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usarioclave

macrumors 65816
Sep 26, 2003
1,447
1,506
2) Allow 3rd party keyboards on iOS

They do - it's just not not system-wide.

Note that I know people who have problems dealing with the visually complicated emoji keyboard. Swapping a third party keyboard would become a support disaster for 90% of the users.

If you want a keyboard in your app, bug the app developer. If enough people bug them, they'll add it.
 

Chrjy

macrumors 65816
May 19, 2010
1,095
2,098
UK
Consider things from his perspective: during the development of the iPhone he was working on a tiny team and had complete ownership of an entire app. That is thoroughly start-up like.

In the original NYT article that is not even a direct quote from him, but the reporter's interpretation of what he said. Given that the article also indirectly reports him giving a "rare window into the company’s start-up-like product development," the "no longer felt like a start-up" paraphrase makes perfect sense in context:

"Mr. Tolmasky said he left Apple in late 2007 because by then, the iPhone had become such a success that the team had to grow and priorities changed. It no longer felt like a start-up, so he left to start his own."

Clearly, he's someone who likes to own a project, not share it with a team of 10 or 20. He prefers broad-stroke inventing to focused work in a narrower niche. That kind of self-knowledge as a developer is the exact opposite of immature and weird. It's mature and wonderful and all too rare.

I am sure he is ten times as happy and productive doing what he does now as he would have been as one cog in the machine at Apple. And there are plenty of developers who prefer to have highly-focused expertise and responsibilities. I am sure one of them is being far more effective in his old job than he would have been.

The whole workforce wins when people are smart enough to put themselves in situations that play to their strengths.

I can see how you could see it like this but it wasn't reference to the project but rather the company as a whole, to quote: as the company no longer felt like a startup
 

krravi

macrumors 65816
Nov 30, 2010
1,173
0
Thats what made Apple tick! A powerful figure who founded the company and was a stickler for "magical" things!

Now I guess its more like....well all of them are peers! No one can say what Steve said! Everyone has to be aware of their boundaries and not step on others toes.
 

unplugme71

macrumors 68030
May 20, 2011
2,827
754
Earth
I get why he left. Working in teams of software development can actually hinder progress. You have to coordinate efforts and follow existing or agreed upon standards. However, coding within a team usually has an advantage - better documentation. You are forced to write what each function does whereas if you own it yourself, you are less likely to document.
 

ps45

macrumors regular
Feb 19, 2010
192
13
Very smart, share a little bit about early Apple development process, quote Steve Jobs, and advertise your new product in the process. This guy just made a million bucks from the NYT story.

Next you'll be telling us all those people that go on Letterman aren't just doing it to entertain us with their anecdotes, but actually have some kind of ulterior motive!
 

kdarling

macrumors P6
It truly was the first powerful mobile web browser.

I've been writing enterprise mobile HTML apps since the mid 1990s. Safari Mobile was nicer to use in many ways, but it was not the first full mobile web browser. A lot of people have a mistaken notion that up until then there was only WAP browsers. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  • 2000 - IE 4.0 on my Jornada Win CE handheld.
  • 2002 - Netfront browser w/ HTML 4.01, CSS2, JS 1.5, and screen dragging.
  • 2004 - IE 6.0 on Windows CE enterprise devices.
  • 2005 - Minimo came out, a port of Mozilla. Very nice, but slow.
  • 2005 - Nokia ported Webkit to Symbian.
  • 2006 - Opera Mobile was getting popular.

mobile_browsers.png

The Picsel document browser, dating from 2003, and which came on some Samsung smartphones in 2005, especially seemed to influence Safari Mobile.

Like the other browsers mentioned above, it had full page rendering. It also had flick scrolling with inertia, a tap-to-zoom version with blurred view for speed, and miniature pages for history / bookmarks.

In fact, Picsel filed a lawsuit against Apple in 2009, which was dropped soon after... likely because of Apple settling with them. (At least one of Apple's zoom patents referenced Picsel prior art.)

--

In some major ways, the Apple team had a much easier task than other mobile browsers. Apple used WebKit internally already. It only had to deal at the start with one resolution. It didn't need to support tiny screens with text reflow, or port to multiple OSes. Most importantly, it didn't need to support devices which only had a cursor pad.
 

MacSince1990

macrumors 65816
Oct 6, 2009
1,347
0
Thats what made Apple tick! A powerful figure who founded the company and was a stickler for "magical" things!

Now I guess its more like....well all of them are peers! No one can say what Steve said! Everyone has to be aware of their boundaries and not step on others toes.

Steve Jobs was a jackass and a lunatic. Quit worshiping his memory. It's pathetic.
 

kdarling

macrumors P6
In some major ways, the Apple team had a much easier task than other mobile browsers.

They also didn't have file uploading for a long time... something that's still mostly missing (except for images), because of a lack of a unified user file system.

Nor did it have to support plugins, such as Flash.

Interestingly, Tolmasky later had this to say about that last missing feature:

In What Ways is the Web Failing?

The web is an incredibly complex environment, where the most important issues at stake are in my opinion the most subtle. For this reason, this argument can quickly digress and we often spend too much time focusing on the wrong problems.

I think a great example of this is the history of Flash. Most people would point to Flash’s incredible decline in the last 3 years as a great success of the web.

However I believe that the crusade against Flash was incredibly misguided and ultimately left us in a worse position on the web overall.

I am obviously no big fan of Flash (having created many technologies meant to compete directly against it), but what web evangelists fail to recognize is that the object tag is also part of the HTML standard and serves an incredibly democratic and important role in the web. Plugins are the equivalent to California’s ballot initiatives, an opportunity for us the developers to shoehorn something into the web when we are unsatisfied with where web standards are going.

Remember that had it not been for plugins, YouTube may have taken another 5 or 10 years to come out. Had plugins existed on mobile perhaps FourSquare would today be a largely mobile web app instead of a native one.

By killing Flash, what we actually did was kill plugins. Sure, today we happen to have a lot of influx of technologies being provided by HTML5, but as things change in the future, we have lost a powerful tool to experiment with. We are now completely at the mercy of the browser vendors and standards writers to have access to some really cool technologies, furthering the gap between web and native.


- Tolmasky 2011
 
Last edited:

Rogifan

macrumors Penryn
Nov 14, 2011
24,084
31,015
From John Gruber's blog.

http://daringfireball.net
Judging by my inbox, an awful lot of coffee was spewed in Cupertino today upon reading Tolmalsky’s self-aggrandizing description of his role in Mobile Safari’s creation. There’s a difference between “the developer responsible for the first version of mobile Safari” and “the developer who claims he was responsible for the first version of mobile Safari”.
 

snprintf

macrumors member
Apr 20, 2014
69
0
He made it snappy to begin with.

----------

They do - it's just not not system-wide.

Note that I know people who have problems dealing with the visually complicated emoji keyboard. Swapping a third party keyboard would become a support disaster for 90% of the users.

If you want a keyboard in your app, bug the app developer. If enough people bug them, they'll add it.

They could just not swap it if they can't understand it. But it seems like a lot of extra settings and extra App Store support just for a lame feature with no significant value.

----------

...You actually use Safari?

What else? Every other iPhone browser is slow and/or clunky.
 
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