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iPhone's Development Limitations Could Hurt It In the Long Run
ZDOne writes "Apple might have finally come around to allowing third party developers to create applications for the iPhone, but only up to a point. ZDNet UK claims Apple is leaving itself vulnerable to the competition and to a loss of lustre
by blocking background tasks on the device. The author notes, 'Perhaps it doesn't trust application designers or users very much. Perhaps it wants the best software for itself, where it can limit what it can do in order not to upset its telco friends. Whatever the reason, it reflects badly on Apple. The iPhone is not an iPod; it's a smartphone connecting to a universe of fast-changing data on behalf of innovation-hungry users. The sooner it stops pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC, the better it will be for everyone.'"
Apple thinks it owns hardware that it has already sold to someone else. This has already been established.
http://ipodminusitunes.blogspot.com/2007/09/weve-won.html
Time for a BadApple tag on /. ? ;)
--I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken.
When you realize with the new cracked firmware, you can already run any code you wish.
If you outlaw _________, only the criminals will have _________.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
There's no monopoly here, so we should let the market decide. If you don't like it, don't buy it. If they've really got things wrong, the market will kick Apple where it hurts. If consumers don't care about background apps, they'll carry on spending.
Me? The beautiful shiny toy is so compromised that I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Among the mobile phone makers, who hands out SDKs for creating applications on the phones? ... I wouldn't even know where to start if I wanted to develop an application for my Sony Ericsson W910, call me clueless but I don't see anything comparable to the iPhone SDK for any other phone.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Symbian 3rd edition, hava also limitations to developers, for certain type of capabilities the program must be signed by nokia. And there is a license 10.000$ for developers to sign and sell symbian applications. It is the same like games on consoles. The device is definitively, "not open" for everyone. https://www.symbiansigned.com/app/page/overview/faq Unfortunately, Apple is not makeing different things that others in the industry done.
Damia
I don't see anything as hyped (and as mostly living up to the hype) as the iPhone. If Time magazine is any indicator, it did phenomenally well last year. To top that, some cheap knock-offs would be needed, but I'm not even sure how far that would fare given that Apple has at least 300 patents on it. Could someone fill me in please? Disclaimer: I've never owned a product of Apple and don't intend to buy any of their products until they become more transparent.
Even if they didn't, the device itself could pack more than enough Cocoa Touch enabled power-apps that will not depend on this function to stay ahead of the competition for a long time. I'm personalty waiting for iWork Touch, which it would greatly surprise me if didn't show up by the end of the year.
A bit unrealted: how brilliant of Apple to sneak in a PDA through it's iPod market. For most consumers, it's easier to buy an iPod with PDA features, than a PDA which can play a bit of music. This will be Apple's next step in the digital lifestyle philosophy. You can no longer only carry around your music and photos, but also your docs and planner.
That would work nicely, if the iPhone knock offs came anywhere near the quality of the iPhone itself. What I'm seeing so far is cheap crap. Once the 3g model comes out, I'm buying and unlocking.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
Look over there! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's a reality distortion field!
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Tech pundits are a curious bunch. They get it wrong 90% of the time. The other 10% is just coincidence because if you throw enough shit against the wall eventually something will stick.
The phone network necessarily has standards of reliability and security far higher than the Intarweb.
Banning uncertified code? Banning background processes?
That sounds pretty damned prudent to me.
The last damned thing I want to see on the phone network is an iPhone worm getting it's hooks into the core of every iPhone in the default settings, PHONE SPAMMING half the planet, and generally turning the phone network into the same power-hungry firewalled, bloaty security nightmare that the Internet is.
I may hate the way Apple does OS X, but when it comes to the iPhone, if they can keep worms off the phone network and prevent background crapware that will drop my battery life down to 12 hours, I say good on them.
We love Apple hardware, but hate Apple business practices. There are many reasons for fanboydom, but limiting the abilities of a phone you've paid out the ass for is not one of them. It really doesn't help that their "security" measures for the iPhone were utter crap that was broken ~1 week after it hit stores, and yet Apple still acts like it is a completely closed business model.
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
How do they figure? I know when I'm running Apollo (AIM client) on my iPod Touch and switch over to Safari to browse, I'll get pop-ups from Apollo when people IM me. Not being a programmer, I gotta ask, doesn't that make Apollo (and it's appropriate daemon) a background task while I'm in Safari? Same thing with having music playing, with Apollo running, while using Safari. Seems to multitask alright to me. Not as friendly as true OS X but not bad for a device that weighs as little as my shoes at 4.2 ounces.
bad comparison. because the IBM PC did soooo badly - look what I am typing this on.
then again.. the clones did well, they reverse engineered the BIOS, the all ran DOS and IBM did not get that much of the profit - so perhaps there is a long term message for Apple here about short term versus long term gains. they have everything in place here to be the proud owners of a new standard in interface, layout, design and overall system - if only they would relax their grip to allow a few systems^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h grains of sand out.
That's the worst analogy in history. The IBM PC was exceptionally OPEN. You got schematics of the entire computer, all parts were publicly available, and even source of the BIOS was printed in the manual shipped with the computer. Furthermore, everybody could create and run programs on the computer (very new in IBM-land at the time). That's not very closed in my book.
Apple is merely doing what they do with all of their products, limit the flexibility to improve stability and the quality of the experience.
I think there is a strong tendency for Slashdot users to see hardware through the eye of a Linux user or an application developer. But that's not the consumer market. If Slashdot ideals applied to markets as a whole, then Windows wouldn't be 98% market share and Internet Explorer wouldn't be 94%.
Most people don't want to play "with stuff", they just want it to work reliably with a standard set of features. As such, Apple has been very successful in, for instance, limiting their hardware choices and software choices.
Apple thinks it owns your iphone, it doesn't consider for a second that the $2000 you are paying entitles you to anything other than to use the phone in the exact ways apple tells you to use the phone. If this was microsoft? Sued to oblivion. If this was the RIAA? PR disaster, phone would collapse. If this were any other phone maker? The phone would disappear in weeks.
So why do people donate $2000 to apple (as we know, you don't own the phone). I personally beleive it's the exclusivity, its a shiny design and you'll always be telling everyone "My phone is better than yours" (whether its true or not, is irrelevant if you beleive it). I know several people who own iPhones, I wouldn't speak to them if I could avoid it- not that you could if you wanted to if you could, they're constantly on their iphones (which is astonishing as they certainly aren't talking to anyone that much)
So will any of this bother iphone users? Hell no! Function doesn't play any kind of role in the decision making process in buying this phone.
The iPod Touch only has 128MB of RAM, and no disk cache. In case anyone missed that the first time: 128. No disk cache. That needs to run both an advanced OS *and* the foreground app while allowing music to play.
Exactly how many third-party applications do the geniuses at ZDNet think they can run at once with less than 128 MB?
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
iPhone's lack of (3rd party) background processing will hamstring whole classes of new apps. The best summation of iPhone SDK problems I've seen is here:
Apple's iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation
All these arguments got pulled around with the iPod, and we all know what a disaster that was.
The thing here is that there is consumer choice. You can get a different phone if you want.
And the phone I want is an iPhone.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
I'd say 128mb would still run, for the average user, about about 16 spyware apps, 3 trojans, 2 worms, 4 backdoors, 5 adware apps, at least one SMS spambot, oh, and don't forget the LOLcat screensaver.
The SDK hasn't even been released yet (we've seen two betas only), and yet people are criticizing it as if this is already the last version of the SDK that will ever be released and no new features or APIs will ever be added.
Christ, the hardware itself is still on its first version (!!) and critics are already acting like the development environment has been neglected since Reagan was in office.
I suppose it's marginally entertaining for tech writers to have a new variation on the old "Apple is Doomed" story that they can use to generate page views. "Recently released handheld battery-powered device doesn't yet replicate all advanced features of a desktop computer! Also, world hunger not eliminated. Apple is doomed!"
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Symbian 3rd edition, hava also limitations to developers, for certain type of capabilities the program must be signed by nokia. And there is a license 10.000$ for developers
That's pure fiction. I have half a dozen unsigned apps on my phone, several of them free and open source.
1. Some dumbass ZDnet pundit yaps on about subjects he is unqualified to talk about technically, unaware of any of the reasons for the engineering decisions Apple makes, and suggests that the he, as an ignorant asshat, can offer the iPod maker sailent advice on how to deploy the iPhone software platform.
2. ZDnet posts it to Slashdot
3. Slashdot links to it.
4. Profit? *
* no CNet/ZDnet is going out of business. Slashdot is just wasting our time.
CanSecWest and Swiss Federal Institute of Tech Deliver Attacks on the Reality of Mac Security
1. It's not an "evil apple" story, it's just a financial musing that in the long run it might limit its market share.
But it's this kind of fanboyish reactions ("OMG, they said that something Apple does is less then perfect, so they must be evil, sworn enemies of Apple and all that's good and holy") that brings me to the next point. In truth, such stories are written equally about any other company and corporation, by people who don't really give a fuck about whether that company even lives or dies. That's the job of financial analysts and magazine pundits. They scratch their heads and go, "Hmm, ya know, maybe Sun won't take over the world this year" or "I think Intel is going to lose a couple of percent of market share to AMD's Phenom". Talking out of the arse, maybe, but it doesn't make them enemies of Sun, Intel or Apple. But that seems to be lost on a whole slew of True Believers, who can't seem to see any shades between "you're 100% in Apple's camp and singing praise to it" and "you're 100% the sworn enemy of Apple and have an axe to grind." And if god forbid you even mention an apple vulnerability once a year, then that's positive proof that you're biased against Apple and pro-MS.
But, at any rate, it helps fuel the next point:
2. It's, if you will, a case of action and reaction. Apple hypes every fart as if it's the second cumming of Christ, especially if it's Steve Jobs. You know, it will revolutionize this, redefine that, it's the thing that noone else ever thought or dared, etc.
And it also has an annoying army of fanboys to carry the Word, and try to convert everyone to The One True Faith. Not even too skillfully, I'd add. If you look at where, Christian missionaries succeeded, they never went around telling people "OMG, you're all stupid sheep and brainwashed by the competition". It doesn't get people in a mood to listen, you know.
So it just _begs_ to have its stuff put under a microscope and dissected, and the results don't always come as "yep, it's 100% pure perfection." In fact, they usually reveal a fair share of shortcomings that just beg to be pointed out in return.
3. And if you keep pushing, or push too hard, hype builds resentment or even a backlash. Daikatana, for example, was merely a mediocre game, that would have otherwise been quietly forgotten, but the unskilled hype created a rather spectacular backlash. Apple so far managed to avoid creating a backlash, and kudos to Steve for managing to spew this much hype without that. He's good. But it did get a bunch of people annoyed.
You know, it's like if I came to you daily to tell you about how great I am at CounterStrike. (I actually had the mis-fortune of working with someone like that.) And maybe sent a few more people to. What maybe started as "I couldn't care less, let's nod politely and hope he goes away" eventually gets to the point of "Oh, ffs, not again. Go fuck yourself with a cactus already."
Briefly, if you will, the few people who do hate Apple, don't hate it for its perfection, they hate for the unrelenting annoyance that Apple's hype and Apple's fanboys can be.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Everyone is quick to point out the 'limitations' imposed by Apple on developers, but I haven't heard anyone pointing out what a rich API is available through the SDK. Why not? Probably because that sort of news doesn't generate enough traffic.
Personally, I have downloaded the SDK. I have an iPhone that I use for business (and fun!) purposes, and I can think of a couple of applications that I would like to see developed, and as an Objective-C/Cocoa developer, I am in good stead to do so. I was amazed at both the quality and quantity of the features available on the iPhone through the SDK, and how simple and straightforward the development process was. As a veteran WinCE developer (and I did wince, lots) I know how not to go about development for resource limited devices, and I can only say that the whole experience so far has been very rewarding.
Thinking about the 'limitations', I can only say that the iPhone is not a desktop computer. It is not tethered to the wall by a power cord, and as a user, I really do put battery life over and above some background task that may or may not add to the quality of my use. I think Apple is right to be concerned about the type and quality of applications installed on these devices, because they care about the user experience.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
Banning uncertified code? Banning background processes? That sounds pretty damned prudent to me.
Smart phones have had background processes and uncertified code for many years, and there have been almost no problems with it in practice. Half of Nokia's phone lineup are fully programmable, multi-tasking machines, capable of running ssh, BitTorrent, Python, VNC client and server, Apache web server, and anything else you can think of. There's even software for turning Symbian phones into WiFi access points for sharing the 3G connection.
Anybody who claims that one needs to ban uncertified code and background processes to avert disaster simply doesn't know the mobile phone business... or is lying through their teeth.
Does anyone run SSH on their iPhone? I do. It kills the battery life. Takes it down to 1/4 what it usually is. People at work complaining about battery life of their phone? They remove some nifty-new application that they just added, all of a sudden the battery life goes back to normal. Amazing. Heck, it's so common that the first words out of my mouth are, "Turn off the SSH server."
The iPhone goes into deep sleep at the drop of a hat to extend battery life. Polling connections, doing anything in the background will keep the CPU from throttling down.
From the customer's and Apple's point of views, this is a bad thing. Mostly because Apple will take the heat for the misbehaving application. For more evidence of this, check out the other slashdot story about the number of crashes caused by NVIDIA. Did NVIDIA catch the heat? No, Microsoft did.
It's a reasonable limitation until they come up with an application that the user can ask,
"Hey, my battery life sucks, where is it all going?"
and the application will say,
"The SSH server".
Symbian 3rd edition (v 9.x) is not capable of running unsigned native application. Period. ,WriteUserData). User can allow application which use only those capabilities to run on his device.
The rest - Network control, Multimedia driver, Communication driver, disk admi, PowerMgmt, Location, ProtServ, ReadDeviceData, Surroundings driver, SwEvent, TrustedUI, WriteDeviceData - should be signed online through Symbian website or offline by other certified body.
Some application, restricted in functionality could be signed by developer without developer certificate(LocalServices, UserEnvironment, NetworkServices,ReadUserData
The situation is quite heated right now, after Symbian introduced some more restrictions recently (removed free developer certificates, which allow sign application for single phone - IMEI numebr). Symbian signed forum turning to flamefeast between moderator interventions. http://developer.symbian.com/forum/forum.jspa?forumID=2&start=0
Of cause all this only from legal point of view. Many devices (all FP1 and Nokia N95-1, not 8GB) have their platform security hacked already.
On the contrary you are misinformed. You cannot run unsigned apps on Symbian. The developer will have to sign it for it to install. Freeware developers don't have to pay but others do. Many users have to go through hoops to download and use the Nokia applications to sign the apps and create self signed certificates to install apps that are not signed by the developer. You clearly don't know. Symbian is locked down from N73 onwards. You may be using a very old Nokia phone which doesn't have this system in place. Al modern Symbian S3 phones do.
Apple fans have become the most pathetic example of the 'sad consumer' syndrome. Brand loyalty can be taken to any extreme, and the less social capital you have then the more likely you are to become a devotee. When all this overpriced plastic crap becomes an expression of someones lifestyle, then its pretty clear to most of the people around them that these characters are compensating for something.
It might go unsaid a lot of the time, but apple fans are probably the saddest bunch of twats you are likely to meet. The fact that they're likely to be less than technically savvy doesn't help any, and they damm well know it.
In a way the iphone shouldn't even be discussed on a site like this - on a technical level it's a complete joke. Of course if you're deluded enough then a "portable computer" that doesn't have the pace to run the Flash plugin is acceptable
The problem is, what do you do when you get boned by Jobs, for example when you buy a machine that is supposed to change the world and realize that the internet speed is little short of pathetic? Simple - you turn that anger against people that don't like the way that Apple behaves.
There, there, just let the anodyne interface sooth you and your hurting wallet! And would sir like some eye candy with your drm laden cripple ware?
Even old mac os classic let any one write apps, why is jobs so scare, he should know of all people, let it be like DOS and it shall be king.
What a frickin lsd hippie old wanker!!! blinded by his ego!, take some more LSD steve, and learn the old ways before your an old man in a wheel chair.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
IMHO, the truth of this lies somewhere between the two camps. Background processes have a lot of problems on phones. They stop the phone being a simple "pick up and use" device, because the user has to worry about which apps they leave running. Somebody using a phone doesn't want to have to think about memory usage, they're probably barely aware of what RAM even is. They affect reliability, performance and battery life.
Almost all apps on PalmOS run in the same way - they save state and exit when you switch to another app. By optimising application startup speed, they give the illusion of multi-tasking. Anyone who's used a Symbian UIQ phone knows how slow application startup is on a lot of smartphones. IIRC, there are some phones that allow background tasks until you start the web browser, at which point all other non-system tasks are killed to save memory.
That said, multi-tasking has some very important uses - background polling for messages etc. The solution is probably a system framework with which applications can register small helper programs to perform specific tasks. The framework can then ensure they don't use too much CPU or RAM and optimise their network access to reduce the amount of time the radio is on.
The analogy "pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC" is a bad one. iPhone dev isn't that open!
Gruber brings up a few good points on the background apps issue http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/one_app_at_a_time
That is some serious hyperbole comparing it to an IBM PC from 1981. I fail to see the usefulness in it. In fact, it probably distracts people from the real point here, which is that Apple's practices aren't great for business.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
because it is tied to AT&T (big blunder), Apple should have made it like any other independent cellphone allowing the customer to choose any service they want (and no, i don't want to perform any unauthorized and warranty voiding hacks to an expensive cellphone)...
the OpenMoko is open for any service...
--not-a-troll=just-observation
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Okay, so maybe the downside is that I always have to wear a jacket with numerous pockets but the fact is that my standalone MP3 player has a longer battery life and is less fiddly to use than any all-in-one phone, my digital camera takes more and better pictures than any all-in-one phone, and my phone only makes clear calls and stores a few numbers but has to be charged a whole lot less than any all-in-one phone I've ever seen.
Plus if lose any one of those separate devices, I can get over it. Has anyone stopped to consider that dependency on a single all-in-one device means it's pretty much always in use? Therefore it will wear out quicker and be less likely to be backed up?
Perhaps "innovation-hungry users" should be changed for "those saps who are both insecure and gullible enough to pay good money for something that an advert tells them will make them cool and acceptable to their fellow mankind".
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
The sooner it stops pretending to be a 1981 IBM PC, the better it will be for everyone.
I'm not certain that IBM believes that the open PC market was better for everyone.
Background tasks, especially networking ones (which frankly, are the most useful type), would flatten the battery really quickly. Even more so with several of them waking up at different times and connecting the network.
On the other hand, making the rule hard and fast is a bit tough. And Apple could provide some means of minimizing drain (waking every task up every few hours for example), but don't damn Apple totally on this one.
That's news to me! It's probably news to just about every Apple fan out there too.
Okay, excluding the established Mac Addicts out there, then yes, Apple has competition. But it would seem to me that the majority of Apple-logo device users out there do so because it's all about the Apple logo being on things and not so much the thing itself. Apple defines cool. And because Apple defines cool, no one else can touch them. Within Apple's bubble, there is no competition; only Apple controlled users and developers.
None of this should be a mystery. It has been going on with Apple since day one. Apple has had a long history of keeping itself down. Its business decisions early on to "allow clone makers" and then to go back and sue the maker (Franklin I believe) to death and claimed their design only to relabel it "Apple IIe." (I believe the basis for Apple's argument was 'we allowed them to make clones, we did not allow them to make something better' or something along those lines. If you ever wondered why there were no Apple compatibles, now you know.) Apple, from very early on, has stifled competition, stifled themselves and have generally kept themselves closed off from the rest of the world in general. One could easily draw some parallels between Apple and one of those brain-washing cults in terms of operations and practices. My point is that Apple has always been this way and always will be.
I'm not "down" on Apple. I just accept them for what they are. In the business computing and mass consumer markets, we thrive on the notion that there should be competition and commoditization of products and services. A computer is a computer is a computer... a phone is a phone is a phone. Products and services are expected to differentiate themselves here and there, but generally speaking, in the general market, there is constant competition and developmental evolution. But not with Apple. If Apple has anything to say about it (and they often have plenty to say) they will not allow competition and barely allow cooperation since most of their agreements tend to come with a LOT of strings and limitations. So while Apple exists in the same mass consumer market that all other entities operate in, they keep themselves relatively contained. I have to wonder if part of that containment is intentional or if it is simply because it simply offends the rest of the general market of users and developers. (To be very clear, Apple offends the market of users and developers with their insistence on what users and developers cannot and should not do. In short, Apple limits itself by limiting what its users and developers can do.)
Maybe I'll get modded as troll by the Apple fandom out there, but the rest of the non-Apple-users out there don't use Apple for reasons that are just as strong and valid as the reason Apple fans are strong Apple supporters. They live on the side of the bubble they feel most comfortable. Some like it inside Apple's bubble-club, and some people don't...most of the people.
I'll say this for Apple: No company defines cool and stylish the way Apple does. Just about everyone likes the way Apple's stuff looks and feels. So ask yourself why is it that Apple doesn't own the market after several decades of user admiration? It's not because people don't want Apple -- they do. It seems to me that it's because Apple doesn't want people [read: consumers, business partners, developers, etc]... at least not people it can't control. (This is, by the way, the same practice that brain-washing cults use in selecting recruits -- through personality tests to determine who is more vulnerable.)
No. Not that issue.
Apple seriously needs to start thinking like Microsoft did in 1990s.
If it wants iPhone to be the next Windows for Mobile, it has to let go of its secrecy and holier-than-thou attitude and open up iPhone SDK and iPhone apps itself.
The market for Windows apps was grown by Microsoft this way.
MSDN, Technet, Visual Basic (yeah, yeah, i understand that's not cool, but many have cut their first teeth on it), etc., not to mention the clear documenting of Windows API (am talking the MAPI era, Win 3.1 and Win 95 APIs).
Let the market worry about deciding which is better and which does not crash the OS.
Yes, initially, AT&T will crib and complain. Yes, some apps can take down the phone. But can it take down an entire east coast network??
Highly unlikely. AT&T may be huge, but its not stupid.
They have 50 years of managing telephone networks, not to mention overcoming the stupid telephone switch reset problem in 1980s which took down the entire network due to new switches.
AT&T is more robust than apple thinks.
Let your favorite child growup Apple. Let it go. Yes, its painful to watch your favorite offspring leave home.
Unless you want it to die, let it go.
But support it. Support it like hell. Telephone, MSDN, Technet, not to mention free iPhones to even the lowliest editor.
Make it popular by flooding the market with it.
You can't control everything.
Let go and watch it flower and make loads of money for you.
Or shield it and watch it die like Newton.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
In 1992 we have complete large word processors, databases, and 3d rendering packages under 4megs of ram.
Know how to write good code, or do you just depend on the api/OS for all stuff like a lazy govt employee, yes you must
do more your self, but you then can have control and limit the ram usage, and do things smartly, and not use 16k of ram for just
one 80char string input query.
Just port the xbox OS (runs on 64m ram) to 400mhz ARM and bingo that would be a decent platform.
Or even port BEOS to a 4meg ram platform.
Today most knowledge is in the API, so all those cool ones running in 4meg ram are dead, like Amiga.
Even tho an amiga on 64 meg ram on a phone would rock.
Yeah programmers get lazier, and its all up to the hardware engineers to make their code run fast for a $9 chip.
So if a 1gig ram chip is so cheap, common apple, give all iphones 1gig ram to work with. Dont be a cheap ass.
A chineese dinner for 3 with beer would cost more than an iphone.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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).
This sounds like good old story. "Boo Apple does not let 3rd parties develop their own Application for this device, this will kill it!" W00t. And within a year Apple released an SDK.
Btw: they have just updated the SDK.
By the time some kind of device based on google API is released on the market, Apple would probably have had the time to had this background app feature, and once again it'll old story.
I think releasing the product to market before and addin extra features after, for the people who need it, is a good strategy. And the apple store for distributing apps and take 30% is a GREAT $$$$IDEA$$$$$ too!
I have an iPod touch. I bought one within a week of its being available. I got the 16G one. It was $400.
Apple locked me out of linux with it -- it won't sync on my computer. I can't add 3rd party apps. And now when I sync it, I keep seeing ads for a $20 upgrade they want to sell me. Whenever I see people who have a touch, I ask them -- and we all feel the same way. We're all kind of offended by that nickel and dime $20 pitch.
It's a beautiful device. As an object, it's pretty much the best gadget I've ever owned. But apple is really making it suck for me, to the point where I don't think I'd buy another iPod.
And it's dumb. They're not going to sell me that $20 upgrade, and not only that, but by pushing it, they're going to lose the next $400 iPod sale. And I can't use the thing if it won't sync on linux. I can't sync my podcasts. I carry my old iPod with me, and leave the touch at home. Seriously.
And again, this is pretty much the coolest object I've ever owned. They've started out with that, and made it crummy and negative.
For nothing.
The iPhone SDK will be build, sign, sell
Yes, which translates into "get nickeled and dimed to death" from a user's point of view. This alone is reason enough not to buy an iPhone.
Java ME is build, test on every phone, sign on every phone, sell nowhere.
I like the "sell nowhere" part of that. Why should I pay yet again for ssh and keyring and the half dozen other phone utilities that I use just because Apple decides to come up with yet another proprietary platform?
http://daringfireball.net/2008/03/one_app_at_a_time
It's a really good write up. I love how people instantly try to vilify apple for it's decision, not to allow third party background apps when a majority of Apples own apps for the iPhone do not use background processing. Perhaps simply it's a resources issue. Battery is the resource that everyone thinks of first, but like any small computer system the iPhone has limited CPU and RAM, push those and you are going to kill the battery even faster.
Moderating to further my personal world domination agenda... and to get chicks.
Since the iTouch does not need to run the core functionality of being a phone, perhaps, Apple would let us run background jobs on that platform.
easy way for Apple: blame the user. Enforce strict process accounting, and then whenever the battery runs low quicker than $THRESHOLD hours, show a report that assigns blame where it should (screen lit time, air time, and cpu consumption broken by application)
it's not like cpu billing is a new thing, is it?
presto
That market has proven these devices are popular and consumers really like them. The Slashdot iPhone haters have so far been proven wrong at every turn. I doubt they're right on this. They remind me of the pro Iraq war crowd that was wrong about everything they predicted about how the war would go down (greeted as liberators, Iraqi oil will pay for it, 120,000 troops will be enough) who are now predicting chaos if we leave. Nice try, but it's pretty obvious based on previous predictions that you people don't know what the hell your talking about.
"I'm tired of hearing "let the market decide" in general. "
You're "the market". How many times have I read here about you all throwing your weight around (broadband, entertainment, operating systems, etc). If you all chose to excempt yourself from being a force for change then you're to blame, not the market.
"Nowadays it's almost always used in defense of companies that prey on consumer ignorance,"
The nice thing about ignorance is that it's not a permanent condition. Anyway it's not ignorance for a majority to not be interested in hacking their "experience". A notion born tinkers may have difficulty with.
"At the very least, if the market is to select a solution, someone has to start campaigning for one instead of just sitting on our asses. It's really a justification for inaction, nothing more."
Glad we could agree.
"I'm tired of replying to people defending lock in for various reasons, so I'll just suggest that those posters reread the book about one of the greatest people of our time:"
Important? Yes! Greatest? Let's not get carried away. The GPL is as much the work of others (so is OSS) as him.
Two things: first, the human interface guidelines (HIG) stipulation that a process not background itself is perfectly reasonable. The phone form-factor has limited battery, memory, and processor resources. It wouldn't take much to make resource contention an issue or to torpedo battery-life and phone performance. This isn't a laptop with a big battery, multi-gigabytes of RAM, and a 3GHz dual-core CPU.
It should also be noted that while the HIG asks you not to make your app run in the background, neither the phone nor the SDK enforce it. You can, in fact, do it.
If you want to sell your app through Apple's service, you probably need to communicate to them that there's a good reason for it (for example, implementing hands-free voice-dialing might require it). Apple reserves the right to not carry applications that don't meet the HIG, but there's no reason to think that they won't make exceptions when a reasonable request is made to do so. Certainly, a good hands-free voice-dialing app would be a good candidate for such a thing.
Off topic, but, heh, yeah, I know that feeling all too well. I'm not Ethan, but same idea.
Actually this guy was worse, if that's even possible. At least Ethan's coworker seems to have more than a CS story. Mine had exactly one.
Every day he'd play on the same map. No idea why, maybe he just got his best scores there or something. Every day he'd sneak behind the same warehouse, climb on the same ladder, drop through the same vent, crawl through the same pipe, drop in the same room, and shoot the guy camping in the corner. (CS fans probably recognize the map by now.) And then relate that in detail the next day. Every bloody day.
What started as "hmm, really? pretty clever that", ended up a case where my brain wanted to crawl out an ear and run for the hills. I can't even put into words how boring it can be to hear the exact same story, in the exact same sequence, the two hundredth time, over several months. But what really makes me cringe is the thought that he was actually enacting that repetition several dozen times a day, each day.
Actually, that's a lie: there was a second story, that of how he defended on that map.
I actually watched him do that once after hours. (Ok, so sometimes I'm too stupid to say "no.") So he quickly buys a gun and run in front of a vent some 6 ft above the ground, and starts jumping up and down in front of it. After about a minute, some enemy drops from the vent on the roof into that duct, my co-worker shoots him. Reloads and keeps hopping there in place, like a kangaroo. Next round, the same thing. Next round, the same thing. Ad infinitum, almost literally.
Two whole hours, he jumped up and down in front of a square grate. That's it.
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *BANG!*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
[...]
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *BANG!*
*hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop* *hop*
I actually stood there and watched it for two hours, mostly out of sheer morbid curiosity. It was so monotonous and mind-numbing, that I was starting to fear I'm losing neurons just watching it. But, you know, I couldn't believe that someone would actually keep doing it. I expected him to go "ah, fuck it, let's do something else" any moment now. No. Round after round he bought his gun and ammo, ran to that vent, and hopped like a deranged kangaroo in place in front of it.
The only thing I can compare it, is that Charly Chaplin movie where he's at an assembly line and twists two screws every couple of seconds.
I won't even try to speculate about what kind of mind would find that entertaining to do, for several hours a day, every day, for months.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
See lowendmac and (for instance) wikipedia
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
and I think it's what Apple was suggesting -- Keeping your state in such a way that you can shut the app down completely and bring it back up without losing where you were when you shut it down.
(The XO basically does this in the standard Sugar UI.) I thought I wouldn't like it, but it seems to work okay, especially for children.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I love my iPhone, and look forward to seeing lots of cool apps on it. But it's ridiculous to put one's head in the sand and pretend there aren't some significant trade-offs in Apple's current development philosophy. My hope is that Apple can be encouraged to open up the platform by seeing significant public demand for things like 3rd party background processing.
Let's see if Android has as much market share as the iPhone one year after it's release. Then we'll talk. I say, let's talk now- where's the harm in that?This isn't a laptop with a big battery, multi-gigabytes of RAM, and a 3GHz dual-core CPU.
No, it's a handheld with a bigger battery than most, hundreds of times the CPU and thousands of times the RAM of the computers that UNIX was first implemented on. If a PDP-11 with 128 kilobytes of RAM and a CPU that clocked in at 1/8th of a VAX MIPS can handle running background processes, then the iPhone bloody well can pull it off.
Every Laptop Apple's shipped in the past decade has been able to prevent power wastage by background processes when it's in "sleep" mode. Why shouldn't the iPhone be able to manage that? Even if it's not sleeping or hibernating in quite the same way, this isn't rocket science (and besides, they have rocket scientists working for them). Run applications in separate process groups and call kill(-ppid, SIGTSTP) for each running app when the GUI shuts off and it goes into sleep mode, then switch to kill(-ppid, SIGSTOP) when the battery gets low.
I think someone elsewhere in this discussion has been saying that it isn't actually prevented, just discouraged.
I haven't forked out the JPY 80,000, not to mention the USD 99.00, so I couldn't say.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
No, it's a reminder that you have a responsibility as a consumer. In fact, the "inaction" part of that is specifically wrong, as waiting for the market to correct the issue is unequivocally an action.
Your post, on the other hand, is just an excuse to blather on about a mentally ill jackass with irrational ideas regarding how the world operates. Ignorance and bluster (typified by bolded print like yours) can't be confused with actual insight. Saying shit loud and frequently doesn't make it lees retarded, it makes it shit that get's said loud and frequently.
As to "preying on consumer ignorance", fuck off. If I'm selling a legal product, the state of the consumer and how informed they are isn't something I care about. Since these people voluntarily walk into the store and voluntarily purchase a product, I have to operate from the assumption that THEY THEMSELVES are satisfied with their level of education. But YOU know better right?
Why is it always people like you who denounce other people as ignorant because they disagree with your conclusions? That kind of idiotic elitism is why the people who endorse what you endorse are so roundly despised.
"I'm tired of replying to people defending lock in for various reasons"
No one is mandating you do so, and if what you replied with here is any indication, being another mouth piece for an unrealistic and discredited position foisted on us by a mentally ill tosser is something we could probably do without.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The book claims TOPS-20 was a commercial variant of the ITS? That's like claiming that Windows 2000 is a commercial variant of Linux. They're entirely different OSes from entirely different people with entirely different goals and motivations. Also, the ITS wasn't replaced with TOPS-20, they existed at the same time on different machines. MIT-OZ and the ITSes were in use concurrently. In fact, it may have been the other way around - I seem to remember the KS10 that became the new AI was born as a TOPS-20 and repurposed for ITS, but I may be misremembering. I'd have to go dig through my archives to see and I'm at work.
As far as the laser being the first closed-source software in the Lab, that's likely bullshit as well. The lab didn't get firmware for most parts of the KLs, they had to argue with DEC Legal to get it and I don't think they got everything. (Firmware meaning code on the peripheral ROMs, not the processor microcode. They had bought microcode kits with the machines, because they had special ITS microcode.) I want to say they didn't get firmware for most of the display terminals too, but I can't remember specific examples.
If Apple keeps iPhone a walled garden, and Google opens up Android, Android may well eat Apple's lunch. So far, closed systems lose out to open systems pretty much every time.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Problem: Background applications reduce battery life
Solution: Add a background application that monitors background applications and battery life
New Problem: The application that monitors background applications and battery life reduces battery life
New Solution: Add a background applicaiton that monitors the monitor that monitors battery life...
etc. etc.
No. Not a 1981 IBM PC. A 1984 IBM PC Jr. You know...the one people referred to back then as "the cripple". People point to the rotten keyboard it originally shipped with, but the machine was deliberately crippled in terms of memory and expandability so as not to reduce sales of the PC. One consequence being that a bunch of software that ran on the PC wouldn't on the Jr. Yes, it had more game ports on it, but little to no expandability. IBM eventually offered a free replacement keyboard, but the keyboard wasn't the problem, so much as a symptom of the problem. It was an entry level home computer in other words, that locked you in to entry level. Nobody wanted that.
It's one thing to sell something with reduced initial functionality, and another to sell something with permanently limited functionality. A market that can't afford the premium product will by the parsed down version in the hopes of eventually being able to add improvements to it. But if people know they'll be locked into the parsed down version they won't buy. Nobody wants to live in a cage, let alone buy the cage and then lock themselves in it.
Well...I guess cult members do...
I own an iPhone and in addition to my other household computers, two Macs. The phone is nice, but it needs work. The saving grace is there's a potential there for an entire world of software developers to let their imaginations play with it. The iPhone hasn't reinvented the telephone...yet. But it could. If Steve will let it. I have just over a year left on my contract with AT&T and I've enjoyed my iPhone very much, but if after that time I don't see this thing living up to the potential here I Will bolt for the next product out there that looks like it will. You can't lock down imagination anymore then you can stop time.
The only way that post is interesting is that it has an interesting amount of anecdote and is not an actual benchmark that can be trusted. Having customers who have Windows Mobile 6 smartphones, Few of them will last 5 days while doing anything other than waiting for an occasional ring. I suppose if you never *talk* on your phone, and it spends most of it's time *asleep*, you might get 163 hours out of a charge (he magically fails to mention that it might be plugged in). But if you are actually using any programs on it, that battery is toast with all that junk open (Windows Media Player? Is it actually playing music? Why leave it open?). This is like the file copy troll all over again.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Everyone is wrong but me. The reason iPhone disallows background apps is simply there is not enough RAM. iPhone has 128 MB ram, much of which is the OS and a couple background apps. When they put out an iPhone with 256 or 512 RAM there will be background apps.
It's so important to have background apps that iPhone 2.0 will probably have the ability to run them as a killer feature, along with 3g and new screens, in order to get all the iPhone 1.0 people to upgrade. There is no way in hell that we don't get background apps eventually, just like there was no chance in hell web apps was the whole story.
For someone talking about history, you don't know too much of it. It took reverse engineering to make the first "IBM compatible" computers. It was only later that IBM became more open.
What a poor rebuttal. The GP is talking about software development, which was completely open. You change the topic to producing hardware clones, the GP's argument stands.
... of draining the battery in record time. For example, turn on Bluetooth with the iPhone, and you can't even get by with moderate use on a 24 hr charge cycle.
No background apps - even the ability to consume cycles periodically - means no instant messenger, no salesforce client notifications, no ebay price watcher, etc, etc, etc.
It won't hurt the phone's ability as a game platform much, but social and communication apps take a huge hit.
Apple needs to give a phone user the ability to enable background use of an application as an option for the phone user. Even if it was more of a cron style thing; if the phone had to run a binary that was the "background" portion of the app and the main part could not remain active, that should be sufficient for a periodic interaction, which is the critical part that's missing. We don't want our phones calculating pi or folding space in the background, but I do want to keep my IM client for my phone logged in with periodic keepalives, and a beep when I get a new IM.
"The sooner it stops pretending to be a 1984 Macintosh, the better it will be for everyone."
There, fixed that for you.
Steve Jobs is just continueing his philosophy of closed technology ecosystems. You should never need anything other than what he spec'd for the system and the software that Apple produces. Drink his kool-aid or f u is the way he thinks.
I started programming on an Apple II. Now I only touch an Apple product when I need to help my parents.
Mac system requirements
* Mac computer with USB 2.0 port
* Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later
* iTunes 7.6 or later5
Windows system requirements
* PC with USB 2.0 port
* Windows Vista or Windows XP Home or Professional with Service Pack 2 or later
* iTunes 7.6 or later
Would you buy Microsoft Office then complain that it doesn't (natively) install on Linux? No, because the system requirements are listed right on the box--Just like with an iPod!
Some of us would rather use a device than manage it.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I agree, particularly about the radios. Scheduling a very limited communication task to happen when the radios are turned on for other reasons (e.g., checking email) is a capability I would expect to be added soon. I think people forget that Apple's interest here is to do everything they can legally do to make the iPhone as useful as possible, so they can sell more. They've already made it clear that they're allowing VOIP and MMS and many other things that naysayers were sure they would never allow. Current limitations are an expedient first cut and will obviously get fine tuned.
I'm at a loss for why somneone would spend 2x the money on an iTouch or worse - an iPhone when a cheap phone paired with a Nokia N800 or N810 via blue tooth is a general purpose computer with a larger and higher resolution screen that has an open API availoable TODAY.
Using my N800 (less than $300 with extra memory), I'm downloading a podcast now, listening to another podcast and typing in a web window now from San Juaquin, Costa Rica now. Traveling light with a multitasking OS is wonderful.
we get back to the real issue - the iphone has VERY LITTLE RAM and those 8gb aren't exactly spacious either.
/. massiv get this and MOVE ALONG
so, we let johnny 'mac-hater' write a simple program for iphone and kapow - it runs like a dog - who do you blame - Apple for producing slow hardware!
Apple are *protecting* themselves.
Can the
My god, he's just like you!
I've been waiting for a phone article so I could ask this but...
I currently have a blackberry pearl that is giving up the ghost. I am looking into other phones and smart phones seem quite a bit in their infancy right now. What I want in a phone is a decent OS, wifi, full qwerty keyboard, etc. Basically looking for a Nerdy phone. Some people here really seem to like their nokia's. Are the E-62 or E-70 decent phones? Also I hate the blackberry SMS app, it is not threaded and a real chore to do a lot of texting on. Is the Nokia SMS app threaded and just hit enter to send just like a AIM/MSN window on a pc? (Also like a treo)
I have been learning towards a Treo 680 since the interface is snappy and there are quite a few apps. But they are bulky, the OS is pretty outdated, etc. Is there no such thing as a nice Linux based phone I could download Firefox for, which has a snappy UI? Android inst there yet and maybe I should try to wait, but not sure how much longer this phone will last.
Sorry for the rambling post, thanks for all help in advance.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Yes, I made the same experience running Monkey Island on ScummVM on my Nokia E65. Letting it sit in the background will sap the battery within a day. Battery life is on the low side anyway on this model (hence I deactivated 3G), especially when using WiFi excessively, but at least I have the option to buy additional batteries - I got three now, and no, I don't think it's overkill, I always have one spare along and another charging at home. Switching batteries is a breeze; can be done within a minute (including shutdown-reboot) and all the settings/time etc. are retained.
Most of the Slashdot community here is totally out of touch with the reality of embedded devices. Yes the iPhone has all of the OS trappings of a modern fully function desktop - and that is tantalizing for a potential programmer who wants to make a cool app that runs in the background.
But Apple has the difficult task of making a user experience with all the capability of a desktop, but is near crash proof, always instantly responsive to any action having the bandwidth to do smooth 3D transitions, etc - all with only 128 MB of RAM & no room for page in flash, while maintaing battery life - so that it "just works" for the end user, and requires zero user support.
Embedded devices require their primary purpose to be uninterrupted by other activities- customers won't be pleased if their iPhone gives them the spinning beach ball of death when they try to make a phone call. The arguments on /. are the difference between the desires of a few hundred geeks and the needs of million of users. Would it be nice to have background processes? Yes. But how do you manage it? How do you manage allowing background apps, while making sure the whole device, with all of the application permutations, won't suck RAM & CPU and kill battery? How do you keep the unwitting user from loading 10 background apps on there computer that take half the RAM and half the CPU. Now the customer is coming into the apple store for support on their "broken" phone, and Apple is stuck helping 75% of users a couple hours for a lousy $400 device.
Now slashdot users will probably say some geek-libertarian nonsense like: "but like man I compile my own OS, and I build my own computer from scratch, heck last week I made my own CPU from open source plans on a FPGA - Apple's like satan cause, ya know, its my right to run background applications on my phone".
Dude get over it. Its a phone. A really nice phone. But the last thing I want is to fuck around with my phone trying to make a call. I won't want it to be like my desktop where I have to ctrl-alt-del to manage stray processes on a daily basis. You can build your own computers from scratch - the rest of us have real things to do with our time.
People keep beating this drum and it's ridiculous. Battery life and phone performance are major concerns. When I say phone performance, I mean making and receiving phone calls.
The developers that want background apps are primarily interested in developing network based applications. It's an awful idea to have network apps running in the background. The limitations of EDGE prevent phone calls and text messages from being received or sent while a network connection is active. In short: A constantly active IM client (just receiving things like your buddies' away messages) would severely limit your ability to receive phone calls. If you had 2 or more apps like this running, you would effectively disable the phone part of your phone.
If you're developing an app that's processing data in the background, then you're killing the battery. The smooth graphics and animation have people convinced the iPhone is a more powerful device than it actually is. It's actually a very limited device in terms of cpu, ram and power. Keep in mind that playing a tiny video stream kills that battery, and it's doing that with dedicated hardware.
Mostly it seems that a few developers are upset because they can't simply port their code to the iPhone and start collecting bags of money- that's because the iPhone requires a different mindset for programming. It has very little ram, but a lot of immediate storage space. This is a huge mental shift. If you store your app state in reasonable format in flash ram, and treat main memory as if it were a processor cache, there's no reason your app can't stop and start on a dime. Storage isn't slow, so there's no need to keep everything in ram. If a user isn't interacting with your application, then why should it be in ram? Save the state to flash and you can get everything you need back instantly when the user starts your app again.
Most phone SDKs are so bad no one wants to develop software for them anyway. Add in the fact that the platforms are so heterogeneous you have to develop a piece of software five or six times, each with a different crappy SDK and emulation environment (most of which have their own set of bugs) to get coverage means that there isn't going to be that big a pool of non-corporate developed software, anyway. Maybe (and it's a very small maybe) Android will fix this, but I doubt it.
That is all.
Some application, restricted in functionality could be signed by developer without developer certificate(LocalServices, UserEnvironment, NetworkServices,ReadUserData ,WriteUserData). User can allow application which use only those capabilities to run on his device.
In different words, Symbian apps can read and write data, use the network, and multitask without having to be approved by Symbian and without any restrictions.
iPhone apps can't, since Apple imposes restrictions on everything and Apple needs to sign everything.
My point exactly.
The rest - Network control, Multimedia driver, Communication driver, disk admi, PowerMgmt, Location, ProtServ, ReadDeviceData, Surroundings driver, SwEvent, TrustedUI, WriteDeviceData - should be signed online through Symbian website or offline by other certified body.
Even if true, who cares? The iPhone doesn't even provide APIs for some of these, and most of them don't matter to users or application writers.
The problems with the "drunken syphilitic warthog" was that everyone had keys to the kingdom, and not everyone was being a good guest. As long as Apple and AT&T control the operating content, they can also guarantee a certain level of reliability and also support the thing. As soon as you load "Fred's iPhone superpackage" on to your shiny clean iPhone, you run the risk that Fred is doing something that will cause problems that Apple tech support cannot fix.
Have you Meta Moderated t
... it means.
They're just fascists!
Would you say they're of the Mussolini variety, or the Hitler variety? Or do they hew to the Franco approach? Have you and your fellow partisans decided to take to the woods to avoid forced deportation? Here's a tip: When you're out there laying low in the woods, waiting for the right time to blow up a bridge or perhaps ambush a staff car, be sure to regularly clean and oil your Sten gun. It's no use having ammo if your weapon won't fire!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
except that I'm not corporate media, and while I might yap on, I do have technical knowledge from experience in IT and development, and I mainly defend engineering decisions rather than present ideas that are only plausible to a trade rag audience.
I know you were just being a hater. It's easy to complain, hard to make a salient point.
iPhone 2.0 SDK: Video Games to Rival Nintendo DS, Sony PSP
You're going to sell ssh on iTunes? ;-/
No, I get what you mean. But, really, I'm not sure it isn't in our best interests that we have to deliberately break the iPhone's OS to install things that don't get a once-over from Apple.
The concern I would have is rather whether Apple is able to sufficiently review the 3rd party apps they put on ITunes, and whether they will resist the temptation to let adware be sold.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I would never trade my crackberry for an Iphone as it just doesn't compete with a blackberry.
The berries better on almost all levels and it allows background programs doesn't crash has no viral apps plus they don't have to pay the apple tax nor are they forced to be sold through the blackberry store.
The Iphone looks nice has a bigger screen that is touch sensitive but thats all it has over the blackberry but thoughs pluses are minused by the other stuff plus it's wired in battery memory etc...
It doesn't deserve my cash at this point though I would be willing to consider an Iphone if they fixed the aformentioned limitaions and antiquiated (noone needs wired in batteries and memory these days as they only hinder expandability) methods of production.
Coward? Coward! Thems fighten words!!
Now, the iP{od Touch,hone} now have a reasonable calendar and address book but that's only part of the functionality. There's no way of beaming the information to another person's device.
Where by "device" of course, you mean another Palm because only like devices can "beam" to each other. I mean, can you "beam" data to a Windows Mobile device? Nope.
Here in 2008 when I want to "beam" someone some data - I send email! Because both of us can easily have email on portable devices. Because eMail is a less proprietary way of sending data than "beaming" (or MMS for that matter). And isn't it better the person I beam data to doesn't have to have an iPhone to receive it?
If you did want to send some data locally for some specific application, there is Bluetooth... I don't think the SDK can access that yet but it's only a matter of time before support is added - that's not a lack of hardware, but of API.
the calendar doesn't have multiple categories etc
Well, it kind of does. On the computer side you have multiple categories, there just doesn't seem to be a way to tell which category an item is in on the device. New calendar entries created on the iPhone can be set to go to a specific category, and when you sync it you can re-classify events as needed.
but it can't overcome some of the hardware deficiencies.
Being a long time Palm owner and fan before the iPhone, I can say categorically there is not one way in which the iPhone or Touch is deficient in hardware compared to any Pam device made, past or present.
I was rooting for Palm to deliver something like the iPhone, and I still think they could have had something like that out years before Apple IF they had not taken the Windows Mobile diversion. It was always Palm's game to lose as far as I was concerned, and they lost big time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It supports suspension in that there's an API that sends you a notification that your app needs to suspend operation - you then have 20 seconds to finish saving state and quite before you are terminated. There's also a database API built in (using SQLLite as the back end DB) that you can use to save state in.
If you think about it this is preferable to just dumping your whole app memory contents out, as that would take extra space and more time/battery to write and read in on swap. Better to write out one or two attributes declaring where you were in the app and return to there when the app launches again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The API will expand as time goes by. Why not take time to do things right along the way?
For background stuff on a mobile device, it makes a lot more sense to have an API or framework to handle building tasks specifically... much less os to leave a whole application running just on the chance it might want to constant access some resource or alert you when three hours have past or some other event is detected.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The stupid thing about the argument that precluding some very technical feature from today's iPhone API means that it will be less widely popular is this - the people the most technical features appeal to, are the smallest portion of the market as a whole. At most they are cutting off a tiny percentage of the market, as long as the most common needs for features limited by API are met - and they are, in that you can get calls or SM messages or notifications you have email or alarms from your calendar.
Limiting such features like this annoys technical people to no end, but if you think realistically about the apps that CAN be created with the API that remains, you'll see the problem is far more slight than is made out and not at all limiting to potential market share.
To turn this argument on its head, why not say equally that any other phone API you care to name does not include some feature specific to the iPhone? All API's have limitations and in the end users chose a device bases first on that which it runs to start with - third party apps are only going to be a secondary concern.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Not to nitpick, but Flash is not ROM. I guarantee that you don't have any of your apps in ROM.
Tolerance does not tolerate intolerance, or hypocrisy.
Wonderful, the mindset that made cooperative multitasking the wonder it was, now applied to phone design. It's all fun and games till someone puts your "I" out.
OpenSSH server, unless its developers are on crack, doesn't poll network connection. It *listens* to a socket until someone tries to connect to it. CPU usage = 0.
/usr/sbin/sshd
It is very unlikely OpenSSH will drain your battery. It is very likely either a poor network implementation of the network layer by Apple or another application is using the juice.
For example, here's the CPU usage statistics for my OpenSSH service that doesn't do much (maybe 10 logins in last year). For 250 day update, the CPU usage on a P3 450MHz machine is,
0:00
uptime - 253 days
In this time the IRQ interrupt handler used up 13 minutes and 9 seconds CPU time. So, blame Apple. Blame another application, but not OpenSSH for having bad network implementation that uses lots of CPU or other resources.
BTW, here's what OpenSSH does all the time,
#strace -p12603
Process 12603 attached - interrupt to quit
select(6, [3], NULL, NULL, NULL
ie. *nothing*
ow is a smartphone different from a regular cellphone? Came across an article at http://www.octanmen.com/articleDetail/318/benefits-of-smartphones.htm. It tells about the smartphone but doesnt tell how a smartphone is different from other phones? Can anyone go through the article and tell me the difference???
Let me help you all out.
Games.
PSP/DS class games.
Nothing else matters. You can have your geeked out background processes on your WinME device, but when the other cool kids load up their 3D games using the 3D accelerometer on the iPhone, your Twitter client is not going to seem so impressive...
Yes, with time and more capable hardware, Apple will no doubt make some background processes available to third party apps, but really, it doesn't matter. Because there will be games.
These things aren't artificial and they aren't done (just) to get fractionally more money out of you. The fact of the matter is telcos don't want you running VoIP etc. on the packet network because the mobile packet networks are not built to handle it. This is their own fault(s) for not having more capacity, but they built their networks with X amount of channelized voice capacity and Y amount of packetized IP capacity based on customer usage. If everyone used VoIP, it would saturate the mobile data networks (at both the BTS and backhaul link levels) and reduce performance to unacceptable levels. Costs would go up to add more capacity on the packet side and you guessed it, that cost would be passed on to you - making voice not such a great deal compared to circuit-switched voice! I believe the long-term path for most carriers (at least in the US) is to make their 4G networks all IP-based with packetized voice, but until that's here (a few years yet at least), circuit switched voice is still the preference for a variety of reasons.
Also, just curious - in what way are circuit-switched voice and SMS on the Public Switched Telephone Network "obsolete?" My understanding is that word means something that cannot perform essential functions due to lack of essential functionality or interoperability, and literally hundreds of millions of people use these technologies daily just fine. Maybe you meant "more expensive than alternatives" rather than "obsolete?"
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