[Kde-games-devel] The iPhenomenon

[Ian Wadham]

On Friday 13 August 2010 5:09:23 pm Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Thursday, August 12, 2010, Ian Wadham wrote:
> > One key to the iPhenomenon and its ease of use is the touch-screen.
> 
> and it's amazing lock in and relative uselessness of many of the apps. give
>  it a year or two for the limitations to sink in.
> 
I thought of this when Lisa, my wife, announced her intention of buying an
iPad before it was available here in Australia.  I found several reviews and
a UK article (sorry, lost the link) along the lines of "Could the iPad be your
only computer?" and it was very illuminating.  I got her to read it and we
discussed it, so she went into her purchase with her eyes fully open, unlike
many others who thronged the Apple store at our local shopping centre on
launch day.  Some even wanted to sleep outside the store the night before,
as if they were queuing for football Finals tickets ... :-)

I was also somewhat concerned about the iTunes Store and the iTunes
software and account you must have in order to get started with iPhone
or iPad.  That is a real pain in the bum.  The commercial trap is a worry,
but as Lisa put it, we trust Apple more than we do Microsoft.  Actually it
all fades into insignificance once you get started.  Apps can be easily
downloaded direct to the iPhone or iPad and are really cheap or free.

Electronic copies of books from Amazon or elsewhere are also cheap.
We don't use iTunes music at all.  That is *not* so cheap and we do not
listen to rock and pop much.  The classical music on iTunes is really,
really expensive and not all that good, from what I have seen so far, so
we are still buying CDs.

Lisa particularly likes that we can get localized apps, such as one for
our Australian national broadcaster, the ABC.  It takes her direct into
program lists, with hardly any "navigation" effort, where she can easily
view and catch up on missed episodes, etc.

As to apps being "useless", that happens in KDE, Gnome and Linux too.
It's an effect of having just anybody being able to contribute.

BTW I have been following the idea of tablet computing for some years,
via articles on Xerox PARC in Scientific American and such.

> > I wonder when/whether they are supported in KDE and when/whether
> > we will have touch-screen laptops.
> 
> we have been working (successfully) on touch screen features for a couple
>  of years n ow. gestures, multi-touch .. it all works. the UI needs to be
>  designed for fingers, but the touch side is already there in Qt and we've
>  been using it for quite a while in Plasma.
> 
> > What I am wondering is whether KDE Games will ever be able to catch
> > up or keep up with this kind of stuff?
> 
> QGesture and make sure the apps are fingerable.
> 
Hah!  So that's what a "gesture" is in the KDE/Qt context!  And now,
what is "fingerable"?

So I looked up QGesture in Qt 4.6.2 and also here
http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.6/gestures-overview.html but I am not
much the wiser for it ... certainly not to the extent that I would want
to sit down and start programming.  Much too little documentation
and therefore not much trust from me.  I have been burned too many
times before.  Using that doco, I could not, for example, work out the
difference between a Pan and a Swipe gesture, nor when it would be
appropriate to use either of them

For a much better and more professional account of this stuff, see:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/General/Conceptual/iPadProgrammingGuide/GestureSupport/GestureSupport.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009370-
CH5-SW1
Pull your socks up, Qt!  Your doco is usually better than this!

> i can only surmize that you haven't watched many of Marco's
> Plasma-on-tablets screencasts, as in a few of them he uses kpat
> to show touch screen playing in action.
> 
No.  Who is Marco?

> > Or should I switch to writing iApps?
> if you think the world should be
>  dictated by Steve Jobs and ignore all the progress we've made, sure.
> 
Steve and the other Steve (Wozniak) are two of my heroes, but
then I go back a long way ... :-)

> i think running off to a walled garden controlled by a company completely
> uninterested in cooperating with anyone else based on one or two devices in
> a market that is in its infancy is, at its essence, playing at chicken
> little.
> 
You know me better than that, Aaron ... :-)  Actually, I am beginning to think
of KDE as a walled garden.  As a programmer, I am locked into it.  As a user,
Lisa feels locked out.

As a grandfather, I have prepared some simple puzzles in Palapeli, with a
picture of the family dogs and another of my grandson kicking a football,
but I am going to find it difficult to compete with Tozzle on the iPad.  My
grandson is likely to be out the door before I have had time to start up
KDE and Palapeli ... :-)

I guess I started to feel bad at Akademy 2008 at the HIG session, where
we heard all about the sophisticated users KDE must cater to.  I forget the
actual examples, but it was like "Archie the Academic User", "Bertie the
Business User", etc.  At question time I asked about "Lisa the Home User"
and was told, more or less flatly, that KDE does not cater to such users.

No, I am not really going to go off and join the iApp programmers.  For one
thing I would have to learn Objective-C and at age 72, having learned and
discarded about 40 previous programming languages, I just do not have
the energy and enthusiasm for that.

I often think of what R W Hamming said in his Turing Prize acceptance speech.
Quoting Isaac Newton, who said that he could not have seen so far if he had
not stood on the shoulders of giants, Hamming said, "In the computer world we
stand on each others' feet".

Sure, I would like to play around with touch-screens, but not at the cost of
having to re-learn language, libraries, etc. and find that they are not all
that different from C++, Qt and KDE, but just enough different to cause
serious misunderstandings, bugs and heartaches.  Been there, done that!

OTOH, if the Apple environment has the *stability* *stability* *stability*
that are the three things in an environment that make for explosive and
creative application development, I might be tempted ... ;-)

BTW, the touch screen is only *one* of the factors that make the iPad and
iPhone easy to use.  Another is that, although the UI is mono-programming
on the surface, apps are "always on" and have almost zero startup time to
get back to exactly where you were.  A bit like Palapeli or Kubrick, but
without the startup time.

So guys, have a look at this Apple stuff and have a think about it.  Let's
stop fixating on technical details so much and think about where we are
going in the next few years.

All the best, Ian W.