Like most things Microsoft, Paper is too little way too late. Penultimate and Sketchbook Pro are superior, and have been around for a long while now. Paper brings absolutely nothing new to the table. Easily forgotten.
Well, I'd say building consumption apps is much easier than building an app for producing things, particularly when dealing with resource-constrained devices. It's really only a matter of time for developers to really figure out how to work with iOS and to make apps for 'making things'. Keep in mind that the iPad hasn't been around for all that long.
Agreed. Seems like a simple application of rectangle detection, coordinate conversion, and use of socket libraries. The first two even come pre-packaged with the OpenCV distribution.
Ummm... The strict uniqueness of app names IS enforced by Apple, unless you're saying that "Color!" and "Color+" are the same app name. How would you expect Apple to enforce such a policy, anyway? Is "Sky Cloud" the 'same' as 'My Cloud'? Who should make such arbitrary decisions?
As far as "Apple doing nothing about it"... Why does this even matter? If your app is in the top 5, being viewed by thousands of people who presumably then click on it, why would you think that a similarly named app that is not in the top 5 receive any attention? If the developer of the other app was able to make money piggybacking on your sales, I'd love to see your sales chart clearly demonstrating this effect, and I'm sure Apple would as well. They're out to make money, too.
Not quite. What the project accomplishes is the ability to embed a fully functional and interactive web browser into another application (e.g. a game), with complete control over the pixels. Accomplishing the same functionality with a WebView, while theoretically possible, would be slow, clunky, and suffer from crashes (should the browser crash), as the rendering engine is running in the same process. It's my understanding that this will be rendered nearly obsolete with widespread Webkit2 adoption, but for now, it does provide a significant benefit (in terms of stability and usability) over a Cocoa WebView.
I'd really like to see this distinction made in the future (if possible). X thousand free app downloads or Y million signups says nothing about how many people are actually using a product or service. These numbers speak more about virality than suggest anything about long term use.
I can't help but feel that one reason Color is struggling is that while Bill appears to have a good track record for startups, he has never built one that is as front-facing and user-centered as Color, where design is an absolute necessity. He appears to be busy hiring a lot of "smart" people, and unfortunately those types of people (e.g. D.J. Patil) don't seem to be the most appropriate for defining the direction of a product whose success involves caring about its users. If Color's new direction also involves giving its users the middle finger, we can safely continue to write all 38 of them off.
Is that the same technology that showed me pictures from another user's phone that were taken miles away from our location when we were using the app? If so, it needs some work. It's also unclear to me how sound can inform GPS coordinates in any meaningful way.