daggar

The inevitable Apple-baiting aside,. this project shows what’s wrong with the current patent/IP regime in general— including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung and the restof them.

The GUI and other user-interface concepts arose from open,. freely-shared research and concepts like this. If the developers of Dataland started patenting everything they touched, the GUI and other developments would have taken far longer to develop. In fact, Dataland might never have been built if the concepts they borrowed had been roped off by a previous set of patents. Every step along the way would have been longer, more arduous, more litigious, and expensive.

Try [du jour hardware keyboard substitute that people insist is better than a harware keyboard until the next du jour keyboard substitute comes out, proving that the last one was inadequate by the mere existence of a new one.]. It’s faster than typing ona hardware keyboard.’

It’s the U2 album effect. " [LAST ALBUM] sucked, but [CURRENT ALBUM] puts them back on top!" Repeat for every [CURRENT ALBUM].

Dear 2K: no one cares about the FPS game you’ve chosen, at random, to affiliate with an old franchise.
Firaxis’s X-Com remake is the game that we care about. You might just cut your losses now.

Any PC gamer worth its salt who loved running into numerous driver errors has been x64 since Vista, since both ATI and AMD had miserable 64-bit support at the time. But I guess it’s important for devs to start making 64-bit Windows mandatory for high end games because there’s both good reason and good support for it now..

FTFY

The more we get into the digital age, the more it becomes glaringly, blindingly obvious that we need an archive-grade binary medium for unpowered storage. Anyone who considers the indefinite maintenance of a trail of live disks indefinitely to be a sensible solution for long-term storage is ignorant of both basic economics and history.

…and THIS is why I won’t be buying the Droid 4. I’ll miss you, physical keyboard, but you’re saddled with so much MotoBaggage that I’ll be getting the GNexus.

The nameplate doesn’t matter. Just about every handset is Chinese.

Unless you think that FoxConn and similar companies are bulwarks of corporate integrity that would never modify their clients’ designs.

Ah yes… so there are no less than three stages where major national or corporate entities can insert malicious functionality, instead of the two I implied.
]Random word that has nothing to do with the content of my post]

Oh and also that MS and Apple phones are being manufactured in China. Who knows what sort of exploits are being built into the hardware.

Right. On those phones it’s MS’s and Apple’s backdoors and nothing else. Except for anything with a driver, of course, which historically have let OEM’s introduce all manner of security holes, intentionally or unintentionally.

The problem isn’t open source, as you said. It’s the closed-source portions where the problem lies. It would have been nice if Google required open-sourcing of all the drivers on a phone to get access to their apps.

I agree. I hope Google starts kicking carriers and manufacturers around like this in the future.

Something tells me that Jobs is going to have a busier postmortem career than Tupac.

If I could pay for new programming a la carte, I would happily do so. While content providers insist on asinine bundling, I have no sympathy for them.

Upgrade in two weeks. Still don’t see anything on Verizon that draws me away from the Galaxy Nexus. The D4’s keyboard would if it weren’t attached to a phone with a nonremovable battery, and the toxic locked bootloader/Motoblur combo.

You could say the same about the postwar European car industry, Japanese cars of the 60’s and South Korean cars of the 90’s. Successful industries do not happen by reinventing the wheel- they start by emulating known, successful models and build up from there. Mark my words, within two decades there will be prestige Chinese brands.

Your choice of profession does not magically imbue your words with meaning. Since you seem to expect others to do your thinking for you, I will help you out.

First, you speak of Apple’s numbers of users as if it’s a magic bullet, along with ‘home screen presence.’ Apparently you are not referring to how many people might use it (as one would expect, not knowing that Being A Developer makes words mean different things), but that they have a large potential pool of geolocation data. However, this confuses, since Being A Developer should make one aware that large datasets are only one component of a successful program,.

Secondly, you speak of ‘development since 2009’ like it’s a long time. It’s not; Google has been constantly refining and adding features to their mapping software for twice that long. Not just maintaining— adding. Apple is chasing a moving target.

Finally, I know how Apple has maintained its success- and it’s not by scattershot chasing of every business model that crosses their mind. They’ve got a limited number of products, and focus on them tightly. Starting a worldwide realtime map service is not a small undertaking. It takes huge amounts of capital, expertise and development to get to the point of being MapQuest. Matching the industry leader is another point altogether and requires engineering skillsets and management structures that Apple has yet to demonstrate.

So they have a data and technology base comparable to Yahoo Maps or MapQuest, maybe as good as Bing.

You misunderstand me. I’m speaking of well-executed and useable program, not of the size of an install base. There are plenty of mediocre programs that succeed just by a captive install base— the ‘Image Zone’ that gets installed with every new HP Printer, for instance. Or Windows Live. Millions of people use these things because they get foisted on them. Both of them have been in development for longer than Apple has worked with maps.

I don’t think ‘deep integration’ means what you think it means. It does not mean ‘pre-installed.’

The fact that you put those two statements together indicates a shuttered mind.

Of course it’s unique; they pioneered streetview, several different zoom methods and a ton of other features. The fact that they didn’t rush to the patent office over every non-duplicated thought that flashed through their heads speaks well of them. The fact that you regard patent abuse as a benchmark of innovation speaks poorly of you.

Swapping out one set of menus for another isn’t progress; it is a purely lateral move.Posts like this are what put people off UX designers. ‘some arcane editing process from 1998’ is often a workflow that constitutes the lifeblood of a small business. Saddling a small company with comparatively massive tasks of re-training and re-organization, all in the name of swapping one set of menus out for another, is a bad move.

Which is not to say that UI’s don’t need to change. PS’s does,. but it shouldn’t be swapping one setup for another because of the whim of one neophile. User interfaces need to be updatable. but it shouldn’t be irreversible. Here is where Photoshop could learn from Portal: Allow more extensive UI remapping. Instead of revamping the config at the whim of a designer, make the damned UI more configurable. Take PS’s existing idea of workspaces and expand on it. Make a few presets: ‘fossilized PS7 Workspace,’ ‘This Months Passing Fad,’ ‘Keystrokes for everything’, etc.

But what is needed, far more than PS interface updates, is to get the rest of the damned Creative Suite up to at least Photoshop par. The interfaces for Flash and Illustrator make PS look futuristic by comparison. If Adobe’s going to push a whole damned Suite, then then should make the components behave like a suite.

Liquid assets do not automatically create management expertise, nor do they prevent a fragmentation of focus, or dilution of service.

Acquiring a bunch of geocoded data is necessary but not nearly sufficient to compete with Google Maps. I imagine that Apple’s acquisitions have gotten them to the point where, data-wise, they compete with MapQuest or Yahoo Maps. What is needed to compete with Google Maps is a deep integration of many sources of data, a huge depth of geocoded web information… it requires re-inventing a lot of Google’s infastructure. It’s not just capital-intensive, it requires management structures that Apple historically hasn’t done well.

Microsoft has plenty of liquid capital (though not as much as Apple), tons of talented people, but their scattershot pursuit of diverse businesses has done them limited good. Apple Maps could become the Windows Live of the new decade.

This will not be good for Apple. Apple maintains its quality by maintaining a tight focus on a narrow line of products. Duplicating a large amount of functionality just to get it under their fiefdom distracts from that focus.

Replicating Google’s massive, sprawling mapping and geolocation data just to make the garden wall a little higher… that’s not a good use of resources. It’s either going to require a huge amount of capital and resources (that they are drawing off their other products) or the offering will be decidedly mediocre.

Google Maps for Android has had this for a few months. Prior to that, MapDroyd did. I have no iOS device, but I’m sure there are offline map programs somewhere in the AppStore.

It’s a little worrying how many people think that the printed word is a problem that must be solved.

Interesting how, considering that every contemporary map API copies Google Map’s features, UI and behavior, no one is huffing and puffing about how one company is blatantly ripping off the innovation of another.

There aren’t even any lawsuits about UI patents or software features. Huh.

I might be interested in one of the mob of Motorola droids if any of them had unlocked bootloaders. Until then, Motoblur (or whatever they call it now) will keep me away.

What Arbeck said.

On top of that, the programmable auto-type function is very nice.

And lastly, it’s open-source, it’s been vetted by quite a few security professionals, and my passwords will never be beholden to closed-source code.

Eh, I’ll stick with KeePass over all of’em.

MEh. It’s no Killdozer.

It’s telling in the way it’s interpreted, as well. It’s not a matter of profit, but image— plumbers make good money, but they’re filthy manual laborers so we need to shy away from even the metaphor.