I don't understand why

This is a gaming forum.

[naum]

Because the reasonings seem the reasonings of a woefully out of touch, supercilious effete bunch of spoiled nincompoops hell bent on a brow-beaten hegemony rather than smart, customer-centric decisions. It exasperates many of us that so many of its customers have drunk the cool-aid and refuse to see this as a problem. It lowers standards and will inevitably lower the quality of other products in the marketplace.

Really?

It seems Apple drove the smartphone market onwards where circa 2007, it appeared to be in a state of stagnation, with RIM Blackberry basically holding abreast market with awkward and failed stabs by Nokia at regular intervals.

Since then, it's been a non-stop parade of "iPhone killers" and 3 years later, a few phones (Droid, Nexus, Incredible) on par with AND MODELED from iPhone specifications. Phones, I may add, that are near as full featured (though still missing apps like Audible) or greater (better Voice implementation, better screen) but still are subpar in responsiveness and UI.

Now it's going to be 2-3 years of wannabes and "iPad knockoffs" that perhaps in 2012-2013.

Apple never going to be market dominant as they're not catering to the crowd that wants to put Linux on a toaster or high end PC gamer or the Apple hater who prides in not cowing to sleek designer Man and his Braun iconic gadgetry. And ultimately, they might end up stabbing themselves with the overly draconian platform restrictions (it is, I concede, an abomination that I must fork over $99 to build and run an application on a machine that I "own").

[Prospero]

Managed code is an output format restriction, not a source restriction (assuming the restriction is "must be managed code", not "you must write it in C#").  You should be able to compile java or erlang to managed CLI and there should be no visible difference to the runtime environment (just as compiling FORTRAN to ARM ELF binaries would be no different to the ip*d execution environment).

Does MS require this of full professional dev shops?  I had heard the managed code limitation was applied for their $99 indie developer stuff and the big guys still often used C++, etc?  (perhaps I was misinformed)

While that's totally true, most people don't have time to write a compiler for their language of choice in order to have proper managed bytecode. In practice most development shops just learn how to use C#. As I said before it isn't the biggest deal because most Windows/360 developers use VS with C++ and C#, but it is still a restriction. MS does require this of all game devs. They use it as some sort of anti-piracy measure.

This is a gaming forum.

I'd almost buy that as an argument for the slobbery Apple hatred, but the iP* product line is bolstered largely by games. Not necessarily great games in most cases, but there are some real gems on the platform. Plus Mac gaming in general has picked up quite a bit over the last two years. Even with Steam coming out today for OS X I won't be getting rid of my Win 7 partition, but if LoL can manage to get a client put together I may actually be able to do the lion share of my gaming in OS X.

[Jeff Kelly]

It's also a security measure.