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Ah, my mistake. I thought capacitive screens didn't work with fingers for some reason.phongn wrote:Neither. The iPhone uses a capacitive, not resistive, touchscreen. It does not recognize pressure (which is how the iPaq's stylus works). You need a capacitive stylus.
Not quite - the complete runtime is available from Adobe and is native on ARM. Safari already uses the NPAPI plugin system; it's not that difficult to add it. The rest of your points remain true - Flash is very often a terrible user experience.Ace Pace wrote:Because Flash support is a pain in the behind, makes you tied in alot of ways to Adobe's market practices, support schedule and buggy applications. Embedding flash into your embedded is a non trivial prospect from the engineering perspective.
I misspoke. When I meant engineering, I did not mean just the conversion from x86 to ARM, I know that has been done. I meant the total user experience, such as dealing with it's inevitable crashes (sticking it in a separate process like many browsers are doing today is probably non trivial in an iPhone).phongn wrote:Not quite - the complete runtime is available from Adobe and is native on ARM. Safari already uses the NPAPI plugin system; it's not that difficult to add it. The rest of your points remain true - Flash is very often a terrible user experience.Ace Pace wrote:Because Flash support is a pain in the behind, makes you tied in alot of ways to Adobe's market practices, support schedule and buggy applications. Embedding flash into your embedded is a non trivial prospect from the engineering perspective.
I don't see the trouble doing process separation either, honestly. It is the user experience that is a big issue - Flash ads are a notorious power hog and a "click to view" option is not the most user friendly.Ace Pace wrote:I misspoke. When I meant engineering, I did not mean just the conversion from x86 to ARM, I know that has been done. I meant the total user experience, such as dealing with it's inevitable crashes (sticking it in a separate process like many browsers are doing today is probably non trivial in an iPhone).
The GPU and CPU are fairly powerful. The bigger issue is UI, I'd think.Stark wrote:I was surprised to see that there are plans to port UE3 to iPad. The hardward doesn't look significant enough to really take advantage of most of the engine's features, but it's an interesting idea.
Some of the 3D engines that are used are pretty solid engines when used for developing PC or high end consoles. You can usually buy a version of the same engine specifically for iPhone development which comes without the features the iPhone doesn´t support anyway.Stark wrote:Well I seriously doubt that they're going to port Unreal 3 itself; UE3 is an extremely flexible engine which is already being used for the sort of low-end 3D stuff that's all over the App Store. I'm not certain it's a 'big deal', as people already use 3D engines for these kind of platforms and UE3's highend trickery is obviously irrelevant. I guess I'm not familiari enough with the engine's lowend capabilities - and I wonder if they'll also port UE4 later.
At least it'll be easy to develop for.
iPhoneOS does not presently allow multitasking outside of certain Apple applications (e.g. phone, music). Apple's presently philosophy for mobile apps is that they should be ready to be pre-empted (or crash, or powered down) at any moment and state restored on next launch.Sarevok wrote:Wait dahak are you saying you can't multi task on a iphone ? I got a pdf open, ms excel spreadsheet halfdone and a music video on youtube playing on the cheap nokia I am typing this from. Is not multi task virtually universal on any device deserving the term "smart" ? Ipad is going to be a brick if it at least dont allow running 3 to 5 different apps in background.
Or you could just use any number of devices with this capability out of the box.Superboy wrote:Just to clarify, the iPhone does let you multitask with certain things; you can listen to music while doing pretty much anything else, for instance. It should also be noted that there are third party work arounds available that allow all sorts of multitasking on the iPhone. It's apparently an easy fix.
Sure, if multi tasking was the only thing you want from the device. These Apple devices do other things brilliantly well, and that's why I love my iPhone. The multi tasking was a minor issue, and I found an easy work around.Or you could just use any number of devices with this capability out of the box.
For you, perhaps, but I like to be able to look at more than one thing at a time. 9.7" is enough to have two things up at once, on hardware that can take running more than one thing at once. While I have no doubt Apple will make money on this product, I know for a fact that this product isn't marketed to any of us. It's marketed to people who want an Apple Netbook, because that's what it is (It doesn't matter what Steve Jobs claims it is, that's what it fucking is. It may have less functionality than a netbook, but let's face it, it's a fucking netbook). It browses (most of) the internet, and you can use it for basic word processing. That, and it already has a big library of games and stuff that people already know and like.Superboy wrote:My point is, the lack of mult tasking is a problem, it's just not a big problem.
I'm going to ask a stupid question here, but (aside from the downloading thing) how much of that can you actually do at once? Or do you simply have the apps available as a background?Sarevok wrote:Multi tasking can be damn useful. I often have a big file downloading or torrenting on my symbian while doing something else. Like gaming, chatting on msn messenger,typing a word document or watching a dvd movie i turned into divx etc. .Basically multi tasking is useful on a phone for same reason as a pc, The smartphone today is as powerful as a netbook pc while being small enough to fit in a pocket. So why not use it as a real computer ? Normal play music while running just one single app thing is so backdated. I had that in 2004. For 2010 smartphone or device needs at least to run browser, email, chat and basic document and media handling programs at once.
I can't imagine trying to do more than one thing at once on a tiny phone-sized screen would be very pleasant anyway. Shrinking them to fit into that small area would make everything unusable.Jason L. Miles wrote:I'm going to ask a stupid question here, but (aside from the downloading thing) how much of that can you actually do at once? Or do you simply have the apps available as a background?Sarevok wrote:Multi tasking can be damn useful. I often have a big file downloading or torrenting on my symbian while doing something else. Like gaming, chatting on msn messenger,typing a word document or watching a dvd movie i turned into divx etc. .Basically multi tasking is useful on a phone for same reason as a pc, The smartphone today is as powerful as a netbook pc while being small enough to fit in a pocket. So why not use it as a real computer ? Normal play music while running just one single app thing is so backdated. I had that in 2004. For 2010 smartphone or device needs at least to run browser, email, chat and basic document and media handling programs at once.
Remember, the iPhone - and presumably the iPad - fake multitasking by having apps save their state on exit.
That was kind of my point. He claims to have all of this on a smartphone.General Zod wrote:I can't imagine trying to do more than one thing at once on a tiny phone-sized screen would be very pleasant anyway. Shrinking them to fit into that small area would make everything unusable.Jason L. Miles wrote:
I'm going to ask a stupid question here, but (aside from the downloading thing) how much of that can you actually do at once? Or do you simply have the apps available as a background?
Remember, the iPhone - and presumably the iPad - fake multitasking by having apps save their state on exit.
I don't necessarily want to be able to do six things at once on my iPhone. But, should I really have 6 different copies of mobile Safari (Safari, one in Tweetdeck, my RSS reader, Facebook, Stanza, etc.)? And sure, the fake multitasking is rather fast, but it's still a longer period of time than is necessary, especially for apps which take sometime to start up. And so I can play music from the iPod app at the same time as using one of the other apps... I still can't use Last.fm at the same time as one of the other apps. I shouldn't have to jailbreak to be able to do this, and especially not for the iPad, which has a much better processor, and more room for battery than my phone.Jason L. Miles wrote:[I'm going to ask a stupid question here, but (aside from the downloading thing) how much of that can you actually do at once? Or do you simply have the apps available as a background?
Remember, the iPhone - and presumably the iPad - fake multitasking by having apps save their state on exit.
That is better then nothing, but its still inferior to proper multitasking. Take this example - it might be much more realistic and common then torrenting. A couple of times now, I've been forced to compare prices or look for the place to buy something on my phone either because the shop I originally went to didn't have whatever I wanted or because I didn't manage to do the price comparison or search before heading out. Now, that pretty much involves 1) a browser, 2) a mapping application (extremely common with speciality shops that are, frankly, at the ass end of nowhere), 3) the actual phone features (calling the shops to confirm their Internet info and/or reserve the product). On my Symbian-based Nokia, once I have all three running, switching between them is literally a press of a button. So I can look up a shop, (click) look up how to get to it, (click) call to confirm that they have the item in stock, and then, if it doesn't pan out, (click) immediately go to the next shop on the list. On the iPhone, sure, theoretically you can do it the same way, however each of those clicks is more like a ~10s wait for the app to launch yet again. Frankly, it offends my sense of efficiency to be constantly launching and closing apps to look up related info.Jason L. Miles wrote:I'm going to ask a stupid question here, but (aside from the downloading thing) how much of that can you actually do at once? Or do you simply have the apps available as a background?
Remember, the iPhone - and presumably the iPad - fake multitasking by having apps save their state on exit.
Right, and you can do all of that with fake multi-tasking, or at least the amount that is feasible on the screen size. You end up with a slight delay, but it still works.Sarevok wrote:Another better example. Often I am chatting with a friend over msn or yahoo and want to send them a link or information. I can just minimize and copy paste it. Say for example Shroomman (we used to MSN often) wants me to review his story. I can download his story and give it feedback while chatting with him over MSN. Or say I found a picture on the net and need to email the link. I can just copy the link, start a new email message and paste the link without killing the browser.