Monday, May 24, 2010
Architosh on AutoCAD on the Mac
They've been leading the wishing section for years, now it's their turn to crow!
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Adobe's founders fume mindlessly in public
The biggest problem with the open letter released by Adobe's founders is there's no there there, no substantive argument.
They warn against the web fragmenting into closed systems, but in fact the exact opposite is happening, the web is unifying into an open system with a common language; it's reaching maturity.
One Adobe creation, the Portable Document Format will constitute an important part of the new web reality, in no small part because it is no longer proprietary. When Adobe turned PDF over to the ISO, all objections against its use disappeared. Had they done the same thing with Flash, the result would likely have been the same, and Flash would now be joining HTML5, the DOM, CSS, and Javascript as part of the emerging standard. In that alternate reality, even Apple would likely be happy to support it because they would be writing their own implementation to their own high standards, and Adobe, having had a huge head start, could continue to dominate the market for tools to create Flash content.
Instead Adobe chose to keep Flash a proprietary format. They should not be surprised that others' reactions run from lukewarm acceptance to outright rejection.
That Flash can be made to run acceptably on mobile devices, and that some web developers would prefer to keep using it rather than learn to use the open standards, doesn't even remotely constitute evidence that the future of the web is at risk unless every platform vendor were to allow it on their systems. Flash is common, yes, but its percentage of installation has already peaked and is beginning to dwindle. It is not and now will never be part of the standard, even if Adobe were to finally see the light and turn it over to the ISO or W3C; it's too late for that.
They warn against the web fragmenting into closed systems, but in fact the exact opposite is happening, the web is unifying into an open system with a common language; it's reaching maturity.
One Adobe creation, the Portable Document Format will constitute an important part of the new web reality, in no small part because it is no longer proprietary. When Adobe turned PDF over to the ISO, all objections against its use disappeared. Had they done the same thing with Flash, the result would likely have been the same, and Flash would now be joining HTML5, the DOM, CSS, and Javascript as part of the emerging standard. In that alternate reality, even Apple would likely be happy to support it because they would be writing their own implementation to their own high standards, and Adobe, having had a huge head start, could continue to dominate the market for tools to create Flash content.
Instead Adobe chose to keep Flash a proprietary format. They should not be surprised that others' reactions run from lukewarm acceptance to outright rejection.
That Flash can be made to run acceptably on mobile devices, and that some web developers would prefer to keep using it rather than learn to use the open standards, doesn't even remotely constitute evidence that the future of the web is at risk unless every platform vendor were to allow it on their systems. Flash is common, yes, but its percentage of installation has already peaked and is beginning to dwindle. It is not and now will never be part of the standard, even if Adobe were to finally see the light and turn it over to the ISO or W3C; it's too late for that.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Simon Sinek at TED
This speech was delivered last year at a TED conference in Washington state.
Click here for full frame.
Click here for full frame.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
using physical brushes with touchscreens
Bill Gates says pen-based tablets will beat the iPad, at least with students.
Something like a decade ago, one of my favorite rant topics was ‘where oh where is the electronic brush?’ I was referring not to brush gadgets such as are common in drawing programs, but to a physical brush that could be used in conjunction with an electronic display. At the time I imagined a brush composed of optical fiber, along with some internal electronics to detect the hotspot of a CRT as it passed beneath the bristles, and more electronics in the computer itself to correlate the signal generated by the brush with a position on the screen.
Well, CRTs are hard to find these days, and LCD screens don't have hotspots. On the other hand, touchscreens have become quite common, and at least those used by Apple are good enough to use for drawing.
The trick would be to find a bristle material, or the combination of a bristle material and the internal design of the brush, that would sufficiently mimic the capacitance of a finger to be detected as such. You can use as fine a brush as the touchscreen will reliably detect.
The difference between such a brush and a pen-input system might appear negligible, to the casual observer, but would be far more pronounced to the person actually using the device, due to the difference between the gradual contact of a brush and the sudden contact of a pen. Moreover, a brush would provide pressure information directly to the device, via the touchscreen, without need for a Bluetooth connection, and clues to nuanced movement via the rolling or rotation of the triangular area contacted by the tip, so you'd be able to use it to move sliders or rotate dial gadgets using very small motions of your fingers.
Also consider that the written language used throughout east asia is traditionally drawn with a brush, and is still more legible done by brush than with with a pen.
Besides which, there's an elegance to brushes that no pen can match, and the main reason for using a hard pen, multipart forms, simply isn't a consideration on a touchscreen.
Something like a decade ago, one of my favorite rant topics was ‘where oh where is the electronic brush?’ I was referring not to brush gadgets such as are common in drawing programs, but to a physical brush that could be used in conjunction with an electronic display. At the time I imagined a brush composed of optical fiber, along with some internal electronics to detect the hotspot of a CRT as it passed beneath the bristles, and more electronics in the computer itself to correlate the signal generated by the brush with a position on the screen.
Well, CRTs are hard to find these days, and LCD screens don't have hotspots. On the other hand, touchscreens have become quite common, and at least those used by Apple are good enough to use for drawing.
The trick would be to find a bristle material, or the combination of a bristle material and the internal design of the brush, that would sufficiently mimic the capacitance of a finger to be detected as such. You can use as fine a brush as the touchscreen will reliably detect.
The difference between such a brush and a pen-input system might appear negligible, to the casual observer, but would be far more pronounced to the person actually using the device, due to the difference between the gradual contact of a brush and the sudden contact of a pen. Moreover, a brush would provide pressure information directly to the device, via the touchscreen, without need for a Bluetooth connection, and clues to nuanced movement via the rolling or rotation of the triangular area contacted by the tip, so you'd be able to use it to move sliders or rotate dial gadgets using very small motions of your fingers.
Also consider that the written language used throughout east asia is traditionally drawn with a brush, and is still more legible done by brush than with with a pen.
Besides which, there's an elegance to brushes that no pen can match, and the main reason for using a hard pen, multipart forms, simply isn't a consideration on a touchscreen.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
not quite the Holy Grail, but...
There is now some reason beyond vain hope to think that AutoCAD will be coming to Mac OS X!
Friday, April 16, 2010
the marketplace of unmitigated, hateful nonsense
Update: It appears Apple may be prepared to reconsider Mr. Fiore's application and risk opening a can of worms.
It must have been a tough call, for whichever of the people Apple employees, to review iPhone/iPt/iPad apps that are submitted to the App Store, who was so unfortunate as to draw Mark Fiore's app. As an Apple employee, there's a pretty good chance they find a lot to agree with in the editorial content of Fiore's work, and would have liked to approve it, were it not clearly in violation of the section of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement covering objectionable material.
The point here is the precedent. If they were to allow Mr. Fiore's work into the store, on what basis could they refuse to allow Glenn Beck, or any of a hundred (thousand?) others of a similar stripe, to flaunt their drivel on the App Store?
I can't bring myself to blame Apple for not wanting to open up the App Store to such nonsense, nor for deciding that, in the interest of keeping it out, Mr. Fiore's work also had to be excluded.
(see the Dunning-Kruger effect, via Daring Fireball)
It must have been a tough call, for whichever of the people Apple employees, to review iPhone/iPt/iPad apps that are submitted to the App Store, who was so unfortunate as to draw Mark Fiore's app. As an Apple employee, there's a pretty good chance they find a lot to agree with in the editorial content of Fiore's work, and would have liked to approve it, were it not clearly in violation of the section of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement covering objectionable material.
The point here is the precedent. If they were to allow Mr. Fiore's work into the store, on what basis could they refuse to allow Glenn Beck, or any of a hundred (thousand?) others of a similar stripe, to flaunt their drivel on the App Store?
I can't bring myself to blame Apple for not wanting to open up the App Store to such nonsense, nor for deciding that, in the interest of keeping it out, Mr. Fiore's work also had to be excluded.
(see the Dunning-Kruger effect, via Daring Fireball)
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Dilger scores
Despite his characteristically over-the-top manner, Daniel Eran Dilger does occasionally contribute a point or two that apparently hadn't occurred to others. Such is the case with his five myths piece on the exclusion of Flash from the iPhone.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
another perspective on the most recent flap
I haven't yet seen the license agreement for iPhone OS 4, because, in my own way, which means on my own time and in fits and starts, I'm working on something for the iPad, which won't be upgraded to iPhone OS 4 until fall. I have some hope of having something ready to ship before then, so I'm still on 3.2. Besides, my phone is an original iPhone, and won't be able to run 4.0, so even if I were working on an iPhone app I'd have to get something new to have a test device, and buying the iPad has already used up that budget for awhile.
But even when the time comes for me to switch to the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, it won't matter one whit that Apple has precluded the use of middleware platforms, since I've quite enough on my hands learning what I need to know to make use of their own frameworks and have no intention of further complicating the task by bringing in someone else's.
Sure, I can see where someone who's been using Flash right along, and had been hoping to avoid the Cocoa Touch learning curve, might feel like they've been slapped down, but Apple's position on Flash has been plain as day for three years, or was until Adobe began muddying the waters by promising Flash developers that they would be able to compile to native iPhone OS apps using CS5. And it should be pointed out that Apple has already allowed some apps built with beta versions of CS5 into the App Store, for use on devices running pre-4.0 versions of iPhone OS, which right now is every iPhone OS device that isn't provisioned for iPhone OS 4.0 development, which includes all iPads. It's also possible that enterprises doing their own app distribution (outside of the App Store) will still be able to make use of this feature of CS5 even with 4.0, at their own risk of course. Apple has drawn a line in the sand, beginning with iPhone OS 4.0 apps submitted to the App Store.
The wiser pundits seem to agree that it's not so much about Flash as about allowing anything to come between developers and the platform Apple has so carefully constructed, and which they are using to push the state of the art. Any third-party middleware layer that became popular could (likely would) impose constraints on further development of the underlying native OS, if only by being slow to move off of deprecated APIs and to adopt new features.
It seems to me that there are two workable approaches to this, either you take the position that Apple has now taken for iPhone OS, beginning with version 4.0, or else you allow any such middleware platform, relying on the competition among them to force them to be good citizens, and using the native OS to set a high standard, which is the position Apple has taken for Mac OS X. Take Java for example. Java has never been allowed on the iPhone, but on Mac OS X Apple writes their own Java runtime. If they had access to the specifications that would allow them to do this for Flash also, they probably would.
This is probably the direction that Android is headed, but without the unitary native platform, since each manufacturer has their own approach, and Google hasn't yet shown much talent for herding cats. Another three years hence Apple will have an even stronger, unified platform, but where will Android be, lost under a pile of middleware platforms?
But even when the time comes for me to switch to the iPhone OS 4.0 SDK, it won't matter one whit that Apple has precluded the use of middleware platforms, since I've quite enough on my hands learning what I need to know to make use of their own frameworks and have no intention of further complicating the task by bringing in someone else's.
Sure, I can see where someone who's been using Flash right along, and had been hoping to avoid the Cocoa Touch learning curve, might feel like they've been slapped down, but Apple's position on Flash has been plain as day for three years, or was until Adobe began muddying the waters by promising Flash developers that they would be able to compile to native iPhone OS apps using CS5. And it should be pointed out that Apple has already allowed some apps built with beta versions of CS5 into the App Store, for use on devices running pre-4.0 versions of iPhone OS, which right now is every iPhone OS device that isn't provisioned for iPhone OS 4.0 development, which includes all iPads. It's also possible that enterprises doing their own app distribution (outside of the App Store) will still be able to make use of this feature of CS5 even with 4.0, at their own risk of course. Apple has drawn a line in the sand, beginning with iPhone OS 4.0 apps submitted to the App Store.
The wiser pundits seem to agree that it's not so much about Flash as about allowing anything to come between developers and the platform Apple has so carefully constructed, and which they are using to push the state of the art. Any third-party middleware layer that became popular could (likely would) impose constraints on further development of the underlying native OS, if only by being slow to move off of deprecated APIs and to adopt new features.
It seems to me that there are two workable approaches to this, either you take the position that Apple has now taken for iPhone OS, beginning with version 4.0, or else you allow any such middleware platform, relying on the competition among them to force them to be good citizens, and using the native OS to set a high standard, which is the position Apple has taken for Mac OS X. Take Java for example. Java has never been allowed on the iPhone, but on Mac OS X Apple writes their own Java runtime. If they had access to the specifications that would allow them to do this for Flash also, they probably would.
This is probably the direction that Android is headed, but without the unitary native platform, since each manufacturer has their own approach, and Google hasn't yet shown much talent for herding cats. Another three years hence Apple will have an even stronger, unified platform, but where will Android be, lost under a pile of middleware platforms?
Sunday, April 11, 2010
recent discovery: the Robots Podcast
As someone who at least imagines himself to have a reputation for being a robotics enthusiast, you might expect me to be right on top of what are currently the best sources of open information in the field, but you'd be wrong.
My enthusiasm is primarily for service robots, machines that do tasks people find uncomfortable, boring, demeaning, dirty, dangerous, or insufficiently valuable, such that you cannot find people willing to do them for what you can afford to pay in any but the most starkly depressed economies.
This is a category that hasn't received much attention in recent years, with most press/blog coverage going to robots that physically mimic humans to varying degrees, and most hobbyist activity directed towards battlebots.
So perhaps it's understandable that something as excellent as the Robots Podcast could escape my awareness for nearly two years. In that time this biweekly podcast has accumulated a very impressive collection of interviews with some of the most brilliant people working in robotics and closely related fields.
It's available both via RSS and on iTunes. Do check it out!
My enthusiasm is primarily for service robots, machines that do tasks people find uncomfortable, boring, demeaning, dirty, dangerous, or insufficiently valuable, such that you cannot find people willing to do them for what you can afford to pay in any but the most starkly depressed economies.
This is a category that hasn't received much attention in recent years, with most press/blog coverage going to robots that physically mimic humans to varying degrees, and most hobbyist activity directed towards battlebots.
So perhaps it's understandable that something as excellent as the Robots Podcast could escape my awareness for nearly two years. In that time this biweekly podcast has accumulated a very impressive collection of interviews with some of the most brilliant people working in robotics and closely related fields.
It's available both via RSS and on iTunes. Do check it out!
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