Steve Jobs...

With all the recent douchery he's been propounding lately - calling the iPad "revolutionary" etc. and calling the cops on those guys - is anybody being turned off by Apple?

From my perspecitve.... MS is utilitarian - image doesn't matter, so who cares what Bill Gates does (but he's never been such a cock.) However with Apple, you're buying the image, and that image is of an absoltue wanker

Anybody else agree?

To be honest I couldn't give a fuck. I will never touch a iPad because it gives me nothing. For now I love my iPhone and what I get from it, is way and above anything else out there. If I get everything I want from a device like Andriod and I like it more I will move over.

What the CEO of a company does or say does not effect me and I couldn't give a fuck about it.

Apple are going down a very proprietary track, not just at a hardware/software level - its central to their business model , and its working pretty dammed well.

Your not just buying an image though, you are buying great products that have had a lot of attention paid to the user experience.

Yup, he strikes me as a bit of a wanker in the sense that he is a bit of a megalomaniac and and control freak, but it's just those very same qualities that have made Apple what it is today - a very profitable business through "revolutionary" products. I use revolutionary loosely because it can mean different things to different people and therefore be argued that nothing of their's is revolutionary. However nothing bar the Walkman revolutionised portable audio like the iPod and iTunes whether or not MP3 players existed before it. No mobile manufacturer has had such a successful first release of phone, that other handset makers scrambled to copy. Similarly the Mac was incredibly successful and set the template for PC's there after (and revolutionised a few industries). The iPad, while not particularly inspiring to me personally could just well be the first successful tablet and other PC vendors will try to copy.

Yup, Bill Gates seems rather nice (especially with age) although rather shrewd, and Ballmer strikes me as a dick, but neither of them strike me personally as particularly visionary and none of their company's products have been mind-blowingly awesome, especially not right out the gate.

Over the last couple of months there has been a small drama unfolding between Apple and Adobe. Apple won't allow Flash on their iPad/iPhones citing poor performance as the main reason and blaming Adobe for Flash's crap performance on Macs (the flipside is Adobe didn't have access to hardware acceleration APIs on OSX like they do on Windows).
More recently, a week before Adobe were to announce CS5 and a much anticipated feature in Flash, the ability to build native iPhone applications, Apple changed a clause in their SDK agreement to state that iPhone apps must essentially be written in native code basically ruling out Flash development. After a week or 2 of following different views of this from both camps, I tend to side with Apple. But it's a pretty fucked execution, especially to a company that has such a history with Apple.
Back to prohibiting Flash as a plugin, seems slightly annoying but at the same time this is potentially helping to usher in use of newer web standards such as HTML5, with native (but not quite cooked) video support and cool tags such as canvas (that in the future may be able to be used to do a lot of the things that Flash is used for). If website owners want their sites to be viewed on the iPad/iPhone they will start using the open standards more.


This is just one example, there are plenty. In summary, their means to an end seem often quite cunty, but the end is usually rather superior products.

Apple have definitely been over-serious douchebags recently. Perfect example of a company whose culture is largely based around being the underdog outsider suddenly being dominant and not knowing how to properly deal with the cultural and branding issues that come with that.

But I love the product that's come out of them and will keep using it.

I dont mind apple but Its easy to make everything work when you offer no flexibility in the way your products can interact with others and limit the functions. Maybe that makes them smart, maybe people will get sick of always waiting.

I find this Flash thing really weird to be honest. It's a proprietary standard to Adobe that you have to pay to develop in - there's all kinds of proprietary software formats that won't run on phones, and many of those phones can't/won't run Flash.
The fact that the thing has an open web browser that supports full open standards is a step ABOVE most cellphones.

Realise that by extending it up to a tablet form has amplified some of the issues but they're still basically the same...

Adobe can go suck a dick, and Apple has both the balls, and the war chest to tell them so.


I do wonder about Steve's recent outspokeness tho. On the burns maybe?

Adobe seems to have put an awful lot into the Flash platform lately, CS5 has a pile of products that were previously in beta that are all based around Flash, and users could even build custom panels for applications like Photoshop in Flash format. So I guess it's not only about playing swfs and videos, this kinda derails Adobe's whole strategy. Things such as InDesign that could export to Flash, presumably in order to make the next generation of interactive ebooks and magazines... for the iPad.
Adobe will have to retool everything if Apple does manage to have any impact. CS6 could wind up looking a lot different. Which might be a bloody relief actually...

Been quite interesting all the emails posted up in various places by people who've had a reply from him. His strong opinions and attitude are somewhat refreshing, and at least they usually make some sense. Can you imagine the pile of crap that would come out of someone like Ballmer's mouth?

Nah, you don't have to pay if you really don't want to. I've done Flash using a text editor and this... http://www.mtasc.org/

what reactionary said

Hahaha

Here's the problem with Flash to .ipa, as I see it.

Developing for iPhoneOS, for a developer, is piss easy. A friend of mine fired up the SDK the other day, and within a day had 95% of a working app complete - and this app connects to a well known trouble ticket platform, so there's a lot of stuff in it. He hadn't touched the SDK before this. Hell, in typical Apple fashion:


Yeah it's that easy.

Now, for those who've used iPhoneOS, you know how obvious the difference is between apps that use the native UI tools, and those that don't. Those that don't? Some weirdo has wasted a whole bunch of time coding all that, when the OS provides it all for you. It's no surprise that the most popular and most usable apps (with the exception of games or more specialised apps) are the ones that most match the base system UI. Users intuitively know how to use them and that breeds instant familiarity.

Now, Flash to .ipa workflow would breed a whole bunch of apps that don't adhere to any of the UI specs, and worse, designed by people that probably don't have that good a grasp of the limitations of the hardware, OS and interface. Lazy design, crapped out in the blink of an eye. I suspect it would be much harder to incorporate newer hardware/OS features into apps designed in Flash. Fuck all that.

Sure, I can see some advantages, but most based on ease of cross platform development. Like I say tho, when iPhoneOS dev is so easy anyway.

With regards to the big guns not being visionary that's probably because they are more like facilitators, they don't necessarily come up with all the great ideas but they make it possible for other peoples great ideas to become reality...and then they get like 99% of the credit.

I'm sure they have all had some great ideas at times too but that's probably not what got them where they are today.

Actually that relates quite well to the OP because you end up with this situation where they are considered the master minds of everything the company has done so when they speak everyone takes it as gospel while in reality there are probably plenty of people within the company that don't even agree, people that do a lot of the really detailed work that make their products sell.

Steve probably just needs to learn to shut his big trap.

In the case of the iPhone v4 though there was clearly some very stupid moves on the part of the person that found it and Gizmodo. Not sure how they ever thought it would not turn out very badly for all involved. The IP value to Apple of an unreleased iPhone is second to none.

Good run down on iPhone 4 saga here...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100515/tc_pcworld/gizmodoiphonesagacourtdocsrevealfascinatingdetails_1