Apple gets Samsung Galaxy Tab blocked in EU

Because veteran developers aren’t fanboys, we just have platforms we hate the least.

I understand your dilemma, behold!

Heh, I’ve most definitely known veteran developers who were fanboys. In many cases, they can be the worst of all, absolutely ignoring blatantly obvious issues.

FWIW, I’m no fanboy. I’m just offering my perspective and experience. I’m not the one calling other people’s comments “absurd” without answering simple questions. I like Android, I like iOS, but they offer very different things and my thesis is simply that you should focus on their relative strengths if you want to praise one or the other. iOS’s strength is that Apple has invested a lot into making a great phone through innovation, design and technical investment. Android’s main strength is Google’s comittment to openness which leads to a lot of benefits like cheaper phones, more varied hardware and less restrictions on their app/content markets.

Saying that Apple is the innovator here is not a fanboy’s “talking point”. It’s a sober statement of reality. It’s amazing to me how quickly people have managed to forget what the market was before the first iPhone hit. It’s only been 4 years since the first iPhone came out and 3 since the first dev kit came out. iPhone pioneered a the high quality smart phone we take for granted today, it pioneered tech like multitouch and it’s continuing to innovate with things like the retina display, airplay and the iPad. Android’s contribution of innovations is paltry compared to that. It’s not that I think that say, the retina display is the best thing ever or that airplay is a big deal. In fact a lot of Apple’s innovations have fallen flat IMO (just as some of Google’s innovations in other markets have). It’s just that I appreciate that Apple is trying, every year, to make cool new shit. Google just isn’t there in terms of tech, innovation or design. Where they’re leading the market is through their policy of openness.

Sorry! FWIW, I thought about making a new thread, decided against it, and now realize that was a poor decision. I’ll post in the other thread if I decide to keep going with this. :-)

I think you are selling sort some of androids innovations though. To me, android home screens are a great step beyond Apple’s list of apps. The way my android phone connects with my Google account and hooks up with everything is pretty awesome too. Some of the stuff, like being able to run apps in the background seems pretty fundamental, but iOS couldn’t do that at all until recently.

Google’s speech recognition API is pretty badass too, I must say, having used it to make a speech recognition app that let you talk to bots in a game using your phone, in a matter of maybe three hours.

I agree with everything else (save maybe the multitasking, but I didn’t use iOS before 4.3 which is when I think they introduced it so I can’t comment without knowing the facts) but I still don’t get this.

I have LauncherPro installed and I’m still at kind of a loss as to what to do with my homescreen. Widgets seem to be pretty damn useless plus they consume resources. And it’s taken a while to get my home screen to look nice (still don’t like how my boxy Music widget looks though). I’ll post a screenshot if I ever figure out how to.

The iOS home screens are simple, fast, and look great with no tweaking.

Did you ever post your list of widgets? I want to see what you use.

My favorite Android feature is the ability to browse apps on your computer and hit install and it automatically installs on your phone.

Widgets I use:

  1. A weather one, because seeing the weather at a glance is what you want 90% of the time, and launching a weather app is tedious makework.

  2. An HTC “People” one, which shows six contacts, and basically acts as a speed-dial. To call/txt them, I just swipe left to the virtual desktop with that widget, and then tap that person, rather than opening up the Contacts app and scrolling through the full list to get to the person.

  3. An HTC agenda view of my calendars. It’s nice to see what’s going on for the next week at a glance.

  4. An HTC bookmarks thing, which lets me launch my browser directly into the sites I go to most (instead of launching the browser, choosing bookmarks, and then choosing the site from there).

I also have the Google Search widget, but since I discovered that long-holding the search button gets me voice search/command at any time, I rarely use it.

Response in the other thread.

The Netherland courts rules against Samsung’s Galaxy II phones.

Software patents are dumb:

The judge determined that Samsung violated patent 2,059,868, which deals with “method of scrolling,” but did not infringe 2,098,948 for “recording a flag in connection with multiple screen taps,” or 1,964,022, which relates to dragging a slider to unlock the phone.

It’s not a pure software patent, Eric. I agree that patenting interface methods is dumb, but it’s not quite the same issue.

If you come up with some slick user interface, why shouldn’t you be allowed to patent it? What’s the difference between that, and some physical device?

Until you build the physical device that the patent described, something which is not required to receive a patent, it’s just as virtual as a graphical user interface on a computer.

Anyway, apparently the patent affects the Gallery application. So technically all android 2.3 devices with the default Gallery would violate this patent.

You’re asking the question backward. The question is, why SHOULD you be allowed to patent it? Remember, the purpose of patents is to benefit the public good by incentivizing people to create and share new things.

So, if we disallowed patents on UI innovation, would people quit innovating in UI? No, of course not. Having a good UI is a competitive advantage even if you can’t lock down a specific trick for 25 years. If we disallowed patents on UI innovation, would people hoard UI secrets to themselves and not tell anyone how they were done to keep their trade secret? No, of course not, you can’t keep a UI secret.

So there’s no benefit to allow UI patents, and therefore giving them out is basically just handing gifts to large corporations, so that they can prevent consumer-benefitting competition.

Then why should you be able to patent a physical design? Don’t those same things apply? Making a good design of anything has some tangible benefit, which is why it’s a good design.

By removing the ability to patent a good design, virtual our otherwise, you actually do harm innovation. The way this harm occurs, is by removing the competitive advantage that comes as a benefit of being an innovator. The non innovative company can just skip the expensive design and research, and copy the best design out there. Since they didn’t have to spend that money inventing anything, they can use that money on other aspects of their business. The innovator ends up being penalized, because they are essentially funding the innovation for their competitors.

Given the way it’s more or less impossible to launch products in many markets (although especially America, given it’s allowance of software licensing) now without spending at best tens of thousands on legal licensing costs and most of your profits…

Point to me where the lack of patents has held innovation in games back.

Not entirely. In pharmaceuticals, for instance, it IS the case that without patents, a lot of drugs wouldn’t be invented. The process of driving a drug through the development process is mind-blowing, and without 20 years of monopoly profits as the pot of gold, it often wouldn’t be worth it.

Which isn’t to say that patents are the best system for incentivizing pharmaceutical companies – I’m very sympathetic to the “bounty” ideas that are out there – but is to say that you couldn’t just abolish them without incurring some ill effects.

In software, though, I have a VERY hard time seeing any ill effects. I mean, does anyone REALLY think that Amazon wouldn’t have developed one-click if it hadn’t been able to patent it? Of course not; they developed it because it made their site better and increased their sales. The patenting was just a way of forcing everyone else’s sites to be bad in comparison.

Seriously, name me a software patent where, if patents didn’t exist, the tech wouldn’t have been developed.

But that’s not the problem. The problem is that you put the innovators at a disadvantage, since they can just have their ideas stolen. And since no manufacturing is required, software companies are at an even bigger disadvantage, since their product is essentially nothing but intellectual property.

…That’s what copyright is for.

Copyright is a very weak protection for software. It basically only protects against someone literally copying the code. It’s trivial to change code so that a copyright would no longer apply to it.