lowededwookie

I'm holding out for Co-Operative Bank here in NZ. They're looking into Apple Pay but there's something interesting that they've mentioned for a future update called "Internet EFTPOS". Has anyone heard of this and can supply some details?

lonepalm said:

This is horrible news as the app I use every day and is the main stain database for me is bento. File maker and it's life years ago by releasing a file maker version which is a significant cost upgrade and not useful to me

Bento was great but you should have ditched it years ago.

Move to Airtable. It's cheap and works brilliantly.

I'm quite excited by this.

What I like about Metal is it isn't specific to a particular platform i.e. it's not written for Nvidia (CUDA) or ATI (ATI Stream) it means that it is able to be utilised on any GPU.

If Microsoft comes on board with this and ported DirectX to this system (not referring to Metal here) then what we could see is a Metal implementation of DirectX which COULD solve the issue of getting games running on macOS easily. This COULD reduce the need for Wine or Cider for games and because Apple could implement this in Metal it COULD solve part of the problem of getting an ARM based Mac to market.

This would solve the graphics issues but would not solve the fact that ARM does not have any Intel code in it so that would cause an issue for Parallels and VMWare.

mr o said:

This is significant.

This is not simply about HTML5, is it? It is about progressive web apps: They look and act exactly the same as a native app on your iDevice. The difference is that they don't need an App store. You simply download them from the web and use them offline. They're written in simple HTML5, CSS and vanilla JavaScript. 

Progressive web apps are the future of the web on mobile. I hope Apple recognizes this, and turn the iPhone into a true Internet Communicator.

Have a look at this video here.  It is a Mozilla talk Chris Wilson did a couple of weeks ago:

Apple tried it with iPhone 1.0. Developers railed on Apple because they couldn't have native apps. Apple added a native appstore. Developers complained about the restrictions on that. Can't please developers at all.

dbeats said:

Will they pay the additional overhead to Apple for supporting these APIs. Apple doesn't do this type of stuff because they feel like it, it's genuinely more expensive and resource intensive to support. So they're suing Apple to save their costs and push them on to Apple. 

It's not the overheads that's the problem it's the security issues allowing other rendering engines opens up. Do you really want to trust Google with their Chrome rendering engine on your iPhone? It's dicey enough on the macOS platform let alone Windows and Linux.

bloodshotrollin'red said:

About bloody time someone booted Apple in the rear over this matter. Back when SJ was flagellating Adobe Flash he said Mac OSX would be the go-to platform for HTML5. What little we have seen of it implemented over the past half decade is an embarrassment to both the memory of Steve Jobs and Apple's customers.

Same story with OpenGL (another tech Apple has refused to engage with). This results in games forced to run inside Wine (which is a joke) because DX has more working features than Apples sorry excuse for a Graphics API.

Really, who can blame them when they build cheap, barely adequate and dated hardware for their Pro computers and abysmal hardware for their consumer models. Games really struggle on Mac Hardware. Barely an AAA titled game will run on "Ultra" settings at above a constant 30fps.

Apple's efforts with HTML5 have been hampered by W3C who can't make their mind up what to put into the standard. W3C seem more intent on caving to Google or Mozilla rather than asking whether or not the implementations are worth it in the first place.

Macs have supported OpenGL since day one but they suffer the same problem as the W3C whereby they have to wait until Kronos make up their mind what they want to support. Apple developed Metal to give us OpenGL without waiting for Kronos.

When it comes to hardware Apple is ONCE AGAIN at the mercy of the hardware manufacturers. Apple has to wait until freaking Intel makes up their mind what they are going to do with their CPUs. Incidentally they largely just end up being incremental speed increases rather than exciting new technology. Why do you think Apple designed their own chips?

The speed decreases by running on macOS hardware is NOT, I repeat, NOT Apple's fault. Time and time again when a games company has ported an OpenGL title to Macs it has run faster on the Mac than the Windows PC. However, MOST games these days DO NOT RUN OpenGL (another reason Apple hasn't gone out of their way to go full on with OpenGL). Most games run DirectX which IS NOT available on macOS or iOS. As such they HAVE to be run in a Wine or Cider wrapper and as such HAVE to have a performance hit. THE HARDWARE IS NOT THE PROBLEM THE DEVELOPERS ARE.

Another quick and easy way is to perform a synch using iTunes.

This will clear a lot of the temporary data that tends to get stored on the phone.

Also, when updating iOS do it from iTunes because it seems to make the machine run better. My suspicion is if you update using iTunes it backs up the phone, deletes everything, fresh installs the OS, then copies everything back from the backup as opposed to the over the air update which writes to the phone, then just updates.