Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd Nov 2011 22:54 UTC
And so the iOS-ification of Mac OS X continues. Apple has just announced that all applications submitted to the Mac App Store have to use sandboxing by March 2012. While this has obvious security advantages, the concerns are numerous - especially since Apple's current sandboxing implementation and associated rules makes a whole lot of applications impossible.
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News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/21/13 15:53 UTC
The new WebKit Opera for Android has been released. "Opera 14 for Android is built on top of Chromium 26, with a total overhaul of the UI in native code, making it fit well with the latest Android design guidelines. Go get the build from Google Play or point your browser to m.opera.com, and give it a spin!"
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
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."More News »
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A bit, sure, but a lot ?
Billing with a typical app store : Click buy, enter password, payment done.
Billing with paypal : Click buy, check that you are actually on paypal and that the bill is correct, enter password, payment done.
The extra visual scan is pretty quick.
What I agree is more uncertain is what happens after payment, the part which does not depend on Paypal themselves. Some vendors redirect you to a download link, some vendors send you an e-mail, some vendors manually check incoming orders... This would benefit from a bit of uniformization. But nothing there which user experience guidelines and vendor-provided software distribution tools couldn't fix.
What do you mean by that ? If I see a nice RSS reader on the Mac App Store, download it, run it, and it turns out that it's actually a basic program which displays a silly picture of a cat with subtext "you got owned !", what is the difference ?
It is a given that purchases are simpler, what I'm wondering about is if it's worth the cost of putting a single entity in control of anything a computer may run.
When I see Apple banning the Wikileaks app from un-jailbroken iOS, Google forcefully removing apps from users' devices from a distance, or Apple remotely bricking iPhone prototypes... I believe that the amount of control which we let others have on cellphones is scary. Current mobile OSs are an evil dictator's dream toy, is that really the future we want on every computer in the long run ?
I think that Apple may be biased about which software they choose to allow on their platform even if they do not write competing software.
As an example, non-tech users' vision of hardware is affected by the software that runs on it. So if some iPhones or Mac are known to run questionable software, it may affect people's decision to buy or not buy this hardware. Therefore, Apple may be tempted to allow or disallow the existence of some software on their platform, depending on what they believe will maximize sales. And I guess this is what they do when they play morality guardians and ban stuff that contains nudity or illegal material on their own free will.
I don't think this is a sane behavior. It is fine for an OS vendor to advice for and against specific software, but not to ban stuff altogether from people's sight as happens of iOS and may happen on Mac OS at some point. For a flawed real-world analogy, I would understand that my favorite book shop does not have a book I like on its shelves, but if the owner refused taking orders of books she doesn't like, I'd find another book shop.
Maybe others would disagree with that though.
You can always consult the CD-ROMs of magazines for apps which display prehistoric women with breasts… Oh wait. :-)
Well, wasn't the point of these magazine apps to introduce on-device content that is updated from the web on the fly instead of going through this kind of bulky procedures ?