Debug with ::printf() only! It builds character!

Yes..yes, I'm sure printf() does build characters!

E) lack of creativity (probably should have listed this first)
Smart phone existed before iOS. Infact it was windows mobile as the dominate
Smart phone OS. However they replicated the desktop experience and did not innovate at all

Has windows ever been dominating? I thought it was Symbian that ruled in the dark times before iOS
Good riddance on that system... though doing NDK development on Android almost makes me feel like being back in the Symbian days... almost.

I never considered symbian a smartphone OS. Of the 385 million installations, how many were true smart phones? But there it is on wikipedia touting it as a smart phone OS. But if you go to windows mobile wikipedia page in 2007 it is claimed they had 47% market share.

E) lack of creativity (probably should have listed this first)
Smart phone existed before iOS. Infact it was windows mobile as the dominate
Smart phone OS. However they replicated the desktop experience and did not innovate at all

So credit where credit is due for apple to usher in that new experience.

But did they REALLY?

Look at the post-lock screen on an iOS device and what do you have?
Rows of icons which you touch (aka 'click') to run an application.

How is this different to the rows of icons on my desktop?
Or on the various phones before it for that matter? (I had a WinCE based phone which had that setup, hell the P900 I had back in 2002/3 had that setup!)

Apple made the smart phone 'cool' via the iPod but on a concept and UI level didn't really do that much besides make the icons bigger and easier for people to touch with their fingers.

I never considered symbian a smartphone OS. Of the 385 million installations, how many were true smart phones? But there it is on wikipedia touting it as a smart phone OS. But if you go to windows mobile wikipedia page in 2007 it is claimed they had 47% market share.

You don't need a touchscreen to be a smartphone. Or at least you didn't. Only a small minority of smartphones had touchscreens before iPhone made an entrance and changed the game.
Then suddenly everyone realized they needed big touch screens...
So I'd say all of them where true smartphones according to the definition then, which simply meant a phone with an advanced multitasking OS where you could download and install native applications instead of just crappy java apps.

Yes..yes, I'm sure printf() does build characters!

You can't even use printf in android. stdout is piped to /dev/null. You have to use __android_log_print macro.

When running with the debugger there is a way to redirect:
[source lang="bash"]
$ adb shell stop
$ adb shell setprop log.redirect-stdio true
$ adb shell start
[/source]

I never really got sold into the whole phone app crap

What is there to be sold on? It's nice to have a device in my pocket that is on par with the desktop PC I had only a few years ago.

It's nice to have a game console, my entire digital library, a camera, note taking software, movies, a star chart that I can point into the sky and see exactly what I'm looking at (great use of GPS and accelerometer!), social networking, document readers, MAPS, gps, etc, etc, etc... A convenience you will miss when it's gone.

[quote name='Animate2D' timestamp='1351899334' post='4996700']
E) lack of creativity (probably should have listed this first)
Smart phone existed before iOS. Infact it was windows mobile as the dominate
Smart phone OS. However they replicated the desktop experience and did not innovate at all

So credit where credit is due for apple to usher in that new experience.

But did they REALLY?

Look at the post-lock screen on an iOS device and what do you have?
Rows of icons which you touch (aka 'click') to run an application.

How is this different to the rows of icons on my desktop?
Or on the various phones before it for that matter? (I had a WinCE based phone which had that setup, hell the P900 I had back in 2002/3 had that setup!)

Apple made the smart phone 'cool' via the iPod but on a concept and UI level didn't really do that much besides make the icons bigger and easier for people to touch with their fingers.
[/quote]

Sometimes, the most revolutionary thing is the most simple. I still don't fully understand the hype of iPhone when it first came out. It looked like a touch screen phone, and there were already touch screen phones at that time. So, Apple did not invent anything big on iPhone. To me, at least, it was just another phone with an apple on the back.

However, the only thing they did right was doing things right. The touch responsiveness was far more superior than any other touch screen phones at that time, and Apple beefed up its phone to have 128MB RAM. I was a J2ME developer at that time, and I was making games on phones with 512KB RAM with Java! This was during the time when the best phone available was probably around 16MB RAM. Having 128MB RAM felt like you had been living in a hut and were given a mansion.

Most phones' UI at that time were horrendous. Touch screens, if there were any, were frustratingly unresponsive. You have to navigate around with the D-pad. Menus were confusing, and different from phones to phones, from carriers to carriers. Another point for Apple for having 'standardized' phone's UI.

After Apple allowed developers to create native apps, that's basically when the mobile apps started to explode. No more fragmentation that J2ME is having. You were only targeting one device, one resolution, one spec -- and a pretty darn nice spec too for a phone. Random games and apps starting to sprout like mushrooms. This pretty much killed all the J2ME apps market (which were only known by technically-savvy folks anyway), and gave birth to the App Store.

You are correct that Apple didn't invent anything, but by doing things right on existing technologies, they revolutionized the whole mobile experience. Phones did not have maps. Phones did not have GPS, or accelerometer. Phones browsers were crap. There were never a need for data plan. Now, it has all changed.

[quote name='Dynamo_Maestro' timestamp='1351887423' post='4996651']
I never really got sold into the whole phone app crap

What is there to be sold on?
[/quote]

Hehe, I never understood the people who wanted to carry around a silly phone in their pocket.

But when I could carry around a little computer with internet connection I could write programs for, the choice was easy

About the iPhone UI.

I worked in the mobile UI industry when the iPhone got out, writing code for Symbian, Nokia and Sony Ericsson (and a bit for Samsung)

It was a huge deal

No-one had designed a touch-only phone before, no-one had the courage to go all out like that. The UI frameworks available at the time was very set in the button thinking, and any touch UIs where simply hacks where you could touch menubars and such, that where never really designed to be touched, and was way too small.
At best, they used a mouse model, but you don't touch things on the screen the same way you use a mouse...
So they gave you a pen with the phone so you could hit the tiny screen buttons, and a couple of hardware buttons and a scroll wheel, so you didn't have to use the touch UI they knew sucked.

Another thing with touch that apple, and only apple understood, (well, any touch user experience expert worth their name would understand too) and was alone with for a loooong time, was the importance of responsiveness.

And thats not just that the phone has to have high performance, its the little things like lists bouncing back when you drag to the end, everything snuggly grabbing your fingertip and follow around in your movements, what ever you do, even when you do an "invalid" touch movment.

Makes you feel in control.

The other touch ui:s had you fighting with laggy response, and bad resistive touch screens and a constant doubt of "did I really press? I better press again... ooops! now I pressed something on the next page, go back! go back!"

Then of course the multi touch. pinch to zoom... well of course that is how you should do it.. why had noone else done it before Well people had ofcourse, about anyone who had prototyped a multi touch UI, but apple, and only apple, managed to get it into a phone.

It was also the first fully hardware accelerated UI, another important factor for responsiveness. Many of the old systems had big problems trying to shoehorn hardware support into their old legacy-filled ui frameworks. Apple had a huge advantage when starting from a clean slate and had the wisdom of prioritizing it... how long took it for android to get hardware acceleration of the UI? (standardized hardware helps immensely of course)

They were the first that managed to make a touch phone that was actually a joy to use. And ofcourse it hit big.

Its not until now, with Android ICS, that they really have any serious competition on the user experience points imo. (havn't tried windows phone yet)