firelock
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Editorial: HomePod is as powerful as the iPhone 6, so let's have an App Store for it
I picked up one on sale for $250 at Best Buy last November on Black Friday. It seemed like everyone had it on sale last holiday season and you could easily get it for the same price on Amazon and other resellers. I actually use it far more than I anticipated and am very impressed with the device. In the mornings I listen to to NPR by saying “Play NPR” or my local public radio station by saying “Play the radio station KERA.” I listen to music of course on it and I also like to listen to the Marketplace podcast in the evenings while I exercise. I have a feeling that Apple is just getting started in this space and even better is to come. But I do also think that the $250 I paid is about the right price.
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Editorial: Steve Jobs would have been proud of Tim Cook's Apple News & Apple TV event
What AI is pointing out is the classic non-doer critic's response to the doers. Whether or not Apple succeeds at everything it is trying to do right now in services is an open question, that they are making the attempt is what is more important. And if something fails Apple has shown its willingness to let go of what is not working (Ping, AirPower, Newstand, trashcan Mac Pro) and try something else rather than cling desperately to failing business model until it is too late. To quote Theodore Roosevelt:“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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The best apps for editing and redacting PDFs on your iPad or iPhone
I can affirm that PDF Expert is an excellent tool. I use Acrobat Pro at work, but for home use PDF Expert is what I use. It is actually superior to Acrobat Pro in several ways and works great on my iPad Pro 10.5” 2018. I have a personal Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CC subscription, which does not include Acrobat, so PDF Expert is a much cheaper alternative to upping my subscription.
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Hulu's new price plans make on demand binging cheaper, Live TV more costly
I was a early cord-cutter, back in 2010, and back then it was really difficult to get the programs that I wanted to watch. I basically used Netflix and I bought a lot of shows on iTunes. Now we are in the golden age of streaming with not only lots of options like Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc., but incredible content being delivered at an unprecedented rate. However, the proliferation of streaming channels is getting ridiculous and subscription fatigue is real and about to get much worse. One of the reasons that I like Hulu is that it consolidates so many broadcast channels into one spot. But what is going to happen when Disney’s streaming service debuts? And then Apple’s? How many subscriptions am I going to need to watch all of th content that I want to see? Not to mention music subscriptions and software subscriptions like Office 365, Adobe CC, and Dropbox?
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Compared: Samsung's Galaxy S10 range vs. Apple's iPhone XS and iPhone XR
Not really an option for us. Our app is a digital publications tool aimed at our independent sales force. As such we update with publications that are media that are held in the framework of the app. Because of this we use the default media player on both iOS and Android. This is the norm for this sort of app, it is just problematic on Android because of its basic architecture, whereas it is not a problem at all on iOS for the same reason.IreneW said:
Not sure exactly what your app is doing, but what about the Android MediaPlayer API?firelock said:It’s still Android. Last year I began managing an app for our company and I had to buy Android test devices and learn the OS. I’ve always been an Apple person and honestly I assumed that Android was probably about as good as iOS, but boy was I wrong. The UX of Android is horrible, and it is different on each device made by different manufacturers. The much-heralded better “customization” of Android is really just a cover for a lack of basic features. And talk about a nightmare for development. I’ll give you a good example: video.
On iOS, all I have to do is make sure our video works on the latest and last version of iOS and I’m good to go. That is because iOS has a built-in video player that can be used natively by all apps. Seamless. Not so on Android. There is no video player native to the operating system. Therefore each manufacturer, in conjunction with your carrier, bundles a different video player with each device. Usually this is some cheap video player that has problems with all manner of video encoding. We have four testing devices and when we first tested video in our app, it played fine on one device, audio didn’t play on another, video played on another but no audio, and on the last the video didn’t work at all. No, not a joke, really. We then downloaded another third-party video player (VLC, considered to be best in class) onto each device and, yes, video worked on all at that point.
This is the much ballyhooed “customization,” you get to/have to download different third party apps to do basic functions like play video. What a nightmare for developers! This causes so many problems you wouldn’t believe it. Even if you have a good player downloaded, when the video plays it jumps out to the different app to play, and then back to your app if everything works properly, which of course it frequently doesn’t. Our app has 4.8 stars on iOS, but just 3.8 on Android mostly because of the video playback issues. I’d say 90% of our help desk tickets on the app are for Android, and probably 50% of those are for video playback problems, of which most are entirely related to the cheap player that they have installed or some unknown bug that is preventing the video player from performing correctly. I could go on but you get the idea.
