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I got a Casio Cosmo Phase since the time and date are always visible, along with the solar system simulation (makes it easy to know which planets are up after sunset and before sunrise to know if you'll take out your C9.25). Battery lasts for several years, it is actually waterproof (can do swimming and snorkeling) not just splash-resistant like the Apple Watch, it has the basics you'd want from a watch like multiple alarms, count-down timer, stopwatch, a very responsive button interface and I can tell you it is resilient as it has been working great for me since 1989!

The fact is, many many people, me included, have swum/showered with their Apple Watch for well over a year [1]. Even swimming in the ocean is totally fine as long as you wash it afterwards.

The reason Apple didn't say it's good for swimming is that the UI simply doesn't function when you swim with it (also not sure if the defined apps are designed to support swim tracking).

[1] http://furbo.org/2015/07/14/a-...

Some Chinese developers downloaded this tainted XCode because of slow download times of XCode from the Mac App Store.

Downloading XCode from the Mac App Store takes nearly a full day! I think this delivery mechanism of XCode is developers is very crummy and quite a nuisance.

Maybe it's an effect of the Great Firewall? My understanding is that Internet throughput in China (especially for inbound traffic) is very unpredictable with speed varying not only across time but also on physical location.

Apple is shrinking into irrelevance. iOS 7 is their Vista.

So by which measure are you measuring that by?

1. The rate at which users upgrade their current phones to iOS 7?

http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/19/ios-7-adoption-already-as-high-as-35-in-one-day-apple-and-developers-reap-the-rewards/

2. Year over Year growth of iOS device sales (we will know in about two weeks)

3. Third party developer support?
http://furbo.org/2013/08/02/app-updates-for-ios-7/

Apple has an ad hoc distribution system intended for distributing apps in developments to beta testers.

What percent of the 20+ million devices running iPhone OS do you think are jail broken? It's just not a reliable answer for most people.

Some people see things how they are.

• John Gruber's fictional diary of an app store reviewer was both hilarious and on the mark.
• Wil Shipley has a very well thought out piece on the problems with the app store and realistic suggestions of ways you might be able to fix them.
• Craig Hockenberry has also recently analyzed where the app store is today.

• The root of the problem: software is not music. Songs sell without iTunes, songs don't harm the device, songs don't bug. But songs are also not essential to sell the device...
• Approvals: Emergencies..., Maintenance releases aren't viable...
• Upgrades: currently there is no upgrade revenue...
• Better rules: clear rules will make the process easier for everyone...
• Better experience for customers: Product evaluations..., Respond to reviews..., Finding apps..., Charge us more money..., Pricing...

I'm still waiting for a fix for the stupid Dock folder problem. Yes, I know there's a workaround (you can put a file or an alias or a folder or something inside the folder, name it something that will be first in an alphabetical sort, and paste a reasonable icon onto that). But I want Apple to recognize how completely retarded this idea was from the beginning, and actually FIX it, the way they fixed the menubar transparency issue first by reducing the transparency before release, then eventually adding an option to disable it altogether.

Seriously, who thought either of these would be a good idea? I know what they were thinking with the menubar, they were thinking "Windows Vista has lots of transparency, we don't want to look boring by comparison!" Come on Apple, I know you can make usability a priority without sacrificing aesthetics when you put your collective mind to it. Focusing entirely on aesthetics at the expense of usability really damages your image.

First off, you can force something to run in the background, but you shouldn't. The limitation on background processes has nothing to do with control over developers and everything to do with battery life. A simple XML query once every 5 minutes is enough to drain the battery in just 4 hours.

In a mobile device, everything you do drains the battery. Remember also that most of the time the user is not looking at the screen and often has the device muted. Consequently, is there really a need for an application to pop up dialogs or sound alarms that will go unnoticed? Similarly, does it really have to do gather data constantly and not, say, during a sync or when the app is actually run by the user? Apple weighed those slim probabilities against the much larger probability that poorly written apps would needlessly waste battery power and put a sensible limitation on developers in order to protect users.

One last point: users don't know which app is draining all of their battery power. Once apps become available, users may well install several all at once. If their battery life suddenly went to hell, it would be a difficult process of trial and error to figure out which app(s) was/were the culprit(s).

The hard part about developing apps for the iPhone is working with a completely new environment.

For example, here are some of the problems with building a SSH client for the iPhone:

http://furbo.org/2007/07/02/beyond-sweet/

-ch