can somone try to load Minecraft (www.minecraft.net) it's browser-based or a .JAR and it's the only JAVA app I personally give a crap about
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Flash Performance on iPad?
- Thread starter Ashton
- Start date
can somone try to load Minecraft (www.minecraft.net) it's browser-based or a .JAR and it's the only JAVA app I personally give a crap about
OS X is Mac OS. "X" is "10" the core version number. The full title is "Mac OS X".
The browser does not support plug-ins of any kind nor can you load Java applications locally. Try to load the JRE at java.com and you'll be greeted with this.
I read OSX is coincidence that X =10. Apple went with X for uniX, it's a RADICAL change from Mac OS 9 and lower.
wow... even Android supports JAVA... did apple TRY to rip out all web functionality from the device???
Troll on, brother.
That's mineCRAFT major difference
(lol seriously though huge and impressive indy game)and personally FLASH is more of a concern to me than Minecraft, but since I'm a JAVA programmer, that kinda pisses me... not to mention Java is considered a mature technology and should work, hell my BD player runs a form of JAVA!
No FLASH, no JAVA, no ActiveX... hell why not just slap Lynx on there and be done with it!
EDIT:
Hey, 99% of my posts are positive or even helpful! I'm allowed a few trollish ones now and then!
QFE. "Mac OS" is the name, "X" is the version, be it 7, 8, 9 or X...
Anyone familiar with Macs would know "Mac OS" doesn't somehow refer to classic only.
Soarin
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2010
- Messages
- 2,489
I have to agree the flash on a broken iPad is ehh. But I still miss flash.
This is absolutely true.
I used to be one of the ignorant ones, so I know the thought process.
Anything produced by Apple = dumbed down devices for the dumbed down masses.
That's what I used to think, until I started using the devices myself, and lo and behold, I came to the realization that's not really the case at all.
They work, and they work well, without much maintenance, without much downtime, and provide quite a bit of power and functionality.
Whether that be something running OSX, or an iPad, iPhone ,etc.
I'd like Apple to be more open myself, and quite frankly, i think the premium on the devices is way too high, but I can't deny the allure or a well performing device(macbook, iPhone, iPad) that does what it's supposed to do and does it well. They aren't perfect, and they don't have as many "options" as alternatives, but they perform their functions better than the alternatives.
Back to the OP : I have an iPad. I missed Flash the first week at most, then everyone started serving up H.264, and the rest is history.
As for games, I'd rather have a native game application for an iOS device over something web based any day of the week. They are built for the form factor, and provide a better experience overall.
That's not completely the case. If you spec out a PC with the same components you'll quickly find there is little to no premium on Macs. Take a current gen 27" iMac for example. Spec out all the parts, including a 27" IPS screen, and the price is pretty darn close.
Mac Pros are similar. I haven't run the numbers in a while but it's probably the case now. The difference is if someone was building a super powerful desktop machine, they're not going to use Xeons, or some of the other parts Apple does on the Mac Pros. The audio chipset used is very rare and much nicer than what you'll find on a desktop board. Add in things many don't care about like FW800, and the price goes up.
Apple does sometimes fail to update their hardware in a timely manner. When I was shopping about 15mo ago I couldn't find a Mac I wanted, so I built an i5 hackintosh. A few months later, they released i5 & i7 iMacs. That made their price much more worth it. Still, I already have a pair of nice monitors. So I wouldn't want to pay for the iMac screen anyway.
This is amazing.
Exactly. I still remember getting an iPhone and worrying about the lack of Flash and how it might bother me, but I started playing around and within 10 minutes I completely forgot. Many months later I've still yet to ever notice issues or problems because of the lack of Flash.
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Ditto here on missing flash. I used it as my primary argument against an iPhone (still using my Blackberry) or an iPad (bought one in November for travel abroad). Once I got an iPad, I realized it really didn't matter. You would think I would have realized it given that I have used flashblock since I moved to Firefox years ago. It's a rare occasion that I find a need to let the flash element run on a website.
As for Java, so far I haven't even noticed that it was missing with 3 months of fairly constant iPad use. The only thing on my desktop that I use Java for is Textwist on Yahoo Games. I have never needed to access it since I already have a similar game on my iPad that runs without an internet connection.
As for Java, so far I haven't even noticed that it was missing with 3 months of fairly constant iPad use. The only thing on my desktop that I use Java for is Textwist on Yahoo Games. I have never needed to access it since I already have a similar game on my iPad that runs without an internet connection.
CrazyCuz2k
Gawd
- Joined
- Sep 22, 2008
- Messages
- 684
Now that Mac's use intel chipsets, prices are comprable... on initial release. Unlike intel/amd that go on 6 month product cycles, Apple goes on 1 year product cycles so you don't get your hardware refresh until a year later. They don't drop their prices until the new model comes out. Saves them a bunch of money on R&D costs and they can still maintain their margin, actually increase their margin as they continue to charge the same price for a 6-12 month old tech. Most people are willing to pay that margin for peace of mind. And for all you naysayers, that's exactly what Apple provides, peace of mind. Their QC is second to none in the computing industry, and if it breaks, you walk in and get it replaced.
Most of us build our comps because we like to spec them the way we see fit. We like piece mealing our parts and like the ability to upgrade as new things come out. We get an upgrade itch and get cold sweats reading and researching Sandy Bridge, Bulldozer, SLI, Eyefinity, and benchmark the shit out of our systems and argue hell over high water why our system is better than theirs. I've got 2 HTPC's (1 watercooled), a watercooled unlocked eyefinity rig, a super quiet low power 10 TB server, intel, AMD, nvidia, and ATI and the device that I use the most is my trust little iPad and before than my 5 year old powerbook which I've given to my dad to replace with my iPad. Why? Because I use it and it work. I don't tinker with it, I don't upgrade it, it doesn't give me that itch. Hell it's not even jailbroken!!! Why??? Because I don't "need" it to... it does what I want when I want and I knew that coming in.
Yea it doesn't do Flash and it doesn't do Java, and it doesn't have a camera, and it doesn't have USB ports and it doesn't have expandable memory, and so on and so forth. I bought it knowing it because it works... like my powerbook before it. My computers don't crash... much... and they're my toys that I tinker with. But never have all my comps been all working at once because I'm always tinkering with them.
My point of the diatribe is that both platforms, have their merits, and they cater to different people and different markets. There's a yin and yang to it all... Mac OS is locked down for stability purposes, they know their market/users, who want a simple productive with some glitz and glamour, the other side of the fence wants an open platform so they tinker and customize so we can get it just right, and we're willing to put on the effort. We're a very "small" minority with VERY LOUD voices. So be it... can we all just get along and be happy with what we have and not make uneducated biased blanket opinions of the "Apple" people and "Windows" people because I get offended because I'm both!
Youre operating on pretty faulty information here, especially as it relates to Apple being open or closed. In general, Apple is open: Android and BBOS6 devices wouldnt be able to use Webkit otherwise. They also continue to release Darwin code.
As for price premiums well, experience is the best teacher. Try building a PC with exactly the same specs and features as a given Mac. Youll quickly find you either cant do it, or you go well over the price of a similarly-configured Mac. The disparity is even bigger in the notebook realm. The Apple tax died with PowerPC.
Overall I agree with you, I just want to nitpick a bit on this: their product cycle isn't really 1yr. It varies. Sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. Also once a product has been out for a while, there's generally rebates, value adds (eg free iPod, free Apple Care)... that are available or can be negotiated. Sometimes there's also "silent upgrades" where the specs say one thing, but they get extra RAM, bigger HD...
Even with the PowerPC it wasn't fully true. It was certainly more difficult to compare. But one key thing was it was more like an equity installment. When you wanted to upgrade, your current machine still had that equity and you could sell it and that made the cost of an upgrade a lot less. So really it only had to be paid once.
Personally I got out of the equity trade when I sold my G5 for $800 and built my hackintosh for about the same price.
I think a lot about user interface/interaction/experience/whatchamacallit and I think that's the giant elephant in the room when it comes to Flash and Java. They were originally built for desktop machines with super powerful general CPUs, taking relatively distinct and exact digital input via keyboard and mouse. Touch input is imprecise and has fewer states, so it's pretty hard to translate everything designed for a mouse and keyboard to work well on a touchscreen.
Single clicks are fairly straightforward. Keyboard input events are relatively doable, depending on how you listen for keys and how the OS implements the key messages. Hover, double-click, click-and-hold, click-and-drag, and scrolling is where it gets really tricky. The iOS user experience, for example, considers dragging to be a scroll event by default, double-tapping to be a zoom or select event, etc. So, there goes the ability to do a straight up translation from touch input to mouse equivalent. You could try doing it the way some laptop touchpads do it and make a double-tap-and-hold-then-drag gesture cause a click-and-drag gesture, but then how are you going to explain that to the user? Slip it into the manual that nobody reads? Not to mention it'll probably be implemented differently by each device or OS maker who has a different idea on how to do it.
JavaScript in MobileSafari was adapted to provide events to override default touch behavior in web pages, which makes it a reasonable theory that Flash and Java could do the same in the virtual machine side of things (if they decided to do so), but that won't change the thousands if not millions of things out there that were set up for those old keyboard and mouse events.
It's also hard to translate the performance. ARM is missing some instructions that are hard to emulate, and I doubt it was designed to run VMs. So, to begin with, even the best port is going to be handicapped. As already mentioned, a lot of what's out there was coded poorly and might work fine on a Core 2 Duo, but on an ARM, there's less wiggle room before you start to notice things going slowly.
From all this, you can deduct some pretty key reasons not to include Flash or Java in the product for now: 1) They weren't built for touch and as yet have not been suitably adapted to touch, 2) they weren't built for low-power processors, 3) the vast majority of what's out there in Flash and Java now has not been updated with touch and low-power processors in mind and thus wouldn't benefit from Adobe and Oracle fixing 1 and 2 anyway.
Compare the effort it would take to fix all of that to the effort it would take to move to other things which can & already have been made to run well on touchscreens and low-power processors. For example, there's really only one company that can work on improving Flash performance, but pretty much anyone can work on improving JavaScript and WebKit.
Apple made a design decision to avoid plaguing users with these key issues until they were addressed. Thus far, Adobe has stomped their feet and cried foul instead of thinking hard enough about these things and either moving on from Flash or cranking out a version that ran up to Apple's standards. Remember, these are people that care more about how smooth it scrolls, how easy and consistent it is to use, and how snappy it feels, rather than how many checkboxes they have in a comparison chart. If given a choice of either a fluid, snappy user experience, or the ability to run Flash, they'd choose the fluid, snappy user experience. A lot of people, myself included, agree with their user experience philosophy, and not from the standpoint that "oh, His Steveness said it so I think so too." but because to them, that's just a better choice to make than to cater to older technology that might detract from the rest of the experience.
People who would rather have the checkboxes have plenty of x86 laptops and tablets to choose from that run all that just fine, and last plenty long enough to watch a movie or two via Flash before they have to plug it in again or swap a battery. Hell, one of my favorite computers was the Lenovo X60 Tablet. But that was a $2500 inch-and-a-half-thick computer built to do everything it can do, not a $500 half-inch-thick computer built to do everything it can do well.
Single clicks are fairly straightforward. Keyboard input events are relatively doable, depending on how you listen for keys and how the OS implements the key messages. Hover, double-click, click-and-hold, click-and-drag, and scrolling is where it gets really tricky. The iOS user experience, for example, considers dragging to be a scroll event by default, double-tapping to be a zoom or select event, etc. So, there goes the ability to do a straight up translation from touch input to mouse equivalent. You could try doing it the way some laptop touchpads do it and make a double-tap-and-hold-then-drag gesture cause a click-and-drag gesture, but then how are you going to explain that to the user? Slip it into the manual that nobody reads? Not to mention it'll probably be implemented differently by each device or OS maker who has a different idea on how to do it.
JavaScript in MobileSafari was adapted to provide events to override default touch behavior in web pages, which makes it a reasonable theory that Flash and Java could do the same in the virtual machine side of things (if they decided to do so), but that won't change the thousands if not millions of things out there that were set up for those old keyboard and mouse events.
It's also hard to translate the performance. ARM is missing some instructions that are hard to emulate, and I doubt it was designed to run VMs. So, to begin with, even the best port is going to be handicapped. As already mentioned, a lot of what's out there was coded poorly and might work fine on a Core 2 Duo, but on an ARM, there's less wiggle room before you start to notice things going slowly.
From all this, you can deduct some pretty key reasons not to include Flash or Java in the product for now: 1) They weren't built for touch and as yet have not been suitably adapted to touch, 2) they weren't built for low-power processors, 3) the vast majority of what's out there in Flash and Java now has not been updated with touch and low-power processors in mind and thus wouldn't benefit from Adobe and Oracle fixing 1 and 2 anyway.
Compare the effort it would take to fix all of that to the effort it would take to move to other things which can & already have been made to run well on touchscreens and low-power processors. For example, there's really only one company that can work on improving Flash performance, but pretty much anyone can work on improving JavaScript and WebKit.
Apple made a design decision to avoid plaguing users with these key issues until they were addressed. Thus far, Adobe has stomped their feet and cried foul instead of thinking hard enough about these things and either moving on from Flash or cranking out a version that ran up to Apple's standards. Remember, these are people that care more about how smooth it scrolls, how easy and consistent it is to use, and how snappy it feels, rather than how many checkboxes they have in a comparison chart. If given a choice of either a fluid, snappy user experience, or the ability to run Flash, they'd choose the fluid, snappy user experience. A lot of people, myself included, agree with their user experience philosophy, and not from the standpoint that "oh, His Steveness said it so I think so too." but because to them, that's just a better choice to make than to cater to older technology that might detract from the rest of the experience.
People who would rather have the checkboxes have plenty of x86 laptops and tablets to choose from that run all that just fine, and last plenty long enough to watch a movie or two via Flash before they have to plug it in again or swap a battery. Hell, one of my favorite computers was the Lenovo X60 Tablet. But that was a $2500 inch-and-a-half-thick computer built to do everything it can do, not a $500 half-inch-thick computer built to do everything it can do well.
Your statement without correction makes perfect sense. Why should Apple (or anyone) send consumers and developers frolicking (lol) through a minefield of stuff, when they could just use ... HTML5?
Your statement without correction makes perfect sense. Why should Apple (or anyone) send consumers and developers frolicking (lol) through a minefield of stuff, when they could just use ... HTML5?
Quoted for the TL;DR... this is what my above diatribe all boils down to.
Your statement without correction makes perfect sense. Why should Apple (or anyone) send consumers and developers frolicking (lol) through a minefield of stuff, when they could just use ... HTML5?
Other than we were talking about a game called "minecraft" your actually ironically correct (and yes I do agree Flash/JAVA can be a "minefield" to a platform developer)
Though keep in mind HTML5 hasnt been updated to accross the board, lots of sites go "meh why bother? wait till we update the entier site" (i.e. v2.5 -> v2.6 still flash, but v 3.0 will be HTML5) Dont forget it will take time to develop a complicated flash interface into HTML5 (as opposed to video)
Very well said and informative. I think you just won the thread.
That's what I went with, though a step or two back, the X41 Tablet. Very happy with it despite it's larger size. ^_^
monkey_slap
Gawd
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2005
- Messages
- 780
Have very few problems without Flash on my iPad. Very few.