Theolog

Steve Jobs: LoL or RIP?

2010-04-29T12:51:00.000-07:00

Apple's Steve Jobs wrote a letter today, telling the world how much he hates Adobe's Flash and laying out his arguments in a fairly clear manner. If one were to believe him. Personally, I don't believe him for the simple reason that his arguments are fairly easy for people with a development background to debunk.

He claims, "Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary" and then attempts to relativise the fairly obvious answer to that with "Apple has many proprietary products too. Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open".

Firstly, like Flash or not, the format itself is an open specification. There are numerous open source libraries that produce Flash content, as well as some professional animation tools that output in Flash's SWF format, such as Toon Boom Studio . The proprietary parts of Flash are Adobe's Flash Software and its file format, which is not what the web gets to see.

As for comparing the propietrariness of Adobe's Flash to Apple's iPad, iPod and iPhone, where the entire system, including hardware, software and even the store is proprietary, to the extent where developers can not sell or even give away their apps unless Apple says its OK to do so is such a poor argument, I think you have to pretty much be willing to believe anything that Steve Jobs says.

Steve Jobs then goes on to make bold claims about how the whole web is switching to HTML5 and h264 video format. He names a whole host of large commercial websites that are or will soon be offering h264 video. What he doesn't say is that while the general tendency was certainly to html5 video in the long term, it is mainly due to these corporations not wanting to lose out on the iPad using visitors in the short term that h264 and html5 are suddenly sprouting out of the ground.

His next claim, that "There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world" must rank up there amongst the most arrogant and boastful claims ever made in the IT world. To be sure, the IT world is full of boastful souls with huge egos, most of whom end up facing humiliating failure, but this one is simply ludicrous. The App Store and the iFamily of devices is a huge success, but how on earth do you actually count all the Flash games and PC and or Console games out there?

However, the success of the iPad might certainly spell the slow death of Flash on the web if things carry on at this rate. It seems there is such a rush to produce politically correct apps (ok, I put this in here to highlight Apple incredible arbitrariness in its behaviour towards App developers) that one sometimes feels that websites with rollovers/hovers will be dead by tomorrow (They won't).

Jobs then gets to the one absolutely true point, and that is Flash's performance, security and resource consumption, all of which are terrible. Point made. Flash has never been a sucess on mobile platforms before because a) no one made Flash apps for mobiles, b)Flash Lite was pretty terrible and c) mobiles were flakey enough without Flash crashing them, thank you.

But then Steve Jobs goes and blows it again with his claims that Flash somehow won't work because (insert some hand-waving here) it doesn't support "touch". I honestly wonder how he can claim this with a straight face while looking at your average website, which is a damn sight less flexible for "touch" than Flash is. I don't know of many websites, which Steve Jobs is claiming is a major target for the iPad/iPhone etc, that support multi-touch and that don't use some form of rollover. In fact, even Apple's own site supports rollovers, right at the very top.

Finally, and this is where Steve Jobs, in my opinion, twists the truth the most while perhaps inadvertently exposing the true reason for his anti-third party developer tools hatred. In his 6th claim, he states, "letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform" and goes on a violent rant even adding the Adobe Creative Suite into the mix (Adobe was forced to switch to Cocoa/ObjC when Apple cancelled 64-bit Carbon a few years back).

The obvious corollary to this is that Apple get to control everything on the iSeries. They already have the industry's strictest controls on customers and developers, but now they really want to make sure that they own the whole thing, from the very beginning to the very end.

So much for openness.

Around ten years ago, in the midst of the anti-trust proceedings against Microsoft, Bill Gates, in the person of a Microsoft funded industrial group, proclaimed "Consumers did not ask for these antitrust actions - rival business firms did. Consumers of high technology have enjoyed falling prices, expanding outputs, and a breathtaking array of new products and innovations...Increasingly, however, some firms have sought to handicap their rivals by turning to government for protection. Many of these cases are based on speculation about some vaguely specified consumer harm in some unspecified future, and many of the proposed interventions will weaken successful U.S. firms and impede their competitiveness abroad."

Today, Steve Jobs claimed, "Our motivation is simple – we want to provide the most advanced and innovative platform to our developers, and we want them to stand directly on the shoulders of this platform and create the best apps the world has ever seen. We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. Everyone wins – we sell more devices because we have the best apps, developers reach a wider and wider audience and customer base, and users are continually delighted by the best and broadest selection of apps on any platform"

I wonder how long it will take for either the US or the EU to start anti-trust proceedings against Apple?

The Eve in EVE: Getting ladies to play Eve Online

2010-04-21T04:38:00.000-07:00

Over on CrazyKinux's site, there's a little competition going as to who can shine some light as to why women don't like Eve:

What could CCP Games do to attract and maintain a higher percentage of women to the game. Will Incarna do the trick? Can anything else be done in the mean time? Can we the players do our part to share the game we love with our counterparts, with our sisters or daughters, with the Ladies in our lives? What could be added to the game to make it more attractive to them? Should anything be changed? Is the game at fault, or its player base to blame?

I know a Dutch girl who plays Eve. She's pretty circumspect on revealing who she is, for obvious reasons. EVE, despite the name, is very much an Adam's game. It seems that men like the heavy technical details and the violent action. Some women do as well, but most don't. Additionally, the social aspects of EVE, or at least the positive ones, seem to lean pretty much towards male bonding (discussing the last pew pew with corpies is like discussing a football/soccer game you saw on TV, discussing ship fitting is like obsessing over cars).

Women in general prefer seem to prefer games that emphasize social interaction. Incarna may or may not bring more of that (if the screenshots from the various stages of WiS development are accurate), but that will not actually make much of a difference in-game unless you add more dependencies to the mix.

There might be more specific points that one could add to the game to make it more interesting for women, but one of the chief problems of the game is that there is very little humanity in the game. The player avatars have no real meaning or influence in the game. People communicate with one another through voice and chat channels and, uhm, yes, internet space ships. There's no human interaction, there's no consequences of human interaction. To counter this...

Let Incarna players interact with one another in more way than one, such as informal settings such as bars, lounges, games, etc.
Let players have more input on the managing and running of missions.
Let those missions be given out in the station, via player interaction.
Advertise scenarios that would appeal to all players, such as...
Diplomats from alliances meet in a neutral NPC station, or even a neutral player station.
Advertise the scenario as needing people who are good at negotiation, diplomacy etc.
Advertise the fact that one's character's looks/clothing have an influence on the way that others perceive him or her. Skilled players already know and use this by manipulating their Bios.
Advertise that Eve has a need for players with "people skills".

The pros of adding a lot of social interaction to the game is that you can get more players who are less interested in the technical aspects. Additionally, none of this has to affect the actual combat/manufacturing/trading side of the game. It just adds another dimension to it.

To summarise, I don't know what would bring more female players to Eve, but Incarna/social interaction has a better chance than the current game does, especially if the social aspects are highlighted.

A whole metric faecesload of people have posted on this already, and here are a few links to some of them:
Think outside the Spaceship
Tech2 Stilettos
Sociability V
It's a womens' world (you just don't know it yet)
Getting in touch with our feminine side

This one, especially, seems to say almost everything I say, only better:
.5 or higher

Want to add another one, this one by a female Eve player, as opposed to a she-male Eve player, of which there are many:
The girls who fly spaceships

Cargo a.k.a. Swiss Science Fiction

2010-03-29T02:44:00.000-07:00

I watched the SF movie Cargo on DVD last night. Very well done sets, and the plot even had promise. What didn't have any promise was the acting. I seriously think that if they'd have used wooden puppets, it would have been a better movie. Simply awful.

Apple: Cocoa vs Carbon

2008-04-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

This week I started finally going through my book on Cocoa programming. The book is 5 years old. That is a real problem since Apple recently changed both Cocoa itself and Xcode, the IDE/GUI builder so that the book is very out of date and hard to follow. The most frustrating thing is that it is one of the better books on Cocoa. The Apple one is simply so shallow that it makes learning why things in the Apple coding world work the way they do (and why they don't often enough, given Apple's lack of attention to the details in documentation) very difficult. The Hillegass one simply assumes you should already have an MSc in Computer Science.

I have also been doing a little bit of background reading on Carbon, Apple's now deprecated C/C++ coding framework - Apple announced last year that it won't be ported to 64 bit, which was as good as saying sayonara. The thing that blows my mind is that Almost all of the really big and important applications on the Mac, including some of Apple's own (Final Cut Pro is Carbon, as far as I know), are written in Carbon. Adobe CS3? Cinema 4D? Office 2008? All Carbon.

This comes about a year after Apple dropped Java as a first class Cocoa programming language.

The net result of all of this is that there is now exactly one native programming language for Cocoa, a language that, like Apple's other mainstay, AppleScript, is not really used anywhere else (unless you think GunStep is widely accepted). Look for job opportunities for Objective-C developers. ObjC, for short, features somewhere around number 38 in the TIOBE language index, just ahead of forth, but behind Bash.

Want to port your code to Cocoa? Good luck. There will be no 64 bit Adobe CS4 for Mac OS X. If you're a video editor and you were really hoping to use After Effects in 64 bit, you'll have to stick with Windows a little bit longer.

Apple is closing up the platform, in my opinion, very much like they are doing with the iPhone. In that they are becoming very Microsoft-like.

If you ask me, which you aren't, of course, the current trends of Microsoft's bumbling along trying to kill off everything else in the computer world, Apple's greedy and autocratic behaviour coupled to the fact that Canonical's Ubuntu Linux is finally starting to make serious headway on the desktop market lead to me thinking that this would be an ideal time for Adobe to start porting its major applications to Linux.

Oh well, one can dream. In the mean time, I have now started using Ubuntu as a development platform for C, Java and Python stuff. It may be a few lightyears behind both Apple and Microsoft in terms of developer tools, but it is also a few lightyears ahead in terms of flexibility.

Yay, Linux.

Theolog 1.0

2008-01-06T11:10:00.000-08:00

The Theolog has started, yo.