Doesn't look like it, uh?

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edit: aww come on folks it's all in good fun

  Ogmento was founded by my Super Ventures partner Ori Inbar. Ogmento became 
  FlyBy and the team there successfully built a VIO system on IOS leveraging an 
  add-on fish eye camera. This code-base was licenced to Google which became 
  the VIO system for Tango. Apple later bought FlyBy and the same codebase is 
  the core of ARKit VIO.

  ...

  I don’t have any hard insider confirmation on this, but I think the Metaio 
  codebase would have helped with the plane detection and probably helped with 
  the mapping/relocalization pieces of the visual tracker. FlyBy had by far the 
  best Inertial tracker on the market, and it’s this piece that makes ARKit 
  magic (instant stereo convergence & metric scale in particular).

The processing power or battery for that form factor will not be there for another 10 years - but offloading processing and power supply to the phone in your pocket via well designed tethering is conceivable.

I think we'll have this in a couple of years, and you'll control it via voice recognition and hand gestures.

The rest are pretty underwhelming. Lots of things that make great demos, but not many that feel like I would come back to them.

The other problem is that fragmentation increases the odds of a vendor walking away from a device since the per-model sales are divided more ways. Trying to pick a device which will get updates basically involves sales forecasting which wouldn't be necessary if the platform was open.

This article is explicitly spun to promote ARCore as "Android scale" and leads with a sentence pointing out that Android is on two billion devices.

You're right, their ambitions are much lower, but it's fair to point out their actual goals aren't anywhere near the image they are trying to project and they really shouldn't be bragging about it being "Android scale" when it's nothing of the sort.

https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/De...

It's no longer just one or two sizes on iOS. Probably a minimum of three assuming you don't want to do a tablet app, and that may change into weeks.

Yeah, I should have said it could benefit from using a fully-fledged game engine, considering you'll likely need to import 3D models, have objects interact with each other, and so on which Unity would help a lot with.

However, I primarily do experimental work in those engines, so I'm pretty biased.

It would be fine if he only criticised the newbie experience (where he's very right), but he also decided to add a bunch of wrong things in there.

I've been developing Android apps for years (before support lib even existed, much less all the fancy new kids) and range of screen sizes has literally never once been an actual issue. Use 'dp' instead of 'px' and you pretty much never have a screen diversity problem. All the platform views & layouts handle the majority of the work.

Does React Native make this more complicated for some reason?

Somehow many of us manage quite fine, and enjoy the experience.

In every other realm that sort of drive-by shooting gets rightly criticized. "Tried Rust -- => everywhere. Lame". "Tried vi. Couldn't quit. Garbage."

We literaly spent a month of man-hours every year to fix up constant breaking Xcode CI setup and iOS API breakages while Android team continued development unimpeded. Not to mention constant breaking changes and crashes of Swift language and IDE toolchain.

I do agree that for a complete beginner the experience is significantly better in Apple world, but please do not comment on "commercial purposes" development if you haven't done either.

The next release of the NDK (r16; due out sometime this quarter) will stabilize libc++ for use by NDK applications and it'll be made the default STL in r17 (which will be out by the end of the year).

iOS has four different retina screen resolutions on the phones, more on the tablets. For all we know there will be more in two weeks. Creating pixel perfect layout doesn't work very well anymore.

It may be easier to exhaustively test on iOS because there aren't quite as many variations, but devs should definitely be using flexible layouts.

Edit to add: I think a good comparison would be building an app around iOS force touch, or Macs with the touch bar. Those seem riskier.

e.g. lots of Android phones basically can't hit low latency audio targets that iOS has been able to hit essentially since launch.

---

NSA had been trying to install network monitoring boxes in all the places.

this was discovered, after a whistleblower from AT&T mentioned this happening in the MUX/IX in the infamous room 641A

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

---

There is way too much to educate ppl in one post on the evolution to the above, but I can go back decades if I have time - and ppl have interest...

Anyway - the NSA was running all over and installing spying boxes... they got caught.

The CEO of Qwest was convicted on "tax fraud" or some such after he had the balls to stand up to the NSA and not install their shit.

Aside: Qwest communications was founded as a splinter from a railroad company who realized they had right-of-way easments along ALL their rail lines -- which was easy to lay fiber alongside, and then build a comms co on that backbone.

Earthlink, which was funded early by key hollywood scientologists, refused to install the boxes as well -- but because they were already spying on all their user traffic to hunt for "clam" people (clam people are those that made fun of scientology due to scientology's belief that humans are evolved from clams - among a great many other weird beliefs... anyway they werent prosecuted, presumably due to holywood big-shot money... etc...)

---

There was a student who was able to look up all the public-works filings for all municipal and federal digging plans/permits/etc and wrote some detailed report on the critical network infra of the US, thus revealing its weaknesses -- the report was nabbed as "national security" as "terrorists" might attack it.. (though they didnt really report on the fiber cuts which caused major upheaval and outages in silicon valley) -- but they shut that kids thesis (i think it was a thesis) down...

The revolving door with the NSA and silicon valley is wide open, obvious and pretty big...

if you want more info. email me... revealing too much on HN is stupid.

Yeah, Python is fun, it seems effortless to do stuff there compared to Java. For example, "a = [1]" vs "List<Integer> a = new ArrayList<>(); a.add(1)" - and then you have to compile and run, no REPL to try it out.

Recently I've been using Julia, it's maybe the most fun I had with a language. Some things are much easier to do than in Python - and it's 1 to 2 orders of magnitude faster.

A number of people have speculated that this is an attempt to get some real world trial and have apps that are already ready so if they announce some sort of HoloLens thing in the future the software/devs are already 80% there.

Either “doesn’t have that feature” or “feature is currently in poor state to demonstrate” are reasons to avoid demoing it.

Where did I write that there's no legitimate use cases for AR? I find games the LEAST PLAUSIBLE use case because holding your phone and moving around a virtual plane is a nice demo, but sucks for extended game sessions.

Indoor navigation and stuff like Google Lens is the most plausible use. And many of the examples you show in your ideas link like showing seat positions, aren't possible in ARKit because it doesn't have persistence.

A lot of the examples in the ideas thread require area understanding like Google's Visual Positioning System, or Tango. If you want a consumer to be able to pop open the camera and instantly have it tell him where his seat is on an airplane, you will have needed to already have stored persistent features of the interior of the plane. (e.g. Tango ADF https://developers.google.com/tango/overview/area-learning)

Look at the Tango app in Lowes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAQ0y19uEYo) This is the kind of AR that is useful to the majority of people, it's the kind of AR that is a killer app, and it's the kind of AR that won't be available without area understanding capable HW deployed for creating these maps so they can be consumed by cheaper SW-only AR stacks.

I'd disagree with the Xeon bit, I have a 6 year old Sandy Bridge quad core, and Android Studio runs butter smooth.

I'll confess to the 16GB of RAM and an SSD though. Although honestly an SSD now days is required for anything to be usable.

Android Studio is amazingly performant though, the Emulator is great, ignoring bugs and glitches and the occasional times it just stops working until I flip enough settings back and forth that it starts working again.

Of course a huge benefit is that I don't need Apple hardware to develop for Android.

I've had no problems using Android Studio on my Mac with 8GB. On a side note, the Android emulator even started faster than the iOS simulator. I also found it odd that the Android Emulator seemed to consume less resources than the iOS simulator which was taking up about 2GB of RAM.

Edit: Also, how does Xcode compare in performance? It seems lighter, but I only have a pretty recent Macbook Pro to test on (which also handles Android Studio just fine)

2 - Android 7 has currently about 13% acquisition after one year

3 - There is currently no obligation for OEMs to provide updates

4 - Given the failure of security updates, only being delivered to flagship devices, I believe Google will ship them directly when they actually do it.

If you're doing a 2D game, theres lots of middleware options as well. Yes, people build for iOS first because you only have to test for a few devices -- its like developing for fixed console HW -- and because iOS users tend to spend more. But most indie games that make money eventually quickly saturate on each platform, and so devs go multiplatform relatively quickly when they make out revenue on a given platform.

The games business is pretty tough if you're not a triple-A breakout hit.

Remember "Redmond Start Your Copiers!" That was an official WWDC banner hung from the rafters by Apple, not some fanboys. Steve Jobs frequently gave interviews accusing rivals of copying, and then copying with the excuse "Good artists copy; great artists steal". All of those years of going on the offensive against everyone, has created a tendency of the other side to look for hypocrisy now.

There's something pretentious, and deeply hubristic and lacking in humility in Apple's marketing that I think has fanned the flames of these fanboy wars. In a way, their marketing reminds of the way Trump talks, only with a larger vocabulary. Replace "Great!", "Bigly!", "SAD!", with "Beautiful", "Amazing", "Breakthrough". It's just continuous repetitive of superlatives, even for minor features.

There is a lot of discussion here about how Apple has a headstart on developer commitment with ARkit.

What will actually happen for the majority of games targeting AR is people will write it in Unity (or perhaps Unreal), and then set it to compile for iOS and Android.

The S8 was the top selling Android phone this year, so this can be rolled out immediately to phones. I just tested out the sample app on my Pixel. As time goes on, the percentage of Android phones with this capability will increase.

ARkit does not work on iPhone 6 or earlier, or the iPad Air 2 or earlier. It can roll out to a greater percentage of Apple devices right now, but Android has a larger overall market share any how. Two years from now, I expect AR on iOS and Android to be fairly on par (of course we have to see how the two stacks measure up against one another).

But a student trying to develop for Android can’t afford devices that start (!) at 908.35 USD. (Price of the Pixel 5" with 32GB storage, in Germany, right now).

And Google just dropped support for my phone, the Nexus 5X (which I bought for 324 USD, on sale, just before they stopped selling it)

Usually the customer's IT assigns hardware to external consultants.

Google could have taken the same approach as Microsoft always did since the MS-DOS days and require specific hardware expectations.

I always thought Kinect Tango and other HW-dependent solutions were a fad, and SW-only on ubiquitous cheap sensors is the right solution. SW keeps getting cheaper, faster than HW does.

I predict that, even if Apple (re)starts the custom-HW fad, within 10 years we'll see devices with good-enough camera-plus-SW AR outnumber specalized-HW AR devices by at least 10:1, and it'll only get more extreme over time.

(Mind you, that prediction requires that we continue to get performance-per-watt-per-dollar improving; i.e. it assumes that Moore's law finds a way to outlive current processor fabrication technologies.)

> If AR is to be useful, it's got to be a lot better at tracking and drift, at making sense of the world, of supporting occlusion and mapping.

That's for sure.

The Tango model of using extra hardware is probably much better, but seems further ahead. The software model works today on existing devices and lets people see how this is useful. Once you have that convincing people it's with the money to have the hardware added to the phone becomes easier.

Given how many Android phones are lower cost than the flagship was Tango ever going to be very popular? Apple could have forced the issue (like Lightning or the headphone jack) but people could always switch Android OEMs to get something cheaper if they don't see the value.

I could be wrong, but I was under the impression they already leverage the dual cameras on the Plus phones.

For example, something I was excited to see is in the updated documentation on source.android.com with regards to how they recommend developing kernel branches alongside devices: https://source.android.com/devices/architecture/kernel/modul...

Basically, one of the issues that's plagued OEMs in the past is the fact that each SoC vendor (e.g. Qualcomm, Samsung, ARM) would not only have a kernel for each SoC, but each OEM device using that SoC would be another branch on that SoC-specific repository. This would then be compounded by the OEMs having their own kernel repositories that pull from the device-specific branches of a SoC repository, and bug fixes from OEMs would have to trickle back upstream to the vendor repository before making them back to other device-specific kernels.

The new proposed model would see a single kernel soruce for a given SoC, and device-specific changes would come in the form of kernel modules, config overrides, and device tree overlays. They are also strongly recommending SoC changes to the kernel be upstreamed to mainline Linux, which would greatly ease porting to newer kernels in the future.

When Pokémon Go came out I was very disappointed to find it's much hyped 'AR' was really just rendering ok top of a live camera image with no tracking at all.

The demo of the ARKit version from WWDC is what I had been expecting.

When Windows Phone 7 was released (this is ignoring that Windows CE was around for about a decade before, giving Microsoft a massive headstart), Android had about 18% of the market. Microsoft leveraged their enormous base of desktop developers, pulling them through various failed initiatives, to get them developing for Windows Phone. Android started effectively from nothing.

In the context of actual history your post is simply surreal.

Also, a used Mac Mini isn't $3000.

Not everything. "Redmond Start Your Copiers" was in response to some very specific copying over the previous year, though I don't remember the details anymore.

> What do you call Apple Music then?

I call it a subscription model to the iTunes store. Subscription models have been around for a long time, even though Spotify is the poster child for applying them to Music I don't think it makes sense to say Apple is copying Spotify (or anyone else) by having a subscription music service, it's the logical evolution of paid music services. You could certainly argue that Spotify proved the customer demand was there (as well as the ability to convince the labels to go along with this), but it's not like Spotify invented the concept.

> Ping?

An unmitigated disaster. But I'm not sure who you think that was copying. I can't think of any pre-existing service like Ping.

> What did Apple do to innovate in that space above and beyond Spotify?

Provide a seamless "it just works" experience across all Apple devices, including integration into their customers' existing iTunes libraries, and into Siri, including the forthcoming Homepod. And I think it's fair to give Apple Music credit for iCloud Music Library as well, which is great.

> That's a long list of UI features Apple cribbed from Android, WebOS, and Windows Phone that ended up (IMHO), inferior copies, where the copy didn't actually improve on (make great) the original.

Can you elaborate?

> In what way does Apple Photos improve on the quality of Google Photo's deep learning based categorization that is user-visible and noticeable?

Apple Photos does it all on-device.

Also, I really don't think you can claim that using machine learning to classify photos is something that Google owns. It's been an obvious idea for literally decades, it's just taken until now before it was feasible to do.

Free for 5Gb, $120/yr for 2TB. Google Photos offers unlimited storage for up to 16 Mpix.

As to your other stuff, I don't see the point in continuing since it's so subjective. On any feature which Apple clearly copied and improved, your answer is "whataboutism" to trace the lineage and claim long long ago, the seeds of it came from somewhere else. History for you is a long line of incremental, but uninteresting improvements, punctuated by Apple's adoption, which somehow defines a clearly new thing. When Apple makes an improvement, it is not diminished by the fact that other people had worked on something similar and that it's lineage can be traced as accumulated incremental improvements.

But somehow, for everyone else, history diminishes their achievement.

For me, the history of product development is one of hundreds or thousands of actors, researchers, and scientists making publishing incremental improvements that stack. People who diminish the work of others, try to hog all the credit by rebranding the achievements of others, and fail to give back are parasites.

And for the record, I am not an Apple hater. I have a maxed out Mac Pro on my desk, I've owned every Apple product you can think of, including standing in line for one of the very first iPhones sold. I have carried almost nothing but iPhones, and my primary mobile computer is a Macbook pro with touch bar.

CRITICIZING a company's magical reality marketing and the inability of its cult-like fans to admit criticism of it, does not amount to hate.

I love Apple products. I hate the way they are marketed.

- If something wasn't feasible to do until the moment Apple copied it from others, why didn't Apple do it first?

- Have there been innovations by companies that compete with Apple?

- Have they ever taken an idea from Apple and made it better?

So, you have $150 annual fee just for the developer account. Plus an additional massive cost every I time I need to replace the device.

The starting costs are significantly higher; maybe not 3k, maybe just 2k, but that’s the same anyway: Completely unaffordable.

And running costs are massively worse, too.

The whole point of Google Photos is that it convinces everybody to give all of their photos to Google, so Google can data-mine them.

Saying Google Photos is free is like saying that Gmail is free. Sure, you're not paying for the service itself, but you're paying with your privacy and access to the most intimate details of your personal life.

--

In any case, discussions about online storage of photos isn't relevant at all to this thread, especially when the context of Photos was in searching them, which has nothing to do with how they're stored or whether they're synced.

Postbank has a Visa or MasterCard for 29€ yearly. Comdirect has a free Visa Debit card. I have it and have not used that account for over two years now apart from downloading the statements. Nothing happened so far and I haven't paid anything.

In your case the easiest solution would probably to order the British prepaid card from Revolut which is available for a one-time 8€ fee and I don't think they refuse anybody. Just note that they are not regulated as a bank but as electronic money so I wouldn't leave large sums of money for a long time on the card (but that's not something you want to do anyway).

The advances in image and speech recognition of these times are due to innovations in deep learning by Google, Microsoft, NVidia, Stanford, U. Toronto, CMU, and many others. I didn't mean to imply it was all Google's doing. Rather that Apple wasn't there, which is why "just waiting for it to become feasible" sounds like apologetics.

Then there's also innovation in making a product out of the new capabilities, or integrating them into an existing product. I think dismissing that as "everybody was just waiting for the technology" is not realizing that, in hindsight, all products look obvious.