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Comment It exists. (Score 4, Informative) 177

by jessecurry (#35848220) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: Where Is the Universal Gesture Navigation Set?
The standard UIControl set that Apple provides for developers has standard behavior already built in. There are a few gestures that may be optionally enabled, but most are on by default. If a developer goes out of their way to create some custom gesture I don't know that there's much Apple could do to stop them.

Comment Re:Poor User Experience, the bane of open source. (Score 1) 318

by jessecurry (#33136584) Attached to: Prankster Jailbreaks Apple Store Display iPhone

Then you must also consider the Iphone is just a vehicle to force people into Itunes and other Apple products and services.

To some extent, yes.

And all the applications that are not permitted in the Itunes store because they violate one of the holy Apple edicts about no-tethering, no-porn, no-competition with Apple, no-mentioning Android, no-non approved code, no-anything lord Steve does not like, no-oh bugger it, the approval staff just dont like your name.

Maybe this is the case. Admittedly, I only looked at around 20 apps, maybe I just managed to find the 20 with a poor user experience and all of the rest are great.

Are you certain that's not the Iphone, I've found my experiences with them to be very poor mainly because I have to go through loopholes, hacks and thrid party services to do simple things like add my own ringtone or use it as a storage device.

It's definitely not the iPhone, minus a few small gripes I love the iPhone. I think that the UI is incredible, the development environment is top notch, and the overall level of quality of Apps on the App store is higher than any other competitors.

Battered wives are very happy to have their husbands, despite the domestic violence.

Obvious troll is obvious.

You have to hack the phone just to get this? With every phone I've ever owned, it's either been unlocked outright or unlock-able by the carrier upon request.

Are you in the US? We're a little restrictive over here.

Comment Re:Poor User Experience, the bane of open source. (Score 1) 318

by jessecurry (#33124066) Attached to: Prankster Jailbreaks Apple Store Display iPhone
I'm not saying that open source and quality user experience are mutually exclusive; just pointing out that in my experience open source software provides a poor user experience. Maybe it's because most open source projects are programmer heavy, or because exposing functionality seems to be the core goal. I'm not really sure.

And I'm not so upset that Cydia gets installed, just that it is installed and it's not easy to uninstall. Is there any requirement that Cydia be installed on a jailbroken device? Or is it just the package manager(UI) of choice for most?

I'm glad that jailbreaking exists, and even more happy that the US government formally declared it legal; but I don't see a compelling reason to use it for anything other than carrier unlocking and perhaps tethering.

I suppose that my frame of reference for this discussion may be a little different than most as I've recently been involved in discussions with people who think that the App store is in trouble because jailbreakme.com exists.

Comment Poor User Experience, the bane of open source. (Score 2, Interesting) 318

by jessecurry (#33123184) Attached to: Prankster Jailbreaks Apple Store Display iPhone
I had my first experience with jailbreaking yesterday. It looks like jailbreakme.com is just a vehicle to force people into installing Cydia. Further, with the exception of the few apps that unlock some functionality on your phone it looks like most of the Apps on the Cydia store are just too low quality to have been approved by Apple. I'm thankful that I was able to SIM unlock my old phone so my girlfriend could use it with her carrier, but the experience was very poor. Every hack that I installed seemed to break something, then I needed to install another hack to fix the previous one... makes me glad to have my phone in Apple's walled garden, I just couldn't afford some much downtime on a communications device.
Graphics

The Nuts and Bolts of PlayStation 3D 154

Posted by Soulskill from the wait-till-the-bayonetta-guys-get-ahold-of-this dept.
The Digital Foundry blog took an in-depth look at how Sony is introducing 3D technology to PlayStation 3 games. They give a step-by-step description of how the system generates a 3D frame (or rather, a pair of frames), and the graphical hurdles that need be to overcome to ensure the games look good. The article also discusses some of the subtle effects 3D technology can have on gameplay: "'One interesting thing came through in the immersion aspect was that in the first-person camera view, it felt so much more like being there. Typically when most people play MotorStorm, something like 90 per cent play in the third-person view,' Benson explains. 'As soon as we put the 3D settings in place, the first-person view became a lot more popular, a lot more people were using that view. This could indicate that 3D could perhaps change the standards, if you like.' ... 'We found that in the first-person view the game is giving you all the sorts of cues that you're used to in normal driving: speed perception, the ability to judge distances, things like that. It's far easier to avoid track objects.' The insertion of true stereoscopic 3D into MotorStorm also brings about a new sense of appreciation of the scale and size of the game world and the objects within it."

Comment Re:I'm conflicted (Score 1) 980

by jessecurry (#31846230) Attached to: Will Adobe Sue Apple Over Flash?
There are some good reasons to expect that developers using your closed distribution channel would actually know the native language. If there is a security flaw, or newly introduced bug, or performance improvement it would be silly to have to wait for Adobe to release an update, have the individuals download that update (maybe for pay), then update their App. Not to say that every developer would be 100% responsive to news like that, but having develops that don't know Objective-C means that they would not be responsive to those forces at all. Also, Apple has a stake in having lots of Obj-C developers out there.
Government

Chinese Researcher Says US Power Grid Is Vulnerable, Strategist Overreacts 203

Posted by Soulskill from the what-color-is-his-hat dept.
An anonymous reader writes with a story about Wang Jianwei, a grad student in China who recently released a paper detailing a vulnerability in the US power grid. Despite the paper being rather typical for security research, its origin set off alarm bells for military strategist Larry M. Wortzel, who testified before Congress that the student was a threat, despite the fact that the published attack wasn't really feasible. Quoting: "'We usually say "attack" so you can see what would happen,' [Wang] said. 'My emphasis is on how you can protect this. My goal is to find a solution to make the network safer and better protected.' And independent American scientists who read his paper said it was true: Mr. Wang's work was a conventional technical exercise that in no way could be used to take down a power grid. The difference between Mr. Wang's explanation and Mr. Wortzel’s conclusion is of more than academic interest. It shows that in an atmosphere already charged with hostility between the United States and China over cybersecurity issues, including large-scale attacks on computer networks, even a misunderstanding has the potential to escalate tension and set off an overreaction. 'Already people are interpreting this as demonstrating some kind of interest that China would have in disrupting the US power grid,' said Nart Villeneuve, a researcher with the SecDev Group, an Ottawa-based cybersecurity research and consulting group."
Crime

US Law Firms Targeted By Cyberscams 121

Posted by timothy from the send-you-this-file-to-ask-your-advice dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "The San Francisco Chronicle reports that last year a Long Beach law firm received an e-mail from a Hong Kong businessman seeking help collecting debts from American customers. After a month of signing paperwork and exchanging telephone calls, the attorney received word that one debtor had sent a $200,000 cashier's check to pay off his balance. The attorney deposited it in his firm's account, subtracted his $10,000 fee and wired the remaining $190,000 to his Hong Kong client. Then the attorney's bank called and told him the $200,000 check had bounced. 'They send me a nice, big, worthless check,' says the attorney. In this case, the bank was able to prevent the wire transfer from reaching its destination, but attorneys say they are on the receiving end of sophisticated scams with increasing frequency that include attacks to steal client data that can be sold or used to learn the details of future litigation."
Education

Nintendo Developing DS Apps For School Systems 40

Posted by timothy from the not-quite-swords-into-ploughshares dept.
MojoKid writes "Shigeru Miyamoto, who has had a hand in some of Nintendo's most popular titles, recently offered that he is working hard to turn Nintendo's DS line of handheld gaming machines into tools for schools. The DS already has a nice line of educational software titles that help users learn, and he thinks that this could really be a huge benefit to schools looking for alternative ways to educate students of a new generation. The company has already managed to get them into Japanese elementary schools."
Wireless Networking

Auto-Scanning the Names People Choose For Their Wireless APs 422

Posted by timothy from the just-name-them-all-hidden dept.
MichaelSmith writes "I code on the tram, going to and from work, and I noticed that there are a lot of WiFi access points along the way. So one week I made it my job to write an automatic scanner which runs from a cron job every minute during commuting times. My backup script pushes the new AP names to my web server and you can read it online. It is a mixture of the straightforward, naive and funny, with a few pop culture references along the way. The first column in the file is the number of access points with that name. The second column is the AP name, in brackets to pick up white space." Why can't "Dress Me Slowly" and "Domestic Bliss" just share an AP?
Firefox

Mozilla Labs To Bring Address Book To Firefox 80

Posted by timothy from the are-belong-to-us dept.
suraj.sun writes with this excerpt from Ars Technica: "Mozilla has announced the availability of an experimental new add-on for Firefox that is designed to import information about the user's contacts from a variety of Web services and other sources. The add-on makes contact details easily accessible to the user and can also selectively supply it to remote Web applications. ... After the add-on has imported and indexed the user's contact data, it becomes available to the user through an integrated contact management tool that functions like an address book. One of Mozilla's first experiments is an autocompletion feature that allows users to select a contact when they are typing an e-mail address into a Web form. ... To make the browser's contact database accessible to Web applications, the add-on uses the W3C Contacts API specification."

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