Not a coincidence. Adonit manufactures the Ink & Slide for Adobe, and apart from some cosmetic differences, and an additional button, the JTPP has all the same functionality as the Ink.
So you could use the accelerometer independently of the touchscreen for gestures like flicking ink blots or swishing the "brush" in "water" -- or maybe you can do some fancy things on the screen like tapping on the same spot for stippling (using the accelerometer to approximate height and velocity, independent of the final pressure on the tip). There's so much fun stuff to do here!
Definitely, that is what we hope developers will start using it for. We expose the accelerometer data in the SDK, so developers can get access to the data. We also use the relative pen position to the iPad to sort out some offset issues to make sure the line appears to be coming from the tip itself.
The touch pressure for paper is done with a new touch Radius property. The radius property on touches was available as a private API, but only made available publicly in iOS 8.
The Ink and Adonit touch pixel point, which are basically the same (We manufacture the Ink and Slide for adobe) use a pressure sensitive tip in the pen itself, and communicate that pressure over Bluetooth. This gives you a much higher resolution on the pressure, with the trade off of the BT stack latency.
The older I get, the more interested I am in the thoughts of people from another time. I discovered long ago that there is far less continuity of wisdom than young people realize. There is a common assumption among young people that the best ideas of the past are carried forward while the failed ideas are left behind. This is true to some extent, but it is much less true than most young people seem to think.
People vastly underestimate the gap between their theories and reality. Experience forces them to change some of their theories to ideas that seem less plausible but that turn out to correspond better to reality. When they try to pass these improved ideas on to younger people without the same experience, they are often rejected. They sound less plausible than what they and their young peers take for granted.
If the younger people go on to have the same experiences as their parents, they might eventually recognize the wisdom of their elders' ideas, but if not, they might never realize how wrong they are and will easily pass the plausible-sounding bad ideas on to their own children. At some point, most of society can have a good chuckle at the old people's "out of date" ideas.
Since each generation faces different experiences, we have a mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience keeps being lost and replaced by plausible-sounding bad ideas.
You also have the mechanism whereby people point at one area that has clearly improved as evidence that today's ideas are better than those of the past. After all, today's telephone hardware is vastly better than the Lisp Machine of 50 years ago, so the design of HTML/CSS/Javascript platform must represent a substantial improvement on the best ideas from Common Lisp with the bad ideas removed.
No? Well then there's another mechanism whereby wisdom born of experience in the past can be replaced by worse ideas that just happen to end up carried to popularity by historical circumstance.
Just as I study how old-time engineers solved technical problems without using today's technologies, I try to study the writings of "old people" from ancient times to modern, and I try to learn from the "out of date" ideas that came from experiences I've never had. I find it contains more real wisdom than the taken-for-granted trendy theories popular among today's young elites. That of course makes me "feel different" and my thoughts "out of date", too.
Pah. Why are old-people's 'experiences' not also 'plausible-sounding bad ideas' from another time? In fact, that's the only mechanism your pessimism permits.
I'd guess, instead, that these modern bad ideas are possibly good ideas that just don't jibe with your experience.
Currently popular ideas are not the result of a historical meme ratchet, whereby ideas have only been replaced by better ideas. A cursory knowledge of history provides ample evidence that bad ideas have often reemerged and become the orthodoxy of the time, supplanting earlier hard-earned wisdom.
With that history in mind, the common notion that today's popular ideas are all wiser than any of the past can be seen as absurdly unlikely. Does that imply that all old ideas are better than new replacements? Of course not. It implies that some of them are.
It implies that if you are more interested in wisdom than in popularity, you should look beyond what is taken for granted as the orthodoxy of your own generation.
Ditto on the above lists. Similar to inter-app communication issue is some way to meaningfully work with documents and data outside of application silos, either to share documents between apps, or to get documents onto and off the device.
We recently launched a simple website monitoring app for the iPhone where we ping sites from our servers, and send push notifications when we detect something is wrong (a poor man's pagerduty or pingdom where you do everything from your phone and can subscribe using IAP).
Probably the biggest lesson we've learned from collecting data on latency and timeouts from our backend is that there are a LOT of very poor hosts out there. Trying to strike a balance between intermittent failures, and actual "Your site is down, you need to do something" is pretty difficult, unless you are willing to simply wait long enough. We'll regularly see timeouts from places like Tumblr and Github Pages--they never go down, but things can get spotty. We can also tell when certain hosting providers are doing their weekly backups (or something - just guessing) because things will just go to pot at the same time every weekend for about an hour.
I can second the S3/CloudFront recommendation. Pretty rock solid (modulo downtime in specific regions).
If it is related to manufacturing, then absolutely. My neighbor works for a Honda supplier, and one day had to drop everything and fly from Indiana to a plant in Brazil with a replacement for some part of the assembly line. It is surprising how quickly a supply chain disruption can ripple through the entire manufacturing line. These organizations track things in hours and minutes.
I've seen the current software patent debacle compared to a nuclear standoff. Reading this article made me think of another analogy: Gangs. How long until independent developers will need to either join the Bloods or the Crips in order to fall under the umbrella of their protection? Unless you are a paid-up member of the Apple or Google development programs, you are a potential victim of random drive-by-lawsuits. Even if you are a member you may get shot at, but the gang will retaliate on your behalf.
