How do people who know X learn Y?

I saw that was sometimes an interview question: "I see you knew Java and learned c#, what methods did you use to learn the new language?" Stuff like that.

High level languages are all pretty similar, the low level implementation varies, and then there's different libraries used for different things. 90% of me learning higher level java stuff was just learning about different libraries and tools. We did a lot of generic programming in my last java class which was pretty cool.

That's kinda along the lines of what I want to learn, not just "here is the syntax for ____" which can be picked up quick. But since python is not statically typed like java and C++ i feel like there may be more **** I need to relearn.

God, **** Apple, seriously. I just had to get the Contacts off my old iPhone to move them onto my Google account/new Android phone.

The first set of instructions I found involved getting iTunes to do it. I duly downloaded iTunes, only to find that "sync to Google Contacts" was removed circa iTunes 11, for good reasons I'm sure

Then I found that since iOS 7, you can two way sync contacts with your Google account via Gmail. I read articles praising how "seamless" this experience is. What most of them don't mention is that this only syncs the contacts in your Google Contacts group on your iPhone to Google. Most of the contacts on my phone were created on the iPhone and are therefore in the "iPhone contacts group". How do you merge the iPhone contacts group with the Google contacts group? You don't. Can't be done.

Good news though, the iPhone also provides an option to upload SIM contacts to Gmail! So all I have to do is save the iPhone contacts to the SIM. How do you do that? You don't. Can't be done.

I think there's an AppStore app that saves your contacts to a connected computer but I have no idea if it's free or what and had already disconnected the phone from my Apple ID.

So I went the only other route for getting contacts off the phone, which involves uploading them to iCloud first. This appears to be the point of all the restrictions, so that Apple can get their grubby mitts on my stuff. I deleted them all from iCloud after exporting them to VCF, but who knows if Apple have stashed the info somewhere for a rainy day.

This is typical of the **** I've had to put up with from Apple and I'm never using any of their products again.

They just learn Lisp. At that point, they know every language, or rather, what every language can't do.

ChrisV,

Your first mistake was getting a phone that was not an iPhone.

One of my coworkers has a "dumb phone." I'm so jelly.

I love my iPhone 6+. True story. I'm even using it right now.

When enumerating the features iPhones don't have, it isn't really necessary to delve into whiz-bang stuff like IR blasters. When someone was evangelising the new iPhone to me the other day I asked whether Apple's technological advancement had yet reached the stage where it is possible for me to copy a ****ing MP3 file to my phone without downloading a 120MB application first. Apparently they're still working on that.

if it weren't for work, i think i'd go back to a circa 2000 style tiny flip phone with voice and text only.

I think iPhones are massively overrated. I'll stick with Android forever until there's something like OpenBSD for phones. Always wanted to get one of the supported phones and try Ubuntu on it but that money always gets spent for other tech toys that seem cooler (pi-top)
[I also don't use my phone for much]

I will say that being more involved with business decisions I understand the Apple approach a lot more. If we have to decide between building a new feature for a user that's using us a lot or building something to make it easier for a small time user to integrate a product from someone else - we'll probably dedicate effort to the new feature (especially if we can offer a work around of some sort to the other person).

Obviously Apple has a lot more resources but I still understand the business decision for not spending time/resources making it really easy for someone to port their contacts from an iPhone to an Android phone. Similarly I understand their approach of dedicating time to making it easy to use their software/products rather than building lots of custom ways for doing things. For example, importing mp3s seems easy with iTunes. If you don't want to use iTunes, yeah - it's probably harder.

Anyway, I understand people that don't like Apple or Apple's approach. It's a totally reasonable position. It just seems silly to get annoyed by it when it's been clear for a very long time that this is how they work.

I've gone iPhone 3g -> Android 2.x (I think 2.4) -> iPhone 4s -> iPhone 6+. My android experience was kind of crappy. I assume its gotten a lot better, but I'm pretty happy with my Apple ecosystem so I have no real motivation to change at this point.

Come on man. How does actually having the ability to export contacts to Google in iTunes and then deliberately removing it fit into this at all? How does dragging and dropping a file onto your phone - functionality so simple and standard you probably have to expend time making your USB device not do it - count as "building lots of custom ways for doing things"?

I get that a lot of people are OK selling their independence and settling into the Apple ecosystem of good and slick (but kind of expensive) products. Like, I genuinely understand that. But when Apple doesn't provide me the facility to put media on my phone by any method other than iTunes, it's because they want to lock me into iTunes. When the only way to export contacts is by putting them on iCloud first, it's because they're trying to lock me into iCloud. Trying to claim this has anything to do with development expense is laughable. The marginal cost to them to fully interop with Google would be like 0.0001 cent per customer. They aren't doing it because they don't want to.

Remember when Google were, for free, including their Maps app bundled into iOS and then in one upgrade (iOS 6 I think) Apple just removed it without asking users and replaced it with their own, worse, version? It's not that Apple won't expend effort to let people use third party products, it's that they wage outright war on people doing so, to the detriment of their own customers. Luckily their products are shiny and cool enough that people are OK with it.

I get when people that aren't CS people make comments like this, but I'm always surprised when programmers do. Just because something works at one point in time doesn't mean its free to keep it working - through upgrades, bugs, new hardware, yadda yadda yadda.

The maps example is another one. Obviously they're doing it for their own interests. That's what companies do. But if I remember correctly it wasn't just because they suddenly wanted to screw with Google. It's that they wanted to do some things differently and without their own app they had no control over that.

People often like the Apple experience - but Apple aims for a very comprehensive/integrated/controlled experience and part of the cost of that is that they have to actually have control over all parts of that or else it doesn't work.

Do you think this is really why the iPhone is so successful? That they've managed to keep a large marketshare purely because they've tricked millions of people into just buying something "shiny and cool".

I think its a naive way of looking at it that misses a lot of factors.

There's a lot more to the maps situation than that. Google was letting Apple use it, but they wouldn't let them have turn by turn voice directions. That was a huge selling point for Androids.

For the most part I agree with you about Apple. But despite hating a ton of **** thy do, I still have an iPhone, and I still work on a Mac pro – because they're the best available option for me.

I think it's more or less correct, and I have an iPhone fwiw and like it fine.

But there really isn't anything essentially better or different about them from the nicer android phones and hasn't been for some time (i've used both). The UI is a little cleaner. Maybe. The physical design is more polished. Mostly Apple's marketing is much, much better, to the point where many people have been convinced their design ingenuity is magical.

I'd say in a generous assessment what they've done is executed marginally better than their competitors and convinced people that the victory was an unmitigated trouncing.

So you got an iPhone because it's shiny and cool?

Why did you spend extra money on an iPhone?

Edit: and if it's a work phone, why does your company pay extra for an iPhone?

I've never understood how the iphone is do intuitive to use and their pcs are so counterintuitive.

work phone. we develop an iphone app so not having one is out of the question. for the same reason i had to get a mac laptop. and even though i don't feel mac os is anything special, i will admit that the hardware superiority (mainly, the battery life) makes that worth it. and it is indeed shinier and prettier than the competition.

I could take that a step further, and say - why do you develop an iPhone app? Things like retaining users is "a thing" that's separate from being shiny and cool. The coolest and shiniest phone isn't going to keep people coming back for almost a decade if it sucks and is unusable. Look at how fast Blackberry threw away their market share.

My point is just that I think its a mistake to simplify something as complicated as a market of hundreds of millions of people. Being dismissive towards how that works means you're probably missing a lot of valuable information about how consumers think and what they care about.

none of this contradicts anything i've said.

we develop an iphone app because iphone is a significant market share. we also develop and android app. i don't use that one as primary phone because we already had it lying around it and it was an older model but still worked fine, so it made sense to get the iphone with the plan attached. if things had worked out reverse i'd probably be using a newer android as my primary phone.

and in fact, everything i said in previous posts is in line with the market trend of iphone losing ground to android: http://www.businessinsider.com/iphon...t-share-2014-5

there are definitely important lessons to be learned from apple about marketing, image, and to some extent UI simplicity. My main point is they aren't actually that dominant in UI simplicity, even though people love to tout that point. It's just simply not true ime. Having used both Android and iPhone, I see choices in each one that are better than its competitor's. But I don't see an overwhelming victory for iphone. There are certainly some things I like better about it, but at the end of the day I am not like "omgwtfbbq i love my iphone lol android".

it's more some like some days "yeah this thing is pretty nice actually" and some days "god apple is an annoying pos"

Proving that the iPhone isn't dominantly better than Android is nowhere near showing that the iPhone's success is because people just like "shiny and cool" things.

I feel generally the same as you describe here (although I'm out of date on Android, when I tried 3-4 years ago the iPhone *was* much easier to use, but I assume its improved measurably since then).

But if you want to justify that people are just paying for something shiny and cool with the iPhone you'd need to show me that the Android is superior in all ways to the iPhone. As you said, I don't think that's true. So dismissing all of the differences seems like naive way of evaluating the smart phone market.

well the argument i'm making is twofold:

1. since there is no dominant usability winner (my assumption, which it seems we agree on), then apple's impressive market sure despite its high price point, even if that share is declining, has to be explained by something else. i see only two things: physical beauty of the devices, and social image (ie, shiny and cool).

2. anecdotally, when i hear non-tech-savvy apple lovers talk about how much they their iphone and how simple it is, i typically see all the signs fashion-based opinion and few objective facts or reasoned comparative analysis. there is a kind of head-nodding, we-see-the-truth, "man, apple is just so much better, right?" attitude for which the "shiny and cool" explanation seems fitting.

I'll fully admit that the marketing genius behind how apple created this state of affairs is something complex, interesting, and worthy of study, and I don't pretend to understand it fully.