The point of my comment is that the results of the pilot program will be suspect because the people running it will likely not be qualified to do a good job (i.e. just like how the people running the ipad procurement project). The pilot program will appear to go really well, then when it comes time to do the full program that is a total cluster fuck, an investigation will reveal that the pilot program was also flawed but it was not noticed (due to incompetence) or covered up (due to corruption), or both.

I don't doubt that some phone and tablet apps are written completely separately. But event he ones that are shown on your link, I would be shocked if 90% - 99% of the code between the 2 apps was the same (even if they are distributed separately.

The business logic will be the same, and even most of the GUI code is probably the same (i.e. same custom widget code, etc). The only part that I would expect to be different is the GUI layouts of those widgets for the different screen sizes.

https://polymer-topeka.appspot.com

This is what I have been playing around in lately. If you get to the demo quiz, you'll notice that the UI changes based on the size of the window it is in. The exact same code is usable on any size screen.

If anyone is still making completely different apps for different devices, they are doing it wrong.

Storing data to the cloud and restoring the data from the cloud should be abstracted. If you had an OO app, you'd just have concrete classes to implement the google and apple cloud save/load features.

I never used apple cloud stuff, but I can;t even imagine something so different that it would not find into a "save data/load data" kind of API.

Why doesn't apple do vector graphics?... Anyway the answer is easy. You just do all the graphics as vector graphics and then generate the raster graphics for specific resolutions when needed (that's actually exactly what happens when rendering vector graphics anyway). I would be tempted to do this even if I was developing an iOS only app, because of how versatile it would be.

They had a budget of $500 million for just the ipads and $800 million for just the software. I work in the defense industry and our contracts are to develop software AND hardware and are well below these figures.

You can get quality android tablets for half the price of a comparable ipad. You can get a chromebook for half the price of a quality android tablet. And keep in mind these are school children that we are giving these devices to. They are going to be covered in food and thrown on the ground and stolen by bullies, etc. We should be buying the most cost effective devices, and I can all but guarantee that the ipad is not it, especially at the volumes we are talking about.

When I was in school back in the 90's we had to buy a $80 ti-82. Now you can get a chromebook for $200 that's more powerful than even the best laptops from a few years earlier. Even if we had the money to buy $700 ipads for every student, that extra $500 / per student would be far better spent on increasing teacher salaries and attracting better teachers.

With 1.3 billion dollars, the school district could have probably commissioned an electronic text book to be written in every single subject taught in school, they could have bought 6.5 million chromebooks without even negotiating a bulk discount.

Anyone who thinks this was a good idea needs to get their head examined. This is the LA school system, where kids can barely read and teachers and kids are living in poverty.

That's the basic rule when you are buying a few computers. It's not the rule when you are purchasing half a $1 billion of computer systems. When your computer budget is larger than the GDP of some small countries, you should be exploring the possibility of saving money by developing custom software.

These kids aren't upgrading from a previous ipad.

The computers don't matter. The OS barely matters, and it gets changed like 1 or 2 times a year. The application that is running on it is what matters, and even an idiot can be taught how to push the button to start an app on any OS, even one they've never used before.

This is like saying that people shouldn't be forced to learn to drive more than 2 makes of cars.

If anything this should be a reason *to* use android (if it was a good reason to begin with). There are more android phones out there, and more android users than iOS users. If anything, teachers are more likely to be familiar with android (52% market) than with iOS (35%).

Not that that should matter. Saying "I can't learn to use software" is like saying "I can't follow and remember instructions", and it should disqualify you from most jobs.

No one is asking anyone to be a hacker. Teachers are only being asked to do what every other person is required to do whether it's filling out an electronic timecard or entering products into an inventory software. It's just following directions. And it's usually a lot easier than the non-interactive paper counterpart.

I brought up HTML as a solution when I thought "interactive books" were like wikipedia pages with some buttons, which HTML5 is more than capable of doing and doing well.

Even the apps that have tablet specific version, no doubt share much (if not the vast majority) of the software. They may be separate apps for commercial purposes, or saving space in terms of higher resolution icons, sprites, etc. I don't consider that to be tablet specific development. It's development for one platform with a little bit of effort spent on specializing UI for phone or tablet.

What I am saying is that they don't even get the performance problem anymore. Games used to be the one thing that couldn't be cross platform because of how hardware specific they were, are now fully capable of being targetted to multiple platforms including mobile platforms.

When done right, the apps written in cross platform environments are not noticeably slower than apps written specifically for one architecture in all but the most resource hungry apps.

Ideally what I would like to see is for school districts across states, and countries to form a consortium to develop open source text books (i.e. like a text book version of wikipedia), that schools could use royalty free. This would really help developing nations as well as American school districts. It would eliminate a lot of wasted effort in creating so many textbooks that contain basically the same information. A parabola still works the same way regardless of which edition of which math book we are using.

The textbook industry is rife with corruption, because of the massive payday you get if you can manage to get a constract for a whole school district. And the content is basically just current public domain knowledge packaged together with some artwork.

You could still pay people to contribute to the textbooks, but the difference would be that the content would not be owned by publishers. It would be public domain.

Alright so where's the experiment that proves this? Where is the randomized controlled trial? You can;t just claim these things because they seem plausible. You actually have to do science (the whole part, not just the beginning).

How was emotional development measured? what was the sample size? How were confounding factors controlled for? And after that is proven, now you need to prove that the link of causal rather than just correlative.

How do you know it's not just that autistic kids prefer things over people? How do you know it's the phone causing the autism or autism like behavior?

This is the point where pseudo science assumes they know the answer and where real science (if it were being done) would start.

In real science, people try to prove that their hypothesis is wrong, to see if it can withstand scrutiny. In the pseudo science world you have these fake studies that set out to collect evidence to prove a conclusion that they have decided on beforehand.

I feel like your framing of this as "debating the science" implies an undeserved legitimacy to what I would more appropriately call "condemning pseudo science".

I don't expect parents to only do things that are scientifically proven to help their kids. I expect them to use their intuition and judgement. If you think screens are harming your kids, then restrict their use. Make your kids listen to Mozart for 3 hours a day. Feed them only whole foods. I am all for that. Just don't pretend it's based on science. And especially don't call it science because guessing (hypothesizing) is part of science too.

They also Pearson to make the software. (i.e. they weren't just buying existing software). They could have commisioned software to be made on any platform, or even for it to have been cross platform.

I have seen some screenshots, and I see why you don't think they would be perform well in HTML5. They have video game level graphics. This is also why I pointed out unity as an example of a popular framework that targets all the platforms I mentioned (that you seemed doubtful of). Unity is marketed as a game engine, but you can make whatever apps you want that require performant graphics.

I agree with this statement. I think interactive books would be very helpful in illustrating concepts in ways that a static medium can't. I was envisioning something like wikipedia with it's animations and maybe some added interactivity. I don't think you need to see a emmersive 3d world of an artists conception of ancient Rome to effectively learn.

I think this can be done much more cheaply than ipads and proprietary interactive textbooks of the sort you are describing. I think kids are capable of learning concepts with a lower production value. (i.e. the kind found in HTML5, like wikipedia).

This is irrelevant if you are commissioning your own.

debatable and see my point for #1

Developers actually prefer android for development, but prefer iOS for profit potential.

Such as? Android apps are java which has a much bigger following than objective C or swift.

The fact that they run the same OS means that the time spent on developing "phone software" vs. "tablet software" is the same, because the same software runs on both. While you may feel subjectively that phones and tablets are very different, the people developing the apps that run on them are targeting both platforms simultaneously. It's crazy not to. In fact, now the trend is to target phone, tablet, and desktop browser simultaneously with things like google polymer, and phonegap, etc.

Developers don't like writing different software for phone, tablet, and desktop, windows, mac, linux, and all combinations, and now with modern tools, they really don't have to.

The only thing the size of the glass effects is which UI profile gets loaded. Properly designed software can easily abstract the functionality from the presentation, like in a MVC (model view controller) design.

In what way is it bad? You say it's harmful to child development. In what way?

I am not changing the requirements. I'm raising my objections to the requirements once it became clear what they were.

That was not my argument. My argument was that android was as good a platform for whatever "interactive books" could mean. I even asked for clarification, and learned that what you were in fact referring to were more like specific educational video games, and then raised my objection.

And this was not my original argument (it's a new one), android also has plenty of games (many educational). I don't see any reason why the games you cited are more educational that the games on android.

Yes, so if you need a specific educational video game about ancient Rome that only runs on iOS, I agree that you should buy something that runs iOS. What I am disputing is the claim that those are the specific apps that are needed on tablets for kids (now that I know that's what you are referring to).

They are the same. Tablets are just bigger phones. Many even have access to cell networks. They are the same components with bigger batteries and bigger screens. The platform is the same in both android and iOS and windows. I am not inventing this idea, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all came to the same conclusion that these devices are basically the same, which is why they run the same OS.

In regards to you accusing me of changing my argument, notice that I didn;t accuse you of changing the what you meant by an "interactive book". I acknowledge that maybe I just didn't know what you meant by it.

Governments are different. what may work well in one country may not work well in another.

I 100% agree with this statement.

The government works better than the market when it works well. But what do you do when it doesn't?

The market gives you a level of success with very little investment. For situations where it is possible to engineer a centralized solution that works better than the market, we should absolutely do that. We can have the government make roads and power lines, and it's better than if we had an ad hoc system made by random people and companies.

But there are lots of systems where the solutions are very complicated and expensive to implement. In these sorts of systems a free market is better. We don't really want the government deciding prices on every good and service. The market does that for free. We don't want the government deciding when people should end relationships with eachother. They don't always make good decisions, but the market of relationships works better than a government solution.

I think we really could do good public schools in America if we poured enough resources into it. But currently it is just not our priority. Even though we spend more money per student than any other country in the world, we are usually ranked near last among developed nations. We have a bunch of people with jobs that they can't be fired from, that have very little interest or capability to do a good job. And despite spending so much on education, teachers get paid very little, which attracts the bottom rung of society to become teachers.

I think a lot of parents would probably prefer to send their kids to schools with amazing teachers that get paid a lot, even if the classrooms didn't have ipads.

In this situation, all it takes is for one private school to offer this alternative to make it possible. To change public school policies requires changing state laws and electing certain people to school boards, etc.

The private sector is like firewood, and the government is like a nuclear reactor. nuclear reactors are much better than firewood when they work correctly, but it takes a lot of investment to get them to work correctly.

In America our government is like 1% working nuclear reactors, and 49% broken ones, and 50% firewood. I am not saying we need more or less government. I am saying we need better government. We should shout down some of those broken nuclear reactors (convert them to firewood), and use those resources better. I'd rather have 25% working nuclear reactors and 75% firewood.

The less nuclear reactors we have, the more resources we can dedicate to making sure they actually work properly, and that we are getting the benefit from our investment.

Yeah, the hypothesis phase is the start of the scientific method, and it involves intuition and making shit up.

You are supposed to complete the process (i.e. doing experiments and performing analysis of the results), before you claim to have any useful answers.

Here is an even more basic question to answer before doing any science. You say technology is "bad for children before a certain age". What is your criteria for determining a good vs. bad outcome? Attention span? Obesity? obedience? intelligence? maturity? We may not even agree on what is subjectively good or bad. One parent may love that their child is good at video games, and another may not like video games and prefer they played baseball.

Even if we agreed on what good and bad outcomes are. The vast majority of these soft science studies are very poorly done. They have small sample sizes. They can not be replicated. The interpretations of the results are flawed. The methodology is flawed, etc. And even worse is the "journalistic" interpretation of these studies that are the predigested versions that people read on the internet.

Go look in these studies that show video games cause kids to be violent, or that TV rots your brain, or that rap music is detrimental, etc. Words you will not see in those studies "randomized controlled trial", "statistical significance", etc. You will find a lot of correlations cited with 0 evidence of causation (e.g. deaths are highly correlated with hospital visits. clearly hospitals cause of death).

It may seem to a lot of parents that technology is bad for kids. And in our society parents get to decide (within reason) what is good and bad for their kids. But this isn't science. This is just a preference.

You can't scientifically prove that pizza is more delicious that sushi. All you can do is prove that more people prefer pizza over sushi (or the opposite).

There is probably enough scientific evidence to prove that parents prefer kids who play sports over kids who play video games. But this is not proof that technology is bad for them.

So you are referring to specific "books" being available on iOS? I thought you were talking about some kind of interactive book framework/platform. This seems even more ridiculous.

I thought you were talking about apps that were more like books rather than video games. If you want cross platform mobile video game performance, you can use unity.

Unity is pretty popular.

I have been developing on Qt for like 9 years. It seems to be a pretty popular platform. Linux desktops are a worse choice for many business applications because they've already invested heavily into MS office. At our company we do all our work on Linux, but we still need a windows machine just to be able to run outlook and get our email, because it's all our IT staff knows how to use.

Even in the realm of documents, there are groups starting to replace Ms documents with tex files, because they are easier to version control and we don't really use any of the features of MS Office.

The world is changing. Office software is moving to the cloud. It no longer even matters what kind of computer you have as long as it has a current browser.

tablets and phones run the same software, and there is just as much android software as ios software. I think you have to deal with the reality that products these 2 companies offer are essentially equivalent.

No I talking about the original topic of what choice is better for school students.

If you think Google is not successful, you need to move back to earth.

I question the educational value of what you call "interactive textbooks" over other materials. The money wasted in ipads could have been used on something much more useful.

Do you have a particular app in mind? An interactive textbook could be done as an html5 app that is completely platform independent.

I hope you aren't under the impression that computers running android are not interactive.

Thats a really good argument to become familiar with more than 2 kinds of computers.

Just a complete mobile computing platform, same as apple.

I'm not sure 18 year old experience in cross platform toolkits is relevant to the topic of what tools exist today, especially when a google search is so easy.

Well it depends on your definition of "make a decision". My definition of "making a decision" (however good or bad it turns out to be) is a standard that committee's frequently can't meet.

If a human being is deciding to either jump out of a plane with his/her parachute or chickening out and staying in the plane, then a committee making a decision is like the person hanging onto the landing gear for dear life with his/her parachute partially open.

It's too bad Linus wasted all this time making a temporary kernel that was just going to be surpassed a mere 24+? years later by the official GNU kernel. Nothing stings more than when the code you write isn't being used.