Be Excellent To Each Other

I thought flash was a pain in the arse until I started using noscript, now I just pretend it isn't there until I want to watch the iplayer or something

Flash can be a pain in the arse, especially when it's used badly, or for no real reason. But, fortunately, it's stopped being the fucking bane of the Internet like it was in the early-mid 00s.

We're closer than you think. For example, http://jilion.com/sublime/video is a feature rich media player (intelligent buffering, full screen support) that matches the usual Youtubeish ones, is written in clean Javascript, and works in Safari and Chrome using HTML5 standards. I don't know how far off Firefox support is, but come on, this is pretty neat this early on in HTML5's life and (I hope) a way forward.

That was Youtube decision and not a requirement. For example, Vimeo works fine on the iPhone, without a standalone app. The website is mobile formatted and when you click a video it moves to a fullscreen Quicktime instance which then receives a H.264 stream.

I completely agree this is about control, I just don't agree that a) the iPhone, and now the iPad, will sell badly because of lack of Flash support or that b) this is bad for the industry.

As for games, not many existing Flash games would port well to 320x480 screens with touch control, I think. If you want to write games targetted at the iPhone using Flash, you can use Adobe's new "compile Flash for the iPhone" doodad and ship it for free through the App Store. Or you can write native iPhone games and release those for free instead. Those are free games that you can play for free, right? And judging by the enormous piles of shovelware crap I see in iTunes, Apple doesn't have much hesitation about approving them. So where is the problem exactly?

When me and (someone from Wales, I can't remember who) first got out hands on your tablet PC, what's the very, very first thing we both did?

And why are we suddenly talking about the iPhone?

And and, HTML5 is years away, and there's no guarantee that Mobile Safari is going to support it (is there)?

It's not a matter of having the technology proved and working though, it's a matter of when the vast majority of sites will have converted to an HTML5 based offering. And that hasn't happened over the iPhone's lifetime to date.



Oh, it isn't, in either case. Doesn't stop it being a pain in the arse to a user though.

Covered it like a plasterers radio?

I learn a lot on this site. I was wondering why Flash was so bogus on my Mac (especially on Chrome, which just dies when presented with Flash. Or GIFs, weirdly).

It was Toby, and you both loaded a porn sight with Flash-based streaming. The porn argument for Flash was floating around a few Mac blogging sites this week after a pro-Adobe blogger mentioned it. It seems an awful lot of streaming porn sites already have, or are building, iPhone versions that don't rely on Flash.

Because no-one has an iPad yet.

It already supports the HTML5 embedded video stuff, including the Javascript player I linked to up there.

Youtube are running HTML5 tests. You can opt in though http://www.youtube.com/html5. Only works on videos that don't have ads at the moment and no full screen.

I bet Stephen Fry does.

These COD perks are getting silly now.

Interesting.
It has to be said, the special YouTube iPhone app and all the effort they put into recoding everything for it seem to be a complete waste of time as it only works about 10% of the time.

Not sure what the problem is there but the YouTube thing seems to work without fail on my Touch.

Same here, YouTube works great on my phone, even on 3G.

It does cock up for me occasionally, but I think it's down to YouTube's servers or O2's cellular data when it does happen.

Vimeo works fine since about a week, not?


yuotube gives me 1/4 times "this fileformat is not supported" but retrying works 95% of the time..

http://fury.com/2010/02/do-the-ipads-mi ... dashboard/

He's not basing this on much, but I like his core idea of the iPad using a dashboard/widget metaphor for background app access. It neatly conveys to users and devs that background apps should be lightweight affairs.

Also "As a user experience designer for Google, I led the design of Gmail 1.0, Google Calendar 1.0, and Google Reader 2.0." so the guy is no dummy.

That's interesting and I hope he's right.

One of the main things that sticks in my mind about the look and feel of the device is how bare and boring looking the home screen was, with the little app icons looking lost.

My though was that the screen should actually be split - half launcher and half dashboard with widgets on it. And that half isn't ready yet.

And yes, it really will need to offer IM type applications that will stay "open", I'm sure that is high on the list of things potential purchasers will want to use it for.

That's an odd interpretation of multi-tasking. Usable multitasking means running multiple things concurrently, things that you want running concurrently - not just being able to dip quickly into something else without interrupting what you're doing. What he's suggested is interesting - but unless you can run (for example) a full productivity app while your internet radio app is running in the background, it's not really fulfilling the brief that most people are looking for.

Well, I don't see why it couldn't work like that - I have a net radio widget on my OS X dashboard for example.

The iPhone OS itself is definitely multitasking, and you can even open multiple standard apps at once with some jailbreak hackery, so I'm sure that, like with cut-and-paste, once they can offer it in a way which isn't going to confuse people and cause problems, they will.
A dashboard does seem like that way..

Quite - but look at all the examples given in his example - stocks, calculator, weather. None of those are persistent apps that you'd leave running.

iChat is though

What I mean is that he's speculating that the missing apps means multitasking, when in actuality all the apps he quotes are those that are totally unrepresentative of what would present a decent multitasking solution. I'm not denying that a dashboard-type multitasking solution would be excellent, I'm arguing that the reasoning he uses for coming to that conclusion is horseshit, well-established credentials or not.

True, it's more wishful-thinking than anything. I still hope he's right though.

If he isn't it will simply be up to the hackers.

If I wish it could make toasted cheese sandwiches will it happen?

Yes, that's what I meant when I said it was baseless. I like his idea, which is why I presented it here, the process by which he arrived at the idea is rather more suspect to my mind.

I agree with him, though, that my usage pattern for a calculator on my iPhone (whilst doing something else, load it up, calculate something, go back to what I was doing) is similar to that for, say, a Spotify control panel (whilst doing something else, load it up, hit pause or next track, go back to what I was doing).

If he isn't right, I'm sure we're going to get a multitasking solution in one of these devices, and I hope it's soon. The community is pinning rather more on "well, Apple aren't shipping for another 60 days, I bet they're going to add this stuff before launch" for me to believe though. It'll be interesting to see what they decide to do. We also need a way to pass data, in rich formats, between apps and between devices (both similar and different, such as a network share or a USB thumbdrive); if I had to bet, I'd suggest Apple know they'll need to add that in some future version of iPhone/iPad OS and are working on it already.

That's UI interaction multitasking though, not proper multitasking. When you close your calculator, the OS can blow it away and free up the resources it's using. When you close your Spotify control panel, the app playing the tunes needs to keep running.

I think that's likely bollocks. They left them off for aesthetic reasons. Why wouldn't Jobs have mentioned it otherwise? Especially with all of the "WOT NO MULTITASKING?!" hype around. I mean, they want to sell the things, don't they?

edit: I now realise what I just said was really obvious and wasn't really what you lot were arguing. Carry on.

But we know the iPhone already has OS level multitasking, it just refuses to let third party apps access it, presumably for a combination of two reasons: resource starvation and management UI. The dashboard metaphor would solve the management UI problem and prompt devs and users to restrict resource consumption by background apps, partially addressing the first problem. The other part of solving the first problem is increasing device specs. It'll be interesting to see what CPU the v4 iPhone gets in July, seeing as how this new Apple-made ARM-derived thing in the iPad is seemingly a pretty nice piece of kit.

Management UI has never been a problem though. A simple alt-tab analog would be the simplest thing in the world to add to the iPhone. I agree that it's the last one resource starvation and not wanting the device to ever experience slowdown - I'm just not sure how you manage that if you do want to open it up.

If this is fake, it's an elaborate one: iPad was designed to have a webcam?

Thinking along the "THIS IS THE PERFECT COMPUTER FOR PEOPLE THAT CAN'T WORK A COMPUTER" lines - it might suit my parents. However, is there any word on separate logins? Can you have two email accounts? etc.

I was thinking that too.
You can certainly have separate email accounts on the iPhone msg software. But if the web browser works properly it might be preferable to use Gmail anyway.

Separate logins and setups? I quite strongly doubt it.

There certainly won't be separate logins, but you could have multiple mail accounts easily.

Define 'easily'. Bear in mind that we're talking about people that are about as likely to understand FORTRAN as they are to understand the difference between user profiles.

I have a blog post brewing about this. Whilst it's not groundless -- it's possible the iPhone and iPad might inspire a super-simple closed-device revolution that, when we look back on it, will look as important as the move from CLIs to GUIs -- I think the bloggers have become carried away with hype. To my mind, there are too many things even novice computer users take for granted that aren't going to work on the iPad. Printing things. Ripping a CD. Listening to an iPlayer stream of BBC radio whilst playing Solitaire. I don't really see how you can expand a future device to do these things without getting back to the closed-architecture can't-really-break-it thing that makes the iPad and iPhone different from computers.

I very much doubt it.

On the iPhone, if you have more than one email account, then the Mail app has a top level screen where you pick your account, then pick which folder you want to see in the account. It's one of my pet hates; it takes six pushes to change from Inbox in one IMAP account to another, which is too many in my opinion.

1) Give iPad to Grim...
2) Grim... sets up mail accounts
3) Give iPad back

Once they're setup it's very easy to switch between them in the mail app.

Have you used Mail on the iPhone? You get a list of accounts that have been set up. Touch one to go to the list of mailboxes within it (like inbox, sent, etc). Touch one of those or press the button marked "Accounts" to go back.

My parents have no problem with it, put it that way.

This is true, it's a little infuriating.

All of [edit - Dr Glwyndr's post]

I guess we tend to approach these things from our experienced computer user angle. For others, the machine is just an appliance that does stuff. My mum's the kind of person who panics if the desktop background picture has been changed. We got an Ipod Touch for her birthday and she loves it: a button for email, one for the calendar, and so on. Haven't got her putting her photos on it yet, but it'll come in time.

DISCREPANCY.

Sure, but only for one email account.


Your parents share an iPhone?

No. It's not complicated. It's just unnecessarily tedious.

My Dad has one. I set up my mum's email account on there too so she can check it when they're away on holiday and stuff.

If there was a quicker way of doing it, it would probably be too complicated for parents
Frankly this is only of concern to people with several active personal email accounts.

Being able to switch accounts via some sort of tabbing at the top would be better than having to traverse back up the tree and down again without complicating things.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001FB5FXA



Hmm.

In a surprising about face, I have just signed up to be notified of when I can pre-order an iPad.

Not surprised

Don't you have an Apple Store anyway?