Whose survival? I think a lot of people would prefer their car to protect them first and foremost, rather than the idiot who stumbled drunk onto the motorway.

For added amusement: a rock inside a crumpled-up piece of newspaper. They might actually fair better than a human on that test.

Fairly average (for a male) hand span, and slim fingers/thumbs. The iPhone keyboard simply isn't built for precise key hits. There are lots of smarts to allow you to type reasonably well regardless, but this assumes that you're typing normal English sentences (and statistically common phrases) and the more you vary from that pattern, the more likely it is to take your typing and produce something garbled or (worse) exactly negate your meaning. I eventually found that retyping any actual mistakes was less frustrating than retyping something that was entered correctly but that the iPhone "corrected" to something else.

Your comment about supporting dozens of languages is way off; the keyboard only supports a single language at a time, and you need to explicitly swap languages (which also swaps the dictionary / auto-correct mechanism.)

For me, it's crappy because the autocorrect commonly changes what I intend into something that I don't intend. After several years, I gave up and turned off autocorrect, which is a partial solution- but the keyboard was really built with autocorrect in mind, and is below mediocre with autocorrect disabled.

I can't comment on the Android keyboards.

"Temporary" because we already know that these are resolved in iOS 8 which is currently in beta. So, yes, you could rightly claim that iOS lacks these features currently- but that would make for an article with a used-by date of a few weeks or months. Like it or loathe it, it's clear that Apple is happy to steal and put their own spin on the major "distinguishing features" from Android-land.

"A worse experience" and "would definitely turn any Android user away" are rather personal judgements. iOS does some things a lot better, and clearly does some things a lot worse. Just because the author's value judgement differs from your own doesn't make him a shill.

This is quite true, and does speak to some bias- at least as far as what the author has a personal interest in, not necessarily a bias in the facts of the article. To be fair, quite a few of these articles were about the chip architecture, which was a rather big deviation from the run-of-the-mill hardware at the time. It was interesting from a technical perspective, regardless of where you sit on the OS fence.

Not exactly. Apple doesn't allow actual demos, they're pretty explicit about this. "Lite" apps are the workaround and they tend to offer reduced functionality but are free- this can serve as a demo if it's easy to divide your app into "the intro stuff" and "the longer term stuff", for example by giving away the first few levels of a game- but cannot serve as a demo if your app doesn't have this distinction.

For example, I'm pretty sure that Apple will not permit a 30-day free trial, nor do they permit you to have functionality which is "disabled in this demo version." You can get around this to some extent with in-app purchases, but that's not quite the same as a demo.

At best, it's a very different way of monetising your software, and a way that some developers may not like. At worst, GP is right and it could compromise your ability to effectively market your app.

"Series hybrids .. are designed to be run mostly by the battery, but have a petrol or diesel generator to recharge the battery when going on a long drive."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...

As a long-time user, I didn't like my first impression of iOS 7 beta, got used to it after about a day, and would not now go back. I actively recommend that people I know upgrade, unless they have an older device (never install a new iOS on a 3+ year old device; it never ends well.)

So, you haven't met me "in real life", but there are plenty of people who like iOS 7.

If we went on "met in real life" figures, then I'd have to say that nearly everybody uses an iPhone and very few use Android. Because that's what I saw on my recent holiday. Obviously not a fair comment, but maybe it goes to show that people with a similar viewpoint often end up in the same place.

You make some good points, however:

So can all semi-modern C++ compilers. This is a compiler technology, not a language concern.

Perhaps true, but this ignores the fact that C++ can effectively bypass heap allocation completely for programmer-defined hot spots. Sure, this pushes the optimisation work on to the programmer rather than the compiler, but it still means a significant performance win. Java can't do this to anything like the same degree.

I think he's referring to signed integer overflow conditions, which don't behave as most people would probably expect and aren't trivial to handle correctly.

Yes and no. Applications can't typically "put things into the cache", but algorithms can (and often are, when it comes to image processing) tuned to suit a particular cache size. Processing the image in an appropriate order, breaking the image into cache-sized chunks, and so on can all be effective strategies which pay off big-time in terms of performance.

I'm fine with this. Hardware keeps improving. Software changes to take advantage of this. Sooner or later, I'll want to upgrade.

There really needs to be consumer protection against this kind of thing. Apple has made a habit of pushing upgrades to devices that really can't handle it. Explaining to people why they shouldn't tap "Yes" when the phone repeatedly wants to upgrade, because it will permanently break their device, is not a battle that you can win. Not until it's too late, anyway.

From what I've heard (and it seems to match my experience, though it's difficult to be sure with a hidden filesystem) the latest update will even background-download itself onto your device without asking, using your bandwidth and device storage- which you can't get back, even if you don't wish to upgrade.

To be fair, Apple devices (at least, first and second gen iPads) have similar screen burn-in problems. Run the device with the same app too frequently and you will start to see minor but permanent panel degradation.

Major problems can be found after the ramping-up stage that you mention. The team decides that they can fix the problem, but only by changing some fundamental assumption upon which the whole game is based. This causes a lot of rework and can blow budgeting and scheduling out of the water. Worse, gp is fairly correct about a practical life cycle for a game engine- so if you bump the schedule like this a few times, you may need to start making "upgrades" to your underlying tech before you've even released the product. That can be a vicious cycle (see DNF.)

"Data storage / retrieval, mechanics" are often the smallest part of a game. What's really expensive is often the art assets, sound, levels, and polish. And a change to any of these can mean updating everything else to suit (oh, we're going with an egyptian theme now?)

We've "burned" an image into several iPad2 LCD screen quite effectively. It's not horribly noticeable while the tablet is in use, but display a uniform dark/black image and it's clear that there is permanent damage. We've since started using a screensaver for that application to prevent the issue from worsening, but the damage was permanent.

It may not be the same mechanism, but the end-user result is the same.