Thoughts on Steve Jobs

Post by **Allan** » 13 May 2010 09:20

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ap ... behind.php

Thoughts on this? Only gave it a cursory read ...

I try to live by git as much as possible.

- A

FlexThis · Post by **FlexThis** » 13 May 2010 10:13

Looks like a way for Flash to get on the iPhone at least Ad wise.

In essence it is just a Flash to HTML 5 converter for animated Ads. Awesome!

Anything to make life a little easier I say.

FlexThis · Post by **FlexThis** » 17 May 2010 15:38

I did a brief check to see if the CSS version or the Flash version caused more CPU usage and the results were about even. Flash used 3k more CPU than did the CSS example. I assume that is the Plugin at work.

All in all, I did not take a performance hit with either page.

Allan - other than PHP, what other code do you work with? I am learning OBJ C at the moment and having a bit of fun in the process. I am also expected to learn a little Ruby on Rails as well. Seems fitting given the MVC model I am learning in OBJ C.

~peace

Pinkus · Post by **Pinkus** » 13 Jun 2010 22:58

I just upgraded my iphone 3g for a droid incredible. I will not miss iTunes or AT&T coverage.

But as far as the ipad goes, I can be more productive on a first gen iphone because... its a phone... with a camera.

As far as not supporting flash... I do not agree with it. Sure flash isn't perfect, but limiting the potential of a product because of those who have problems is the wrong way to go about it. You could just as easily have flash disabled by default.

Post by **Allan** » 18 Jun 2010 15:40

I forgot about this thread and was just going back on it for fun and saw this:

Tsiangkun wrote:Just to use Tip-Tap as an example.
If you developed this as a real iPhone app, you wouldn't need to have an input box for the tax rate. The iPhone can tell *where it is*, and then look up the appropriate tax rate for that location. This feature won't work cross platform, not all phones have GPS, and not all diners are in areas with cellular towers.

HTML5 contains a drop dead simple way for the browser to get location information:

http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

Using jQuery, getting lat/long is as simple as:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(handle_geolocation_query,handle_errors);

This gives you position.coords.latitude/.longitude to work with. It's ridiculously easy. I could write in a tax rate lookup function in about 5 minutes in about 10 lines of javascript; other web scripting languages support the API too.

As far as being in areas without cell towers, wifi can be geolocated quite accurately, quite easily. But for those areas lacking both wifi and cell reception, well, lookup tables could be stored locally, but in that situation native app or not, you're gonna be entering the info into a field ...

Tsiangkun wrote:Further more, the a real iPhone app could be take advantage of the camera to keep a digital copy of the receipt for the user in an on phone database.

Yeah, this does suck. I've been advocating for a webkit camera API since iPhone 1. I hope it will come soonish. Doesn't Android support this?

@FlexThis I've written a few dinky programs in Java, Obj C, and have done some really simple stuff in C++ but I'm primarily a front-end developer. I mostly make my living converting images (PSD et al) to HTML/CSS and adding in some interaction with Javascript (primarily jQuery as cross-browser issues in straight JS make me queezy). Essentially, I know enough programming to get myself into trouble with people who actually know how to program