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Cross With the Platform
Tim Bray tweeted, No platform has hit the big time till it's been flamed by JWZ. He was referring to this rant in which Zawinski systematically dismantles any claim the iPhone has to cross-platform compatibility. "I finally got the iPhone/iPad port [of Dali Clock] working. It was ridiculously difficult, because I refused to fork the MacOS X code base: the desktop and the phone are both supposedly within spitting distance of being the same operating system, so it should be a small matter of ifdefs to have the same app compile as a desktop application and an iPhone application, right? Oh ho ho ho. I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS. ... they got some intern who was completely unfamiliar with the old library to just write a new one from scratch without looking at what already existed. It's 2010, and we're still innovating on how you pass color components around. Seriously?"
He does have a point though, and I have also felt that while UIKit gets the important things right, it feels a little rushed around the edges. And it was rushed, so that's not surprising.
His example there is pretty clear, instead of using the perfectly good class NSColor, they rewrote it differently as UIColor, leaving some important functionality out. You can deal with it, sure, but it's kind of annoying.
Still, I don't know who was expecting any sort of compatibility on the GUI portion of the iPhone, since the paradigm is completely different. It doesn't even make sense to think that you wouldn't have to rewrite the front end. On the other hand, I haven't found any problem porting C code or C++ code to the iPhone; I don't claim to be an expert but it does use GCC. In other words, it is highly compatible with existing code, but you'll have to rewrite your user interface. Which is probably what you were planning on doing anyway.
Qxe4
No thanks.
Personally, I hate web apps. They're still vastly inferior to desktop applications. They need a constant connection, are less responsive than a desktop app, are limited in the GUI they can have, work or not depending on the browser, and are in many cases outside of my control, which is excellent for lock-in.
There still are many places where I have no internet connection. It happens when travelling in the underground. It's frequent above the ground in a train in some areas. It's unaffordable when roaming. It doesn't work in the middle of nowhere. I find it unacceptable to lose access to my stuff just because I happen to be somewhere without a cell tower.
What we need is more open architectures, where anybody can make anything they want without interference.