Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 1st Jul 2010 19:04 UTC
So, the iPhone 4 has been out for a while, and is getting mostly pretty good reviews - there's one major sore spot, though. Apple made this hoopla about their fancy antenna thingie, but as it turns out, this thingie is kind of a design flaw, causing signal loss (and dropped calls) for some people. Despite downplaying by Steve Jobs himself, AnandTech has done a thorough investigation, and they've found out that the problem - which affects every mobile phone - is a whole lot worse on the iPhone 4 due to the new antenna. At the same time, however, the iPhone has much better reception in low signal situations. What?
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Member since:2005-10-02
Member since:2006-11-14
I fail to get the joke, if the intent was to make people not freak out when coffee is poured on the device and the current design was specially crafted to make people not freak out when coffee is poured on the device, then the design if flawed if people freak out when they see coffee on the device.
Going on stage when announcing the launch of the device and claim people do not freak out when coffee is poured on it then start saying it is a non issue or freaking out customers are mentally unbalanced when customers start reporting freaking out when they see coffee pouring on the device will lead to bad PR and lawsuits
Member since:2005-11-10
The point is that if it is built so that if someone accidentally spills something on it, the owner doesn’t freak out, then it is built well. The engineering speaks to the human emotion so that the owner knows how to react. That’s a difficult thing to quantify and communicate in product design—“does this product look and feel fragile? Does the user assume that is fragile before they have even picked it up?” Thus my example of cutting through the discussion and demonstrating that the product was fragile because everybody instantly reacted.
Member since:2006-06-12
Member since:2005-11-22
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2010-03-08
I like the idea, think you can get them to implement it? 
He could, but then I think he wouldn't work at Apple.
I suspect that their higher-end products are made to look fragile on purpose, in order to feel more precious and desirable. Just like some sort of jewelery. Because if you consider the weight and the materials being used, the iPod Shuffle and some older releases of the Nano are maybe the sole products from Apple which *do* look and feel rock-solid.
Edited 2010-07-02 05:11 UTC
Member since:2005-07-12
In other words you want a phone designed by Kalashnikov at the peak of the Cold War?
Toss it in the deep end of a swamp for two weeks, dig it out, put it in the sand and drive over it five or six times with a half-track, pick it up, smack it on the side twice to loosen things up, piss down the barrel to wash out any funk, rack the bolt and start firing?
Of course, I'm loving a design flaw that can be fixed with a piece of electrical tape.
Member since:2010-03-08
In other words you want a phone designed by Kalashnikov at the peak of the Cold War?
Toss it in the deep end of a swamp for two weeks, dig it out, put it in the sand and drive over it five or six times with a half-track, pick it up, smack it on the side twice to loosen things up, piss down the barrel to wash out any funk, rack the bolt and start firing?
Toss it in the deep end of a swamp for two weeks, dig it out, put it in the sand and drive over it five or six times with a half-track, pick it up, smack it on the side twice to loosen things up, piss down the barrel to wash out any funk, rack the bolt and start firing?
Add up 1 month battery life and I'm sold ^^
Of course, I'm loving a design flaw that can be fixed with a piece of electrical tape.
It remains a design flaw :
1/Why is it the users, and not the designers from Apple, who have to put that piece of electrical tape in place ?
2/If you put something as ugly as electrical tape in contact with the iPhone 4, it will immediately stop being Premium Apple Hardware and became a normal touchscreen smartphone from 2010, a device trying to be both a phone and a computer and being shitty at both. Who would want that to happen ?
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
"But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 13:17 UTC
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 12:06 UTC
"According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.More News »
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Member since:
2005-11-10
Apple—unwilling to compromise on quality, except for style.
I had the strangest / geekiest dream yesterday. I dreamt Apple had hired me as a designer and there was a round table discussion with me, Ive, Jobs and other engineers talking about this new prototype iPad on the table that included a camera this time (like it was supposed to :|). We were discussing the choice of materials and nobody seemed to be getting to a point, so I held my cup of coffee over the device and ceremoniously poured cold dregs on to the iPad. Everybody freaked out. I interjected and said "This iPad has a design flaw. Every time I pour coffee on it, everybody freaks out. Please make it so when I pour coffee on it, people don’t freak out."