[HN Gopher] Secret iPad
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Secret iPad
Author : fraXis
Score : 125 points
Date : 2020-04-03 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thinkfractional.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (thinkfractional.blog)
| dhosek wrote:
| I love these behind the scenes accounts of stuff.
| li4ick wrote:
| If you like this kind of behind the scenes, i highly recommend
| Ken Kocienda's book "Creative Selection" about the development of
| some parts of the first iPhone.
| snazz wrote:
| I'm surprised they weren't told about it at all in advance. Is
| that standard for Apple nowadays?
| brundolf wrote:
| Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel
| and cool! ( _magical_ , even)". I've said it before, but I dearly
| miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We
| have much better devices now; we should have _better_ apps! I
| should be so desensitized by how _interesting_ the new apps are
| that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious!
| Instead today 's apps are boring. They've been reduced to nothing
| but feeds to scroll through, clients for online services, and
| crappy games.
|
| What in the world happened?
| xxpor wrote:
| There's no money to be made in the app store, for the most
| part. OTOH, there's plenty to be made in monthly service
| revenue (and 30% of it isn't taken by apple in most cases).
| alasdair_ wrote:
| The money thing is more a power law thing. There is
| DEFINITELY money to be made in the app store (I worked On an
| app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a
| product with only twelve engineers directly working on it)
| but it's almost all going to the winners in a specific
| category.
| sneak wrote:
| It turns out you can make more money repeatedly selling $0.99
| token packs for simple dot puzzle game powerups than one-time
| $1.99 or even $2.99 whole-app purchases. There are also more
| people who play silly puzzle games in waiting rooms around the
| world than people who play guitar.
|
| There is still tons of innovation in the App Store. It's just
| on Skinner Box mechanics now.
| freehunter wrote:
| There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on
| the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small
| amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very
| niche audience (like XCode).
|
| Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as
| evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad
| can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can
| run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. There's a Github app,
| there's a file explorer app, you can connect USB drives and
| keyboard and as of very recently, a mouse.
|
| So where is VS Code for the iPad? Where is desktop-class
| software for the iPad? Why is this [1] article from _8 years
| ago_ still the best-in-class way to write code on an iPad? Is
| there still some kind of missing support I 'm not seeing?
|
| [1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-
| macbook...
| DevKoala wrote:
| I would guess that there are more great apps published daily
| than ever before. The issue is probably discovery. Even if you
| build something great, you are competing for attention, and
| people who can pay for ads get the most attention.
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(page generated 2020-04-03 23:00 UTC)