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What iOS 4 Does (and Doesn't Do) For Business
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Galen Gruman investigates what businesses can expect from Apple's new iOS 4. Multitasking, the biggest new capability, is for now simply a promise, as apps will need to be retrofitted to make use of the capability. The other big new capability for IT, a set of APIs that allow BlackBerry-like management of the iPhone, such as auditing of policies and apps, over-the-air provisioning of apps without iTunes, and over-the-air configuration and policy management, also remains in the realm of promise, as the various mobile management tools that have been reworked to take advantage of the new iOS 4 capabilities won't be available until July or later. And despite the fact that email works more as it does on the desktop, iOS 4 still fails to deliver several email capabilities key to business users, including zipped attachment management, junk mail filtering, message rules, and message flagging."
What F'd up sadistic moron would push the junk mail filtering, message rules, and flagging down to the client? Wouldn't that mean that each client would be configured separately? I always set up that stuff so the user can configure it at the server level so that their laptop, desktop, phone, etc all are seeing the same exact mailstore. These are probably the same people that considering having "Sent Items" only stored on the actual device that did the sending be the way to go.
One thing I miss is the ability to do different notifications based on filters / profiles set up. The Blackberry can do this by flagging certain messages as a "Level 1 Notification" and then you can set normal messages to come in quietly, but Level 1 messages can vibrate, ring, whatever you configure it to do. It's great to get notified when your boss or superior email you, but let the other 200 emails a day just collect quietly.
The other feature I wish existed is when I reply to a message on my iPhone, that it shows up in Outlook as replied to (via the Exchange ActiveSync). Without it, there's sometimes confusion whether I've replied to this or not when reviewing the emails on my desktop.
The politically correct term is actually "berries of color."
I'm not an expert, but I play one on slashdot.
They've only sold a few tens of millions of those things so far, and their new model took five whole hours to sell 600k units to regular customers, sight unseen. They'd better get their act together and start reaching out to the enterprise or that thing's gonna tank and take them with it.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Honestly what Apple have done isn't so much listening to developer's requests as it is fulfilling those requests to the greatest extent possible *without compromising user experience*.
Not compromising user experience, even potentially, appears to be their guiding principle and it's served them well. Slashdot will never love Apple because they aren't the target market. I, like a lot of people who swear by the iPhone - actively want appliance computing when it comes to a smart phone. I actively want the walled gardens of the XBox 360, PS3, Appstore, Wii, and even Steam, because these things substantially reduce malware and/or cheaters. I understand that it is fundamental to the basic principals of a Turing machine that they can never eliminate these things (ie virtual machines, etc.), merely reduce to a level unlikely to affect me. But in practice that's all I need, much like how in practice I only *need* 256-bit TLS for securing online purchases.
The antagonism seen towards Apple on Slashdot is due to the fact that it's an explosively growing market segment that isn't targeted for the core Slashdot demographic. It implies that the world is moving on from them, and nobody likes to hear that.
--Ryv