The screen size looks wrong because the app is running in pillar box mode — it's only been compiled to run for 640x960 screens (i.e. iPhone 4S and older).
The keyboard is iOS 6 styled because the app hasn't been compiled for iOS 7.
>IMHO, feed reading should be integrated into the browser as a tab, not in the hands of commercial interests.
This is a really interesting idea. Has there been any talk in Chrome development about building a browser-side RSS reader? Google would still get all the information they get from Reader now but they'd be making the 'feature' exclusive to their browser. This coming not long after Apple removed their feed managing ability in the web browser, meaning they could get a load of Chrome converts on OS X just from that.
It'd be really interesting to see what happened if browser-side RSS became "the thing" again. Although, as julien pointed out, doing it browser-side doesn't necessarily mean your RSS isn't in the hands of a commercial interest.
Although other than knowing it's running IIS (which is in the Server header of the responses anyway), it's not particularly useful. Unlike modern web apps, it's not displaying a stack trace or debug information that contains db connection strings and the like.
Also, this is fixed by changing one line in web.config AFAIK (it's been a good five years since I worked with IIS in any capacity)
There is none — the title is misleading linkbait. The article only mentions Apple twice, and even then it doesn't explain what "Apple's poisonous touch" has to do with GNOME 3 being almost universally disliked — or as the title puts it, "killed" (which is also completely untrue).
Not true:
"What happened that made GNOME developers seemingly abandon all sense of sanity and design a desktop interface that almost no one wants?
...
The more likely candidates for inspiring GNOME's 3.0 stumble is Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS."
Maybe the title is linkbait, but the thesis isn't absurd.
That's true, but I'd guess that's true of much desktop software. People don't use Microsoft Word because of its efficient C++ code; they use it because it's semi-standard, has lots of features, and overall is good enough. I would bet giant piles of legacy code are a bigger reason for not moving to C# than anything language-specific is.
The only technical limitation I can think of is the one which exists server-side. Siri has been having troubles from time-to-time with just iPhone 4S owners polling it. Imagine if all iPhone 4 (and even 3GS) owners were trying to use it too.
Do you care about that when you use Twitter or Gmail? Instead for Apple, after paying a shitload of money, you are super interested in how hard is scaling for them?!
There is no limit to my shock at how people are mentally gamed by Apple.
I have to believe that Apple has the engineering talent to scale something like this up. It's a pretty straight forward problem, and it's not like they don't have enough cash to double their server farm.
It wouldn't be competing directly with Google though, would it? Siri offers a limited range of functions (currently, though this will inevitably widen as Apple makes more modules (and possibly opens it up to third parties)) whereas Google indexes (almost) everything on the web and searches by text.
I agree though: due to its nature of remotely processing input, Siri could become a search engine accessed via a web browser assuming the computer has a mic (which most current Macs — especially the biggest-sellers, MacBooks — do). It would become a single interface for accessing dozens of services — like Wolfram Alpha and Yelp — and tapping petabytes of information.
No you're right, they are not ready right now, but they seem to be heading toward that collision somewhere down the road.
I was thinking mic would be necessary too but they would certainly have to have a fallback for machine's that lack that capability (aka, a text input box box). Apple could even do their spin on it and have the question spoken back to you after you enter it so Siri can 'hear' it (Apple has to spin it unique in some fashion similar to how Bing has a background picture distinguishing itself).
For some reason I didn't even consider that you could control it via normal text input, but you're obviously right as that's what Siri will eventually use after the voice-recognition software is used. This totally widens the possible market then, you're right.
I think the main bottleneck at the moment though (and why Siri was limited to the iPhone 4S even though the 4 and 3GS run it perfectly) is due to server load. They simply don't have the infrastructure to handle all the requests.
As much as I love what you said, I hate to break it to you that t_hero.png is actually named due to the fact it's the "Hero" graphic. This just refers to the fact that it's the main splash image of the page.[1]
You can see the hero image which was in use before the announcement of Steve's passing here[2] — look at the filename.
The keyboard is iOS 6 styled because the app hasn't been compiled for iOS 7.
Nothing out of the ordinary here.