Apple is now worth four times Dell. Clearly Dell is ailing.
I, Steve Jobs, was asked what I would do to fix the company. Here's my answer:
What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
I call that irony.
Apple is now worth four times Dell. Clearly Dell is ailing.
I, Steve Jobs, was asked what I would do to fix the company. Here's my answer:
What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
I call that irony.
People supply many reasons to explain why Apple has not put Flash on iPhone, ranging from alleged arguments with Adobe to performance and battery difficulties.
While any or all of these reasons could be contributing factors, I believe that the most significant reason is more intrinsic: Flash on iPhone would suck.
Why would it suck? Because Flash, and its APIs, commands, and entire model of thought, are meant for the desktop, not for iPhone. And, as has been pointed out before, iPhone is not the desktop.
How would things like mouse-over, click, etc. occur? Okay, I can see using a finger tap for a click, but how would mouse over be accomplished? Worse still, how would the keyboard work? Although some Flash applications use Adobe widgets, even these are (I think) based upon the same keyDown/keyUp-style events. How will iPhone know when to show the keyboard? And, supposing that problem is worked out, how will it know what area should be focused on?
Assuming Flash applications are then limited to ones which require no keyboard movement and only minor mouse activity, we are still left with another problem: mice are precise, fingers are not. Many applications which use tiny buttons would be impossible to use.
This problem could, conceivably, be solved by using the pinch-zoom method. However, then drag-and-drop becomes impossible, as any drag operation would instead be understood as a scroll operation. Even without zooming or a need to scroll, drag-and-drop is complicated, because the only time that a mouseMove event could be fired in the first place is when the mouse is down.
Even YouTube would not work well in Flash on iPhone. You would have difficulty pressing the play/pause button, and using the track bar would be darn near impossible unless mouse-move was implemented.
While Flash does work on other phones, these phones still use the desktop paradigm: there is a fixed keyboard, and the stylus is very similar to the mouse. While the mouseMove/over difficulties would still be present, precision is not an issue, and there can be dedicated scroll bars on the side of the screen for scrolling (so zooming can occur, and Flash documents are not limited in size).
But, there is a reason why iPhone is so great: because it is not built traditionally, because it is not built like the desktop.
Flash is a desktop technology. iPhone is as far away from the desktop as you can get. That is why Flash on iPhone would suck.
That means I only have ninety-nine more to go! Actually, what it means is my little upload-managing portion of the site needs to be updated to support paging. As of this moment, it does not, so each time that page is generated, it creates a page with about fifty items on it.
Yet another movie! My brother and I have just finished our Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter cross-over movie. We have begun working on our next movie, and you'll probably see what it is next week. The one we are working on now is in Final Cut Pro, whereas the one just posted was done (mostly) in iMovie, though there were a few corrections to a couple of shots in Final Cut Pro, and most of the titles from the Lord of the Rings trailer were replaced with ones made in Photoshop and (in one case) Apple's Motion (I'll posting a tutorial on how to make these titles shortly).
So, here's our movie:
My brother and I just made this YouTube video of a Mac and PC ad where the parts are played by Smeagol and Gollum. Take a look!
I learned the hard way: do NOT go overboard on programming projects. It is way too much work.
I spent probably seven to eight hours programming my recent C++ assignment that was supposed to be a simple menu-driven command line application. I had to overcomplicate it hower. I made a menu controller, and made it allow registering of command objects. Then, I made each of the eleven (I think...) commands as separate classes, inheriting the base command class. In addition to that, I created the model for the application (a phone book of students and staff). Further, I allowed removal of items added (not a requirement), and saving of the entries to a file in a machine-readable format, and reading of that same format (again, neither one a requirement - though writing to a human readable file was). I added support for quotes to allow values to take up more than one word. I added support for backslashes within those quotes to escape quotes.
I could have used a simple switch statement for detecting menu commands. I could have made it completely straightforward, with none of the bells and whistles I added. I didn't. It was a big mistake. Not only was the project 37 files instead of the 7 files, but it was much more complicated than it needed to be (though, much more modular and, perhaps, well-written).
This seems like an obvious and easy-to-implement feature to me. Why can't QuickLook be used from open and save dialogs? As all of the (non-Adobe) open/save dialogs are created by the OS itself, this doesn't seem like it should be too difficult to implement. Indeed, even CoverFlow could be there!
It seems like an obvious enhancement to me - in fact, I'd almost consider the lack of it as a bug. I've already submitted it to bugreport.apple.com as an enhancement.
This is weird: the Little Brown Handbook mentions, several times in a row, People Magazine. Though this may be a random choice for use in their examples, something about it struck me as odd, especially the sentence "Do your own critical reading of People or another magazine." Though the Little, Brown Handbook suggests "another magazine," they specifically mention People there. Why? (page 164, tenth edition)
Further, on page 198 (tenth edition), they specifically state, as part of an assignment, to go to groups.yahoo.com. Again, why?
These two instances look a bit like mild advertising to me. I do not know, as I have no knowledge of any deals Yahoo or People may have made with the makers of The Little, Brown Handbook. However, it is interesting (and, if these are indeed advertisements of a kind, ironic) that they occur in chapters dedicated to analyzing sources for, amongst other things, that kind of content.
Words have meaning, but music has feeling. Music is thus unattached - it is free to be interpreted in any way.
Writing usually cannot accomplish such a feat.
Some people get all worked up about computer science. I can understand to some extent - I am very into computers. But I see computers as tools to accomplish tasks, not as tasks unto themselves.
Though sometimes subjects such as compilers, etc. catch my attention, I am predominantly interested in solving problems. As I use computers a lot, these problems are often computer-based. So, I write programs and websites to fix these problems. During the course of writing these programs and websites, I find things in programming languages, database techniques, etc. that can be improved.
Thus, my goal is not computer science itself, but improving things. And computer science is a means to that end.
Sometimes I want to ask colleges: "What is it about your school that will make me not have nightmares?"
After a singularly unhelpful phone call to a college (I won't name names) I am feeling extremely depressed. The person who I talked to probably wasn't trying to be rude, but that's how they came across.
One problem is that I will be majoring in Computer Science (most likely). As of right now, I have learnt all that I know about computers on my own. As such, I am extremely good at teaching myself computer science-related fields. I do not have confidence in any college's ability to teach me better than I can teach myself. Why should I have confidence in any given college to do so?
Why should I trust any university's computer science department at all?
I have been taking a C++ course at my local community college and it hasn't been overly helpful (though the teacher is good). It has not been helpful because I already knew the language. Further, I can usually learn a language in one or two days - I do not need a course to teach it to me!
I want to retain the ability to teach myself instead of be taught. Colleges and universities should expand my current resources so I'd be better able to conduct research. Colleges and universities should guide me to produce useful and innovative technologies and products. Colleges and universities should not restrict me, force me into classes whose subjects I would learn faster and better on my own.
That is, apparently, not how colleges work. At this point, I'm more worried about finding a college I'll accept than finding a college which will accept me.
On a side note, these are courses that might be of interest to me:
Drag-and-drop is evil.
You may ask me why this is. The answer is simple: you have to keep holding down your mouse button until the drag is finished. That is unacceptable. It is too easy to let go of the button and too difficult to maneuver the mouse while holding the mouse button down.
And thus, drag-and-drop (for anything but very short ranges is evil. As is copy-and-paste.
Copy-and-paste help alleviate some of the problems of drag-and-drop, but you have to epress Command-C (or Control-C on Windows), navigate Edit > Copy, or right-click (or control-click) and press copy.
