dick applebaum

mr o said:

I am not a fan of the rounded viewable screen area.

It'd be great if iPhone 9 would enlarge its screen estate by getting rid of the home button and extend its viewable screen area up to where each of the rounded corners starts. That would increase the screen size and keep the viewable screen a rectangle with sharp corners.

In short: Here's hoping iPhone 8 and iPhone X meet somewhere in the middle, iPhone 9.


>:x

EDIT: adds "In short"

Mmm...

The human eyes do not view the world as a rectangle with sharp corners.  

However, a dot release update to iOS 11 Control Center could easily provide an option to do that and/or change the notch to a black bar,

How 'bout:

iPhone seXy ?

Mmm...

According to Patently Apple, Apple has the tech to provide in-air gesture recognition for the new iPhone X.  That way you could navigate without touching the screen.

Now we're learning that Apple is likely to add another exciting dimension to their next-gen iPhones with gesturing controls as part of replacing the Home button next month. While Apple has the technology, it's still unknown if they'll take gesturing to the next level and introduce in-air gesturing. 

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At the moment, the gesturing may be limited to on-screen gesturing. Whether Apple takes it to the next level with in-air gesturing is still in question. In June Patently Apple posted a report about Apple's new iPhone X suppliers. One of the new suppliers is Lumentum. In the early moments of their promotion videothey point to 'gesture recognition' as being part of their 3D sensing technology. So the technology is certainly in place for Apple to introduce it. Whether it will pan out this year is a hope but not a guarantee. 

http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2017/08/apple-to-surprise-the-market-by-introducing-in-air-gesture-recognition-on-their-oled-iphone-x.html

Maybe the new iPhones -- and even new iPad Pros, MacBooks, Macs AppleTVs...

Ha!

This thread got me thinking about my first job using a database -- it resided on a stack of punched cards.  Below is an example of sorting the database by the content of a certain field, e.g. Employee Last Name.




If the field was designed to contain a Name of up 25 characters -- then 25 columns of the punched card were set aside for the Name Field.  


And... And... To sort the database by Name, you had to repeat the above process once for each column, last to first!  That means 50 times - as you had to sort twice for each alphabetic column.

A typical sort included Div, Dept, Last Name, First Name -- a total of ~100 passes through the sorter.

palomine said:

Database software is absolutely CRITICAL for business. I hope they are improving the advanced side of this app. Companies run Windows databases because FileMaker hasn't been adequate. Last time I looked it was still hard to do a basic table layout and joins. Apple could jump into the enterprise right now if this software is up to the task. The same goes for the other usual office applications. Maybe IBM will fill the gap?

I used the original version of this app called NutShell (before Apple bought it).  It was the first db app that exploited the Mac's GUI.  You could graphically design your db structure and the relationships -- quite the thing in it's day.

I don't think IBM is interested in providing locally-run db solutions -- rather, local clients to their cloud db solutions -- especially NoSQL dbs.

Apple is in an interesting  position.  

In 2015 they acquired FoundationDB -- a performant, flexible, horizontally scalable, reliable, ACID, transactional db.  It is structured as layers above an ordered, key/value store.  This concept allows the user to implement one or more SQL or NoSQL Layers without sacrificing the advantages of the base foundation.  FoundationDB included an SQL layer implementation with the base product. (The latest version of  3rd-party SQLite  db is implemented using an ordered, key/value store.)

Likely, Apple acquired FoundationDB for internal use:  ApplePay;  iTunes store; App Store;  iCloud...

But they could offer a Cloud (iCloud or IBM Cloud) db service based on FoundationDB with iOS, macOS, tvOS, Window, Linux, even browser clients.

Some interesting tidbits might be related:

1. APFS -- Apple's new File system
2. Swift Open Source
3. Swift used to write both the server-side and client-side parts of solutions (Apple/IBM)
4. Ability to run/test both the server-side and client-side parts locally, on the same device.

Here's a demo of FoundationDB in action: