shamino
About
- Username
- shamino
- Joined
- Visits
- 110
- Last Active
- Roles
- member
- Points
- 611
- Badges
- 1
- Posts
- 564
Reactions
-
Ex-Apple engineer explains why the first iPhone didn't have copy and paste
Beats said:shamino said:Apple may have been the first to deploy these technologies on a consumer device, but they didn't invent it.Before there was any iPad/iPhone, we were all fascinated by multitouch UI demos produced by Jeff Han (researcher at NYU and founder of Perceptive Pixel, which was since acquired by Microsoft). For example:- Jeff Han's NYU homepage (not changed since 2006)
- His demo reel from 2006 no longer embeds in the web page (the required plugins stopped working in web browsers a long time ago), but you can download the MPEG video here: https://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/multitouchreel.mpg
- Jeff Han's TED Talk demo, from 2007
I don't think Apple ever used Jeff Han's code, and modern multitouch display panels use a completely different technology from what Han was using, but I can guarantee that lots of important people there (like the rest of us) saw these videos and drew inspiration from them. Including swiping, scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations.
Dismissing the hard work of Steve Jobs and Apple engineers because crappy resistive touch screens existed is ludicrous. I was heavy into futuristic cell phones in 2007 and had the highest rated Windows Mobile Phone and it was absolutely garbage compared to what iPhone brought. None of the ideas of Windows Mobile carried over to iPhone and it had none of the cool iPhone inventions like pinch to zoom. There were arrows everywhere in the UI and there was a “calibrate” setting I had to revisit every few days. This was a super high-tech phone in 2007, mobile keyboard and all!You didn't actually read anything I wrote, did you? I didn't say anything about resistive screens or Windows phones. Where you did you get the idea that I did?Jeff Han was not a Microsoft employee at the time. He was a researcher at NYU, where he developed a lot of the fundamental research behind multitouch interfaces. He published video demonstrations of his research over a year before Apple announced anything of the sort. He was using a unique hardware system involving glass panels, cameras and projectors - which nobody else has ever used - but that's irrelevant. The point is not the digitiizer but all of the user interface concepts that he developed in order to show the usefulness of multitouch.I get the impression that you hadn't actually watched his videos when they were published in 2006 and 2007. You should go watch them now in order to understand what I'm talking about.Again, Apple did a tremendous amount of work to bring the iPhone to market, but to claim that they invented the underlying UI concepts like multitouch interfaces is to deny history. -
Apple's legendary Clarus the dogcow returns in macOS Ventura
ravnorodom said:I also miss flying toaster. Not sure if that’s the Apple thing or Toast thing.Neither. Flying toasters were a part of the After Dark screen saver software, made by Berkeley Systems.
-
Relive the 2012 hit 'Angry Birds' rebuilt from the ground up for modern devices
Interestingly, it appears that its predecessor (the original Angry Birds, as a free download with ads and in-app purchases) is no longer in the app store. It doesn't even show up in my purchase history on the phone where I have it installed.On the other hand, $1 for the full game, including the Mighty Eagle (which is a $5 in-app purchase on the ad-supported version) is a great deal for a really fun game. -
Compared: Mac Studio versus Mac Pro
If the rumors about the 4-way connectivity module (M1 Ultra-Max?) prove to be true, then that module would support up to 256 GB of RAM. Which may be enough for the entire Mac Pro market.Or they may introduce a new kind of module (M2?) that can support more.Another possibility, which might make sense if they think there are enough customers that want truly huge amounts of RAM (e.g. >1TB) is that the on-module unified memory will behave as a cache to a much larger amount of external DDR5 RAM. You'd be able to run the Mac without any DIMMs, using only the unified memory (in the M1 module) or with DIMMs, if you have a need to go beyond that amount.Similarly, if Apple believes that Mac Pro customers really need PCIe slots, there's enough bandwidth to support them, even allowing external GPUs to run alongside the built-in GPU/NN units. But I think that is less likely. I think that if Apple decides to support PCIe slots (and this is far from certain), that they will primarily support hardware that doesn't replicate what the M1 module has on-board (e.g. advanced networking and storage peripherals, professional multi-channel video capture, and other such things).But this is just my opinion. I could be wrong. -
Compared: Mac Studio versus Mac Pro
rob53 said:Mac Pro, up to 12 TB ports? Are these mainly on PCIe cards?Yes. If you look at the specs page, the high-end video cards (the Radeon Pro W5700X, W6800X, W6900X and W6800X Duo) each include four TB3 ports and one HDMI port.Then there are two more ports on an I/O card and two built-in ports mounted in the top of the case.